I benefited from this regard of Mr. Phillips for the artistic side of my landlord. The regard was extended to me. It was part of the security of my second life in the valley, one of the accidents that made it possible. And now all at once that security was gone.
It was decided, by Mrs. Phillips, that just as Alan’s death had been kept by Mr. Phillips from my landlord, so now Mr. Phillips’s death was to be kept from him. She didn’t think he would take the news quietly; and she feared that she would not be able to manage my landlord if his behavior became in any way extreme. And so, though withdrawn for some time with her nerves, Mrs. Phillips stepped forward once again now and sought to take charge of things: Mrs. Phillips with the thin blue veins in the dark, finely gathered skin below her eyes, and the more prominent veins at her temples and below her thin hair that spoke of stress and pain.
She took to telephoning me; on the telephone now she became long-winded and repetitive. She told me again and again that Mr. Phillips was her second husband and though she meant no disrespect to his memory and didn’t want anyone to think that her love was less, the grief for Mr. Phillips had repeated, had been like a continuation of, the grief for her first husband; that the grief she had felt for him, Mr. Phillips, had been further absorbed by all the things she had had to do after he had collapsed, and all the trouble at keeping the news from my landlord.
She was repetitive. But she was reporting on a continuing discovery about herself and the development of her grief; the grief was like something with a life of its own. She was also perhaps saying — perhaps only to herself — that she intended to stay on at the manor, to try to do the job she and Mr. Phillips had done together.
And it was only several stages on in my response to the event and to Mrs. Phillips’s telephone conversations that I saw that a new uncertainty had suddenly come to Mrs. Phillips’s life. I had been shocked when I had first learned that the Phillipses had made no plans for their future, had not laid anything by. Then I had admired them for their adventurousness, their readiness to move on, to make their home in another place. Of course, they could be adventurous in this way because they never doubted that there would always be some new position for them — and it could be said that that kind of expectation was in itself a kind of security.
I don’t think they had even contemplated retiring. They knew very well that they had taken up an old-fashioned job; but they saw it as a kind of withdrawal; and they had probably seen themselves going on in this way until they were old. Now the active partner had been taken away; and Mrs. Phillips’s prospects, if she left the manor, seemed to me fearful.
No doubt I exaggerated. I didn’t know the Phillipses’ friends, didn’t know how they lived or joked together. Especially I didn’t know about their work, their world of work, and what adjustments they made as workers to preserve their pride. I remembered only how, out of her own security at the manor, Mrs. Phillips had been ready to see Pitton cast out; how much at a loss Pitton had been when he had to leave, how passive he had become, refusing to look for work, out of his unspoken dread of the figure of the employer.
But what was true about Mrs. Phillips’s grief was not true about old Mr. Phillips’s grief. He had coped with the deaths of his father, mother, sister, wife. The death of his cousin in 1911—as he had told me more than once — had prepared him for all their deaths. Now to his great surprise, in his mid-seventies and near the end of his life, he had found in the unexpected death of his son a grief that had surpassed that earlier grief. He was broken, Mrs. Phillips told me. The grounds of the manor that had given him such pleasure after Pitton had gone — he could no longer bear to be there. And he no longer came to work in the vegetable garden; or, formally dressed in a suit or jacket and trousers in the very pale colors he liked, to walk with his pronged staff.
It was as though he too had died. As though it was of this death — his son’s — that he had spoken when we had seen the first rooks squawking and flapping about the manor beeches.
IVY WAS beautiful. It was to be allowed to grow up trees. The trees eventually died and collapsed, but they had provided their pleasure for many years; and there were other trees to look at, other trees to see out my landlord’s time. So too it had been with people. They had been around; when the time came they had gone away; and then there had been other people. But it wasn’t like that with Mr. Phillips. He had been too important to my landlord. My landlord had awakened from his long acedia to the tenderness and regard of Mr. Phillips; and the death of this strong, protective man couldn’t be hidden beyond a fortnight.
My landlord was enraged when he found out, enraged that he had been encouraged to think and talk of a man as living when the man had died. He quarreled and made scenes. He knocked down glasses, overturned full ashtrays, pushed meal trays off his bed, generally tried to make a mess. Grief was beyond him, was too frightening for him. He could express only resentment, and his resentment focused on Mrs. Phillips.
She thought it was unfair. What she had done, as she told me on the telephone, had been done for his sake. She thought it was selfish: in his rages there was no consideration for her own feelings about her husband’s death. And she thought it was childish. She said, “Nothing he can do is going to bring Stan back.”
In the early days she had been full of regard for the manor and its master. For the artistic side of my landlord, which was like another emanation of his privilege, she had had a corresponding reverence. She had had something like awe for the little gifts she had brought to me from my landlord — a poem in verse or prose, a drawing, a dainty little basket, a sandalwood fan, some sticks of Indian incense. Sometimes in those early days she had even typed out (perhaps without being asked) the prose poems or prose writings, the act of typing making her job more than that of a housekeeper. What she typed mightn’t have been always comprehensible; but that added to the mystery and the beauty for her.
She had passed on to Mr. Phillips her reverence for the artistic side of my landlord. But while Mr. Phillips had allowed this reverence to grow, Mrs. Phillips’s own reverence had lessened. She had become more matter-of-fact about everything. Gaining security in the manor, she had lost her original feeling of awe; gaining security, she had looked inwards, concentrated on her nerves, surrendered (like her employer) more and more to the protection of her husband.
Now that her husband had gone, she had lost her security. The manor job, which had been so easy for so long, became suddenly hard; the manor became full of tension. And in her dealings with my landlord she went right back to her nurse’s attitude. But she was without the strength now to back up that attitude. The man was childish, she said; he wanted attention for the sake of attention. She would have known how to deal with that once; now she didn’t. The job began to wear her out.
The vegetable allotment within the walled garden was abandoned. But there still came to the grounds some of the strange men whom Mr. Phillips had called in to do occasional pieces of work. While Mr. Phillips lived these men had walked and moved quickly, like people not anxious to draw attention to themselves, done their jobs and gone away. But now there was no authority; and there was a change in the attitude of these men. They walked more slowly; they walked past the windows of my cottage; they raised their voices.
On my way back one afternoon from the river walk I saw two men in the overgrown garden. They had billhooks. They were near the old pile of sawn aspen logs. One man was small, much smaller than Alan (who had worried so much about his size). This man had a sly, dangerous face; in his eyes there was a look that made me feel he had been caught out and resented it. The other man was taller, though not much taller, dark-haired, with dark skin around his dark eyes.