The taller man said, without being asked anything, “We are taking away the rotten logs. Margaret knows. She gave permission.” Margaret was Mrs. Phillips.
It was my policy not to interfere with people I saw in the grounds; not to act as a watchman. But the billhooks, and the dancing blue eyes of the small man, worried me.
I said to the man who had spoken, “What is your name?”
He straightened up. He almost held his hands at his sides. He said, “Mr. Tomm. With two m’s. German.”
“German?”
“I’m a German. Mr. Tomm.”
Was this how he always introduced himself? Was being a German (he had an English Midlands accent) the most important thing to him, and something he felt he ought to get out of the way as soon as possible? Or was he joking?
He said, “My father was a prisoner of war. He worked on a farm near Oxford. He stayed on and married the old carter’s daughter. My father died five years ago. My mother died last Christmas in Birmingham. I used to live up there. But I lost my job and my wife left me. That’s why I’m here.” He made a scything, grass-cutting gesture with the billhook. “I love gardening. It’s all I want to do. I get it from my mother.”
I looked at the small man, to see what he was making of the story. He, the small man, was considering me intently. His little cheeks were working; he wasn’t going to talk to me. On his small, delicate forearms I saw tattoos done in green and red and blue-black. These colored tattoos, done with modern tools, were a new craze in the locality, spreading without publicity or overt promotion; Bray had told me about them. In tattoos at least the small man was keeping up with his bigger fellows.
The talker said, “I’m going through a bad patch.”
I left them. Just outside the box-bordered enclosure, quite wild now, there was a small pickup van reversed against the entrance, not far from my cottage. For rotten logs alone? I felt that other things — garden statues, urns, stone pots, even greenhouse doors — were at risk; that those two men were scavengers rather than serious thieves.
Mrs. Phillips seemed bemused when I telephoned. But she knew the name of the German. “He used to work for Stan. He’s a German, you know.”
Not many days after, the pickup van came again. The German got out, and a bigger, fat, unshaved man with reddish blond hair reaching down to his shoulders. The fat man wore bell-bottomed jeans and in his hand he held an empty rolled-up nylon sack that was almost the color of his hair. He didn’t look at me, the fat man, was quite indifferent to me. His eyes were small and preoccupied; his lower lip was thick and red and wet.
The German said, “He’s my brother. He has nowhere to stay. Last week he got a job with accommodation in an old lady’s house. The solicitor arranged it. But they wanted him to be a servant. The old lady used to start ringing for tea at five in the morning. He’s going through a bad patch.”
In the days of Pitton, the known and half-tolerated intruders in the gardens and water meadows had been local gentlemen looking for a little Saturday-afternoon shooting. Now there was no Pitton; his day and his order seemed as far away and as unreachable as the original grandeur of the garden had seemed to me when I had just arrived and, among the relics of that grandeur, found only Pitton. There was no Mr. Phillips now, neither old nor young. And the people who came to work in what remained of the garden had become marauders, vandals.
The very kind of people who, in the great days of the manor, would have given of their best as carpenters, masons, bricklayers, might have had ideas of beauty and workmanship and looked for acknowledgment of their skill and craft and pains, people of this very sort now, sensing an absence of authority, an organization in decay, seemed to be animated by an opposite instinct: to hasten decay, to loot, to reduce to junk. And it was possible to understand how an ancient Roman factory-villa in this province of Britain could suddenly, after two or three centuries, simply with a letting-go by authority, and not with the disappearance of a working population, crumble into ruin, the secrets of the building and its modest technologies, for so long so ordinary, lost.
And Mrs. Phillips didn’t really know what was happening in the grounds around her. She had no means of judging men, judging faces. Depending on herself now, she was continually surprised by people. That stored subjective knowledge of character and physiognomy which most people have — which begins simply enough, with the association of a particular kind of character with a particular kind of face, an association of greed, for instance, with a fat face, to put it at its simplest — that stored knowledge was denied her.
It was part of her incompetence, her new unhappiness. And it came out again when she tried to get help, when she advertised for women to help in the manor and was surprised again and again to get people like herself, women adrift, incompetent, themselves without the ability to judge people, looking as much for emotional refuge as for a position, solitary women with their precious things (full of associations for them alone) but without men or families, women who for various reasons had been squeezed out of a communal or shared life.
The first of these ladies came upon me like a vision one lunchtime when I was going out to the bus stop. She was below the yews and she was in brilliant green; and the face she turned to me was touched with green and blue and red, green on her eyelids. The colors of the paint on the old lady’s face were like the colors of a Toulouse-Lautrec drawing; made her appear to belong to another age. Green was the absinthe color: it brought to mind pictures by other artists of forlorn absinthe drinkers; it made me think of bars. And probably a bar or hotel somewhere on the south coast was the lady’s background, her last refuge, her previous life.
How long she must have spent arranging that violently colored face, dusted with glitter even for lunchtime on this summer’s day! Where — and to whom? — was she going now on her day off? So dreadfully coquettish, so anxious to please, so instinctively obsequious in the presence of a man — everything about her caricatured by age, and the caricature further set off by the rural setting, the yews, the beeches, the country road.
What had Mrs. Phillips seen in this woman? How had she thought that this woman, rather than the other applicants she must have had, would have helped with looking after the house and my landlord?
Soon enough there were the complaints. Soon enough, complaining of the “staff,” Mrs. Phillips put herself once more on the side of my landlord, made common cause with him — almost in the way that Mr. Phillips had done — against the crude, uncomprehending world.
“He rang and asked for a glass of sherry. She went to his room with a bottle in one hand and a glass in the other, and looking as though she herself had had a drop too much. A bottle in one hand and a glass in the other — I ask you. He didn’t like it. ‘A little formality, Margaret,’ he said to me. ‘A little formality. It’s all I ask. A drink isn’t just a drink. It’s an occasion.’ And I think he’s entitled to a little formality. I told her, you know. Take in nothing without a tray. I told her.”
Poor lady in green! She did something else wrong very soon afterwards — I believe Mrs. Phillips said she again took up a bottle and glass without a tray: she was too old to learn. And she didn’t last out her period of probation. I didn’t see her go. That glimpse of her, green (the brilliant green of her dress) in the dark-green shade of yews and beeches, on the black asphalt lane to the public road and the bus stop, that glimpse of her in her brief rural exile (as she made it appear) was all that I saw.