One or two of her successors I saw. Many I didn’t. I just heard about them, heard the more sensational stories, from Mrs. Phillips. The arrival of one created consternation: a large removal van drove up to the manor courtyard with her “things.” None lasted. One wished to do nothing; one wished to take over and give instructions; one rearranged furniture in a number of rooms. Perhaps among them there was one who might have done very well, but had to go for that reason — Mrs. Phillips not wishing to train or nurture a rival and possible successor.
The whole situation with the “help” or “staff” became too much; the sharing of the kitchen and quarters became too much. It was decided that there were to be separate quarters for people from outside. One or two of the closed rooms of the manor were opened up. A decorator appeared.
And I felt that my time in my cottage — with the preparation of quarters for new staff, who might not always be single women, who might have families or friends with the privilege of roaming the grounds — I felt that my time in my cottage was coming to an end. Accidents, a whole series of accidents, had kept me protected in what was an exposed situation. Now that protection was coming to an end. The rooks building and cawing above in the beeches — perhaps this was what they had also portended.
The decorator — he seemed like an agent or instrument of change, but he wasn’t, any more than old Mr. Phillips had been when he had started working and walking in the manor grounds after Pitton’s departure — the decorator was a short, plump man, pink-complexioned, or seeming very pink in his white overall.
I grew to recognize the rhythm of his day, how he paced himself through his solitary physical labor. From time to time, for fixed periods, fifteen minutes in the morning and afternoon, an hour in the middle of the day, he withdrew from his scrapers and rollers and brushes and paint tins and sat in his car, holding the racing page of his paper over the steering wheel, drinking milky tea from his flask in the morning and afternoon breaks, eating sandwiches in the midday break, not being in a hurry then to open his sandwich tin, first giving himself another fifteen minutes or so with the racing page of his paper, and then, having unfolded the greaseproof wrapping of his neat parcel, eating slowly, steadily, without haste, but also without relish.
His car at first he parked on the lane just outside my cottage back door. When, using more gestures than words, I showed him what he had done, he without speaking moved nearer the manor courtyard to a spot where he was hidden from the manor and from me.
His car was like his castle. Out of it, he was at work, in somebody else’s place; in it, he was at home. He looked serene, self-sufficient. In the top pocket of his overall (over a very thick, hand-knitted blue pullover) he had an empty, open, flip-top cigarette packet. This was his ashtray; the gesture with which he flicked ash into this packet was practiced. It was clearly an old habit or procedure, part of his tidiness as a decorator. The tidiness, the concentration required for painting, the way sometimes his face went close to his painting hand, the silence in which he worked for ninety minutes or so at a time, his solitude — this gave him a disturbing presence, made him seem more than his job and his appearance, the pinkness of his skin and the whiteness of his overall. And I found, when I began to talk to him, that he had a curious voice: it was soft, evenly pitched, childlike, passive.
He took his cigarette-packet ashtray seriously. I said I liked the idea. He didn’t dismiss it or make a joke about it. He spoke very seriously about it. He told me when the idea had come to him and how it had come; people always remarked on it, he said.
And as we talked at various times over the days — he was ready to talk: his solitude was like something imposed on him, something he didn’t mind setting aside — I found that he took everything about himself seriously, that he regarded himself with a kind of awe. There was something else: he seemed to be looking at himself from a distance, all his habits, his rituals. He was awed by what he saw: he didn’t understand what he saw.
Even this sitting at intervals in his car — that was puzzling to him, because that was when he also took his pills. He took his pills and studied the racing page, because his dream was to be a full-time gambler, a serious gambler. Not betting like a pensioner on outsiders, but betting on favorites all the time: it was the only way to make a living out of gambling. He needed his pills; he took two sorts four times a day. He could do nothing without his pills; he went nowhere without his pills. The pills kept him going. And it was through Mr. Phillips, long ago, that he had discovered the pills. That was the connection with Mrs. Phillips, though, as he said, he didn’t know Margaret so well.
Before the pills he used to burst out crying in public, for no reason; he used to just begin to cry. He didn’t know why. He was well off, better off than many people he knew. He had a house, a wife, a car. At first people at work didn’t know he was crying; they thought he was just allergic to gloss paint or the new synthetic varnishes. But one day the tears got the better of him, and he had to go to the hospital.
He found himself in a ward where the beds had no sheets, only mattresses and blankets. There was very little space between the beds. The nurse was a man. Even through his tears he recognized the oddity of that. The man who was the nurse, Stan, Mr. Phillips, gave him some pills; and he fell asleep. He had never slept so soundly; he woke up feeling so well he was grateful to Stan ever after. That was how he had got hooked on the pills.
And Stan helped him more. “He was so good to me. He said to me one day, ‘Look, if you don’t pull yourself together, I’m going to have you registered as disabled. You might think there’s going to be more benefit for you from the social security because of that, but I’m telling you: there’s nothing in it for you. There’s no extra benefit. Ask the almoner.’ And he was right. There was nothing in it for me. So I pulled myself together. So sad about Stan. I used to think that if I really had a big win on the horses I would go to Stan and give it all to him. All. Just like that.” He made a lifting gesture, as though, as in a cartoon, money came in coin in sacks. “I thought I would go and say, ‘Stan, this is the biggest thing I’ve done. I want you to take it, because you’ve been so good to me.’ ”
His eyes began to water. But they remained expressionless, steady. His face didn’t change color; his voice never lost its childlike quality.
“I’ve lost everything now. House, furniture, wife. But that was when the crying left me. When I left my wife. When I left her I left all my troubles behind. I found her with the man on the Wednesday. I hit her. By Friday they had me out of the house.”
This was the story he told over many days, saving up this detail for last. And even in this detail much had been left out. Much, for instance, would have gone on before that Wednesday discovery. But that was the way he saw the event; that was what had worked on him.
Sitting in his car, flicking ash into the cigarette packet in the top pocket of his overall, he gave a dry sob, like a little convulsion.
He said, “It’s not for her. It’s for Stan.”
THE WEATHER was cool, end-of-summer, early autumn. Good weather for external painting, the decorator said: the paint had a better consistency, the charged brush moved more easily. It was one of the few bright pieces of knowledge — knowledge external to himself — that he possessed. But the air that was good for the decorator’s brush was also full of end-of-summer dust and exhalations of various kinds.
On my walk one afternoon, just beyond what had been Jack’s garden, between the old-metal and timber and barbed-wire farmyard debris below the beeches on one side of the way, and the deep, rubbish-burning chalk pit on the other side (the branches of the now tall silver birches singed a month or so before by a fire that had been fed too richly), I began to choke.