Mrs. Phillips said, “Funny old man.”
Strange words; strange distance between herself and the old man. The distance showed in her face as welclass="underline" the smoother skin, the new clarity of the eyes, the lack of fatigue. And there was, in the tone of her speech, a reviving irony and love of life.
She said, “I think I should tell you before you hear it from somebody else. You know how gossip flies about the valley. I’ve given my notice.”
So the gift of the stick acquired another association. Mrs. Phillips’s bringing it over — that almost mischievous voice on the telephone, that distancing of herself from old Mr. Phillips, who had until recently walked with such privilege in the manor grounds — that gift was like the winding down of her manor life. How easily she seemed to do it! As soon as I had got to know the Phillipses, had stopped seeing them as exemplars of their job, I had admired them for their adventurousness, their getting by with so little, their readiness to move on. Yet now Mrs. Phillips’s news added a touch of desolation to the beauty of the gift she had brought.
She said, “I don’t have to tell you. It hasn’t been much of a life here since Stan died. Stan could have managed. I can’t do it by myself. He’s very difficult.” This was a reference to my landlord. “And it isn’t going to get better. That’s what makes it hard. It isn’t the kind of thing where you feel that what you do is going to make things better.”
She began to move towards the door. She paused; she looked through the high glass panes of the kitchen door at the broken aspens, growing vigorously again from their stumps.
She said, and her tone was intimate, half questioning, half looking for reassurance — I might have been a relation: “I met someone on holiday. He joined our group for dinner one day. So many matchmakers among one’s friends. You wouldn’t believe. Anyway. I thought I’d let you know before the gossip reaches you. Stan and I agreed on that. Whoever remained should marry again.”
It was strange. She had never been so easy with me, so without strain, the strain first of all of her strangeness in the manor, her uncertainty with me, then the strain of her illness, then the strain of her solitude. And perhaps, as I thought now, the strain of her life with Mr. Phillips, the man of great strength. And I, as if in response to her new personality, had never felt so close to her.
THE NEWS, as Mrs. Phillips said, spread fast about the valley. It got to Bray. His first thoughts were for my landlord, the master of the manor. He said, and it was as though he was speaking of himself as well, “Old age is a brutal thing. I suppose they’ll just sell up. In the end there’ll be nothing left.”
I said, “It’s lasted all his life. Not many people can say that. That’s happiness.”
He stayed with his own thoughts. “When you are young you can fight back. When you’re old they can do anything they want with you.”
His slit eyes narrowed; a tear ran down his soft, middle-aged cheek. In spite of his talk, the dignity of the house had always mattered to him. He had always taken an interest in its affairs. The dignity of the house had given value to his independence; it was what he measured his own dignity against. The deepest part of him, the part with the hidden memories, the memories that would die with him, was his servant’s character.
Squinting at the road, the tears running down his cheeks, Bray said, “She’s left. She became very ill and had to go back to the home.”
It was the first time he had mentioned the woman he had seen at Salisbury railway station at midnight, the solitary woman in the big tweed coat in the bright lights of the nearly empty station.
THE CEREMONY OF FAREWELL
IN MY late thirties the dream of disappointment and exhaustion had been the dream of the exploding head: the dream of a noise in my head so loud and long that I felt with the brain that survived that the brain could not survive; that this was death. Now, in my early fifties, after my illness, after I had left the manor cottage and put an end to that section of my life, I began to be awakened by thoughts of death, the end of things; and sometimes not even by thoughts so specific, not even by fear rational or fantastic, but by a great melancholy. This melancholy penetrated my mind while I slept; and then, when I awakened in response to its prompting, I was so poisoned by it, made so much not a doer (as men must be, every day of their lives), that it took the best part of the day to shake it off. And that wasted or dark day added to the gloom preparing for the night.
I had thought for years about a book like The Enigma of Arrival. The Mediterranean fantasy that had come to me a day or so after I had arrived in the valley — the story of the traveler, the strange city, the spent life — had been modified over the years. The fantasy and the ancient-world setting had been dropped. The story had become more personaclass="underline" my journey, the writer’s journey, the writer defined by his writing discoveries, his ways of seeing, rather than by his personal adventures, writer and man separating at the beginning of the journey and coming together again in a second life just before the end.
My theme, the narrative to carry it, my characters — for some years I felt they were sitting on my shoulder, waiting to declare themselves and to possess me. But it was only out of this new awareness of death that I began at last to write. Death was the motif; it had perhaps been the motif all along. Death and the way of handling it — that was the motif of the story of Jack.
It was a journalistic assignment that got me started. In August 1984 I had gone to the Republican Convention in Dallas for the New York Review of Books. I had found nothing to write about. The occasion was overstaged, scripted in advance, and in itself empty; and I was oppressed by the idea of thousands of busy journalists simply finding new words for stories that had in effect been already written for them. It was only back in Wiltshire, away from the oppressiveness and handouts of the convention center, that I began to be able to acknowledge what I had responded to: not the formal, staged occasion, but the things around the occasion. And suddenly, where there had been nothing to write about, there was a great deaclass="underline" the experience of a week, all new, which, without the writing, would have vanished and been lost to me. With the discovery of that experience came the language and the tone appropriate to the experience.
It was out of that excitement, finding experience where I thought there had been nothing, and out of that reawakened delight in language, that I began immediately afterwards to write my book. I let my hand move. I wrote the first pages of many different books; stopped, started again. Then from apparently far away the memory of Jack, peripheral to my life, came to me; and with it the conviction that to write of Jack was the best way to get started, to summon up the material of The Enigma of Arrival, to set the scene and themes, to indicate the time-spread of the book I was intending to write. For some weeks I made many starts, allowing my hand to run; starting at different points.
There were interruptions. A bad molar. It was extracted — quite suddenly, it seemed. An extraction wasn’t at all what I had been expecting when I went to the dentist, who usually saved things; and there came to me a sense of decay, uneffaceable, as I felt, through the anesthetic, the dentist’s strong fingers pushing at the painless tooth; a sense of death. Two days later, with a salty rawness in my mouth, there was a prize-giving lunch for an old writer friend in London — this occasion mixed up with looking for a new flat in London, and the special gloom of looking at old flats, other lives, other views. Then Mrs. Gandhi was shot dead by her bodyguard in Delhi. Immediately after that there was a visit to Germany for my publisher in that country: the shock of East Berlin, still in parts destroyed after forty years, seedlings grown into trees high on the wrecked masonry of some buildings, a vision of a world undoing itself: new to me: I should have gone long before to look. On the morning of my last day in Germany, in West Berlin, I went to the Egyptian Museum. I returned to Wiltshire to the news that my younger sister, Sati, had had a brain hemorrhage in Trinidad that day: just at the time I was leaving the museum. She was in a coma; she was not to recover. For more than thirty years, since the death of my father in 1953, I had lived without grief. I took the news coldly, therefore; then I had hiccups; then I became concerned.