The builders were working on the roof, hanging slates fast. The van with the builder’s name was on the droveway, where once Jack’s geese had roamed. There was a radio playing loudly somewhere in the unfinished, hollow, reverberating building. The builders, town people, were more unwelcoming than the town farm workers had been.
How exposed a house looks when it becomes a site for builders, how stripped of sanctity, when a room, once intimate, becomes mere space! Jack’s cottage (whose interior I had never seen until now) had been reduced — without side wall or middle flooring — to pure builder’s space, and at this stage of building was still pure space, like the space within the ruined stone-walled house with the big sycamores further along the droveway. Somewhere in that space Jack had made his bravest decision, to leave his deathbed for the last Christmas season with his friends, in the so ordinary public house not far from the end of the droveway. And that was the space to which — with what illness, delirium, resignation, or perhaps reconciliation — he had returned to die.
I saw this new building going up in summer, in white chalk dust. But in winter, as I knew, the site had been one of mud and water, settling at the bottom of the valley, mud and water many inches deep. That was the source of the damp that had given Jack his bronchitis and his pneumonia. But now that wet and damp had been dealt with. All the ground that had been Jack’s garden and goose ground, and the gardens or grassed-over areas of the other cottages, all that had been concreted over, to create a forecourt for the big house.
At the back, the concrete floor of Jack’s greenhouse was not to be seen; the area had been incorporated into the new living space of the big house.
So at last, just as the house was cleansed of Jack’s life and death, so the ground he had tended finally disappeared. But surely below all that concrete over his garden some seed, some root, would survive; and one day perhaps, when the concrete was taken up (as surely one day it would be taken up, since few dwelling places are eternal), one day perhaps some memory of Jack, preserved in some shrub or flower or vine, would come to life again.
With that building of a big house where once, perhaps for centuries, had stood the cottages or dwellings of farm or country laborers, a cycle had been completed.
Once there would have been many hamlets, settlements of farm workers and shepherds, near the fording places along the river. These hamlets had dwindled; they had dwindled fast with the coming of machinery. Fewer hands had been needed; and then, when sheep stopped being kept, even shepherds were not needed.
The garden of the manor, the forested orchard, lay partly on the site of one vanished hamlet. Such building-over would have occurred many times before. The duplicate name of the hamlet or village, Waldenshaw — the same word (for forest or wood) in two tribal languages, both long since absorbed into other languages — the very name spoke of invaders from across the sea and of ancient wars and dispossessions here, along the picturesque river and the wet meadows.
This history had repeated, had radiated outwards, as it were: much of the wealth for the Victorian-Edwardian manor, its gardens and ancillary buildings, had come from the empire, ventures abroad. Once the manor estate had covered many of the acres of my afternoon walks. But its glory had lasted one generation. The family had moved elsewhere; the estate had become the manor and grounds alone; it had shed its farms and land. Others had taken over those acres, built new big houses in villages or on the sites of hamlets once full of working people. And now the last of the peasant or farm cottages along the droveway had been taken over. What had once been judged a situation suitable only for agricultural cottages — next to a farm, far from roads and services — had become desirable. The farm had gone; the very distance from the public road was a blessing. And so, the quality or attributes of the site changing, the past had been abolished.
I had lived, very soon after coming to the valley, with the idea of change, of the imminent dissolution of the perfection I had found. It had given a poignancy to the beauty I had experienced, the passing of the seasons. I had promised myself again and again, every spring, every autumn, to get a camera (or at least to relearn how to use the one I owned) to record the droveway and the ruined house below the sycamores and the gypsy caravan and the farm buildings and Jack’s cottage and garden and goose ground. But I had never once taken a camera on my walks; and perhaps because I had no physical record of these things, they had an added poignancy, since they very soon began to exist only in my head.
I had thought that because of my insecure past — peasant India, colonial Trinidad, my own family circumstances, the colonial smallness that didn’t consort with the grandeur of my ambition, my uprooting of myself for a writing career, my coming to England with so little, and the very little I still had to fall back on — I had thought that because of this I had been given an especially tender or raw sense of an unaccommodating world.
I had seen Jack as solid, rooted in his earth. But I had also seen him as something from the past, a remnant, something that would be swept away before my camera would get the pictures. My ideas about Jack were wrong. He was not exactly a remnant; he had created his own life, his own world, almost his own continent. But the world about him, which he so enjoyed and used, was too precious not to be used by others. And it was only when he had gone, when the town workers who had replaced him had gone, it was only then that I saw how tenuous, really, the hold of all of these people had been on the land they worked or lived in.
Jack himself had disregarded the tenuousness of his hold on the land, just as, not seeing what others saw, he had created a garden on the edge of a swamp and a ruined farmyard; had responded to and found glory in the seasons. All around him was ruin; and all around, in a deeper way, was change, and a reminder of the brevity of the cycles of growth and creation. But he had sensed that life and man were the true mysteries; and he had asserted the primacy of these with something like religion. The bravest and most religious thing about his life was his way of dying: the way he had asserted, at the very end, the primacy not of what was beyond life, but life itself.
MY TIME was over in the valley, that particular, rhythmical time of manor cottage and grounds and the special signs there of the seasons, and walks on the downs and the riverbank. And I felt like that — that the second life I had been granted had ended — though I did not move far. The cottages I had been renovating were on the same bus route, the bus that made fewer trips, with fewer passengers, for more and more money.
One day a middle-aged woman spoke to me. Some of the people on the bus spoke to me; some, even after twelve years, never did. I did not recognize the woman who spoke to me.
She said, “Jack. Jack’s wife.”
And then I remembered her face and the cadaverous, wicked-eyed face of her father.
She spoke of Jack, always, in this distant way, as though speaking of another person altogether, someone she had known rather than lived with.
She said, “It’s the hair you didn’t recognize.”
She fingered her hair. It was short.
She said, “Jack liked it long. He liked me to wear it in a bun.”
This was something new about Jack. From a distance, his own beard, and his upright posture, had made him look like a romantic, something like an early socialist (in my fantasy); and perhaps he had copied the beard from an older person. Perhaps he had, after all, self-consciously lived out a certain kind of life. Perhaps in his own way he had been a tyrant, imposing, in addition to the long hair and the bun, a style and way of life that had been irksome to his wife.