And I knew at once, I had an immediate idea, that the person sitting beside Mr. Phillips was my landlord, the man in the manor, the man I had got used to not seeing. And before — forgetting Mr. Phillips’s smile and the dangers of the road — I could properly focus on the stranger, the car had gone. This was my only glimpse of my landlord, his face; and I wasn’t sure what I had seen.
I had an impression of a round face, a bald head, a suit (or the jacket of a brown suit), a benign expression. What I most clearly remembered — it was the detail I was sure of: not the kind of detail that imagination could supply — was a low, slow wave of a hand. A wave just above the dashboard, so that from the road I saw the tips of his fingers making an arc at the bottom of the windshield.
We had never met. Mr. Phillips must have told him who I was; and — in spite of the bad sight he was said to have, one of his many afflictions — he must have seen me before I had seen him. And secure in the car, with Mr. Phillips at his side, he must have seen me more clearly than I had seen him. My glimpse had been so hurried, so shot through with the confusion of the moment — coming at the end of a swift sequence of little alarms and recognitions — that I wasn’t sure whether my imagination, as instantaneously as in a dream, hadn’t suggested certain of the details I thought I had seen, to supply me with a picture of the man I had more or less created in my head already.
I had an impression of benignity above the wave. But I had cause to question that impression when I spoke to Mr. Phillips on the telephone in the evening. With a laugh that was like a carry-over from the smiling good humor I had seen in him in the car that afternoon, he said yes, the man I had seen in the car was my landlord. And then, as though explaining my doubt, Mr. Phillips said, “He always wears dark glasses in the car. Otherwise his stomach gets upset, and then he gets a migraine.” How then, if he had been wearing dark glasses, had I seen a benign expression in his eyes?
So this glimpse of my landlord — this glimpse of someone unexpectedly ordinary — made him, after all, more mysterious. And more than the man, it was the occasion that was memorable: the manor car with the descendant of the manor builder and the planter of the trees, driving below the beeches on the ledge at the rim of the down, just above the river and the water meadows. So that more than ever for me the personality of the man continued to be expressed by his setting, by these beeches on the public road, by the permanently closed front gate of the manor and the overgrown garden at the back.
My imagination had given me a glimpse of a benign elderly man in a brown jacket making a shy wave from his car. This picture — created in a flash as the car had gone by — answered my own need. It was how I wished to think of the man in whose grounds I had so unexpectedly, for the first time in my adult life, found myself at peace.
I soon learned that the picture wasn’t true. Neither was the other picture which I carried, a contrary, slightly sinister picture I had allowed my fantasy to work up from details given then and at other times by Mr. Phillips: of a fat, round-faced man buttoned up in a suit, with dark glasses and a hat, being taken out for a spin through countryside he would never otherwise see; being taken out for thrilling but safe glimpses (safe, as for a child standing behind a rail at the top of a tower and looking down) of the world from which he had withdrawn; yet never too thrilling, not London, for instance; just the countryside, and the houses of a few people he knew very well, and some hotels on the south coast, where he went in fine weather to have lunch or to get his hair cut. (This last detail, given me quite innocently by Mr. Phillips one day, added long, lank hair to the dark-glassed and otherwise formally suited recluse of my fantasy: I saw my landlord being at once pushed and supported into the lobby of some Victorian hotel by Mr. Phillips, Mr. Phillips holding on with both hands to the left arm of his charge, while the free right hand of my landlord blindly groped.)
Neither picture, neither the man I thought I had seen, nor the man I had invented, answered to what I was told about my landlord by people in London who knew him and sometimes came to visit him. That other man, coming to me in fragments as it were, remained far away.
A pampered childhood here, in the grounds where I now walked about. In the cold shade of the overgrown orchard there was a round, two-story children’s house, solidly built, thatched, and still more or less whole, though the surrounding vegetation was partly strangled and decayed, as in true forest. In the room downstairs there was a real fireplace, with inset stone or concrete shelves in the wall on either side, and with ladder steps to the upper room, which had dormer windows in the conical thatched roof. More than a doll’s house on a grand scale, and yet less than a child’s play house: an adult’s idea, rather, of a children’s house, with nothing left to the imagination.
After that pampered, protected childhood, a young manhood of artistic talent and promise and of social frivolity. I was shown photographs of those days both by Mr. Phillips and by Bray, the car-hire man, whose father had worked all his life at the manor. Bray lived in the flint and brick cottage his father had bought long ago from the estate; but though Bray was now independent of the manor and proud of it, refusing even to serve people in the manor, he had all kinds of manor souvenirs to show and he liked showing them. Blurred black and white photographs of parties in the grounds, the gardens not yet grown, undergrown; photographs of young people sitting in uncertain light (dusk or dawn?) on the rails of new timber bridges over the creeks in the water meadows. (Photographs — snapshots — melancholy in their effect: each snapshot, capturing a moment of time, with all its unconsidered details, forcing one to think of the tract of time that had followed, and being a kind of memento mori in the way a good painting of the same occasion — charged with the spirit and labor of the painter — would never have been.)
Then in early middle age, after the parties, after the second war, a disturbance of some sort, a morbid, lasting depression, almost an illness, resulting in withdrawal, hiding, a retreat to the manor, complicated after a while by physical disorders and — finally — age.
I was his opposite in every way, social, artistic, sexual. And considering that his family’s fortune had grown, but enormously, with the spread of the empire in the nineteenth century, it might be said that an empire lay between us. This empire at the same time linked us. This empire explained my birth in the New World, the language I used, the vocation and ambition I had; this empire in the end explained my presence there in the valley, in the cottage, in the grounds of the manor. But we were — or had started — at opposite ends of wealth, privilege, and in the hearts of different cultures.
Twenty years before, when I was trying to write at the Earl’s Court boardinghouse, residence in the grounds of the manor would have seemed suitable “material.” But the imperial link would then have been burdensome. It would have tormented me as a man (or boy) to be a racial oddity in the valley. And I would have been able as a writer (at that time) to deal with the material only by suppressing certain aspects of myself — the very kind of suppression and concealment that narrative of a certain sort encouraged and which had led me, even as an observer, eager for knowledge and experience, to miss much.