It was the Phillipses who had encouraged me to walk through the back garden and along the riverbank, pooh-poohing as an unnecessary delicacy my wish to walk at the very limit of the lawn, beside the water meadow. (Their own visitors were less circumspect.) My landlord had his own patch, they told me; it was somewhere at the end of those overgrown walks through the wood at the far side of the house; I could walk with freedom. And I had done so for some years. I had certainly been observed by my landlord from one of the manor windows. And I believe that in his appearing where he was, there might have been an element of willfulness. His movements out of the house were major affairs. Someone would have had to take the chair out for him, for instance. And perhaps it was out of a wish to “show” him — for his pettishness, his petulance — that neither Mr. Phillips nor his wife had told me that my landlord was sitting out in the back garden that day.
His house, his garden, his view, his name. What did he see? Whatever he saw would have been different from what I saw. And so, after learning and possessing that view and the river for so many seasons, I was suddenly shocked, suddenly felt an intruder, as much as I did when one day Bray, the car-hire man, in a special nostalgic mood (he had been quarreling with his wife and with Pitton, the manor gardener, who was his next-door neighbor) showed me a social magazine of the 1920s, and I had seen a handsome, self-aware group of young people of the period, sitting on the rails of one of the bridges over the creeks between the back lawn and the river. Another view, another place!
What did he see, sitting there in his canvas-backed chair? Did he see the tall weeds in the solid greenhouse, the tops of some of the weeds flattened against the glass? Was he agitated by the wish to put things right or by the idea of decay and lack of care? Did he see the ivy that was killing so many of the trees that had been planted with the garden? He must have seen the ivy. Mrs. Phillips told me one day that he liked ivy and had given instructions that the ivy was never to be cut.
What were his feelings, then, when a tree collapsed? So many trees had collapsed. Such a wilderness now ruled in the water meadows, such a forest litter, with so many fallen willows, and the exposed Norfolk reeds then laid flat by the floods of a winter that for a week or so had cut an extra channel through the meadows on the opposite bank.
He liked flowers. Pitton grew flowers for him in a corner of the walled vegetable garden. And from what I heard, he became passionate for flowers as soon as the weather brightened. He could not always wait for the flowers Pitton grew. He insisted then, after his winter seclusion, on going out to flower shops in Salisbury and other towns, sometimes making long journeys to certain favored garden centers to buy flowers and plants in pots.
It was Pitton who reported to me that, on the way back from one of the flower expeditions, my landlord had seen the peonies below my window and in the shade of the yew hedge and had felt as I did about the depth of color of the overshadowed peonies.
Pitton, reporting this (to please me), found himself in a quandary. The difficulty lay in my landlord’s pronunciation of the word “peony.” Pitton didn’t want to be disloyal to his employer.
“He doesn’t say ‘peony’ like you and me,” Pitton said. “He says pe-ony.” The word in this pronunciation rhymed with “pony.”
Somewhere — was it at Oxford, or was it in the pages of Somerset Maugham — I had read or heard of this Edwardian affectation, an affectation known to be an affectation. Bal-cony rhyming with “pony”; and pe-ony rhyming with “pony.” And the affectation that Pitton reported was strange. Like my landlord’s knowledge of the value of his name, this affectation, the badge of a particular group, this class lesson from another age, had survived his desperate illness, his acedia.
And — forgetting this affectation — how did his taste for flowers go with the ruin of his own garden — the ruin through which, from his windows, he would have often seen me walking? Did he in fact see decay? Or did he — since vegetable growth never stopped — simply see lushness? Or did he cherish the decay, seeing in it a comforting reflection of his own acedia?
That wouldn’t have been too fanciful. It would have been like my own wish, coming to the cottage in his grounds, not to interfere, to take things as I found them; and then my later wish, out of my own delight in the place, not to see decay, not to be saddened by that too ready idea of decay, to see instead flux, constant change; and the feeling which I grew to cherish, that in the very dereliction of the grounds I had come upon them at their peak, that the order created by sixteen gardeners would have been too much, would have made for strain and anxiety, that the true beauty of the place lay in accidental, unintended things: the peonies coming out very slowly below the thick dark green of the yews; the single blue iris among the tall nettles; the young deer that for many months lived among the reeds beside the rotting bridges over the water channels, having learned that the place was not frequented by men.
I had come to the manor in a mood of withdrawal myself, and I understood how in that mood one would have felt mocked, it would have debilitated one, to make gestures that were too affirmative. As part of that wish to be unaffirmative, to take things as I found them, not to interfere, I had painted my room in the cottage a deep mauve. It was the least assertive color I could think of, and it came from something in my childhood.
My elementary school in Port of Spain was in a street, Victoria Avenue, that ended in a cemetery. Nearly every afternoon after school I saw the horse-drawn hearses and the mourning procession on foot passing the high, rubble-filled wall of the cemetery, named Lapeyrouse after the French explorer La Pérouse by our late-eighteenth-century French settlers (fleeing the effects of the French Revolution in Haiti and the other French islands). The horses that pulled the hearses to Lapeyrouse were covered with a reticulated pall, black or mauve. As a result, mauve — purple — was never for me the color of power and pomp; it was the color of death. In the mood I was in when I came to the cottage, any more affirmative, life-encouraging color would have been only mocking. (Later that color became associated with the beauty and benignity and welcome of the place.) And since one seeks to understand people by looking for aspects of oneself in them, I was willing to attribute something of the attitudes of my own withdrawal to my landlord.
But perhaps there was as little pattern in his emotions, his sensual responses, as in his poems. He liked summer, the sun, flowers, ivy. Perhaps he was incapable of any effort to put things right. Or perhaps he was merely spoilt, and thought that however much the ivy and the gales destroyed in his garden, there would still be something for him to see; there would still be some sunshine in the summer and some clearing in the ruined garden for him to sit out in.
Ivy so covered and smothered some trees it was hard — especially for me, who knew so little — to tell what kinds of trees they were. A tree that collapsed one year turned out to be a cherry tree. I had known it only for its fitful blossom breaking through the ivy matting. Pitton and Mr. Phillips between them cut up the cherry trunk into discs; they used a chain saw, and the discs were perfect little things, like toys, when freed of the ivy matting. I was offered some of the discs for my fire. I put the discs I had been given in my outbuilding (the half-cottage against the vegetable-garden wall) and left them there to dry. When they did dry out, I couldn’t bring myself to burn them all.