One disc I kept, as a souvenir of the garden, and I had it smoothed down and varnished. It had dried with its sheeny bark on; there were only a few spaces between the bark and the wood; and drying as slowly as it had done, the wood had hardly cracked. Just showing sawmarks, and nondescript as wood, without a definite color, growing dusty in my outbuilding, the cherry-wood disc came up beautifully when it was smoothed down. I counted the rings. There were forty-seven.
For its first two or three years the cherry tree might have grown in a nursery. So it might have been planted in the autumn of 1930. For the first twenty-six years the sapwood had grown at a healthy pace; and the color of the wood at the center was blond. But then, for its last twenty-one years, the growth of the sapwood had slowed down; the lines of the heartwood had grown close together; and the outer wood of the disc was dark.
Here in the secret vegetable life of the cherry tree of the garden was something like confirmation of what I had heard about the life of my landlord. In 1949 or 1950–1950 being the year I had left my own home island, had made my roundabout journey to England, looking for material to write about, and being as a writer (in the pieces I attempted) much more knowledgeable than I was as a person, hiding myself from my true experience, hiding my experience from myself — in 1949 or 1950 my landlord had withdrawn from the world, out of an excess of knowledge of that world. That probably was when he had given orders that the ivy was not to be touched. Up to that time the garden laid out by his parents had been more or less tended, in spite of everything, in spite of the war. Four or five years later, going by the evidence of the rings on my disc of cherry wood, the ivy had taken; and twenty-one years after that the choked, strangled tree had collapsed and become part of the debris of the garden, the debris of a life.
It occurred to me one day that at the time the ivy had taken or become established on the cherry tree, at the time my landlord’s acedia had become permanent, while he was still a youngish man, I would have left Oxford. And since I had to do something, and since I had left home to be a writer, and no other talent or vocation had declared itself in me, I had set myself up as a writer — as deliberately as that. There was no joy in that decision. That was the blankest and most frightening year of my life. And one day in the valley, for no reason, perhaps only for the sake of the thrill, as I was walking up the hill beside the windbreak of pine and beech and hawthorn and field roses to the viewing point, walking in that setting which had given me joy of place like no other place in the world, I found myself thinking myself back into my personality of twenty-five years before, and felt again a panic I had all but forgotten, and the wish it had given rise to, to run and hide: having no money, no job, having developed no talent, having no place to return to that evening except a dark and very damp basement flat rented by a cousin; having nothing to offer my family who, since the death of my father the previous year, were psychologically dependent on me.
Somehow I had done the writing. Somehow — and twenty years later, it was to seem such a piece of luck — I had engaged myself in the world. And twenty years of a life which had been the opposite of my landlord’s had brought me to the solace of the debris of his garden, the debris of his own life. Debris which nonetheless never ceased to have an element of grandeur.
A man with a simpler idea of himself, a simpler idea of his name, would have seen the great value of his property, might have realized its value, and lived elegantly elsewhere on the proceeds. But my landlord preferred to be with what he knew. Other people might contemplate a move for him. He himself could not think of a life away from his house and garden, which perhaps he continued to see in his own way, perhaps even saw as whole and perfect, the way we fail to see the tarnishing that has gradually come to flats or houses where we have lived a long time.
THE MANOR seemed so much itself, the style of things there so established, that the recentness of the decay was a surprise. And having learned to see that, I saw it in other places as well. I saw it in the cold frames just outside my cottage.
These frames, intended as little nurseries, had low walls of brick, with the northern wall a foot or two higher than the southern; and they were roofed with great timber-framed glass covers, hinged to the higher, northern wall, so that the glass covers sloped south. These covers could not have been easy to lift. Like many other things in the manor grounds, they had been overspecified: heavy glass, oversolid timber frames. At some stage the cold frames had been abandoned; and the heavy covers, taken off their hinges, had been set against the high vegetable-garden wall. That was where I found them.
They looked very old, with the weeds and grass growing around them. But when in the summer, going beyond what was strictly my own territory, and cutting the grass between my back door and the garden wall (with the manor’s mower, filled by Pitton with the manor’s fuel), when in the summer I first cut that grass and took the mower right up to the garden wall and the glass covers, what a transformation! What had looked like bush in a long-neglected corner of the grounds came up, after its cut, looking level and neat. And it was as if the glass covers had been set against the wall just a few months before.
The earth there, against the wall, had been made up partly of wood ash and reddish coal ash, perhaps even from the fireplaces of my own cottage (and perhaps before the days of “refuge”). Between this made-up earth and the side wall of my outbuilding there was a depression with a bulky metal grille: a soakaway, one of many set about the grounds, to drain the water that ran off the downs, the road, the paved lane, the lawn, the drive. Nothing was natural here; everything was considered. Grass and trees concealed as much engineering as a Roman forum. Just one cut with the mower did away with the idea of wilderness outside the back door of my cottage, showed up the considered lines of wall and earth and outbuilding, and the solidity of the timber-framed glass covers against the wall.
Still firm, the timber of those covers, still showing white paint. Few of the glass panes had broken; four or five had merely slipped from their cracked putties. And although the soil was poor, and was on the north side of the garden wall, and for much of the day was in the shade of the beech trees, yet the grass and weeds that grew between the glass covers had grown unnaturally tall and rich. And though in the brick-walled frames themselves (still edged with timber to receive the glass covers) there were drifts of beech leaves and beech mast, and out of the oddly yellow sand there grew nettles and ground elder and weeds whose names I didn’t know and many thorny blackberry bushes, yet that one cut with the mower around the cold frame did away with the idea of old decay — as, five or six years later, the rings in the disc of the collapsed cherry tree were also to do.
It was oddly unsettling to see the ground at the back of my cottage “come up” again; unsettling to deal with the idea that the dereliction of the place was new, the dereliction which to me had made it perfect as a place of refuge, and in which I had taken such comfort; that the place had been let go just a year or two before I had arrived; that the process of contraction, though begun twenty or twenty-five years before, had recently accelerated; and that my own presence there was part of that accelerating process.
And the Phillipses too: when I had first met them, they had seemed to belong, to be part of their setting, to have been molded by the neglect by which they were surrounded. I had sat in their sitting room and looked out onto the mottled stone terrace, with its views of the untended gardens, the big trees, the overgrown water meadows obscuring everything beyond; the branches of shrubs in the foreground now hung with seed bells for the birds; and to one side, empty washing lines with a supporting pronged pole.