So we became friends. And on some afternoons of the late summer and early autumn — sunshine and shadow on the lawn — we worked together. He allowed me to help with the last cutting of the lawn — I always liked cutting the lawn. And I helped with the gathering of the leaves — a pleasant midafternoon activity (for an hour or so), oddly serene, stacking the leaves into a roughly carpentered two-wheeled caged trolley, pushing that through the orchard and past the children’s house to the “refuge,” removing the front of the trolley, tilting the trolley forward and then spreading out the leaves on the springy, slippery leaf hill.
A few days before Christmas I went to Pitton’s house to give him a bottle of whiskey. It was damp and cold; the road ran with wet; the beech trees and the sycamores, though without leaves now, still seemed to keep out the sun. Pitton’s gate and the paved path to his front door were in better shape than Bray’s. It was only when I was right at Pitton’s door that I noticed how badly in need of paint the door and timber surround were; and that the front casement windows were half rotted.
It was a long time before Pitton came to the door. Perhaps he had had to prepare, to dress. And there was an embarrassment about him, a tightening of his face, which let me know that he didn’t like being “caught” in his house.
The house was much poorer than I thought. The improved agricultural cottage of sixty-odd years before, however sturdy its external appearance, was a little ragged and knocked-about inside. The narrow hall was shiny with rubbing, hardly a recognizable color. The small front room was scrappily furnished.
Modest furniture which, though old, still made one think of the shops where it had been bought; modest television and hi-fi, which again made one think of cheap shops; cheap unlined curtains. Only the photographs — of Pitton and his wife together, younger; of Mrs. Pitton alone, twenty years before (a photograph with which she was clearly pleased, looking over her shoulder); a photograph of the son — only these photographs made the room, which had been Pitton’s for so long, personal.
The casement windows, as I could see more clearly from the inside, were warped; the room was drafty. Why hadn’t Pitton done something about the decorations? I know what he would have said. Decorations were the estate’s responsibility; the house wasn’t his. He was waiting for the estate to decorate his front room and no doubt the rest of his house; he was content to allow time, a portion of his life, to pass in drabness. It was disappointing. Here was the true servility, the true obedience, of the man. It was hard, faced with his gravity, his measured movements, his weighty manner, his self-cherishing, to grasp that other fact about him. So much of the money he earned, then, went on clothes, for himself and Mrs. Pitton, that show to the outside world about which they were both so particular.
I gave him the whiskey. He thanked me, but he didn’t look especially pleased; his tight expression didn’t go or soften. That expression softened, the muscles of his face grew slacker, only when, making conversation, covering up what I now recognized to be the error of my visit, I mentioned his hi-fi equipment. I said I had nothing like that myself. The tight, embarrassed look on Pitton’s face was replaced by a foolish, self-satisfied smile. He was glad — it was amazing — he was glad his possessions had surprised me.
And that foolish smile of Pitton’s took me back to early childhood — like a dream here, in this valley, in this house of Pitton’s — and to painful memories. Within our extended family our little unit was poor; and I remembered, on the one or two occasions when remote, richer branches came to visit us, how strong the instinct with us was to boast, to show off, to pretend that we were richer than we were letting on. Curious instinct: we didn’t boast with people who were as poor as ourselves; we boasted to people who were richer, who could easily see through our vanity. I had seen it in others too; my earliest observations as a child were about the lies of poverty, the lies that poverty forced on people. We were a very poor agricultural colony at the end of a great world depression. Very few people had money; great estates had to be sold for very little, money being so scarce; and among the laborers there was great distress. Yet as a child I saw people pretending to their employers, to the people who paid them every week, that they, the paid people, were richer than the payer knew; that they, the daily or the weekly paid, people who worked for eight hours or more a day for less than a dollar a day, had secret means and — almost — a whole secret life.
Something of this — some whiff of huts and damp and the swamplands of my childhood — came to me at Christmas, in the Wiltshire valley, in Pitton’s improved agricultural cottage. He was poor. I discovered now that he was hurt by his poverty, ashamed of it. I discovered now that his nerves were rawer than those of the Phillipses or Bray. He was much more vulnerable than they were.
THE SHOUT of “Fred!” came from somewhere in the manor at about three o’clock. It had taken me a little time to work out that that was being shouted, the shout having at first seemed like another of the many country noises: the cry of some animal; the far-off cuckoolike shout of the cowman driving the cows back from the water meadows to the milking shed (he was simply shouting, “Go on! Go on!”); farm machines; birds; the flap of pigeons’ wings as they fluttered about their perches or roosting places in the thick ivy on the old granary wall; the antiquated milking machine from the farm beyond the churchyard — this machine rose to a scream just before it was turned off, making you aware then, in the comparative silence, of the whine with which you had been living for the previous two hours, a whine which lingered like a ringing in the ears or like the sound of cicadas; the drone and roar of military aircraft.
When I had worked it out, the shout of “Fred!” from Mr. Phillips became quite distinct; and I thought it was part of an old routine, something that had existed long before my time. I soon discovered that it wasn’t so. And I was able to give a character and mood to the shout, and to understand the tensions that played around it. Pitton, I then realized, never acknowledged the shout or called back.
It was an afternoon shout. But sometimes — and especially in the spring — it could be heard in the morning. It meant then that Mr. Phillips was mediating between my landlord and Pitton. In the spring my landlord wanted to see flowers; to go shopping; sometimes to combine the two things. He didn’t want to visit other gardens (that would have been too disturbing to him, entering other people’s houses or territory). He preferred to go to flower shops and garden centers; and he wanted Pitton to go with him.
On these excursions, when Pitton was called away, where did he sit in the manor car? Did he sit in the front, beside Mr. Phillips, the other manor servant? Or did he sit alone in the back, a man apart in another way?
I feel Pitton was taken along for the company and the protection his company (together with the company of Mr. Phillips) offered my landlord. Pitton couldn’t have been taken along purely for his advice as a gardener, because the plants bought — which Pitton had to look after — were not always suitable. Azaleas, I remember once, unsuited to our chalk, which Pitton had to plant more or less in pots of sand. I asked him why, and he floundered, became inarticulate, until inspiration came to him and lit up his face and he said, “Minerals.” Having planted the azaleas in sand, he had then, every day until the azaleas died, to “feed” them with an expensive “iron” solution, “feeding” being quite an appropriate word, for these small azaleas needed to be fed with droppers, the way birds or young motherless animals might have been fed.
In my third year, my third spring, there were more of these morning shouts than before. And this had to do with a change in my landlord’s condition. From being very ill and almost immobile with his acedia — at about the time the Phillipses had gone to the manor to look after him and his house — my landlord was beginning slowly to recover. Some medicine or drug had been found to neutralize the paralyzing nature of his acedia, and this brought into play again the personality (or that part of it) that had survived his long withdrawal and blankness. An operation had then partially restored his sight.