In this reawakening of my landlord to life and his especial world the Phillipses helped a great deal. Mr. Phillips was professional, understanding, a protector, a strong man to whom the sick man, at once employer and dependent, could entrust himself. To the strength of her husband Mrs. Phillips added tenderness and admiration for the artistic side of the employer who wrote poetry and now, in addition, with his restored sight, began to do drawings. These drawings were oddly fluent, practiced, easy, as though they had been done many times before, as though they came from a segment of that past life of my landlord’s that he had just recovered: Beardsley-like drawings, of another age, with long tendrillike lines and little stippled areas emphasizing the large areas of white.
Some of these drawings — in reproduction: his continuing or reawakened extravagance — he sent me by Mrs. Phillips now, in place of the old printed sheets of poetry he had sent in my first year.
In his reawakening, his rebirth, my landlord met the Phillipses halfway. He was tender with them, as they reported. They were part of the life he thought he had said good-bye to. The Phillipses accordingly felt needed; perhaps in none of their previous jobs had they been made to feel like that. And they in their turn became softer, less spiky, more secure in their positions in the manor. Their toughness was now partly explained: it was the toughness of people who wanted to be as tough as they had found the world tough, and wished to hold themselves ready for whatever fortune threw at them. The Phillipses, becoming confident in the manor, no longer strangers to the place, became happier; as happy in their way as their employer in the summer. That repeated morning shout of “Fred!” seemed to say it all. As did that glimpse of a happy Mr. Phillips — like an impresario — driving with his employer that day in the manor car, on the road below the old beeches.
That mood lasted into the next summer. Pitton often had to go away on some excursion and sometimes when he came back he had some little piece of news for me. “I’ve hardly done anything today. I was called away early this morning.” He wasn’t complaining; he liked the idea of being “called away”; he was recording his pleasure at the new idleness, the new closeness to his employer, and with that closeness the sudden luxury almost of his job: car rides, shopping trips, sight-seeing trips, all on a workday morning. “He said, ‘Pitton’—that’s how he calls me, you know: he doesn’t call me Mr. Pitton.” I called him Mr. Pitton; that was why he gave this explanation. “ ‘Pitton, I think we should go to Woolworth’s this morning. I hear they have a good garden department.’ Woolworth’s,” Pitton said, amused but respectful. “Imagine him in Woolworth’s.”
Of these summer excursions of my landlord I heard second accounts from Mr. Phillips sometimes. And of some of these excursions I had even a third account. This came from Alan, a literary man from London, a distant relation of my landlord, who sometimes came now to spend a weekend at the manor, which he had known, he said, from visits as a child, beginning with the war.
Alan was in his late thirties. He was a small man, as small as I was. His size was one of the things that tormented him. He told me almost as soon as we met — as though to raise the subject before I did — that at school someone, one of the teachers, I believe, had referred to him as “dwarfish.” This worry about his physical appearance perhaps explained Alan’s clowning, his mighty explosions of laughter, the extravagant cut and colors and shininess of the clothes he wore at parties in London, where from time to time I saw him. The gaiety of these clothes and the boisterousness of his manner contrasted with the nervousness, almost the shiftiness, of his eyes; and contrasted as well with the solitude and soberness of dress and behavior he imposed on himself when he visited the manor, where one sometimes surprised a wrinkled old-lady’s look on his face, before the wrinkles became the wrinkles of gaiety.
Alan seemed to spend much time alone when he was at the manor. He was to be seen at odd hours wandering about the grounds, carefully dressed, and usually in country clothes — but there was no audience there for his clothes or his moods. What did he get out of these visits? He said he liked the house, the atmosphere; and he was fascinated by my landlord, whom he found very “period,” the period, as Alan said, “before the deluge,” “antediluvian.”
He had heard from my landlord about the trip with Pitton to Woolworth’s. When he told me this he roared with laughter. “He said that Pitton was too ashamed to enter, and had absolutely to be dragged in.”
Who had improved the story I had had from Pitton — the story in which Pitton had been simply amused by the trip to the garden department of Woolworth’s? Was it my landlord, the reawakened recluse? Or was it Alan?
Alan had no book to his name. He wrote occasional book reviews and did occasional reviews of books and films and other cultural events for the radio. His radio work was better than his printed work, his voice and speech suggesting, and transmitting, a greater intelligence and zest. Such a slight name, though, such a slight achievement for someone nearly forty, someone who had already more or less defined his personality and path and the level of his ambitions.
On the radio his voice and attack and wit suggested that those few minutes in the studio were the merest interlude in a busy, complete, rounded life: a life one might envy. Listening to him, one felt that there was so much there, in the man, the sensibility, the cultivation, the mind; there was so much more that he would have said if he had had the time. That was also the impression — though to a fainter degree — that his printed work gave: the few paragraphs one read appeared to be just a shaving from a larger, more considered view of life and art and history, and even from a more considered view of the book or play being written about. But those little reviews and short radio talks and swift discussions abruptly terminated by a chairman before the news program came on — that was the sum of Alan’s work, life. He did no other job.
To know his name, to mention some slight thing he had done, did not — as one might have expected from someone so urbane — get an abashed dismissal from him. It encouraged him to speak of his work. He remembered all the phrases he had made, phrases that had seemed on the radio to bubble out of a natural effervescence, and sometimes fell a little flat in print. He would say, “As I said in that review of the book about Montgomery, the writer seemed to have been dropped on the head as a baby by a military man—” And he would break off and roar at his own joke, just as he roared at the joke — his own, or my landlord’s — about Pitton going ashamed and cringing outside the doors of Woolworth’s and having to be led in firmly by the long-haired recluse.
“Isn’t it nice to have rich friends?” Alan said one weekend. And feeling he had said something frank and funny, he fluttered his eyelashes; and the coquettishness, quite unexpected, revealed another side of his dissatisfaction and incompleteness.
Alan, speaking of rich friends, was thinking more of himself as a writer, the man with patrons and grand houses at his disposal. But we were all embraced that summer, made light-headed, by my landlord’s reawakened sense of the luxurious, his reawakened extravagance, his constant wish to seize and heighten the passing moment, to arrest and elaborate on every experience. These were the manners and style, as Alan said, as though to explain his point, of “before the deluge.”