Mrs. Phillips said, “I thought I should let you know.”
This was her nurse’s manner, which she shared with Mr. Phillips and perhaps to some extent copied from him. The other side of this manner, with Mr. Phillips, was his authority, his power, his irritability. With Mrs. Phillips it was her invalid’s manner, the thin dark skin darkening and gathering below her eyes, the thin veins getting blue and prominent, seeming about to rupture, suggesting with the very many fussy shallow lines on her forehead infinite suffering and fragility.
She said, “I thought I should let you know. I know you are close to him. They’re letting Mr. Pitton go.” The “mister” was for my sake; that was how I called him and referred to him. She and Mr. Phillips called him Fred. “Of course,” she said, a little more jauntily, “it’s been coming for some time.”
And that was true, though I had never wanted to face the facts or to inquire too carefully into them, half wishing to believe in magic, in things going on as I had found them, believing — like Alan, to some extent — in the great wealth of my landlord and the ability of the people who looked after his affairs to perform great financial feats. But I knew that Pitton and his house were costing money; and the Phillipses were costing money; and the manor itself was very expensive to maintain, even in the way it was. And I could see that the estate — more a nature reserve than workable land — provided little revenue.
The great inflation of the mid-seventies would have cut cruelly into whatever income my landlord had. And the manor required too much attention. It wasn’t a place that could simply be let go. It wasn’t like my cottage; its scale was more than human; it exaggerated human needs. People had to be trained to use buildings like the manor; and that was why — like the ancient Roman villa at Chedworth in Gloucestershire — these buildings were perishable. People could easily do without them.
When the boiler exploded at the manor, and the ceramic or concrete or asbestos casing of the tall metal chimney against one wall had shattered into a thousand jagged fragments all over the manor courtyard, I heard — either from the Phillipses or from Michael Allen, the young central heating man, who came with his van and spent many days in the courtyard — that the annual heating costs at the manor were four to five thousand pounds. That might have been an exaggeration. Men like Michael Allen, entering rich houses for the first time because of their skills and trades, might have liked to exaggerate the importance of their county or gentry clients. Still, five thousand pounds as a heating bill — it showed how unstable prices, and our world, had become.
In 1857, in Madame Bovary, Flaubert could write of the peddler’s six-percent interest charge as extortionate, bloodletting. Now we lived easily with that kind of charge. In 1955, when I was very young and new to London and trying to write, I wanted nothing more than five hundred pounds a year; and, more modest than Virginia Woolf thirty years before, I would have undertaken to pay for my own rented room out of those five hundred pounds. In 1962, at a lunch in a London club with a humorous writer and a cartoonist, I put my needs — the two other men had asked — at two thousand pounds a year: I had moved up from the rented room to the rented, self-contained flat. This figure had scandalized my fellow lunchers, older men, as far too low. And indeed, just three years later, when I had bought a house and taken on a mortgage, I would have considered five thousand pounds a year as just about fair. Now that was a figure that could be talked about as a heating charge. Not many fortunes would have been able to stand that kind of expense, one among many; and my landlord had retired from the world in 1949 or 1950, some years before I had thought five hundred pounds a year enough for my needs.
I watched for Pitton. He had the knack — sometimes it seemed, in spite of the steadiness and gravity of his movements, like a little game he played with himself — of reaching the white gate at the end of the lawn more or less on the stroke of one o’clock.
He would appear on the lawn in front of my cottage, his morning’s work done, four or five minutes before the hour. He would do what he had to do in the garden shed — put away tools, reassume formal clothes (if that was necessary) for the short walk along the public road to his house; lock up the shed; and then, adjusting his pace to the time in hand, start on the walk to the gate. Sometimes he would enter the lawn from the vegetable garden, through an old wooden gate (over-specified, pulled out of true now by its own sturdiness and weight) in the garden wall. Sometimes, coming out of the summer bush as clean as a cat, he walked up from the overgrown orchard through the overgrown box-hedged enclosure.
This morning he came out of the box-hedged enclosure. He had only in the last week cut his first summer path through the tall weeds there, one swath up, one swath down. He was not wearing his plastic raincoat or his Wellingtons. He was quite formally dressed, without a jacket, but with a country shirt and his woolen tie. He didn’t have to change. What he had to do in the garden shed didn’t take long. His walk to the gate was his very slow, arm-dangling walk. Not the way he walked when he pushed open the gate at nine in the morning; not the way he walked when he worked. This very slow walk was the way Pitton walked when his work was over, when his time had become his own again. And there was nothing in his walk now that hinted at the end of a routine; nothing in his pre-lunch ritual that suggested an agitated man, a man in possession of the news Mrs. Phillips had given me half an hour before.
At two o’clock he was back. He unlatched the white gate that separated the short, dark, yew-hung lane from the open manor lawn; latched it behind him; and his walk, though unhurried, suggested a man who was at work again.
I thought that there had been a mistake; that Mrs. Phillips had misheard, or had passed on to me as a decision something that had been only an idea, something that had perhaps been discussed and dropped. Pitton was so untroubled: I thought he knew better than Mrs. Phillips.
An hour and a half later, after my walk on the downs, past Jack’s cottage, up between the barrows to the view of Stonehenge, an hour and a half later, coming back to the grounds, I heard the shout of “Fred!” from Mr. Phillips, shouting to Pitton from the manor, shouting to Pitton somewhere in the back garden. There was no reply. This was normal. And then at five there was the ritual of Pitton’s departure — locking up the garden shed, and expressing in his very slow walk to the front gate the end of the day’s labors.
But he didn’t appear at the gate at nine the next morning. He didn’t appear at half past nine or at ten. It was later, in the middle of the morning, just before eleven, that I saw him. And he was banging imperiously at my kitchen door, the only door I used, the door that faced the abandoned cold frames, the heavy timber-framed glass covers stacked up against the high garden wall, the nettles growing tall behind and between the glass, and, over the wall, some distance away, near the river willows, the tall middle aspen and the mangled but already sprouting stumps of the other two.
The foolish pride he had displayed when I had seen him in his house and complimented him on his hi-fi equipment; the pretense that he had a rich source of money quite separate from his gardener’s wages; the passion, the staring, enlarged eyes, the quivering nostrils on the pink-champagne morning when he had stood awkwardly bent, the tie dangling from his neck, in front of the overgrown box trees and waited for me to come to him — all of that, the folly, the pride, the wildness, the passion, was in his face. But instead of the surprise of champagne there was the bewilderment of anger, an anger that seemed to have taken him to a depth of feeling for which he was not prepared, anger that seemed to have taken him close to madness.