He was confused, pulled in many directions, helpless. He seemed to be proving the point made by Mrs. Phillips. She had been continuing to look for some explanation of Pitton’s dismissal that would make it easier for everyone to bear; and she had settled on the idea that in his last year at the manor Pitton had gone very strange, that he had been finally undermined by the solitude of his labor — a pretense of work, a kind of half idling — in the wilderness, and that he had “gone to pieces.”
In her previous job, Mrs. Phillips said, she had seen any number of people who had gone to pieces; it wasn’t only people you read about in the newspapers who went to pieces. I had thought that Mrs. Phillips was straining too hard to find an explanation. But then, meeting Pitton at the bus stop in the valley and meeting him sometimes in Salisbury, and talking about his problems, which he kept on insisting were insoluble, I thought it was possible that Mrs. Phillips was responding to the odd mixture in his personality of passion and servility and affectation and pride and independence.
He didn’t want to be a gardener again, he told me. He could do the job at the manor; but he couldn’t do it anywhere else or for anybody else — it was too undignified. Nor did he want a town job. The country gentleman in him, or rather the free country laborer in him, feared the anonymity, the nothingness of the town worker.
I would meet Pitton at the bus stop in the valley. We would talk then until the bus came. We never talked on the bus. We sat on different seats. We also continued to meet in Salisbury; and sometimes we met in the village on the public road when I was coming back from my walk over the downs. Our talks were circular. He would put ideas to me about what he might do; I would encourage him; and then he would reject my encouragement, returning to the idea of the “grudge” against him.
Pitton’s difficulty — as I understood when I put myself in his place, and examined myself and my own fears — was that he had lost touch with the idea of work. In fact, after the manor, the freedom there, the routine he had created, the calm he had established for himself, his relationship with the seasons, the year, time itself, what he feared was not work but employment — and perhaps not employment so much as the idea of the employer.
In the end, quietly, ashamedly, he took a job. He drove a laundry van. I knew about it only when I saw him driving the van, the laundry leather moneybag added to his country-gentleman clothes and slung over his shoulder and chest like a bandolier. And in the end he left his cottage and was given a council flat in the town, on the old London coach road.
It could not have been pleasant for him in the cottage towards the end, when he had been under pressure to leave, to release the property and the capital it represented to the estate. I expected that he would have been happy at having found another place to live, and quite a reasonable one. But, with the passion and twisted emotions that had now become permanent with him, he complained. The flat was shabby. In what way? It hadn’t been decorated. They expected him to do his own decorating; that was the way he was being treated.
It was always hard — so convincing was Pitton’s manner — to understand that he was an obedient soul, the father of an obedient soldier; that — with all his passion — servility, or dependence, ran deep in his nature.
BRAY SAID, “So our friend has moved out.”
I was sitting beside him in his car, and he spoke out of the corner of his mouth, the corner that was on my side.
Bray said, “An arrogant man.”
Below his driver’s cap Bray’s eyes, at once concentrating on the road and expressing an inward pleasure, were like slits, sloping sharply down to the sides of his face. And then, speaking of the manor family as though they were all still there, as though the manor organization of which his father had formed part still existed, Bray said, “They’re a funny family.” There was tribute in his words, and also pride.
He reached for a book on the shelf below the dashboard and passed it to me, with the semiabstraction of a man concentrating on the road and also with the clumsiness of a man not used to handling books. He said, mysteriously, “Have a look at this when you get home.” As though the book, the mysterious object, would explain much; as though the book would free him, Bray, of the need to say more.
The book was by my landlord. It was nearly fifty years old, something from the 1920s. It was a short story in verse, with many illustrations. The paper was good, the book was expensively bound in cloth; and though it carried the name of a reputable London publisher of the period, it was clear that the production of such a slight work in this lavish way had been subsidized or paid for by the author.
The story was simple. A young woman gets tired of the English social round — many opportunities there for drawings of the costumes of the 1920s. She decides to become a missionary in Africa. Goodbyes are said; the lovers who are left behind pine in different ways. A ship; the ocean; the African coast; a forest river. The young missionary is captured by Africans, natives. She has fantasies of sexual assault by the African chief to whose compound she is taken; fantasies as well of the harem and of black eunuchs. Instead, she is cooked in a cannibal pot and eaten; and all that remains of her, all that one of her London lovers finds, is a twenties costume draped on a wooden cross, like a scarecrow.
This was the joke knowledge of the world the young boy of eighteen had arrived at; this was the knowledge (which would have appeared like sophistication) that had been fed by the manor and the grounds. And perhaps later knowledge had not gone beyond the joke: outside England and Europe, a fantasy Africa, a fantasy Peru or India or Malaya. And perhaps passion too had never gone beyond the titillation of the Beardsley-like drawings of this book. And that was the most amazing thing about the book Bray had preserved and cherished: the drawings.
They were in the very style of the drawings which Mrs. Phillips had brought over as gifts from my landlord during the previous summer, of the shopping expeditions and the champagne. He had struck his form and won admiration for his style at an early age; had early arrived at his idea of who he was, his worth and his sensibility; and he had stalled there. Perhaps he had stalled in what might be considered a state of perfection. But that perfection — that absence of restlessness and creative abrasion, that view from his back windows of a complete, untouched, untroubled world — had turned to morbidity, acedia, a death of the soul.
That morbidity had been like a long sleep. Then he had miraculously awakened, and he had found his world still about him. He knew that the spaciousness of earlier days had gone. But he was prepared, as he had always been prepared, to live with what he found — that was how, projecting myself onto him, I read him.
He liked ivy. When the trees in his garden collapsed he did not complain. He had enjoyed the ivy for many years, and now he would have to content himself with other things. So it was with people; when their time came, it came. He had made no comment — from what I heard from the Phillipses — about the fall of the aspens, which he must have seen for fifty years at least. So, understanding now that there was no longer a gardener, he never — from what the Phillipses said — asked for Pitton, with whom the previous summer he had played and about whom he had made up his stories, to tell to the people remaining to him, like Alan. (Like a child of two or three who might play every day with its grandmother; but then, should that grandmother suddenly die, might never ask after her.)
I saw Pitton driving his laundry van sometimes. Hard to recognize in him the man whose routine, whose appearance at the white gate, had been part of the new life and comfort and healing I had found in the valley.