The Unsettled Dust Read online

  ROBERT AICKMAN

  THE UNSETTLED DUST

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  The Unsettled Dust

  The Houses of the Russians

  No Stronger Than a Flower

  The Cicerones

  The Next Glade

  Ravissante

  Bind Your Hair

  The Stains

  About the Author

  Copyright

  THE UNSETTLED DUST

  During the period of my work as Special Duties Officer for the Historic Structures Fund, I have inevitably come upon many strange and unexpected things in all fields; but only three times that I can recollect have I so far encountered anything that might be thought to involve an element of the paranormal.

  Since interest in paranormal phenomena appears to be growing steadily, partly no doubt as an escape from a way of life that seems every day to grow more uniform, regulated, and unambitious, I have thought for some time that it might be worth while to set out at least one of these cases, the most striking, I think, of the three, in an orderly though completely frank narrative; separated from the many other documents connected with my employment. It is not a matter of struggling for half-lost memories, since for the most part the task consists in adapting extracts from my Diary for the period of time concerned. I have now been Special Duties Officer for just over ten years, and I think the moment has come to set about the task.

  It so happens that it has been during those ten years that the Fund has set up a Psychic and Occult Research Committee. As is well known, the Council hesitated for many years before taking this step, having in mind the extreme undesirability of the Fund involving itself in controversy of any kind, and also the constant danger of its being charged with crankiness or reaction; but in the end the pressure became so great that a response could no longer be avoided. I think it was inevitable. The link between an interest in old buildings (often ruinous and sometimes ecclesiastical), and an interest in what are popularly called ‘ghosts’, is obvious. Also the Fund, like most established voluntary societies, is supported mainly by the elderly. A Psychic Committee was and is as inescapable as the Animals Committee that has been with us almost from the start.

  The P. and O. Research Committee has undoubtedly done much good work, but I have hesitated to deliver to them a report of my own, despite the fact that I am possibly in a position to deliver three. The Fund is a very conservative organisation (not in the party sense, of course), and my dilemma is that of the civil servant. If a civil servant takes an initiative and things go right with it, he cannot, in the nature of his employment, look for much in the way of reward; whereas if his initiative goes wrong, he can expect all kinds of trouble, everything from a reprimand to blocked promotion, and a permanent black mark against his name in the files. It is accepted, therefore, that the way to advance in the civil service, or in any field where civil service conditions prevail, is never to take an initiative and never to support anyone else’s. It is inevitable that this should be so, as long as we base all our administration on the bureaucratic model. The Fund is not as hard a master as the civil service, of course, if only because no one had to answer to Parliament for its actions; but caution is compelled upon it by its sheer size, and by its obligation to offend no one, if this can possibly be avoided, not even its direct critics. A report, even if carefully edited, delivered by me to the P. and O. people on any one of my three cases could, in my judgement, lead to contention, to unpopularity in various quarters for the author, and conceivably even to a libel action in which the Fund would be involved. There are few subjects on which people are more touchy than the ‘supernatural’, as they call it. It is the measure of the importance they attach to it, even if few of them care to admit it. The delivery of such a report would hardly be construed by the Council as lying within my duties, if trouble resulted. One can but speculate upon the mass of important information which never sees the light of day for similar reasons. I have thought it best to confine the circulation of my narrative to a few selected people, binding them in advance to the strictest confidence; and to place a copy for posterity in my small archives.

  The position of Special Duties Officer, of which I have so far been the only incumbent, was created when the growth of the Fund, and the number and variety of its properties, conjured up a miscellany of tasks, often urgent, but all outside the scope of any member of a staff which had been recruited almost solely for duties connected with preservation in the strictest sense – and which, as was freely admitted at the time, was often by then advanced in service. My ploys have varied from setting up a large bequest of sculpture in a once ducal park, to organising a sailing-boat harbour on an island off the Welsh coast; from a frustrating six months devoted to relaying an ornamental paving, to an even longer period spent in promoting an open-air season of fertility plays with singing and dancing. Most of my work has been done in the open air, trying to dodge the British climate, the local authority Philistines, and the Fund’s own members, so many of whom have ideas of their own and think they have bought the entire staff with their own small subscriptions. Well, not all perhaps. Some of the members are very nice people, and eager to offer their hospitality. I have had my moments of cynicism, when I have felt that all that has mattered of the Fund’s work has rested on my single shoulders, but that was mere self-pity and I really know quite well that I have done much better as a Fund officer than I could expect to do in any other job. I fell right on my feet when the Fund engaged me.

  The events I am about to describe took place at Clamber Court in Bedfordshire, a seat of the Brakespear family, the family of which one branch is said to have provided the only Englishman ever to be Pope; who was also the Pope with the greatest physical strength of all the Popes. The Clamber Court branch was represented by two unmarried sisters. Their father, the last Lord St. Adrian, had died years before, and their mother was said to have been a little queer ever since. At least that was the gossip around the Fund office. In the end, the girls had settled Clamber on the Fund, but remained there themselves as Fund tenants. The same office gossip said that the girls had lived very wildly at one time, having no one to control them, and had got through a lot of money. Explanations like that might have been true in former times, but there is seldom much in them nowadays. It is far more likely that the Brakespears were orphans of the social storm like most of the Fund’s clients.

  My sojourn in the house had nothing to do with the building itself or the surrounding property, as I shall explain in a moment, but it so happens that I had paid Clamber one previous visit. It had not been in the course of my duties, which do not include any kind of regular round. I went there as an ordinary Fund member, without disclosing anything more. In those early days, I often found it instructive to do this and to note how my colleagues were faring in their endless struggle with the different buildings, often near to collapse even when offered to the Fund; and with the odd and recalcitrant people who lived in them. In those days, the Fund’s aged President frequently described the staff as an extra-large family, and it was by no means only a cliché: one felt the presence of the Fund wherever one went, watching how one behaved, and difficult to get away from. Of course I felt much more at home in a year or two, much more sure of my ground. When it came to my going to places like Clamber Court, it should also be remembered that I had worked at one time in architecture, though I never qualified; and so had an interest in buildings for their own sake. Naturally that is true of many of the Fund’s staff.

  Clamber Court proved to be a square, four-storeyed, brick pile, with, on each side, a square, two-storeyed, smaller brick pavilion. The pavilions had slate roofs coming to points, and pilasters on three sides. They were linked to the main block by le
ngthy one-storey passages, with big, circular-topped windows. This branch of the large Brakespear family had become rich at the time of the Hanoverian succession, and that then entered upon a new period of importance, drifting so far from the other branches that ultimately no heir could be found to the title. A conspicuous feature of the property was two very long drives. The first one led from the front of the house, dead straight down a two-mile avenue of fine old trees to a noble, ornamental gateway on the main road. The other ran, less straight, but at no less length, from a pretty lodge at the east to a related lodge at the west (also on the main road). The drives crossed at about a quarter of a mile from the house-front. At the point of intersection was a baroque fountain, with an heroic male figure about to drive a spear into a fat boar. I found it an uncomfortable group, but redeemed by the all too unusual excellence of its condition and maintenance. In modern Europe, most estate fountains are broken, sordid, and regarded with indifference even by their owners. This one shimmered, and, supreme marvel, actually spouted water, quite probably at the proper force. I had already noted that the drive down which I had driven my Mini (the transverse drive) was clean and weeded; every pane of glass in the two long corridors from the main house to the pavilions appeared to be in place, and gleaming in the spring sun. The Fund cannot always afford perfections of that kind. Almost certainly, the Brakespears must have had something left in the kitty.

  The interior of the house confirmed this. Not only did it contain many objects of real excellence, but it was painted, tended, and polished. There were no sagging wallpaper and no holes in the ceiling. On the other hand, I could not say that the house was dusted. This was curious. One might have written names in the deposit on the gleaming surfaces, as Rembrandt did in Korda’s film. Indeed, I did write ‘Historic Structures Fund’ on the top of a dining-room table, and the words stood out quite clearly in the light of a sunbeam. The odd thing was that one of the house employees, a tall, grey woman in a grey nylon wrapper, just watched me do it from the other side of the room, and said nothing at all, though she was presumably stationed to keep an eye on the behaviour of the public. I particularly noticed that she didn’t even smile at what I had done. I was so surprised by the dust in the house and by the indifference shown to it that the next day I sent a memo to the Fund’s Regional Representative. I suggested that there might be a cement works in the district, an idea that had occurred to me during the night; and that the Fund should possibly require all the house windows to be kept shut.

  That was nine years ago. Two years later, I was required to stay in the house for (as my Diary confirms) eighteen days. The reason was the need to superintend one of the maddest schemes in which the Fund ever entangled itself – indeed, the maddest of all, as I said at the time, when anyone asked me, and as events have since confirmed, to my very sincere regret: the so-called recovery of the River Bovil. For years, there had been complaints in various quarters (none of them, of course, in full possession of the facts) that the Fund was too conservationist and backward-looking; too little prepared to enter the field and do battle. The worst consequence of this uninformed agitation was that the Fund found itself saddled with the project for cleaning out the weeds and mud from this small, local river that no one had ever heard of (not even the people who lived in the district, as I soon found), and patching up the broken-down locks. The view that I (and others) expressed was the obvious one that if there was any real demand for the river, then the proper public authorities could be depended upon to attend to it. The matter was simply nothing to do with the objectives of the Fund. But there was the usual group of hotheads, with not enough work to do in the world, as one could not but feel; and they had interested one of the local landowners in putting up a little money, though only one landowner and nothing like enough money. They said that most of the work could be done by volunteers, and that the public would find the rest of the finance. Needless to say, neither claim proved to be true, and the whole business committed the Fund to endless travail, by no means ended yet, nor likely to be. The Fund is simply not equipped for struggle, argument, and publicity. Nor has my own experience disposed me in favour of what are called ‘voluntary workers’. In practice much more is always achieved by regular, salaried staff, keeping themselves out of the limelight. And so it has proved in the case of the Bovil project. But if I say more on that topic, I shall be suspected of disloyalty to the Fund Council, which would be quite wrong. It is more a case of loyalty being often best shown by preventing mistakes being made.

  After (in my view) insufficient discussion, the Bovil project was agreed to and the hottest and most thrusting of the hotheads put in charge of the actual works, a man named Hand. I myself didn’t think he was altogether an Englishman, but it was obvious that he was very young for the degree of responsibility in which he had involved himself, so I was asked to look after him during the first stages of the work, as I was twenty or more years older and had gained experience from a wide variety of different jobs. Hamish Hay thorn, the National Secretary of the Fund, wrote to Miss Agnes Brakespear, reputedly the more businesslike sister, to ask if I could stay at Clamber Court while I was launching the scheme. The Fund expects people whose properties have been accepted to help in this way, as the need may arise; though sometimes Fund employees find themselves offered only an attic and very simple fare. This had by then happened to me several times, and I was quite prepared for it at Clamber Court. (Nowadays, of course, in my case it hardly ever happens, because I have learned to enter into the different foibles of the Fund’s tenants.) I remember that Miss Brakespear took a long time to answer at all, and all the while the Bovil scheme was held up; but we heard from her in the end, and off I went that very afternoon. I arrived in good time for dinner, though that, as I have just said, might not have meant very much.

  There was a long tradition that the great gates on the main road were opened only for family weddings, family funerals, and visits of the Sovereign, and the smaller gate further up the same road had been padlocked by the Fund’s Regional Representative, because it had proved impossible to find a tenant for the adjoining lodge, owing to the noise of the traffic; so that I wound my way in my Mini through the lanes leading to the eastern entry, as I had done two years before. It had perhaps been not quite as much as that, because now it was earlier in the spring, with not yet a leaf on any of the big, old trees: in fact, not yet officially spring at all. This time, the man at the gate was wearing a hat, which he touched when opening for me.

  My spirits rose as I saw that the long, winding drive was as spruce as before. All the hedges within view had been properly laid and many of the farm gates had been renewed. The hero huntsman when at length I reached him, was enshrined among complex traceries of water, and the doomed quarry adrip with it. The house, I thought, as I completed the finishing stretch up to the wide parterre of rectangular stones before the double staircase, looked immaculate but unfunctional, like a vast Staffordshire model. When I stopped my engine and stepped out, the complete silence contributed to the illusion. I stood for a moment looking down the slow descent to the great gates, and watching big, black rooks wheel like sheets of burnt newspaper between the bare trees, the only life there was.

  ‘Hullo,’ said a casual voice from above. ‘Come in.’

  Standing with her hands on the balustrade at the top of the two flights of steps was a woman; plainly one of my two hostesses, though I had never then knowingly seen either. I wavered, as one does, between ascending the right-hand steps or the left, but she said nothing and just watched me.

  ‘I’m Olive Brakespear,’ she said as I arrived, and held out her hand. I should have expected the hand to be cold, as it was one of those fine March days, which often seem the chilliest of the year. But it was not. ‘You’re my landlord.’ In my experience, the tenants always either said something like that or, alternatively, did everything to pretend that the relationship was the other way round.

  Miss Brakespear, however, was an unusual figure. She w
as well above average height for a woman (and six or eight inches above mine), and remarkably slender and well-shaped, though tough and wiry looking. The last impression was reinforced by the fact that she was wearing worn brown riding breeches, worn brown riding boots, and a dark-blue shirt, open at the neck and with the sleeves rolled up. Her face, neck and forearms were all tanned and brown, even though it was the end of the winter. Her face was striking because she had strong, prominent bones, large, melancholy eyes, and a big, rectangular mouth, but some might have said that her head was too long, her cheeks too sunken. She had straight reddish-brown hair, starting rather far back on the brow. It was glossy and well-kept, like the mane of a race-horse, but worn shoulder-length and curled outwards at the ends, after the fashion which prevailed during the Second World War. It was very difficult to guess how old she was. Her physical style was one which is eminently durable.

  ‘I was watching the rooks,’ she said. ‘Sometimes when the trees are bare and the light beginning to go, I do it for an hour at a time.’ Looking at her in her blue shirt, I am sure I must have shivered. ‘Come on in, or you’ll get cold,’ said Miss Brakespear.

  The big, oblong, pillared hall contained only formal furniture, though I was pleased to observe a heap of the Fund’s official, blue-covered, guidebook [?] to the house. The wide door had lain open while Miss Brakespear stood outside, so that the cavernous room was cold and echoey, especially as there was no fire. It was also dim, as evening was descending, and Miss Brakespear had not turned on the light.

  She went before me up the dark main staircase, taking two steps at a time with her swinging stride. Impeded by my bundle, I followed her much less gracefully.

  We turned leftwards along a high, wide passage which traversed the first floor of the house, with big white doors opening into silent rooms on either side. I had not previously been upstairs, because the rooms open to the public were all below. Miss Brakespear’s step in her riding boots was sharp and swift, whereas I am sure that I merely shuffled. At the eastern end of the passage, Miss Brakespear opened the door of my room. At least I had not been relegated to one of those designed for occupation by the servants.