The Unsettled Dust Read online

  *

  Nine days later (Nesta had begun to keep a diary) Curtis, without explanation or precedent, suddenly, in the middle of dinner, began to make a scene.

  They had been eating for some time in silence, when Curtis, his fish unfinished, crashed down his knife and fork and bawled out: ‘What the hell’s the matter with you, Nesta?’

  One change in Nesta seemed to be that her nerves were growing stronger, so that she no longer trembled before the unexpected, as she had hitherto tended to do. Now she looked Curtis in the eyes. ‘Nothing is the matter with me that I know of.’ Her look changed as she added, ‘I’m sorry the dinner isn’t better. You know it’s Peggy’s night out.’

  ‘You’re a better cook than Peggy any day.’ It was hard to believe, notwithstanding, that indifferently cooked fish was responsible for Curtis’s remarkable wrath.

  ‘I expect I didn’t stick closely enough to the directions.’

  ‘Why have you messed up your hands like that?’

  It was, in fact, the first time she had worn brightly coloured nail varnish.

  ‘Do you like it?’ She stretched out her hands across the table. It was true that they now looked unlike the hands of a capable cook.

  ‘It makes me sick.’

  Nesta slowly withdrew her hands and placed them in her lap.

  ‘It’s hideous. Besides, it’s vulgar. Never do it again.’

  None the less, now that the cause of his fury was exposed, the fury was ebbing, the more quickly for its violence.

  ‘After all they’re my hands.’

  Curtis was stricken by her placidity.

  ‘Don’t do it again, there’s a good girl.’

  ‘I think if s nice.’

  ‘Oh darling, it’s not. It’s horrible.’

  Nesta remembered having read in some cynical book that although a woman’s appearance is what a man most cares about, yet, too often, the more she does about it the less he cares for the result and for her.

  *

  Curtis had assumed that Nesta would discontinue the notion. When he was proved wrong, the thing became a small obsession with him. By bed and by board, Nesta’s painted hands seemed to be deflecting him, warding him off. He had assuredly never realised that he cared so very much about carmine finger nails.

  It was in his behaviour to Nesta, in acts of omission, that his distaste found expression; for after the first outburst, he seldom returned to the subject in words. He was ashamed and uncomprehending; and felt compelled secretly to agree with Nesta that her hands were her own. Also he felt that he lost status by his concern with something so unimportant. He apprehended hostility to Nesta creeping into and about him like a snake; and was dismayed.

  For Nesta, in her insensitiveness to his needs and impulses, it seemed to him that the manicuring of her nails had become a main business of her life. Every evening she seemed to be plying a battery of small instruments infinitely sharp, and unpleasantly surgical in aspect; or, in the alternative, endlessly filing. The distinctive gritty sound of Nesta filing her nails became to his nerves in their emotional aspect what the dentist’s drill was in their physical aspect. Once he found words to suggest that, instead of in the evening, she tend her nails during the day when he was out of the house; but later he divined that already she had been tending them by day also. Even apart from his antipathy to coloured nails, it was a disquieting revelation. It disgusted him in itself, as if Nesta had acquired a pathological obsession.

  As sounds unheard can, it is said, be sweeter than those heard, so hostility unacknowledged can be bitterer than open warfare. To her preoccupation with her hands, Nesta shortly began to add the extravagant and wasteful buying of clothes. Previously she had seemed content with exactly the type and size of wardrobe favoured by other married women of her age and income level and district. Now she was buying recklessly; and, what Curtis found if possible, even more disturbing, was dressing more and more oddly. As far as he could see, her eccentric but costly garb lacked even the justification of being in the mode.

  There was one evening when he arrived to escort her to a bridge party. The invitation was of long standing, and the date agreed for weeks.

  ‘Darling, I’m sorry but you simply can’t show yourself at the Foxtons like that.’

  ‘Does it become me?’

  ‘That’s not the point. You know what the Foxtons are like. The Foxtons,’ he repeated with desperate emphasis.

  ‘Should I surprise them?’

  ‘Put on something else quickly, darling. We’re forty minutes late already. More.’

  ‘You’re late. I’ve been dressed for hours.’ She picked up a tiny scalpel-like object, and began to bore with it at her nails. She brought to the task a curiously profound concentration, slowly moving her bare elbows as she made the minute movements. She resembled a subaqueous tree, gently rippling in the movement of the water.

  ‘You’re spending far too much on clothes anyway,’ said Curtis, his nerves flaring, as always, at the sight of her occupation. ‘I can’t keep up with you.’

  ‘Keep up with me?’

  ‘Pay the bills,’ Curtis said bitterly, although he was neither poor nor ungenerous.

  ‘Have you been asked to pay any bills? Extra bills?’ Not for a moment did she look up from her work.

  ‘I almost wish you would ask me. I don’t want them all to descend on me at once.’

  She made no reply to that, but simply said, ‘What about the Foxtons?’

  ‘I’ll ring up, while you change.’

  ‘I’m not going to change for the Foxtons.’

  He was sincerely shocked. The Foxtons were among their best friends.

  ‘Darling, we’ll have no friends left.’

  *

  It was hard not to think so; because even when Nesta did go out, he noticed that she seemed no longer to enjoy her former quiet popularity, and fancied that thereby he himself became suspect also for the shadowy change in her.

  Although he had been married less than a year, Curtis came to dread his return home in the evening. Not only was Nesta apparently losing all taste for the small dinner parties and little gatherings with their friends which he so much enjoyed, but she seemed also to be losing her interest in him. It was not that the housekeeping appeared to be neglected: on the contrary, Curtis thought he now discerned a new and conscious punctiliousness over every detail. But the effect was of a household in the charge not, as is desirable, of benevolent and invisible fairies, but rather of recent graduates from a College of Domestic Science. Nesta seemed to manage her home more and more impersonally; and she carried this impression into every aspect of their joint life. Fundamentally Curtis had married neither for passion nor even for a well-kept home, but for sentiment: so that Nesta’s changed behaviour particularly distressed him. She herself seemed neither happy nor unhappy; but to find an obscure contentment in sitting always by herself, impelling Peggy to correct every deviation from formal domestic perfection, wearing ornate clothes, and endlessly employing her elaborate manicure case and green taffeta covered beauty box. From the latter, when open, rose a vapour of invisible but choking face-powder and a mêlée of headachy perfumes.

  A very upsetting development was when Nesta began to wear hats with veils. It was now that Curtis seriously wondered what to do about her. He thought of mentioning the course of events to a doctor, but there was really nothing to be said which would not sound impossibly foolish. Nesta, although unsympathetic, was perfectly rational in her dealings with him, and was running the house more efficiently than ever. Her body was, of course, her own, to adorn as she wished. She acquired what appeared to be a large number of new hats, many of them evening hats, in the French manner, and an equally large number of veils, varying in colour, opacity, and pattern; and before long was never to be seen by Curtis without one. Because it was at this point that she began to keep strictly to her own room at nights. For reasons unacknowledged by either, they had occupied separate rooms from the start; but the rooms had
a communicating door which until now had never once been locked. Nesta met Curtis’s questions with simple statements that she wished to sleep alone ‘for the present’; and when he became more pressing, with quiet defiance.

  The new hats were all in what Curtis took to be more or less the fashion, although he did not move in circles where those fashions obtained in their full purity; and the veils were at all times elegantly, even coquettishly adjusted. Sometimes the mesh was large, and Curtis thought that he could see her face almost as well as if the veil were not there; but, on the whole, and as time passed, his idea of Nesta’s features fell into steadily increasing indistinctness and even distortion. The only exception was her mouth, which she exposed in order to eat, dexterously twisting the veil above her upper lip. To Curtis, in his isolation from her, Nesta’s mouth seemed newly and poignantly desirable. Its image lingered in his thoughts, growing more and more sensual as he brooded upon it. Before long he wanted merely to kiss her mouth more than once he had wanted entirely to possess her. But he considered that to kiss her would be undignified while she continued to use him so disparagingly. Even more, he doubted whether she would welcome his kiss. He held back from a conflict which might have to be final.

  One day, between morning and evening, she seemed to have changed all the furniture in the flat, installing many new objects, moving into new positions most of the things which were there already, and undoubtedly casting a number of pieces away. Into the drawing room Nesta had brought a full-length looking-glass, tall and wide, stately and heavy, and bordered with a tumbling riot of gilt fauns and maenads. It might have come from a Venetian palazzo which had been redecorated in a late period. She had altered the lighting in the room, so that at night all of it bore upon the new looking-glass; which, indeed, was now almost the only object left in the room. The flat, however, was a large one, and Curtis through his inner storm of protest and bewilderment felt an intimation that Nesta had transformed something commonplace into something exciting and dramatic. Unfortunately Curtis had married neither for excitement nor for drama.

  Now they dined by the light of candles stuck in writhing silver candelabra. One night Nesta was wearing a misty dress, entirely white but not in the least bridal; and over her head a silky white veil, against which her mouth as she ate showed red as a new wound. To Curtis, Nesta’s mouth seemed miraculously to have changed its shape: it was impossible that it could ever have been so desirable. He forced himself to eat and to complain. He took up the theme which worried him almost as much as the change in Nesta herself.

  ‘If you go on spending money like this, you’ll compel me to disclaim responsibility for your debts.’ Even the spoon with which he was eating his soup was new and sweetly chased.

  ‘You have no responsibility for my debts.’

  Nesta had a small income of her own, but Curtis well knew that it could come nowhere near to meeting her present almost daily orgies of expenditure. He considered that her implication to the contrary was insulting to his intelligence.

  ‘I hope you’ll explain that to the lawyers. The law says that a husband is responsible for his wife’s debts,’ said Curtis wearily and bitterly. He had no expectation of making any impression on her.

  ‘You’re paying for nothing more than you ever did.’

  Curtis put down his beautiful alien soup spoon. He knew that many months had now passed since all this began, and indeed there had been no bills for any of it.

  ‘Who is paying then?’

  ‘I am paying. You are getting the benefit without paying.’

  ‘You can’t be paying. You haven’t got the money.’ His need to cover her lovely mouth with kisses made him foolish. ‘There’s someone else. All this nonsense is for someone else.’

  Nesta laughed.

  ‘It’s for someone else,’ Curtis repeated.

  ‘No. It’s for me,’ She spoke with a significance he was too irate to grasp.

  ‘I should have stopped it once and for all long ago.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Had you locked up, if necessary.’ At this moment indeed he would have done worse things than that.’

  ‘How could you stop it? You started it.’

  Curtis changed colour in the candlelight. He remembered the saying that what you fear is true.

  ‘It wasn’t even for your own sake. You were thinking entirely of me.’

  ‘Nesta!’ he cried. ‘Tell me what is happening to you?’

  But without replying, she produced a tiny shining implement and began to file her nails. The absorption which always accompanied this process was around her like a screen.

  Feeling fear and shame and pity, he went to her. He pulled up a chair and put his arm round her shoulders.

  ‘Nesta,’ he said. ‘Let’s be as we used to be.’

  He tried to kiss her. Before his lips touched hers, he was conscious of a sharp pain. He raised his other hand to his cheek. It was smeared with blood.

  ‘Get back,’ cried Nesta. ‘Mind my dress.’

  Now he was holding his handkerchief to his cheek with both hands. The blood seemed to be spurting out. Already Curtis felt that everything about him was discoloured with it.

  Nesta had risen and was standing in the corner of the room gazing at him. He could see her eyes bright through the white silk veil.

  Even with the pain of the injury and the discomfort of the blood, he also saw something else. He had supposed that Nesta, even though it seemed inconceivable, had struck at him with the small sharp file. But as she stood, the light fell on her hands, and he saw that every one of her painted nails had been sharpened to a deadly point.

  ‘So that’s what your manicuring amounts to.’

  ‘It’s time you noticed.’ Nesta still spoke quietly. Curtis had seated himself at the far side of the table, on which he placed his elbows as he held his soaking handkerchief to his face. ‘This is the way they grow. I keep trying to blunt them.’

  Curtis looked at her.

  ‘To file them down and to make them look socially acceptable. The way you want them.’

  ‘It’s the most horrible thing I ever head of.’ Of course she was mad.

  ‘It’s getting more difficult all the time. The more I file them, the sharper they get. I don’t know why I go on bothering!’

  Curtis was trying to collect himself. ‘Look, darling,’ he said to her across the table. ‘Look, darling, you’re ill. You’re saying so yourself. If you’ll give me a minute of time to clean up, I’ll go and rout out Nicolson. I’m sure he’ll come round.’ Nicolson was their doctor.

  ‘I’m not out of my mind, if that’s what you mean.’ She said it so calmly that Curtis, who had risen to his feet, stopped and sat down again. ‘Out of my body perhaps. Not my mind. I don’t suppose Nicolson can do more about the one thing than he can about the other.’ She put her hands on the table, interlocking the fingers. ‘Have you any further suggestions?’

  ‘There must be something for us to do.’ He thought wildly of psychiatric clinics, marriage guidance centres, and other such outposts in the jungle. The whole territory was one into which he had never thought he would have to enter.

  ‘Perhaps what I need is an ugliness salon. You don’t happen to know of one?’

  ‘I’ve never seen you look so beautiful.’ He had ceased to play his appointed part, and spoke his thought.

  ‘But you don’t want me all the same? Not now? Not really?’

  ‘Of course I want you. You’re my wife. If only things could be as they were. That’s what I want.’

  ‘She picked up an exquisite decanter, one of their new acquisitions, and filled a delicate wineglass. ‘You know, I had no idea,’ she said, ‘how deep it goes. Most people know nothing. Nothing. It goes to the very bottom of life.’ She drained the glass. A drop of the red wine hung on her mouth. She licked her lip.

  ‘What does? I don’t understand you.’

  Regarding her, and trying to puzzle out what he felt to be her insults, he was for a moment f
ar from sure that really she looked any different from the way she had looked on the day he married her. As far as one could see: and behind her white veil. Apart from her hands, of course.

  ‘As you don’t understand me, you can’t want me,’ said Nesta.

  ‘But I do want you,’ cried Curtis. ‘I tried to kiss you and you wouldn’t let me.’

  She was standing with the tips of her ringers resting on the white table cloth. Curtis was reminded of a clawed goddess with a beautiful immemorial face which he had once seen in company with that earlier woman in his life. Nesta’s bright eyes were again fixed upon him. ‘You say you want to kiss me,’ she said. ‘How long is it since you’ve even seen my face? Do you think you’d still recognise me?’

  She began to unwind her veil. Then she picked up one of the heavy candlesticks and slowly moved it towards her face.

  Except that she was now elaborately made up, Curtis was still unable to define the change in her.

  ‘Well?’ She was pressing for a response.

  Curtis did not move, but sat, one hand still to his cheek, staring at her familiar face as Odysseus stared at Circe.

  ‘I never gave you a likeness of me, but I had one taken all the same.’ Putting down the candles, she opened her bag and passed a half-plate photograph across the table.

  Curtis did not look at it.

  ‘It’s wonderful what make-up will do when you have a good photograph to copy,’ said Nesta. ‘Do you think it’s like me?’

  Curtis snatched at the photograph and without glancing at it, tore it into confetti.

  ‘It doesn’t matter now,’ said Nesta, ‘although it seems to be the only print left. It’s become so difficult to make myself like it that I should have to stop trying anyway. There are limits even to make-up, you know. Besides, why should I? So look your last. There’ll be only your memory left.’

  She was blowing out the candles one by one. Curtis had sunk his torn face in his hands.

  When the last candle was out, she spoke again.

  ‘Kiss me goodbye.’

  Curtis could hear her moving towards him through the blackness, thick with the smell of wax. He crouched into himself, but now she was beside him. Her warm lips softly and gently touched the invisible back of his neck. Her hair was newly and wonderfully fragrant.