The Unsettled Dust Page 15

  ‘There are indeed many matters,’ said Noelle. She felt that she was being watched from the houses on the other side of the road, beyond the worn entrance to the wood.

  ‘Possibly it would help if we ourselves could define our position in the light of the changed circumstances?’

  Noelle glanced at him for the first time. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘If you think so. Please come in for a few minutes.’

  He followed her in. She felt that she should take his hat, but in a modern house there was nowhere in particular to put it.

  ‘I have sent the children away,’ she said.

  He sat on the same sofa; the sofa on which she herself had just been scrying the opaque future.

  ‘This is a boomerang,’ he said, as if most people would not know.

  ‘It was my husband’s.’

  ‘Yours is a terrible loss for anyone.’

  Noelle nodded.

  ‘Most of all for a woman as sensitive and highly strung as you. Your cheeks are wan and your lovely eyes are shadowed.’

  ‘I was very fond of my husband.’

  ‘Of course. You have a warm heart and a tender soul.’

  ‘In some ways he was not very grown up. I think he needed me.’

  ‘Who would not need you?’

  Noelle hesitated. ‘Would you care for a glass of sherry?’

  ‘If you will join me.’

  ‘Yes, I’ll join you. It may be the last sherry I shall see for some time.’ She filled the two glasses. ‘I admit that I have been left in a difficult position, Mr. Morley-Wingfield. All this will have to be sold. Everything.’

  He seemed to smile. ‘You do not really suppose that I can agree to be addressed by so absurd a name?’ He raised his glass. ‘To the best possible future!’ he said very seriously.

  ‘You told me it was your name,’ said Noelle, not responding to his toast. ‘Actually, you volunteered the information. What, in fact, is your name?’

  ‘My name is John,’ he said, now undoubtedly smiling, but smiling at her.

  ‘Mut and Simon seem to know nothing about you.’ She was sitting on one of the leather-padded brass ends to the fender.

  ‘I can return the compliment. I know little about them. All I know is that I met you in their company. That matters very much. I hope to both of us. I greatly hope it.’

  ‘I think I should tell you,’ said Noelle, ‘that I saw you digging in your garden. I was with my husband.’

  ‘You are mistaken,’ he replied. ‘Never willingly have I held a spade in my hands since I left Harrow.’

  ‘Do you know how my husband’s illness began? His last illness?’

  ‘I must acknowledge ashamedly that I do not.’

  ‘We went for a walk in the wood with our children. My husband insisted on breaking through the next glade, while we left the children playing. He slashed himself quite badly, and he never really got over it. Some kind of blood poisoning, I suppose, but the doctors were baffled. In the end, he died of it.’

  ‘It is a sad moment to say such a thing, but I admit to being baffled also. I cannot follow the story. I think there is an element of fantasy somewhere, my sweet Noelle. It is because you are so upset by everything that’s happened.’

  She thought it was the first time he had addressed her by her name. Indeed, she knew very well that it was.

  ‘That is just what Mut said to me on the telephone. But it’s not true. It was when we were in the next glade that we saw you digging. We saw you quite clearly.’

  ‘So your husband saw me too?’

  ‘No,’ said Noelle, after a second. ‘I don’t really think he did. He was preoccupied. But I know perfectly well that I did.’

  ‘How was I dressed?’ asked the man. ‘Seeing that I was digging. How then was I got up?’ His tone was perfectly friendly, perhaps quizzical, though he was gazing straight at her.

  ‘You had taken off your jacket.’

  ‘My dear girl! Whatever next? Was I digging in my braces?’

  ‘As a matter of fact, you were.’

  The man looked away from her and down at the Eskimo-style carpet. He had drained his glass, as, for the matter of that, had Noelle.

  ‘It all seems rather unlikely,’ said the man, though only in a tone of mild remonstrance.

  ‘The sincerity of your belief,’ he added, ‘makes you look more charming and delightful than ever. What suggestions had our mutual friend, Mut, to offer? Another delightful woman, by the way, though a daisy in a spring field, where you are the lovely lily of the world, body and soul and spirit.’

  He had ceased to fondle the boomerang and was letting it lie beside him on the leathery cushion. Noelle crossed to the sofa and picked it up. She continued holding on to it.

  ‘Would you like another glass of sherry?’

  ‘If you would.’

  She filled the two glasses and went back to the fender seat.

  ‘Previously,’ she said, ‘I had no idea at all that you actually lived in the neighbourhood. You should have told me.’

  ‘But I don’t!’ he cried. ‘I merely came to know it from the time I was at Sandhurst. What days those were! The laughing and the grieving!’ Then he raised his glass. ‘I propose another toast. To a bright future erupting from the troubled past!’

  Again Noelle did not respond.

  ‘We must expect that it will take a little time,’ said the man, soberly. ‘It will be the crown of my life to see the task accomplished.’

  Noelle almost emptied her glass at a swig.

  ‘You push through into the next glade,’ she said. ‘You go straight across it, and beyond the trees and bushes on the far side is a half-timbered house with lots of big windows, and you live there.’

  ‘Half-timbered houses do not usually have big windows, or they should not have them. I would not live in such a house.’

  Noelle was twisting the boomerang round and round. There was nothing left of her second glass of sherry.

  ‘I saw you,’ she said.

  Then she threw the boomerang down. Against the Eskimo carpet it looked like every modern painting.

  ‘What does it matter,’ cried Noelle, half to herself, hardly at all to the man.

  All the same, it did matter: the house was only ten to fifteen minutes away, even when one was walking at the pace of one’s children, and then struggling through the bushes and undergrowth in a quite sedate manner.

  ‘I came in the hope of helping with any difficulties there might be,’ said the man, ‘and plainly this is the first of them. The distance is very short. I suggest we go and look for this house. We both know the way quite well. Besides, the fresh air will do you good.’

  ‘I think it is going to rain again,’ said Noelle.

  ‘We shall be back before it falls.’

  *

  The moist surface mud on the woodland path could not but remind Noelle of the funeral. She had been surprised that Melvin had not stipulated for cremation, but the Will had proved to be immaterial at almost all points.

  At the funeral it had drizzled persistently, but now it was merely a matter of a penetrating moisture in the air. Noelle was wearing her stylish mackintosh, but the man was seemingly unprotected. Noelle feared that his trousers would lose their crease, even that the entire fine fabric of his suit might lose texture and buoyancy. Already his shoes were streaked and smeared. Noelle was wearing boots.

  ‘Are you sure you want to go through with this?’ she asked him.

  ‘I mean to drive out some of the megrims,’ he said.

  They descended the slope to the clearing. The recurrent raininess had left nothing but a mush. One could no longer distinguish plastic bag from squashed balloon, cigarette pack from snapcorn box. Natural forces were mounting a liquidation of their own.

  ‘Ane now for the next glade!’ admonished the man jovially.

  ‘We can’t possibly,’ cried Noelle. ‘The bushes are soaking. You’ll utterly wreck your suit. I hadn’t realised.’

  �
�She made no reference to his hat, which was even more inappropriate.

  ‘I haven’t been noticing the weather very much lately,’ said Noelle.

  ‘We’ll be through in an instant,’ said the man. ‘If you’ve done it already, you’ll know that.’

  ‘She surmised that Melvin’s fate could not but be in his mind, though of course he would never speak of it, perhaps never again.

  ‘It’s just your suit,’ said Noelle. ‘I know it’s not very difficult.’ She must not permit him the slightest doubt that she had at least once been through, had seen his house. ‘You really need to dress up for a thing of this kind in weather like this.’ Melvin had always overdone it, as he overdid so many things, but of course he had been basically right. She had always seen that.

  ‘I’ll take off my hat,’ said the man, ‘and then you’ll feel better.’

  And, under his lead, they were through in no time. On the other side, Noelle had to admit that she could detect no particular damage to his clothes, apart from his shoes; and that even her own elegantly flowing mackintosh seemed unscathed.

  The man had been laughing for a moment, but now the two of them stood silently in the next glade. The tree structures, the pendant greens and browns, seemed to Noelle more mysteriously architectural than ever. They too brought back the funeral to her, but she realised that many things would do that for some time to come, possibly for the rest of her life, which in any case might not be a long one, as Melvin’s had proved not to be.

  ‘It has an atmosphere,’ said Noelle, in the end. ‘I admit that.’

  ‘Yes,’ said the man. ‘But you are almost the only being who would feel it. You are a wonderful person.’

  All the time there was a faint tinking and tapping which Noelle had certainly not been aware of on the previous occasion. She realised that in the then circumstances she might well not have noticed it. She said nothing about it. It reminded her of a visit she had paid with a German business party to Das Rheingold in English at the Coliseum. She had not understood a word or appreciated a note of it, though at the end the Germans had been very courteous and affable about it.

  ‘They all kissed my hand,’ said Noelle out loud. ‘Every single one of them.’

  The man looked at her.

  ‘I am so sorry,’ said Noelle. ‘I was uttering my thoughts. I must be very tired.’

  ‘Of course you are tired, dear, sweet Noelle,’ said the man.

  ‘You hardly know whether you are on your charming head or your pretty feet.’ He looked at Noelle’s boots. ‘But we shall change all that. Slowly but surely.’

  It would have been uncouth of Noelle not to smile, though noncommittally.

  ‘The house you mentioned stands at the other side of the glade?’ enquired the man, not too obviously humouring her. He had resumed his hat.

  ‘Through there,’ said Noelle, pointing.

  ‘More bushes!’ cried the man, in mock irony.

  ‘Not such dense ones. Then you come to a barbed-wire fence. All of which you know perfectly well. I’m afraid your shoes will suffer in all this wet moss. But it’s entirely your own fault.’

  ‘But of course,’ cried the man, as before. ‘Please go ahead.’

  Noelle wallowed across the river of moss without looking back. She wondered if there were small snakes and horrid insects concealed in it, which the dampness might bring out, perhaps for feeding purposes.

  At the far side, the tapping and tinking were distinctly clearer. Noelle looked quickly back. She saw that the man’s shoes were submerged at every pace, and that water streamed from them each time he took a new step. She knew from her own experience how wringing wet the bottoms of one’s trousers become at such moments.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she enquired weakly.

  ‘Go on, go on,’ the man said. ‘Go on as though I were not here.’

  Noelle considered for a moment.

  ‘All right,’ she decided. ‘I shall.’

  But through the second belt of trees and bushes, and short though this part of the journey was, she advanced far more slowly.

  The staid truth was that now there was no other sound at all but that of the tapping, the hammering, the clanking – perhaps even clanging. It seemed to Noelle that the din was rising in a degree entirely out of proportion with the distance she was covering, as presumably, she advanced towards it. It was continuing to be much as in the opera, when hurricanes of sound had at times risen almost on an instant from a seemingly peaceful and even flow. She realised perfectly well, however, that the present turmoil of noise was as nothing to that on a reasonably large modern building site; or not yet. There was always something for which to be grateful when one made the effort to see life in that way.

  Furthermore, all the disfiguring barbed-wire seemed to have vanished or been taken away; at least for the limited distance in either direction that Noelle could find time to take in.

  The hedge round the garden was still there, low and thin, but now sadly shredded, selectively shrivelled.

  The costly-looking half-timbered house seemed not to be there. Alas for so many human certainties!

  Noelle compelled herself to advance in her mackintosh and boots across the line which once the barbed wire had marked. At that moment, she realised that though barbed-wire had a bad name among her friends, yet those having recourse to it might often so do for largely benevolent reasons. Melvin’s friends would take that for granted. What was happening to her now was like going over the top.

  She peered downwards over the tattered hedge.

  There was the most enormous hole or cavity; excessively diametered, far deeper than Noelle could discern.

  All down the hole men were working constructionally – or so she assumed. Hundreds of men – thousands, she might have been forgiven for thinking. Men were doing pretty well everything the mind could think of – and not only Noelle’s quiet and reasonable mind.

  Sooner rather than later, she realised that women too were working down there: to start with, at typewriters, at comptometers, at computers. Noelle knew these things from the days when she had herself worked in offices, as Mut still did.

  There was noise enough in all conscience, for any auditor who was fully human; but Noelle soon realised that probably the noise was nothing like enough for everything that was being actually done. The comparison with the fully modern building site of average scale recurred to her. Properly, there should have been far, far more noise. She was sure of it. Perhaps that was the most alarming thought of all on that day of her husband’s obsequies.

  Noelle turned herself right round and stood with her entire back squarely against the garden hedge. She looked in every direction for the man who had challenged her to this strange experience on such a day of threnody.

  John Morley-Wingfield, like the once-tangled wire, was no longer visible. His apparition was no more finite than his name.

  Of course, notwithstanding his talk, he might have failed at the last thicket; might have decided upon some care, after all, for his suit; might even have retreated before the full moss crossing, and be composedly awaiting Noelle on her own fully domestic side of the edificial glade.

  His case would in some degree have been made. Noelle had seen for herself that, in the strictest construction of words, there was no half-timbered house with over-large windows. Possibly, indeed, Mr. Morley-Wingfield was a property speculator who had demolished his dwelling to set up a factory more or less on the site, or an office block. Few of Melvin’s friends would have seen much to criticise in that, and some would have pointed out that the transformation would give employment at many different levels, and thus contribute to progress.

  The moisture in the air had begun to precipitate heavily and also to darken the sky. Right through the experience, Noelle had realised, at the back of her mind, how late in the day it was. Possibly the second most alarming thing of all was that at such an hour all these entities were still at work.

  One could call this nothing but
heavy rain. Noelle wondered if there was a way out of the wood by turning rightwards up the glade: a shortcut. She had no wish ever again in her life, short or long, to meet those furbelows of parched or sodden trash at the point where people turned; to behold those deftly shaped official seats, fouled with inscriptions, nicked in or encrusted.

  But turning rightwards up the unknown, moss-bottomed glade would be far too much of a further new experience at this of all moments. The glade might appear comparatively indifferent to her, but, even in a suburban wood, the coming of darkness could bring unexpected risks, as poor Melvin had so often emphasised. Noelle was sure that Melvin had often been right in matters of that kind.

  Indeed, while hurriedly reflecting in this way, Noelle had almost recrossed the spongy moss, which this time seemed less likely to harbour leeches and freshwater scorpions than to be in itself vaguely bottomless. Had John Morley-Wingfield simply sunk through a particularly soft spot?

  She pushed into the by now almost familiar bushes. At this point the noise of the rain had become loud enough to drown the faint thumping and tip-tapping of the overtime workers.

  Noelle could not hold back a cry. The briar immediately before her was still splashed and flushed with blood; exactly as when she had last seen it. The weeks and months of rain had made no difference at all.

  Up the slope from where the rubbish rotted, down the gentler slope through the silver birches, Noelle, encumbered by her boots, ran for home, with half-shut eyes. She was quite surprised to find her home still there.

  *

  But she did not enter the house: partly because the man might soon be there too; partly because, after all, Melvin might still be there (it was supposed to take forty days for the dead to clear); partly, perhaps mainly, for wider reasons still.

  Instead she walked to Kay Steiner’s house. Though winded by her up-hill and down-dale run, she still walked briskly and unobtrusively. But surely it was by now too dark for the neighbours to continue watching her, abstaining the while from the television?