The Unsettled Dust Page 3

  ‘The dust seems to blow in again as soon as it’s swept away,’ I said, shivering in my unheated bedroom, and in the tone of one making an excuse for another. ‘There must be some dusty new industry near the house.’

  ‘It blows off the drives,’ said Elizabeth. ‘The drives are always dusty.’

  ‘If that’s what it is, I think something might be done. I’ll have a word with Mr. Blantyre about it. He might arrange to have the drives tarmacked – anyway, near the house. The dust is really rather terrible.’ After all, I was one who had some indirect responsibility in the matter.

  ‘Terrible, as you say,’ said Elizabeth non-committally. ‘But please don’t bother. There’s nothing to be done about it.’ She spoke with surprising authoritativeness; as if she, and not the Brakespear sisters, were the Fund’s tenant – or, rather, perhaps, still the landowner.

  To argue would naturally have been a mistake, so, continuing to shiver in the cold of the morning, I asserted that the coffee on the tray would suit me well and that there was no need to change it, as she had suggested, for tea.

  I found it hard to accept Elizabeth’s explanation of the omnipresent dust. It was true that the drives were dusty, noticeably so, quite like what I imagine country roads to have been in the early days of motoring, when veils and goggles had to be worn, and the back of the neck thickly muffled; but there was so much dust in the house, and with so many of the windows shut, at least during the winter. For example, I had not opened mine on going to bed the previous evening, though this was contrary to a rule of health from which I seldom depart. I drew on, over my pyjamas, the heavy sweater I had brought against the river winds; poured out excellent hot coffee with a shaking hand; chewed scrambled egg and toast; and resolved to pay Blantyre a visit, even though it meant driving more than forty miles each way, to discover why still no action seemed to have been taken on my memo of two years before.

  I put on all my thickest garments, descended, looked in the cold state rooms for the sisters, failed to find them, and decided simply to depart as had been agreed the previous night. As I drove away in my Mini, I observed my wake of dust with more conscious care. There certainly was a cloud of it, a rare sight nowadays in Britain, but I still found it hard to believe that all the self-renewing, perennial dust of Clamber Court came from the two drives, long though they were.

  I noticed that the water in the bowl of the huntsman fountain was patched with ice, though the jets still spurted frigidly upwards and sideways. The immaculate fountain was a symbol of the whole property: cold but kempt, as one might say. And one could only suppose that the responsibility and burden lay upon Miss Agnes Brakespear. Nobody who lacks direct knowledge of such a task can know how heavy it is in the conditions of today. I, with my increasing professional experience in such concerns, thought I could understand how irritating Olive Brakespear’s attitude might be to Agnes Brakespear. Olive still behaved, however diminished her force, as if Clamber Court maintained itself; still took the house, in however reduced a degree, at its own valuation when built. The struggle lay with Agnes; and no doubt the better part of the nation owed her a debt, and others like her. All the same, I knew which of the sisters was the one to whom my greatest debt was owed. I thought sophistically that there would be little purpose in keeping up Clamber Court unless someone had at least an inkling of the style associated with dwelling there. It was a sentiment of a kind often to be discovered in the Fund’s own literature. Olive Brakespear also served. Still, it seemed hard that dedicated Agnes should be additionally encumbered with so much dust. The cold wind blew it around me. It penetrated cracks in the bodywork, however shut the windows.

  I drove towards the little house which young Hand had leased beside one of the broken-down locks. It had been unoccupied for years, having neither gas nor electricity, neither water, except from the river, nor a road; so that Hand did not have to pay very much for it, which was just as well, as the Fund was all too heavily committed in other directions on his behalf. I had to leave my car by the roadside and cross two freezing fields by a muddy path. Hand and a group of six or eight other youthful enthusiasts were frying bacon on a primus stove while the wind whistled through the broken windows. A row of Hounsfield beds, all unmade after having been slept in, was almost the only approach to furniture. The party seemed to be dressed entirely in garments from those places known as ‘surplus stores’. In every way, it was an odd background for a project under the auspices of the Historic Structures Fund, though no doubt it had a certain pioneering value in its own way.

  Unfortunately, I arrived considerably later than the hour we had agreed; though this did not surprise me, as I had always said that the time insisted on by Hand was far too early, especially as it was still winter – officially and in every other way. They were sarcastic about my lateness, and they were hardly of the type to appreciate my concern with the worrying problem of the dust; which, therefore, I did not even mention.

  I shall say little more of the Bovil Restoration Project: partly because most of the details are already well known (at least among those likely to be interested in them), and have been the subject of an exhaustive Report, edited by Hand himself (though I myself think an independent editor would have been better); and more because it is my sojourn at Clamber Court that I am describing, upon which the Project impinged hardly at all. The two parts of my life at that time were almost in watertight compartments, to use the obvious but apt metaphor.

  After that rather terrible first day on the river, freezing cold (and, later, raining as well), muddy everywhere, and spent mainly (as it now seems) in pushing through endless thickets of dead bramble and dogrose, with insufficiently defined authority over Hand’s rough-mannered group, I returned to Clamber Court and a first-class dinner with much relief. The second evening with the Brakespear sisters, a replica of the first, presented the oddest contrast to my day with Hand and his noisy friends, as can easily be imagined. A really bitter wind was getting up, as it often does towards the end of March; but though it made the house creak a little, it did nothing to disturb the dust. At one point, I had proposed to mention the dust to Olive Brakespear, if I could find myself long enough alone with her; having at least made a start with the grey Elizabeth. But no possible moment seemed to arise that evening. Perhaps I was too exhausted with the river, to embark gratuitously upon new uncertainties. Probably I thought that I should wait until I knew the Brakespears better: if one ever could.

  Only when back in my room for the night did it clearly strike me that Agnes might deliberately have prevented my being alone for more than a minute or two with Olive. Thinking back over the evening that had just passed, I could recall more than one moment when Agnes had obviously been about to fetch something or do something, and when, instead, she had remained. The reasons for leaving us had been tiny, and many people might have been dissuaded by mere inertia; but hardly, I felt, Agnes. She had sat on, though she had been fretful and under-occupied from the start; and was then all the more fretful, no doubt, if she felt tied by the task of never taking her eyes from two people she did not trust. Could it relate to her immediate suspicion of me concerning the dust, when first she saw me? Did she imagine that Olive and I were becoming affectionate? Was it merely that she did not believe in allowing Olive any unnecessary peace? Or had I altogether deceived myself?

  One of the moments which I found to be oddest in this generally odd way of life, was the moment when I returned to the house after my day on the river. It was always evening and always I seemed quite alone in the world, or at least in the big park. There was not even a light in the house, because Olive never turned one on unless compelled, and Agnes came back an hour or so later from undertakings which were apparently demanding, apparently unsatisfying, but never quite defined (and one could hardly enquire). Everything was silent. I had to mount the curving stone steps, and disturb the silence by pressing the little bellpush at the centre of the long façade, stretching through the evening from pavilion to pavilion. Th
e illusion of the house being a vast, empty model always returned to me at this time. That there should be any living person in the huge, dark, noiseless interior seemed either absurd or sinister.

  But I never had to ring more than once. The grey Elizabeth always appeared after the same short interval and let me in. She never put on a light for me, and I never did it for myself. I suppose we both held back out of regard for Olive. I myself found Olive’s day-after-day passivity as unfathomable as Agnes’s day-after-day agitation. Three or four of these days passed, and I never saw Olive on a horse, though all the time she wore the same worn riding breeches and boots. It was true that I had always left fairly early and returned fairly late, and that Olive might have tended to these clothes because she looked her best in them, as many women do. All the same, I might by now have been invited to visit the stables, at least in principle. Elsewhere, it had usually happened during my first luncheon; with the time unchallengeably fixed for immediately after it: at houses where the stables still functioned, of course, and had not been let off as a mushroom farm or school of art.

  Up the dark staircase I went on my fourth evening (as I see it was from my Diary), while Elizabeth trailed back across the almost empty hall to the kitchen at the rear. I walked leftwards from the landing along the dark passage to my room.

  Then something absolutely unexpected took place. I opened the door and I saw the back of a man standing before one of the two windows; the window not fronted by the big dressing table. He was looking out into the dark park: dark, but not yet completely dark, and, of course, less dark than the interior of the house. I could see perhaps a little more than just his black silhouette.

  I know exactly what happened next, because I wrote it down the next morning. First, I stood there for a quite perceptible time, in plain shock and uncertainty. The man must have heard me approaching and opening the door, but he made no move. I then switched on the three poor lights, though far from sure what I ought to do next. The man did then turn and I got a quite good view of him. He was taller than I was, young and handsome, with a prominent nose and a quantity of dark hair which curled effectively on his brow. This description makes his aspect sound like that of an artist, but in fact, it was more like that of an athlete, and perhaps most of all like that of a soldier. I cite these misleading popular types only to give some idea of the impression he left upon me during the seconds I looked at him. Undoubtedly, he was very well dressed in a conventional, unostentatious way. He might have been a visitor to the house, who, in the dusk, had strayed into the wrong room. What he next did, however, made an idea of that kind unlikely (though not impossible): he simply walked with a quick step towards me as I stood by the door, looked straight into my eyes (of that, naturally, I am certain), and then, without a word, strode past me into the passage outside. I do not think I was more than normally upset (I noted down the next morning that I was not), but, none the less, I could find nothing to say, even though silence made me look a fool. He departed down the passage and vanished in the darkness. I made no note of how far I could hear his steps if at all. I imagine that waiting for him to speak took all my attention. And now, of course, I have no recollection.

  From every point of view, I should, I suppose, have followed him, but instead I shut the door, and walked over to the window where he had been standing. The floor boards were thick with dust, but there was no mark of his feet. It was when I saw this that real fear began to rise in me: the explanation that the dust had already covered the marks, though not in its own way impossible, to judge by what I had noticed elsewhere in the house, was by now hardly less unsettling than the notion of there being something queer about the man himself.

  I went through my drawers and I accounted for all objects that I could remember I had left lying about. Nothing seemed missing. I was almost sorry.

  I returned to the window and looked out into the darkening park. And then something really frightening took place. It was now dark enough for my ill-lighted room to reflect itself in the glass and appear in even more ill-lighted reproduction outside; but not dark enough for the room to be all I could see beyond the window. Through the reflection of the back wall of the room, the wall behind me as I stood, I could still see the shadows of trees and the whiteness of the intersecting drives. The outline of the huntsman fountain was clear enough quite to catch my attention. As I stared at it, I saw, or thought I saw, the figure of the man I had seen, standing on the drive a short distance to my left of it. There really was not enough light to distinguish one person from another, and certainly not at anything like that distance; but I had no doubt that this figure was he. Moreover, I had never before looked from my window and seen anyone on the drive. It was a very isolated and, one would have thought, undermanned establishment. The moment I set eyes on the figure standing on the drive, I was carried away by terror, so that I may not be completely reliable about what happened next. I did not seem to see the figure move, but within moments, instead of being on the drive, it was somehow within the four walls of the room that was reflected immediately before me. The reflection of the room was mis-shaped, as such reflections always are, and the walls were still transparent, but it was impossible to doubt where the figure now stood. Staring out petrified, I made absolutely certain, as a child might; checking in the reflected room behind me: and among them the figure stood.

  I know, as will be seen, that at this point, I cried out. Those who deem this either weak of me or incredible, are invited to find themselves in a like situation. But I did manage to turn myself round, to confront the intruder: perhaps because it was even worse to suppose he was standing out of my sight.

  I found I was alone in the room. I stared at its emptiness to make quite sure; and then looked back at the reflected room. That was now empty also, apart from my own vaguely reflected shape in the foreground. I fell into an armchair.

  There was a knock at my door; and I thought that the manner of it was familiar.

  ‘Come in.’

  It was the grey Elizabeth, who had knocked as when she brought my breakfasts.

  I rose to my feet. I don’t quite know why.

  ‘Miss Brakespear says she heard something and asked me to find out whether anything was wrong.’

  On the instant, I decided to plunge.

  ‘When I came in here a few minutes ago, a man was standing by the window looking out.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ was all the grey Elizabeth said.

  ‘What do you mean by that? Who was he?’

  ‘Other people have supposed they saw him.’

  Annoyance rose in me to drive out fear.

  ‘Are you saying that I’ve been given some kind of haunted room?’

  ‘Certainly not, sir. People have seen him in many different rooms. But you won’t see him again. No one has ever seen him more than once.’

  ‘Have you seen him?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘That’s not for me to know.’ She looked and spoke as if I had asked her something improper.

  ‘Then I shall ask one of the Miss Brakespears.’

  ‘Please don’t do that, sir. The tale upsets the Miss Brakespears very much. Let’s just keep it to ourselves, sir. I’ll tell Miss Brakespear that you cried out because you’d cut yourself.’

  It sounded utterly absurd. It reminded me of the suggestion that the dust in the house came from the drives.

  ‘But I haven’t cut myself.’

  ‘Yes you have, sir. Look.’

  It was not the least astonishing thing. There was a quite bad gash on the soft part of my left hand, the area between the little finger and the wrist. Half my hand was greasily wet with blood. I did not know how I had done it, and I never learned. Possibly it had happened while I was blundering about the room a few minutes earlier.

  ‘Let me get the first-aid box,’ said the grey Elizabeth. It was scarcely practicable to object. She departed and soon came back with it. The Fund’s rules require that at least one box of th
is kind be kept at every property, because the public visitors manage to do the most extraordinary things to themselves.

  The grey Elizabeth bound me up quite skilfully; so skilfully that I had to congratulate her.

  ‘Miss Brakespear taught me,’ she said. ‘She’s a qualified, trained nurse.’

  It was obvious that the grey Elizabeth admired Agnes. I had noticed it before.

  ‘And now, sir,’ said Elizabeth, finishing me off, ‘if I promise that you’ll see nothing ever again, will you please promise me that you’ll not speak about what you’ve seen to the Miss Brakespears?’

  It seemed to me an excessive request.

  ‘They shouldn’t have people to stay in a haunted house without warning them.’

  ‘They seldom do, sir. With respect, sir, you’ll recall that you were not invited by either Miss Brakespear.’

  It could hardly be denied.

  ‘And therefore, sir, I’m sure you’ll agree that it would be better to leave private things unspoken.’

  This exceedingly plain hint brought back to me that at other properties of the Fund I had sometimes stumbled upon privacies that I should have preferred to be ignorant of; and that, occasionally, small difficulties had ensued.

  ‘You’ll know better than I do, sir, that in houses where things such as we’re talking about are supposed to happen, the owners often don’t care for them to be spoken of.’

  That too I did know; and the Fund’s Psychic and Occult Committee has since been much impeded by it.

  But I was still doubtful, as was only natural.

  ‘How can I be sure that nothing more will happen?’

  ‘Those to whom anything happens, find that it happens only once. In this house, anyway,’ replied the grey Elizabeth, with the most convincing confidence.

  ‘I might be an exception.’

  ‘Even if you are, sir, you wouldn’t wish to do a hurt to the two ladies.’