The Unsettled Dust Page 4

  The truth was that by now I knew in my bones that it was not a thing to talk about with the sisters. I could not even imagine how I could possibly begin.

  ‘All right,’ I said to grey Elizabeth. ‘All right, if nothing more happens.’

  Suddenly Agnes Brakespear appeared in the doorway, wearing one of her dark dresses.

  ‘Whatever is going on? Elizabeth, why didn’t you come back to tell me? Mr. Oxenhope, are you hurt?’

  ‘I foolishly managed to cut myself, and Elizabeth has been binding me up.’

  So that evening passed like the three previous ones.

  When the time came for bed, I certainly cannot say that I was easy in my mind, but I thought that I could rely upon the grey Elizabeth. I had gone through an exhausting day in the open with Hand and his intolerable gang, and I soon fell asleep.

  When Elizabeth brought me breakfast, I felt that we were parties to a bargain, and took advantage of this to make some new, exploratory remark about the dust.

  ‘Old houses are always full of dust,’ she replied, calmly avoiding my eye; ‘do what you will. A gentleman in your position must know that better than I do.’ And she went without asking me a question, as she usually did, about the contents of the tray being to my liking.

  That day was Saturday, but Hand had pointed out that so far from the weekend being a holiday, it was the time when we could expect the number of volunteers to be doubled. This was obvious enough, but I must have looked put out, because Hand had gone on to say that he was sure they could manage on their own if I cared to miss the Saturday and Sunday. But I was certain that something appalling would happen in my absence, so did not avail myself of his suggestion.

  For example, friction had already begun with the riverside farmers, as anyone could have foreseen, and Hand was only waiting his chance to deal with them forcefully, so that the name of the Fund would quite probably have been dragged into the national press. For weeks the local paper had contained little but correspondence about the scheme, and ‘statements’ concerning it from Mayors, Chairmen of Councils, and business men: the great majority adverse, as could well be understood. The editor had also published two long letters from Hand himself, but both so aggressive and so clever in the wrong way that they could only have done more harm than good. Hand was never able to understand the kind of objections that normal, reasonable people feel to operations that directly forward none of their interests. The majority like to confine any idealism they may have to approved outlets, and not let it enter their immediate environments and working lives. This may or may not be sensible and admirable, but it is a fact of life. Hand could never really grasp it.

  At weekends on the river, there were even girl volunteers, or, more probably, girls who followed boys who had volunteered; so the chaos and confusion were worse than ever. Some of the volunteers showed qualities that were, doubtless, in many ways excellent, even though ill-adapted to the world of today, when everything at all serious is settled by agreement, manifestly or behind the scenes. I should not necessarily have been opposed even to the scheme itself, provided that the Fund had not been required to assist with it, let alone I personally. The central mistake was in the commitment of the Fund to anything so harebrained and explosive … All the same, I ploughed on through a welter of mud and a continuous bitter wind; doing my best among people with whom I had little in common, if only because I was older and had seen so much more of the world than they had.

  And every evening I returned to the vast, dusky, silent house; ascended to the room where I had made that strange encounter; hung my clothes out to dry; scraped the worst of the mud off my boots on to a sheet of local newspaper; lay on my bed for half an hour; and then went down to Olive playing out her endless dreams on the music room piano. She sometimes spoke, but never stopped playing or offered me a drink until Agnes’s step could be heard in the stone-paved hall. Where I left my car at the front of the house, Agnes left hers at the back, and entered through the kitchen quarters. When she came into the music room, she was always the first to speak, and seldom much more agreeably than on my first evening. It was plain that Olive’s habitual silence irritated her in itself, and one could understand how this might be, when Agnes had to live with Olive year after year. Nor could I doubt that there were other things than silence about Olive that irritated Agnes. Agnes always wore one of the woollen dresses I have mentioned. I saw three or four of them in all. I imagine that, unlike Olive, she, to this extent, changed for dinner. I had not so far set eyes on her at any other time of the day. Agnes usually made some formal enquiry about the progress of the river project, to which I made a formal reply; and nothing more was ever said on the subject, somewhat to my relief. We talked about Agnes’s local preoccupations, with Olive sometimes breaking her silence to be sarcastic, though only mildly and gently so. We discussed topics in which no one of us succeeded in interesting any of the others for a moment. Agnes produced a large embroidery frame and decussated away the hours, without, to my mind, producing anything very beautiful. The work was for presentation at Christmas to the meeting place of a women’s organisation in a nearby town.

  One evening, I remember, we talked about the Fund itself. Agnes was not very cordial.

  ‘Since the property was settled on the Fund,’ she asserted, ‘we haven’t been able to call our souls our own.’

  I had heard something of the kind from other tenants, so cannot say that I was exactly shocked.

  ‘The Fund has the ungrateful task of having to meet the requirements of the State,’ I replied. ‘It does all it can to soften the wind to the shorn lamb.’

  ‘By this time it could do more to stop the wind blowing,’ said Agnes.

  This, for me, was too much after the style of Hand. I had been listening to such tiresome talk all day.

  ‘The Fund has to keep out of all controversy,’ I said, with such deliberate firmness as I could achieve. ‘If it didn’t, it wouldn’t be permitted to hold property, and your house might have been pulled down by now, or become an institution.’

  ‘Our house!’ exclaimed Agnes, with bitterness. The tenants all feel the same, and I suppose one cannot blame them.

  ‘Since the Fund took over, we’ve been living here on sufferance, almost on charity. Our lives have ceased to be our own. We are unpaid curators. The nobility in Poland who have had their estates stolen, are sometimes permitted to go on curating a few rooms in their former houses. Though in England it is dressed up, that is our position, and nothing more. At least it is my position. I can’t speak for Olive.’

  Olive was lying back in her usual chair before the fire, her legs stretched out, her hands beneath her head.

  ‘Oh, I agree,’ she said. ‘We are simply waiting. Soon it will all be gone.’

  ‘The Fund,’ I pointed out, ‘likes to keep members of the family living in the house. The public doesn’t take to museums, and very few of them know or care anything about architecture or pictures. What appeals to them is getting into someone else’s home, and having the right to poke about inside it. It is only on that basis that the Fund keeps going. It may or may not be sensible and admirable, but it’s a fact of life, and we all have to do our best to accept it, even though I quite see it’s often not easy.’

  ‘You can’t live in a house you no longer own,’ said Agnes. ‘The choices, the decisions, the responsibilities are no longer yours. You are at the best a housekeeper; at the worst, a dummy. Not that people in any way cease to hate and envy you. Often they hate and envy you more, because they’ve seen more. The difference is that you’re tied down, and deprived of any redress against them. I hope you’ll agree from what you’ve seen that I’m an efficient housekeeper, but I spend as little time in the house as possible. I get away as much as I can, even if what goes on outside the walls is often frustrating too.’

  ‘It won’t last,’ said Olive. ‘It can’t last. Not even in Poland.’

  ‘My job is to see that it does last,’ I said, smiling. Or at least it is
the job of my colleagues.’

  ‘We should have fought harder for ourselves,’ said Agnes. ‘We should have put up more of a struggle.’ She spoke as one merely placing an opinion on record; not even attempting to convince, not expecting in the least to be agreed with. Here she differed from Hand, who would have begun to make immediate plans, however impracticable.

  An irritation of our age is the collapse of the rules concerning names. My hostesses had still not begun to address me as ‘Nugent’, no doubt owing to my invidious position, of which, like many of the other tenants, they were so excessively conscious. And, in that same position, it was hardly for me to begin calling them ‘Agnes’ and ‘Olive’. On the other hand, the old fashioned formalities would have seemed strained; would have caused the very embarrassments they were designed to eliminate. We never altogether reached a settlement of this problem. No doubt that was symbolical. It was a house in which the rules lingered, because a house in which it was otherwise impossible to live with decency; but the rules, like Olive Brakespear, now lacked force, let alone fire.

  Often I thought about Olive; about her square mouth, her slenderness, her lovely hands, her air of poetical mystery: but though there had seemed to be a certain understanding between us from the start, she took care to add not one twig to the tiny flame, one brick to the rudimentary fabric. Probably she no longer had twigs or bricks in her store.

  I found Agnes was beginning to talk much more to me, even though it was most of the time at me. ‘This whole thing about us and the Fund is grotesque,’ she would exclaim. ‘Don’t you think so?’ Or she would suddenly make a wide and difficult enquiry: ‘What do you think of Dutch barns? The Fund must have more experience of them than I have.’; or ‘Are there any really good people working for the Fund? Is there even one?’ Once she suddenly asked: ‘What is your own candid view of my sister Olive?’, and this with Olive sitting there as usual, silent and indifferent unless directly addressed.

  At least it all tended to ward off sheer dullness. And the food and drink continued as good as the general maintenance. And the dust remained. By then, snatching thirty minutes here and thirty minutes there, I had prowled half across five parishes looking for a cement works, but had failed to find one.

  *

  And next came the incident of the dust-cloud at dawn.

  Each night, worn with the burden of communication, we went to bed rather early. I was usually quite ready for it; so hard was my life on the river – in a way, I suppose, so healthy, albeit unenjoyable. I used to fall asleep immediately, and every night thought less of the intruder I had seen; but I found that on most mornings I awoke early. The truth was that, as in many country houses, far too long was officially set aside for slumber. I would awake, and in the cold, grey light see by the ticking French clock that it was only six, or even earlier; whereas Elizabeth could not be expected to arrive with my breakfast until half past seven. Sometimes I climbed out of bed and walked several times up and down the room in my pyjamas, deliberately chilling myself; having learned from experience elsewhere that the change from cold air to warm sheets and blankets often sends one more quickly back to sleep than anything else.

  At that hour, the fountain huntsman looked both more alive and more mythological than when he stood transfixed and obsolete in the rushing world. One felt that he was the single living man in square miles of farm-haunted landscape. As I stumped about looking for new sleep, I glanced out at him, even when I had to scrub the frost off the panes to see him. On one of these early mornings, I saw something else. The park was greyly lit, lightly frosted, and, as far as I could see and hear, perfectly unpopulated and still: an excellent world, in fact, for a stone man to hunt in. As I looked out, excited, I admit, by the cold, quiet beauty of the scene, I saw a cloud of dust bowling along the white drive from among the trees on the let; a globe of dust might better describe it. It was possibly ten or twelve feet high, and quite dense; and though more or less spherical, dragged a dusty train behind it, like a messy comet. The dust looked almost black in the faint dawn light, but I was sure it was really grey – the perfectly ordinary grey one would expect. It rolled along quite steadily towards the fountain; and, in the apparent absence of any wind, I thought at once that it must be raised by some small, heavy vehicle – or, anyway, moving object – at the invisible centre of it. The invisibility was especially odd, however: one would expect to have seen something of such a vehicle, probably the front of it, butting out from the cloud that followed it. I was so carried away that I actually opened one of the heavy sash windows with their thick glazing bars, and listened for the noise of an engine. I could hear nothing at all: not even awakening rooks and hedgehoppers.

  Leaning further out, I saw the dust-cloud roll on until it reached the intersection of drives at the fountain; and then the episode ended in total anticlimax: somehow the cloud was not there at all. It could not really have blown away, because there was no wind; and that quite apart from the question of there having presumably been some solid object to cause it, though still none was visible. I could not even say that I had seen the cloud disperse. It was more as if I had been so concentrated on the movement and character of the cloud that I had been half-asleep to the particulars of its dissolution, to a development so unanticipated. Anyway, there was now neither cloud nor cause for cloud: nothing but the cold, still morning with the stone huntsman perched half-iced at the centre of it.

  I shut the window, shivered a little, and returned to bed, though not to sleep. In fact, it was this seeming freak of nature that I have described which really propelled me to Blantyre. That same morning, I drove round to Hand’s lock cottage; told the assembled volunteers that other Fund business, coming unexpectedly, would compel me to be missing from the river that day; made no reference to the rather obvious looks of relief which followed my words; and drove off to Bagglesham, where Blantyre, the Fund’s Regional Representative, operated from his crumbling, half-timbered house in a side street. It had once belonged to a family of pargeters, and legend said one could still smell the dung that went into their special kind of plaster; but that was a paranormal manifestation that never came my way.

  Basil Blantyre, who has since, unfortunately, died (still in harness), was already nearer to eighty than to seventy, and sensibly reluctant to leave the warm fire in March weather; but he welcomed me in most cordially, though I had not been able to tell him I was coming. There was a telephone at Clamber Court, but I had never heard it in use, and I thought that a call to the Fund’s local luminary could, if overheard, cause only trouble. Blantyre most kindly made me a cup of instant coffee with his own hands. He lived quite alone, his wife having never fully recovered (as I had been given by Hamish Haythorn to understand) from the shock of the bankruptcy and the compulsion to leave the house where the Blantyre family had lived, reputedly, since the Middle Ages. To Blantyre, as to me (and others), the Fund had proved a welcome haven from life’s storm.

  ‘I want the lowdown on Clamber Court and the Brakespear sisters,’ I said, pushing back the scum on the hot coffee.

  ‘There was a lot of sadness in the family. I speak of the time before Clamber was settled on the Fund.’

  ‘There hasn’t been much happiness since, judging by what I’ve seen and heard.’

  ‘What can you expect, Oxenhope? People don’t like losing their houses and still living on in them. That, at least, Millicent and I were spared.’

  Quite possibly this was a form of sour grapes, as the Blantyre house had been much too far gone for any decision but demolition.

  ‘There may be more to it than that,’ I said. ‘What splendid coffee! There seem to me some very odd goings-on at Clamber Court.’

  ‘So I have heard,’ said Blantyre, looking away from me and into the blazing logs.

  ‘To start with, the Brakespear girls appear to have no visitors. Apart, of course, from the public.’

  ‘Poor old dears!’ exclaimed Blantyre vaguely.

  ‘They’re not as old as that.
I acknowledge that I myself find one of them quite attractive.’

  ‘So-ho!’ exclaimed Blantyre in the same vague way. It was manifest that he had long ago lost all touch with the Clamber situation.

  ‘And then,’ I said, ‘the house is full of dust.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Blantyre. ‘I know. That’s just it.’

  ‘That’s just what?’ I asked, putting down my cup. The second half of the contents was thick and muddy.

  Blantyre did not answer. After a pause, he answered with another question.

  ‘Did you see anything else? Or hear?’

  ‘See,’ I said, lowering my voice, as one does; even though it was still the middle of the morning. ‘Not hear.’

  ‘You saw him?’ asked Blantyre.

  ‘I think so,’ I said. ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘And it? You perhaps saw it as well?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘This very morning, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘You don’t say so.’ Blantyre turned back towards me.

  ‘If what I saw was the same it.’

  ‘I have no doubt of it,’ replied Blantyre.

  ‘I first saw the dust, the ordinary dust, when I visited the house two years ago. I went incognito, you know.’

  ‘You should never do that,’ said Blantyre very seriously.

  Coming from a man almost twice my age, I let the reproof go.

  ‘At the time I sent you a memo on the dust,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t wonder. Many people do.’

  ‘You mean that there’s nothing to be done about it?’

  ‘What do you think about that?’ asked Blantyre. ‘Now that you’ve had more experience.’

  ‘The servant says it blows in off the long drives.’

  ‘So it does,’ said Blantyre. ‘In a way.’ Here he started coughing rather alarmingly, as if the dust had entered his own lungs.

  ‘Can’t I get you something?’ I asked.

  ‘No, thank you,’ Blantyre wheezed. ‘Just give me a minute or two. You haven’t finished your coffee.’