The Unsettled Dust Page 9

  ‘My idea was to start out along the southern path, where I’d seen those parties going on among the few Russians that Mr. Kirkontorni had said were still left. I wasn’t at all keen about the big houses on the ridge, and what I really wanted was to have another look at the Russians themselves, especially as I seemed to be the only person who cared about them.

  ‘From the moment I started along the path, I felt a great sadness all about me. It was not the kind of feeling I was used to – not at that age. Naturally I put it down to the fact that now I knew about the houses, and couldn’t see them any more as mere property going to waste. Not that property going to waste is ever a cheerful sight in itself. I told myself that it must be the sad story I’d heard about the Russians, even though Mr. Purvis and I had been left to fill in the details, which, at that time, I knew no more about than any other ordinary English boy. Whatever I told myself, I felt worse and worse with every step I took. I felt as if a great pit was opening wider and wider, that previously I’d known nothing about; and that pretty well the whole world was sinking into it, so that soon it would be as if I were alone at the North Pole or on the moon, with no one even to cry out to. You may think that’s a bit far-fetched after all these years, but it’s exactly how it was. It was the feeling of being completely cut off and helpless that was the worst part; and the fact that on the face of it this was nonsense, because I could always run back across the bridge, only made it worse. I felt there was some explanation, something I didn’t know about, which was the real cause of the trouble. All the same, I was determined not to run away just because I was in a blue funk.

  ‘In the middle of it all, I remembered my medal. I pulled it out and held it clenched in my hand. Whatever I thought it might do, it didn’t do. I went on feeling exactly the same. But I continued clutching hold of the medal, as I ploughed forward. And this time, the sun was shining all the while, as I’ve said.

  ‘I reached the wooden house painted blue where I’d talked with the Russian lad, seen the priest giving out the medals, and all the rest of it. There was no one about and everything was quite silent, but the house was not locked up, like the houses between it and the bridge. On the contrary, the door where I had seen the priest watching me from behind his huge, fluffy beard, stood wide open.

  ‘I can’t tell you how, but I knew at once that there was no one inside.

  ‘The house had an utterly unoccupied look, but that didn’t always mean much on the island, and I think it was the wide open door itself which told me there was no one there. I thought I could risk taking a look.

  ‘I struggled with the gate. It was even heavier and more jammed than I had supposed when I first saw it, and I couldn’t think how the Russian boy had managed it so well. But I shoved it back and pushed my way up the garden path through the long grass and weeds. Believe it or not, I walked straight in. All things considered, I think it was plucky as well as cheeky, but I still didn’t suppose that anything was really wrong. How could I? I knew nothing.’

  At this point, a couple of locals who had drifted into the bar, and had been seated in the background intermittently muttering short, slow sentences to one another, drifted out again.

  ‘There was nothing inside but blood,’ said the old man. ‘Blood everywhere. Big blotches on the peeling walls, with darker centres, where the blood had started spurting. Blood splashed about the grey ceiling, as if kids had been in there with squirts that had got out of control. Blood heavy on the floorboards, dusty and rotten though they were. I could see the shapes of bodies, as they had lain there; many bodies, because it was a big room, thirty or thirty-five feet long I daresay, and perhaps twenty-five feet wide, and these shapes were right across the floor. After that, I have never doubted the marks that are said to be on the Holy Shroud at Turin: at least I have never doubted that they could have been made by a human body. The blood leaves an extraordinary definite outline. In that room, the marks suggested that several of the bodies had lain across one another. There was even blood on the windows, including the window where the little boy had waved to me. The sunshine shone through it like stained glass, and made the room redder still. It was like the Holy Grail, all glowing, and yet the room was filthy and dusty too. And the blood smelt. I can smell it now, when I think about it. At the time I all but fainted with the smell of it.

  ‘But I didn’t faint. I think it was partly because I still didn’t fully understand. I got out and tore off to the bridge as fast as my young legs would carry me.

  ‘Or rather towards the bridge. Because on the way I met the first person I’d seen on the island that day. He was a scruffy specimen too, dressed in little better than rags. If he hadn’t been in the very middle of the mud road, I’d have run right past him.

  ‘He said something to me in what I took to be Russian, and for some reason I stopped. His hair was going grey, and he had straggling grey wisps on his face and chin; not a proper beard, but just above the last word in neglect and untidiness. Of course I must have been looking very peculiar myself at that moment.

  ‘I made my usual answer: “English”. I imagine I was pretty well gasping.

  ‘“What are you holding in your hand?” he said: just like that, and quite comprehensibly.

  ‘I unfolded my hand and snowed him my medal lying on the palm of it. I was past caring if he snatched it.

  ‘“Do you know what that means?” he asked, pointing to the words.

  ‘I shook my head.

  ‘“The Feast of the Sheep of the Theotokos,” he said. “It is a privilege to possess such a medal. Only at the Feast are they given. They bear a blessing.”’

  ‘“But to participate, you have each time to cross yourself. Like this.” He showed me, as the boy had done. The Greeks do it differently from the Latins, as I expect some of you know. I had forgotten that part of it until he reminded me.

  ‘“I am a hermit,” he said, “having been long a pilgrim. I am now the only Christian soul resident on this island, where once there were so many.”

  ‘I could only bow my head. Raw though I was.

  ‘“Remember and live,” he said. “Remember and live long.”

  ‘Then he passed by me without a smile, and I walked quite slowly to and across the bridge, feeling much calmer.’

  The old man stopped.

  We had not expected an end just there, and were taken by surprise.

  ‘What’s the Feast of the Sheep of the whatever-it-was?’ asked Gamble, somewhat ineffectively.

  ‘It’s an annual celebration in the Orthodox Church,’ replied the old man, ‘but the details you’ll have to discover for yourself.’

  ‘And the charm has worked ever since?’ enquired the barman.

  ‘According to my belief, it has worked on several occasions, even though I was not raised in a faith which has no part in such things. Plainly I cannot expect it to work for all time.’

  ‘In a sense perhaps you can,’ said Dyson, quite quietly.

  ‘Anyway it worked tonight right enough,’ said the barman, still awed by the evidence of his own eyes.

  Of course we were all shying away from the core of the experience, as people do. And it seemed inappropriate just to thank the narrator and compliment his tale, as mere courtesy suggested. We all seemed painfully short of any right things to say. This may help to excuse a certain discordancy in a question which Rort put at this point.

  ‘The suggestion is that the people died in the civil war?’

  ‘No,’ said the old man. ‘The civil war began only in 1918, and all the Russians had gone back to their own country long before that. It was in Russia that they died, not in Finland.’

  Rort smiled, too polite to express doubt. One could tell from his face that he thought the tale too preposterous to be worth powder and shot. ‘I expect they’d most of them done the same kind of thing to their serfs and servants in their time,’ he said; entering, as he saw it, into the spirit of the narrative.

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ said the old
man. ‘All I know is that, speaking for myself, I wouldn’t have much truck with the people responsible for what I saw until they at least repudiate what they did then.’

  ‘If we followed that line of thought, we’d have a third world war,’ said Rort.

  But the old man said nothing further; nor, after Dyson had thanked him (quite adroitly) on behalf of us all, did he or we return to the subject during the remainder of the course.

  NO STRONGER THAN A FLOWER

  ‘Beauty whose action is no stronger than a flower.’

  WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

  ‘Naturally I don’t care, because I love you,’ said Curtis. ‘I’m thinking entirely of you.’

  Nesta had always been given to believe that, whatever they might say to one, it was a woman’s appearance that men really cared about; and indeed she thought that she well understood their point of view. So understanding had she been in fact, that she had long regarded herself as truly resigned to the wintry consequences in her own case. She would not, therefore, ever have accepted Curtis’s proposal of marriage, had she not greatly, though as yet briefly, loved him. She had a temperamental distaste for extreme measures.

  This trait of Nesta’s, and her experience of men, had prevented her discerning that Curtis was a far more desperate character. Having in his early twenties loved a woman of great beauty, he considered that he had learnt his lesson: beauty, although it had its place, was not to be lived with. He took it for granted that there were other values. He was horrified, therefore, to find himself now preoccupied, almost unconsciously at the start, with a stealthy campaign to persuade Nesta to do something about her looks. The campaign, he perceived, was being planned even before he proposed to her. This present suggestion was a climax.

  ‘I don’t really believe in it,’ said Nesta.

  ‘But, darling, how can you tell if you don’t put it to the test?’

  Of course this was old stuff between them.

  Nesta said nothing.

  ‘I don’t see that you have anything actually to lose,’ said Curtis.

  ‘I suppose I might lose you.’

  ‘Darling, please don’t be silly. I keep saying it’s you I’m thinking about.’

  ‘I wonder how I’ve managed until now?’

  ‘You’ve had no one to look after you.’

  If she could have accepted that at anything like its face value, she would doubtless have at least tried to do what Curtis wanted. As it was (although she did not doubt that Curtis loved her in his own way), she did nothing. A date had been fixed for the marriage, and Nesta was afraid that if she took the step demanded of her, and it did not end in reasonable success, then Curtis would jilt her.

  *

  After the marriage, it became suddenly clear to Nesta that to the generally accepted rule about men Curtis was no exception. Curtis had gone about his plan cleverly enough to confuse her at a time when she so much wanted to be confused; but marriage cleared her mind like a rocket piercing a cloud and releasing a downpour. Possibly the worst symptom was that from the nuptial day Curtis had never referred to the matter. Apparently he had decided to accept her as she was. And since, having been long self-occluded, she was greatly wishful of change and adventure, she could not welcome his decision.

  One trouble with Curtis’s previous attitude had always been its practical vagueness. As often with men in difficult and embarrassing contexts, he had urged action upon her with a persistency which indicated, she now saw, that latterly the subject was always in the front of his thoughts about her; but never making any very precise or feasible proposition. He would generalise about the importance and efficiency of beauty culture, and even, more than once, hint at plastic surgery; but at the smallest demur by Nesta would fall back upon an aloof irritability which she took to imply that naturally the details must be left to her. There was about him a suggestion that it was the least she could contribute. Why? Because she was a woman, she supposed. It was also the reason why she loved him.

  One thing which marriage did for Nesta was to stoke up a romantic sensitivity which previously she had banked down with daily loads of dust and ashes. She acquired an impersonal dissatisfaction with a way of life which a year before she would have thought ecstatic if it were not that she would then have altogether excluded it from her thoughts as impossible. Curtis’s passion might be somewhat guarded, but it was neither infrequent nor frightening; his general consideration for her was admirable; and he provided her, starved as she was of affectionate outlet, with continuous opportunities to assist and look after him. Only he no longer suggested that she should seek advice about her appearance; no longer remarked that every woman did so or wasn’t a woman.

  Eight or nine months after she was married, Nesta for the first time gave the problem exact and businesslike consideration. As commonly happens after a long period of irresolution, an apparent answer, a seeming first step, stared her in the face immediately she started seriously to look for it. She went to the library of her mother’s club, where she read through the flowing advertisement columns of the fashion papers for women, papers which she would not have about the flat, lest Curtis misunderstand, and perhaps pity, her interest in them; and in one which was new to her (it was entitled ‘Flame’), she found a relevant intimation. Restrained, sensitive, civilised, promising nothing and alluding only to a consultation without obligation, it bespoke as much as could be hoped for, Nesta thought, in such a case, although placed somewhat unnoticeably in a corner of the penultimate page. There was an address to which enquirers were invited to write for an appointment. No telephone number was given, but it was not a matter about which Nesta would have telephoned.

  The reply to Nesta’s letter was elegantly typed on thick paper, bearing at the top a representation, embossed in red, of a sleek, slightly formalised head and neck (a desirable looking creature, Nesta admitted, rubbing the raised surface with her finger); but the address was in a street, and indeed a part of the town, which were outside her restricted topography. The suggested appointment was for that morning. There was no need to confirm it, stated the letter; apparently in no doubt that Nesta would haste to attend. Nesta put the letter in the handbag. She decided in favour of a taxi.

  It was a long journey and a disappointing landfall. They were high terrace houses of that kind which while apparently built for single families, and certainly very inconvenient to operate on any other basis, yet give the impression of never having been so occupied. Now, in this particular street, they appeared largely to be let out in single rooms for habitation by the elderly and disappointed. The presence of children playing on the pavement manifested both life’s renascence and the street’s continued social descent.

  The house Nesta sought was in the middle of the row. Its knocker and letter box flap were polished and the lace curtains at its windows clean and lusciously draped; but the general effect was somehow still so cheerless that Nesta upon beholding it as she stepped out of the taxi, immediately decided to go home.

  She hesitated for a moment, trying to assemble an explanation.

  ‘Don’t yer like the look of it?’ enquired the driver.

  Nesta turned to him. ‘No,’ she said, and regarded him seriously.

  It seemed all that was needed.

  ‘’Op in. I’ll soon ’ave yer back ’ome.’

  Nesta nodded.

  But already the moment was gone. The front door of the house was open, and a woman advancing down the short strip of garden. Nesta was unequipped with the ruthlessness which might have enabled her to act on her impulse and bolt.

  ‘It was you who wrote to me?’

  Again Nesta nodded. The woman was staring at her.

  ‘Make up your mind,’ enjoined the taxi-driver. He seemed to disapprove of the latest development. But Nesta was looking in her handbag.

  ‘I’m Mrs. de Milo. You made an appointment with me.’ It was a statement of fact.

  ‘Yes,’ said Nesta. ‘I think I’m in time.’ She had found the fare, but the
taximan still seemed doubtful.

  Mrs. de Milo made no reply, but stood staring at Nesta, as if minutely considering whether she for her part would take matters further. Mrs. de Milo was an ageless woman with a white smooth face, Grecian nose, and large but well shaped breasts. She wore an elegant white overall of medical aspect, gleaming with starch. Her black hair, very thick and glistening, was parted in the middle and drawn into a carefully composed bun.

  ‘Come in,’ said Mrs. de Milo, her mind apparently made up. ‘We can’t talk in the street.’

  The taxi began to move off.

  *

  The effect that evening on Curtis was interesting. His expression when Peggy let him into the flat and he first saw Nesta was one which Nesta found it difficult to decide about, wrought up though she was to observe him minutely. Then he spoke.

  ‘Darling!’

  She would not smile.

  ‘Darling, I thought for one moment –.’

  Still she left him to define.

  ‘All the same … You do look different?’

  She perceived. Curtis’s initial response had been nothing less than complete non-recognition. Although she had been standing in shadow it was startlingly more than she had reckoned upon.

  She did not go to him, but rather drew back a step.

  ‘I’ve altered my hair style.’

  ‘I’ll say you have.’ He was almost peering at her. ‘Why?’

  ‘I wanted a change.’

  His face lightened somewhat.

  ‘Anything you want, darling.’

  Peggy asked if she should bring in soup. It was amusing that Peggy had never seemed even to notice the innovation.

  ‘Give me a minute of time to change,’ said Curtis, as he always did. When alone with Nesta, he dined in one of his older suits.

  Nesta turned and, full in the light, looked at herself yet again in the expensive, but not very beautiful hanging glass which had been her father-in-law’s wedding present.