The Unburied (2 page)

‘You were good at that.’

‘I was magnificent.’

‘Are you confessing?’

‘Confessing? My dear man, I’m boasting. The greatest actors can create a human being before the very eyes of spectators – not show them something fabricated beforehand like a puppet. To go out onto the stage and become the character at a moment of crisis and speak without knowing what you are going to say until the words come out! To court that danger and to triumph, that is the great adventure that life offers. The incomparable adventure. Don’t you see that?’

‘I’ve never acted.’

‘I’m not talking about just acting. I’m talking about being alive. Otherwise you’re dead without the dignity of burial.’

‘You regret nothing?’

‘Only that I am now dying.’

There was nothing to be gained by asking her again about Perkins, who died because he lacked the imagination to live anywhere but in the present moment. I turned and left the room.

My trip turned out to have been worthwhile in a more concrete way. As my train made its slow and necessarily roundabout progress towards the coast, the names of Flemish towns and villages which had acquired a hideous familiarity in England in the last four years began to appear on the signboards. I thought of the grieving mothers of so many of my pupils for whom I had been unable to find words of comfort. And then there came into my memory the old woman’s involuntary start at the word ‘son’ and as I pictured her, I saw the black piano with its lid lowered and at that moment an idea about how I might proceed came to me.

The death of the old lady just two months ago removed the last obstacle to publication of the document which follows. As a preface to it I need only say that this comment was written on the outside of the envelope which contained it – written as a consequence of my own intervention, though I did not know that until many years later:
I have just learned that I was wrong about the role of Ormonde who I now know was dead many years before the events recounted here. Nevertheless, I will let this stand as a true record of what I witnessed and the conclusions I later drew from my experiences – wrong though some of them must have been. E. C.

Tuesday Evening

While my memory is fresh I am going to describe exactly what I saw and heard on the occasion, less than a week past, when I encountered a man who was walking about just like you and me – despite the inconvenience of having been brutally done to death.

My visit began inauspiciously. Because of the weather, which for two days had draped a cloak of freezing fog upon the southern half of the country, the train was delayed and I missed a connection. By the time I reached my destination – two hours late – I had been travelling for several hours through a premature night. As I sat alone in the ill-lit carriage, holding a book in front of me but making little attempt to read, I gazed out at the shrouded landscape that grew increasingly unfamiliar and indistinct as the dusk fell and the fog thickened. Gradually the impression took hold of me that the train was bearing me not forwards but backwards – carrying me out of my own life and time and into the past.

Suddenly I was recalled to myself when, with an abrupt jerk, the train began to slow down and, after a series of shudders, came to a halt in a darkness that was barely mitigated by the dim lights from the carriages. We were so far behind the timetable that I had no idea if this was my station. As I stood at the door trying to see a signboard in the liverish yellow glow of a distant gas-lamp, I heard a window further along the train being lowered and a fellow-passenger call out to ask if we had reached the terminus. A voice from somewhere along the platform replied in the negative, saying that this was the last stop before the end of the line and naming my destination.

I took my bag from the rack and descended with only two or three other travellers. They passed from my sight while I stood for a few moments on the platform, shocked by the cold and stamping my feet and clasping my arms about me as I tried to breathe the foul air in which the acrid smell of hard frost was mingled with the smoke of the town’s thousands of coal-fires.

Austin had told me that he would be unable to meet me at the station because his duties would detain him, and that I should therefore go straight to the house. I had preferred that, since it had occurred to me that I might not recognize him and it would be better to encounter him at his own door. I could not decide if the prospect of finding that he had changed was more or less disturbing than discovering that he had not. I believe, however, that what I was really afraid of was not so much the changes I would find in him as seeing in the face of my old friend the transformation which the years had wrought upon myself.

The train whistled and shunted out of the station leaving me gasping at the soot-laden smoke it had belched forth – a dark, bowels-of-the-earth mineral smell. Darkness fell again and all that was visible now was a flaring gas-jet above what must be the gate from the platform. I directed myself towards it and at the barrier a railway employee, muffled up with a scarf across his face, took my ticket with one of his gloved hands.

When I passed out to the forecourt I found that my fellow-passengers had vanished like phantoms. There was only one cab waiting and I engaged it. The face that the driver turned to me had a bulbous nose and hanging lower lip which, together with the stench of sour beer on his breath, inspired little confidence. I gave the address and we lurched into motion.

Although the town was unfamiliar to me I knew that the station was about a mile from the centre. Through the little window of the swaying vehicle I could see almost nothing, though I could hear that there were few other vehicles on the road. In three or four minutes we started going up a slight rise and I guessed that we were ascending the hill at the summit of which the Romans had built their fortress to guard the ancient crossroads.

On both sides of the road were rows of cottages in several of whose lighted windows I caught sight of families sitting down for their evening meal. Though my welcome so far was cold, I told myself that at least I would not be spending the week in College with the dreary remnant of my unmarried colleagues who had not been invited anywhere.

The cab slowed as the hill grew steeper and I realized, with surprise, that my heart was beating faster. I had often wondered what sort of a hand my old friend had made of his life. As undergraduates we had talked much of the stir we would make out in the great world – both of us passionate about our studies and ambitious for recognition. Did he regret the way his life had turned out? Was he happy in this remote little town? Had he found other compensations? From time to time I had heard rumours about his way of life from our common acquaintance, though I gave them little credit. I had speculated often about him and when I had received his invitation – so surprising after such a long estrangement – I had not been able to resist.

The carriage breasted the rise and as the wheels began to clatter over the cobbles, our speed increased. Now there were street-lamps whose misty haloes cast scant light in the thick fog and I could see that although we appeared to be in the High Street, there was little traffic in the carriageway and few foot-passengers on the pavements. As the hooves of the cab-horse rang out in the silent street, we might have been travelling through a sacked city deserted after a siege. Then, without warning, I was thrown from side to side as the vehicle made a succession of sharp turns and passed through a great arch – the clattering hooves echoing around me. I thought the driver had brought me to an inn by mistake but at that moment I heard I might almost say I was stunned by – the heavy thud of a great bell. It struck four more times – each chime seeming to overtake the last like ripples spreading outwards through the fog – and I realized that I was right underneath the Cathedral and that in the near-darkness of the fog we had come upon it without my being aware.

The cab swung round sharply for the last time and drew up. A few yards away was a porch – the south door of the transept. In the flaring light of a gas-mantle I saw a stack of bricks and some wooden slats, covered by a tarred cloth.

‘Are they working on the Cathedral?’ I asked the driver as I descended.

‘Aren’t they always?’ he answered.

As I was paying the fare the door of the nearest house opened and a figure came hurrying towards me.

‘Old fellow, how glad I am to see you,’ said a youthful voice that I remembered so well I shivered. The voice was the same but I saw before me a stranger, a middle-aged man with lined cheeks and a high forehead from which the thin greying hair was receding. Austin seized me and hugged me and as I felt how slight his frame was, I remembered that unEnglish impulsiveness and emotionalism of his that I had always envied and been a little afraid of.

‘Thank you for coming,’ he said, one hand patting my back as we embraced. ‘God bless you. God bless you.’

At his words I felt a profound regret for what had happened. It could not have been foreseen during the period of our friendship that we would be parted for so long – parted by an estrangement that had come about because he had been implicated in the most painful experience of my life. Afterwards it was I who had written to him in a gesture intended to show that I wanted our friendship to survive. It was only when he had failed to respond that I had begun to wonder if he felt guilt for the part he had played and then to speculate more and more about what role exactly he had been assigned or had taken upon himself. Despite that, I wrote him a short note that first Christmas and every subsequent one, and after a few years he had begun to do the same – more briefly – and had continued to do so about every two or three years.

I heard news of him through common acquaintances, though less and less often as they lost touch or went abroad or died. And then a month ago – long after I had assumed that the embers of our friendship had turned to ashes – I had received a letter inviting me to visit him – indeed, urging me to do so in the warmest terms – on any date of my own choosing since he never went away, provided only that I had ‘the patience to endure the company of the dull and crotchety old fellow I’ve become’. At first I had wondered if blowing on those embers now would revive or extinguish them, but I had an idea of why he might have decided to invite me and so I had written back to say that I would come with pleasure and that it fortunately happened that I was anxious to survey and measure the ancient earthworks at Woodbury Castle just outside the town. I said that I would come early in the new year on my way back from my niece and that I would give him as much warning as possible. (In the event, I had altered my plans and had been able to give him only a few days’ notice.)

Behind me I heard the cab turning in the narrow way between the houses and the Cathedral.

Austin drew back, still holding me by both arms, so that for the first time I could see him, though only in the feeble light cast by the gas-mantle some fifteen yards away. There was the old Austin smiling at me. The same brightness in his large black eyes, the same boyish eagerness. He was smiling and yet, for all his apparent pleasure at seeing me again, I thought there was something evasive, something shadowed in his gaze that did not quite meet mine. Was he thinking what I was thinking: what have the years done to you? What have they given you to match the bright youthfulness they have taken?

‘Dear Austin, you’re looking very well.’

‘All the better for seeing you,’ he said. ‘Come in, my dear old friend.’

He seized my bag and winced theatrically at its weight. I tried to take it from him but he drew it away too quickly for me so that for a moment we were a couple of playful undergraduates again. ‘What on earth is in it? Books, I suppose?’

‘And Christmas gifts for my niece’s children. Though one of them is for you.’

‘Oh, capital! I love being given presents,’ he exclaimed. He carried the bag ahead of me to the door where he thrust out an arm to invite me to enter before him.

I peered up at the building. ‘What a pretty old house,’ I said. In fact, as I spoke the words I perceived that the house was quaint rather than pretty. It was tall and narrow and the casement windows and doors were so manifestly out of alignment with each other and with the ground that, squashed between two bigger houses, it looked like a drunken man being held up under the armpits by his companions.

‘It comes with the post. It’s regarded as a benefit, but I often think I should be paid more for living in it. The best houses are in the Lower Close.’

Meanwhile the cab-driver had effected his awkward manoeuvre and I heard the vehicle roll away. As I passed over the threshold I went down a couple of steps, for the level of the cobbled court outside had risen over the centuries. In the dark little hall I found myself facing a staircase – indeed, the house was all stairs, for it was of an ancient construction with only two rooms on each floor. When I had removed my greatcoat and hat, Austin led me into his front-parlour. I could see that the kitchen was the little room beyond it. The front-parlour – or dining-room as he called it, and it was apparent from the table laid for two that this was where he ate – was cold, though there was a newly-lit fire burning. In the light of the gas-lamp I could see Austin clearly at last. His nose was redder than I remembered it, and though his skin was still as pale as paper, it was now coarse and wrinkled. He was as slender as he had been as a young man. (I cannot say the same in my own case, I fear.) Oddly, he was taller than I remembered. Seeing my scrutiny he smiled and I did the same. Then he turned away and began to tidy up as if he had made no preparations for my arrival.

All the while he asked me questions about my journey and I responded with enquiries about the house and its position and its amenities. I seated myself in one of the two old chairs at the table. The furniture was shabby and broken down, with a greasy shine upon the fabric. The old panelling was blackened by a couple of centuries of candle-flames and on the bare boards there was only a threadbare Turkey carpet. Absurdly, I felt my heart thumping. The place was so mean, almost squalid. I thought of my own comfortable apartments and the college servants who kept everything clean and neat.