The Unburied (20 page)

I walked very quietly towards the chancel where the men were working. Three of them were at their labours and the old verger, Gazzard, was standing watching them with his back to me.

None of them noticed me standing under the crossing-tower. And then suddenly I felt I was being observed and that made me glance up at the organ-loft. I did so without thinking. It was one of those moments of inattention when mind and body seem to drift apart as if an effort were required to hold them together, when time appears to lose its motion. Or rather, when it later seems like that for such moments can only be captured retrospectively. It was like those many times when I would realize I had read several pages with apparent concentration but without being able to remember a word. At such times I wondered, if my mind were not on my book, where was it?

And so it was on this occasion. When I glanced up at the organ-loft I suddenly became aware of where I was and had no idea how much time had passed or how I had got to where I found myself. Over the edge of the rail was a pale spot in the darkness and as I watched, it resolved itself into a face which seemed to be gazing straight at me. A cold, white, empty face with eyes that were two pieces of glass – empty and yet they seemed to peer into me. They looked through my soul – or rather my lack of a soul for they found or created an answering emptiness within me. It was the face of a creature not of our world. How long we stared at each other – or rather I stared at him for I cannot be sure that he was looking at me – I have no means of knowing. The face disappeared and I seemed to awake with a shudder and in a cold sweat, and it was at that moment that I reconstructed the sequence of events. I had an idea about who it was that I had seen, but I could not accept it. Everything I knew and believed would be thrown into confusion.

I stood there waiting to see who would emerge from the doorway which led down from the organ-gallery. Eventually, realizing that nobody was going to come down those steps, I turned and in a trance I made my way along the transept towards the door.

As I stepped through it and pulled it shut behind me my eyes were almost dazzled by unexpected whiteness. The air was filled with movement as myriad drifting snowflakes turned black and white when they caught or lost the moonlight. While I had been inside, the snow had begun to fall in earnest and enough had descended to cover the cobbles and roofs. I had not realized that I had been in the building for long enough for that to have happened. Always, with the first snow of the winter, the world was reborn. Involuntarily I remembered my childhood – hurrying through the snow with my nurse to watch the skaters on the nearby pond, coming back from school at the end of my first half when the coach laboured through deepening snow as it approached London, and waiting for my father to return on Christmas Eve when I knew I would be allowed to stay up late and sip hot punch with my parents. The memories moved me so deeply and seemed so innocent in contrast to what I had just experienced that I felt tears coming to my eyes.

And then it happened. I record only what I saw and believed at the time. The reader must be patient with me.

About sixty yards away in the pale moonlight and clearly distinct against the snow, there was a black figure standing at the entrance to the alleyway into which Austin had vanished. But this was not Austin. It was far too tall. The face was that of the being I had just seen in the organ-loft.
If he were a mortal being, I knew of no way he could have got from there to where he now was without my having seen him for I had watched the stairway from the gallery and then walked straight out of the only unlocked door of the Cathedral.
And once again the figure seemed to be looking at me. A long contemptuous stare. Then it turned away and entered the mouth of the alleyway making ungainly movements as it went. It was limping and that made it seem like some wounded creature dragging itself away, filled with pain and misery and rage.

I had seen William Burgoyne. I was sure of it. In that case, the world was not as I had imagined it. The dead could walk again, for a man who had died two hundred years ago had appeared before me. That meant that all that I believed – all the decent, rational, progressive ideas by which I lived – were childish games that could only be played in the daylight. When it grew dark then the real powers reassumed their place and they were irresistible, irrational and evil.

I don’t know how long I stood there – ten minutes, fifteen, half an hour – for never had time seemed to me so illusory. When I came to myself I looked at the snow-covered cobbles. I could see in the faint moonlight that the surface of the snow between where I was and where the figure had stood was untouched. If it was anything but some insubstantial being, it could not have got there without leaving traces in the snow!

I wanted to get away from that place, and yet to return to Austin’s house was unthinkable. I could not bear the thought of being confined and least of all in that old house that now seemed to me to be full of mocking shadows, of half-heard voices muttering in the creaking of the ancient timbers. I hastened along the side of the Cathedral in the opposite direction, passed under the entrance and found myself in the silent High Street. I set off fast and at random. How long I strode around the sleeping streets I do not know.

The town’s peacefulness reassured me that the world of ordinary life, of the patterns of sleep and work, still existed, for what I had seen was like a cry of agony in the middle of a chamber concert – a glimpse of pain and anger powerful enough to raise a man from his death two hundred years after the event. I let my legs carry me where they would and I hardly knew where they took me. Wherever I passed, my footsteps were the only stains upon the light dusting of snow that now lay upon the town. I remember that at one moment I was climbing a gently sloping hill along a curving road lined with big villas, each with a wrought-iron balcony and verandah and painted wooden shutters, and I remember pausing near the summit to look down at the houses and their long gardens that led down to a little stream sheltered by weeping willows all along its length, and I remember thinking that it must have been charming in the summer although the trees were now silent and gaunt in the winter moonlight. I thought of the parents and children and servants sleeping inside them, and sighed as I imagined what a pleasant place those dwellings would have been to grow up in or to bring up a family.

From up here the little town lay before me like a child’s toy, my sight of it slightly misted by the falling snow. In the centre the dark shape of the Cathedral thrust upwards from the low roofs around it, and as I thought of the dark little Close huddled in its shadow I felt an unwillingness to return there out of the clear air of the hilltop.

After a few minutes I set off. I descended the hill again by a different way and saw nobody until at last in some street on the edge of the town – more like a country lane with its thatched cottages and rutted carriageway than a town street – I met a milk-cart driven by a burly young man who called out a cheerful greeting. This communication with a breathing human being brought me back to my senses. Now I hurried back towards the centre of the town, taking as my landmark the spire of the Cathedral that loomed up against the dark sky. After a few minutes I was so close to it in among the houses that I could no longer see it. And then I heard its clock sound the half-hour and knew I was near it. It was half-past three. I was completely lost among narrow back-streets and gardens until I found myself in one of the lanes I had taken after losing sight of Austin. Suddenly I smelt butter and ginger. Something was baking! I followed the smell. As I turned into a long narrow street I saw only one light along its whole length. It was a street of tall old houses of faded red brick, now somewhat dilapidated with the paint on the doors and window-frames peeling and the wood rotted beneath it. All of them had several bell-pulls and name-plates – sure signs that they had been made down into separate dwellings. I went up to the sole window where there was a light and looked in.

There was a gap in the frayed curtains and through it I could just see a part of Austin’s face and the lower part of his body. He was sitting in a chair and talking but I could not see whom he was addressing. I saw him raise a glass to his mouth and drink. I strained to hear and could just make out a murmur of voices – one of which was a woman’s. I could not tell if she was the only other person in the room with Austin or if there were more than those two. And then as I watched, a hand which seemed too large for a woman’s but whose fingers were slender and delicate, reached towards Austin and rested for a moment on his knee in a strangely intimate gesture.

Austin smiled at his invisible companion with such tenderness, his face illuminated with such evident happiness, that I had a sudden memory of him looking at me that way many years before and felt a sharp stab of regret, remorse, even jealousy. I only looked for a few seconds, terrified that he might glance out and see me, though I suppose that the lights inside the room would have turned the window-panes into black mirrors. I backed away from the window and walked down the street in a daze.

So that was his great passion – a squalid liaison with a woman of the town in this shabby district. What a fool I was not to have thought of that as a reason for his going out in the middle of the night! I was horrified at the idea that he might find out that I had followed him. And at the same time, I was astonished. The Austin I had known had never gone in for mercenary amours – as many of our contemporaries at the University had done. Indeed, he had never been involved with women at all, as far as I knew. I had never had a moment’s unease on that score during his friendship with my wife.

I thought of him hurrying through the dark and silent streets to his lover. How ridiculous at his age. And yet how enviable. I found I had to pause and take a deep breath as I thought of the sheer naked shamelessness of my friend’s indulgence in this adventure.

At the end of the street I seemed to come to my senses and found that I knew where I was. I was at the corner with the street which led to the alleyway in which I had lost Austin. I retraced my steps. Now it occurred to me that the affair might not be what I had assumed. Perhaps Austin was truly in love with some woman who was worthy of his love. Yet their meeting like that in the middle of the night implied that their relationship was in some way illicit. Was she married? Was she even the wife of a colleague or one of the men attached in some capacity to the Cathedral? In that case, who could she be? I thought of the cycle of disappointment, excitement, resentment and desire through which I had not been forced for two decades. Who was this imperious, unreasonable creature who had such power over him – summoning him, perhaps, to come to her in the middle of the night regardless of the risks? Recalling him, it might be, after a period of anguished banishment, during which he might have had to watch her smiling with affection upon a rival. When I remembered what I had suffered, I hardly knew whether to envy or to pity him.

Then a horrible idea came to me about who the woman might be. I could not believe that it could be true. How could such a woman find Austin worthy? And yet it occurred to me that the real Austin, the Austin I had known if he still existed, might be worthy, for the best qualities in him were admirable. And of all women in the world she would be the one to find and encourage them for, as I had seen, it was characteristic of her always to think the best of people and try to understand and forgive their worst actions. What horror it was to reflect that it is often the very generosity of the lover which makes an unworthy beloved seem deserving.

I went back to the house, shaking the snow off my boots before I went inside, and took a lighted candlestick up to the sitting-room. I had determined upon a certain course of action. Austin’s behaviour was of a piece with other strange acts since my arrival: his watching me that afternoon in the Close, his abrupt changes of mood and swings from friendliness to resentment. The circumstances now – the fact that it was the middle of the night, the snow, the figure I had just seen – all of these factors seemed to mean that I had stepped out of the ordinary world and was therefore allowed to take measures that I would not normally permit myself. I had begun to think that there might be a connection between the theft of the miniatures – if they were indeed what had been taken – from Dr Sheldrick on Tuesday night and the odd business of the package that had mysteriously arrived inside Austin’s front-door.

I crossed to the armoire. The doors were solid and when I tried them, I found they were indeed locked.

I scrutinized the room for any other clues. It struck me that the bookshelves were the tidiest thing in the house. Did that mean that Austin never touched his books or, on the contrary, that he was so devoted to them that he was careful to keep them in order? Because of the orderliness, it was striking that on one of the shelves there was a single volume out of place and lying on its side. Noticing that it had a book-mark inserted in it, I picked it up and found that it was a collection of fairytales and bore inside a gummed label indicating that it was from the library of Courtenay’s. On an impulse I took it up to my room, made ready for bed and got under the covers.

I opened the volume at the place where the book-mark had been put and, finding that it was the beginning of one of the stories, began to read it. My attention wandered, however. Could it be that I had imagined the figure I had seen in the organ-loft and again in the Close? It was true that I had drunk several glasses more than was customary during the course of the evening. Now that I considered it, I could explain some of what I had seen, but not everything. It might be, for instance, that I had stood on the steps for longer than I had realized and that the falling snow had covered the traces of the figure I had seen before I had thought to look. Yet the fact remained that he could not have got from the organ-loft to where I had seen him without passing a few feet in front of me. Even now that I was tucked up in bed I was unable to feel amusement at my superstitious terror for I still had a strange feeling that I had seen something from another world or another time. Austin’s remark about being damned – that his mysterious passion had led him to perdition – came unbidden into my mind. The creature I had seen that night was evil – even damned – if that word meant anything.