The Unsettled Dust (15 page)

‘Do you live here?’ asked Trant.

‘Yes,’ said the child, and, child-like, said no more.

It limped forward, climbed the altar rail, and stood beside Trant, looking up at him. Trant found it difficult to assess how old it was.

‘Would you like to see one of the other bishops?’

‘No thank you,’ said Trant.

‘I think you ought to see a bishop,’ said the child quite gravely.

‘I’d rather not,’ said Trant smiling.

‘There may not be another chance.’

‘I expect not,’ said Trant, still smiling. He felt it was best to converse with the child at its own level, and make no attempt at adult standards of flat questioning and
conventionalised
reference.

‘Then I’ll take you to the crypt,’ said the child.

The crypt was the concluding item in the guide book. Entered from just by the north-western corner of the choir, it was, like the ‘Adoration’, a speciality, involving payment. Trant had rather assumed that he would not get round to it.

‘Shall I have time?’ he asked, looking instinctively at his stopped watch, still showing 11.28.

‘Yes,’ said the child, as before.

The child limped ahead, opened the choir-gate and held it for Trant, his inscriptions unread, to pass through. The child closed the gate, and led the way to the crypt entry, looking over its shoulder to see that Trant was following. In the rather better light outside the choir, Trant saw that its hair was a wonderful mass of silky gold; its face almost white, with the promise of fine bones; its lips unusually red.

‘This is called the crossing,’ said the child informatively. Trant knew that the term was sometimes applied to the intersection of nave and transepts.

‘Or the narthex, I believe,’ he said, plunging in in order to show who was the grown-up.

The child, not unnaturally, looked merely puzzled.

There was still no one else visible in the cathedral.

They began to descend the crypt stairs, the child holding on to the iron handrail because of its infirmity. There was a table at the top, obviously for the collection of the fee, but deserted. Trant did not feel called upon to comment.

In the crypt, slightly to his surprise, many of the lights were on. Probably the custodian had forgotten to turn them off when he or she had hurried forth to eat.

The guide book described the crypt as ‘large’, but it was much larger than Trant had expected. The stairs entered at one corner, and columns seemed to stretch away like trees into the distance. They were built in stones of different colours, maroon, purple, green, grey, gold; and they often bore remains of painting as well, which also spread over areas of the vaulted stone roof and weighty walls. In the soft patchy light, the place was mysterious and beautiful; and all the more so because the whole area could not be seen simultaneously. With the tide of centuries the stone-paved floor had become rolling and uneven, but agreeably so. There were occasional showcases and objects on pedestals, and there was a gentle perfume of incense. As Trant entered, all was silence. He even felt for a moment that there was something queer about the silence; that only sounds of another realm moved in it, and that the noises of this world, of his own arrival for
example
, were in a different dimension and irrelevant. He stood, a little awed, and listened for a moment to the nothingness.

The child stood too, or rather rested against a pillar. It was smiling again, though very slightly. Perhaps it smiled like this all the time, as if always happy.

Trant thought more than ever that it might be a girl. By this time it was rather absurd not to be sure, but by this time it was more than before difficult to ask.

‘Bishop Triest’s clothes,’ said the child, pointing. They were heavy vestments, hanging, enormously embroidered, in a glass cabinet.

‘Saint Livinus’s ornament,’ said the child, and crossed itself. Trant did not know quite what to make of the ornament.

‘Animals,’ said the child. It was an early book of natural history written by a monk, and even the opened page showed some very strange ones.

The child was now beginning positively to dart about in its eagerness, pointing out item after item.

‘Shrine of Saint Macarius,’ said the child, not crossing itself, presumably because the relic was absent.

‘Abbot Hughenois’s clothes.’ They were vestments again, and very like Triest’s vestments, Trant thought.

‘What’s that?’ asked Trant, taking the initiative and
pointing
. Right on the other side of the crypt, as it seemed, and now visible to Trant for the first time through the forest of coloured columns, was something which appeared to be
winking
and gleaming with light.

‘That’s at the end,’ replied the child. ‘You’ll be there soon.’

Soon indeed, at this hour, thought Trant: if in fact we’re not thrown out first.

‘Via Dolorosa,’ said the child, pointing to a picture. It was a gruesome scene, painted very realistically, as if the artist had been a bystander at the time; and it was followed by another which was even more gruesome and at least equally realistic.

‘Calvary,’ explained the child.

They rounded a corner with the stone wall on the left, the forest of columns on the right. The two parts of a diptych came into view, of which Trant had before seen only the discoloured reverse.

‘The blessed and the lost,’ said the child, indicating,
superfluously
, which was which.

Trant thought that the pictures and frescoes were becoming more and more morbid, but supposed that this feeling was probably the result of their cumulative impact. In any case, there could not be much more.

But there were still many things to be seen. In due course they came to a group of pictures hanging together.

‘The sacrifice of three blessed martyrs,’ said the child. Each of the martyrs had died in a different way: by roasting on a very elaborate gridiron; by disembowelling; and by some
process
involving a huge wheel. The painting, unlike some of the others, was extraordinarily well preserved. The third of the martyrs was a young woman. She had been martyred naked and was of great and still living beauty. Next to her hung a further small picture, showing a saint carrying his own skin. Among the columns to the right was an enormous black cross. At a little distance, the impaled figure looked lifelike in the extreme.

The child was still skipping in front, making so light of its disability that Trant could not but be touched. They turned another corner. At the end of the ambulatory ahead was the gleaming, flashing object that Trant had noticed from the other side of the crypt. The child almost ran on, ignoring the intervening sights, and stood by the object, waiting for Trant to catch up. The child’s head was sunk, but Trant could see that it was looking at him from under its fair, silky eyelashes.

This time the child said nothing, and Trant could only stare.

The object was a very elaborate, jewelled reliquary of the Renaissance. It was presumably the jewels which had seemed to give off the flashing lights, because Trant could see no lights now. At the centre of the reliquary was a transparent vertical tube or cylinder. It was only about an inch high, and probably made of crystal. Just visible inside it was a black thread, almost like the mercury in a minute thermometer; and at the bottom of the tube was, Trant noticed, a marked discoloration.

The child was still standing in the same odd position; now glancing sideways at Trant, now glancing away. It was
perhaps
smiling a little more broadly, but its head was sunk so low that Trant could not really see. Its whole posture and behaviour suggested that there was something about the
reliquary
which Trant should be able to see for himself. It was almost as if the child were timing him, to see how long he took.

Time, thought Trant, yet again; and now with a start. The reliquary was so fascinating that he had managed somehow almost to forget about time. He looked away and along the final ambulatory, which ran to the foot of the staircase by which he had come down. While he had been examining the reliquary, someone else had appeared in the crypt. A man stood in the centre of the passage, a short distance away from Trant. Or not exactly a man: it was, Trant realised, the acolyte in the red cassock, the boy who had been polishing the brass feet. Trant had no doubt that he had come to hurry him out.

Trant bustled off, full of unreasonable guilt, without even properly thanking his child guide. But when he reached the boy in the cassock, the boy stretched out his arms to their full length and seemed, on the contrary, to bar his passage.

It was rather absurd; and especially as one could so readily turn right and weave a way out through the Gothic columns.

Trant, in fact, turned his head in that direction, simply upon instinct. But in the bay to his right, stood the youth from across the Atlantic in the green wind-cheater. He had the strangest of expressions (unlike the boy in the cassock, who seemed the same dull peasant as before); and as Trant caught his eye, he too raised his arms to their full extent, as the boy had done.

There was still one more free bay. Trant retreated a step or two, but then saw among the shadows within (which seemed to be deepening) the man in the grey suit with the vague foreign accent. His arms were going up even as Trant sighted him, but when their eyes met (though Trant could not see his face, very well) he did something the others had not done. He laughed.

And in the entrance to the other ambulatory, through which Trant had just come and down which the child had almost run bravely casting aside its affliction, stood that same child, now gazing upwards again and indeed looking quite radiant, as it spread its arms almost as a bird taking flight.

Trant heard the great clock of the cathedral strike twelve. In the crypt, the tone of the bell was lost: there was little more to be distinguished than twelve great thuds, almost as if cannon were being discharged. The twelve strokes of the hour took a surprisingly long time to complete.

In the meantime, and just beside the reliquary, a small door had opened, in the very angle of the crypt. Above it was a small but exquisite and well preserved alabaster keystone showing a soul being dragged away on a hook by a demon. Trant had hardly noticed the door before, as people commonly overlook the working details of a place which is on show, the same details that those who work the place look to first.

In the door, quite filling it, was the man Trant had believed himself to have seen in the pulpit soon after he had first entered the great building. The man looked much bigger now, but there was the same bald head, the same resigned hands, the same multicoloured garments. It was undoubtedly the very person, but in some way enlarged or magnified; and the curious fringe of hair seemed more luminous than ever.

‘The cathedral closes now,’ said the man. ‘Follow me.’

The fair figures encircling Trant began to shut in on him until their extended finger-tips were almost touching.

His questions went quite unanswered, his protests quite unheard; especially after everyone started singing.

‘I am coming to see you,’ said the man. ‘Tomorrow. Tomorrow afternoon.’

He looked into her eyes quite steadily, but he certainly didn’t smile.

Noelle did smile. ‘You don’t know where I live,’ she said.

‘I know very well,’ said the man.

Obviously, it would have been easy enough for him to have found out from Simon and Mut, whose party it was, but it seemed strange that he should have done so before even meeting Noelle, before setting eyes on her, almost certainly before being told about her. Not until that moment had he implied that he already knew anything at all about her. It would have been absurd for Noelle to ask him how he knew.

‘We can’t just leave it at this,’ said the man, with some urgency. ‘We can’t.’

‘Perhaps we can,’ said Noelle.

‘I know the district round Woking pretty well,’ said the man. ‘I’ll call for you about three tomorrow and we’ll go for a walk in the woods.’

True enough, where Noelle lived there were woods of a kind in almost every direction; but that applied to so much of residential Surrey. Specifically, there was a wood on the other side of the road, opposite her gate.

‘I don’t promise to be there,’ said Noelle. ‘I can’t.’

‘Then I shall have to take a chance,’ said the man. ‘We mustn’t just leave it, and we’ll get no further here.’

‘What’s your name anyway?’ asked Noelle.

That tone was advancing upon her with the passing years. She deplored it, but one cannot expect to find people
en
masse
who speak one’s private language. It is bound to suffer erosion by the
lingua
franca.

But, as if to confirm the man’s point that further
communication
was impossible, Mut at that instant turned up the record-player and Simon turned on the new strip lighting. Simon and Mut went through a party as if it were a dress rehearsal. As little as possible was left to chance. Noelle always wondered what would happen if there were ever to be an actual performance.

Still without a smile, the man had dissolved into the glare and the din. Noelle wondered if he were making an
assignation
with someone else; perhaps proposing the North Downs as background. Alternatively, he might well be going home. For him, the party might have fulfilled its purpose.

Only when Melvin, her husband, was on his travels, did Noelle herself go to these parties where almost everyone was younger than she. But that was quite frequently, so she realised how lucky she was that people like Simon and Mut could still be bothered with her. Not that Mut in particular was so enormously much younger. Noelle and Mut had aforetime shared an apartment. The then infant Simon had already been Mut’s lover, been it for years, but Noelle had not yet met Melvin. Indeed, when Mut had been out of the room, Simon could be depended upon for a small-scale agitation, or quick pass. It was a tradition that still lingered.