The Unsettled Dust (19 page)

Anyone could see that she was worn out. Kind Kay
suggested
that she take in Judith and Agnew for a few days, so that Noelle would have time to find her feet. The children were not in the room at the time, and Noelle accepted with hardly a demur. Judith had been weeping excessively, and was now lying down. Agnew had been looking paler and more mature every moment.

There was resistance at the time of departure, but Kay dealt with it skilfully, and Ted Mullings offered a ride to Kay’s house in his gamboge Jaguar. Agnew stepped in ahead of everyone, but Judith declined furiously to go at all, and had to be dragged all the way on foot by Kay, while Agnew waited on her doorstep, as Ted Mullings had to be on his way back to his wife in Kent.

The solicitor had a quantity of work to take home, especially as he had been away from the office for so much of the day; and thereafter Noelle was alone in the house. She had declined Kay’s offer to take her in also for that one night at least. She had much thinking to do, and solitude might help the process, though she was far from sure whether or not it would.

It was autumn and she threw the remains of the funeral baked meats into the fire. Melvin had always insisted upon as many open grates as possible, and today one of them had been put into use. Noelle regularly had to stand over the daily woman, Clarice, while it was done. Noelle disliked such sustained exercises in authority exceedingly.

Her father’s clock struck six. Noelle felt like midnight, but at least there was a reasonable amount of time for all the thinking she would have to do; all the bricks she would have to make without straw, without the right kind of experience, or the proper temperament.

She could scarcely make herself another cup of tea; scarcely just yet even want another cup. She picked up a boomerang with which Melvin had returned from Darwin. Melvin had admitted that he had only bought it in a shop, but it had been a special shop. The boomerang was not a commercially produced plaything, he had said, but a real weapon. Ever since, it had lain on his desk. Noelle handled it wistfully. The house was of course packed with all kinds of things that would have to be disposed of somehow; and profitably, if at all possible. Not even Melvin’s life assurance had proved to be of a kind best suited to the circumstances as they had turned out. Noelle realised that she really must start thinking at once. Her situation was considerably better than that in which many widows found themselves. She knew that well.

*

But the bell rang.

Noelle looked at her father’s clock. It was not yet ten minutes past six. Doubtless someone had left something behind. Instantly, it occurred to Noelle that she herself had been left behind. She flushed for a second and managed to open the door.

The man from the house on the other side of the wood was standing there. Naturally, he showed no sign of the disarray in which Noelle had last seen him. His eyes were quite
unstaring
. This time he even wore a hat, though he swept it off as the door opened. He spoke at once.

‘I was so sorry to hear of your great loss. I did not think it right to intrude upon the funeral, but I wish to say how much I should like to do anything I can which might help you. It seems to me the sort of thing that should be said as soon as possible. So here I am to say it, and to say that I really mean it. Perhaps you would permit me to think for you about the many matters that must arise?’

‘There are indeed many matters,’ said Noelle. She felt that she was being watched from the houses on the other side of the road, beyond the worn entrance to the wood.

‘Possibly it would help if we ourselves could define our position in the light of the changed circumstances?’

Noelle glanced at him for the first time. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘If you think so. Please come in for a few minutes.’

He followed her in. She felt that she should take his hat, but in a modern house there was nowhere in particular to put it.

‘I have sent the children away,’ she said.

He sat on the same sofa; the sofa on which she herself had just been scrying the opaque future.

‘This is a boomerang,’ he said, as if most people would not know.

‘It was my husband’s.’

‘Yours is a terrible loss for anyone.’

Noelle nodded.

‘Most of all for a woman as sensitive and highly strung as you. Your cheeks are wan and your lovely eyes are shadowed.’

‘I was very fond of my husband.’

‘Of course. You have a warm heart and a tender soul.’

‘In some ways he was not very grown up. I think he needed me.’

‘Who would not need
you
?’

Noelle hesitated. ‘Would you care for a glass of sherry?’

‘If you will join me.’

‘Yes, I’ll join you. It may be the last sherry I shall see for some time.’ She filled the two glasses. ‘I admit that I have been left in a difficult position, Mr. Morley-Wingfield. All this will have to be sold. Everything.’

He seemed to smile. ‘You do not really suppose that I can agree to be addressed by so absurd a name?’ He raised his glass. ‘To the best possible future!’ he said very seriously.

‘You told me it was your name,’ said Noelle, not responding to his toast. ‘Actually, you volunteered the information. What, in fact,
is
your name?’

‘My name is John,’ he said, now undoubtedly smiling, but smiling at her.

‘Mut and Simon seem to know nothing about you.’ She was sitting on one of the leather-padded brass ends to the fender.

‘I can return the compliment. I know little about
them
. All I know is that I met you in their company. That matters very much. I hope to both of us. I greatly hope it.’

‘I think I should tell you,’ said Noelle, ‘that I saw you digging in your garden. I was with my husband.’

‘You are mistaken,’ he replied. ‘Never willingly have I held a spade in my hands since I left Harrow.’

‘Do you know how my husband’s illness began? His last illness?’

‘I must acknowledge ashamedly that I do not.’

‘We went for a walk in the wood with our children. My husband insisted on breaking through the next glade, while we left the children playing. He slashed himself quite badly, and he never really got over it. Some kind of blood poisoning, I suppose, but the doctors were baffled. In the end, he died of it.’

‘It is a sad moment to say such a thing, but I admit to being baffled also. I cannot follow the story. I think there is an element of fantasy somewhere, my sweet Noelle. It is because you are so upset by everything that’s happened.’

She thought it was the first time he had addressed her by her name. Indeed, she knew very well that it was.

‘That is just what Mut said to me on the telephone. But it’s not true. It was when we were in the next glade that we saw you digging. We saw you quite clearly.’

‘So your husband saw me too?’

‘No,’ said Noelle, after a second. ‘I don’t really think he did. He was preoccupied. But I know perfectly well that
I
did.’

‘How was I dressed?’ asked the man. ‘Seeing that I was digging. How then was I got up?’ His tone was perfectly friendly, perhaps quizzical, though he was gazing straight at her.

‘You had taken off your jacket.’

‘My dear girl! Whatever next? Was I digging in my braces?’

‘As a matter of fact, you were.’

The man looked away from her and down at the
Eskimo-style
carpet. He had drained his glass, as, for the matter of that, had Noelle.

‘It all seems rather unlikely,’ said the man, though only in a tone of mild remonstrance.

‘The sincerity of your belief,’ he added, ‘makes you look more charming and delightful than ever. What suggestions had our mutual friend, Mut, to offer? Another delightful woman, by the way, though a daisy in a spring field, where you are the lovely lily of the world, body and soul and spirit.’

He had ceased to fondle the boomerang and was letting it lie beside him on the leathery cushion. Noelle crossed to the sofa and picked it up. She continued holding on to it.

‘Would you like another glass of sherry?’

‘If
you
would.’

She filled the two glasses and went back to the fender seat.

‘Previously,’ she said, ‘I had no idea at all that you actually lived in the neighbourhood. You should have told me.’

‘But I don’t!’ he cried. ‘I merely came to know it from the time I was at Sandhurst. What days those were! The laughing and the grieving!’ Then he raised his glass. ‘I propose another toast. To a bright future erupting from the troubled past!’

Again Noelle did not respond.

‘We must expect that it will take a little time,’ said the man, soberly. ‘It will be the crown of my life to see the task accomplished.’

Noelle almost emptied her glass at a swig.

‘You push through into the next glade,’ she said. ‘You go straight across it, and beyond the trees and bushes on the far side is a half-timbered house with lots of big windows, and you live there.’

‘Half-timbered houses do not usually have big windows, or they should not have them. I would not live in such a house.’

Noelle was twisting the boomerang round and round. There was nothing left of her second glass of sherry.

‘I saw you,’ she said.

Then she threw the boomerang down. Against the Eskimo carpet it looked like every modern painting.

‘What does it matter,’ cried Noelle, half to herself, hardly at all to the man.

All the same, it did matter: the house was only ten to fifteen minutes away, even when one was walking at the pace of one’s children, and then struggling through the bushes and undergrowth in a quite sedate manner.

‘I came in the hope of helping with any difficulties there might be,’ said the man, ‘and plainly this is the first of them. The distance is very short. I suggest we go and look for this house. We both know the way quite well. Besides, the fresh air will do you good.’

‘I think it is going to rain again,’ said Noelle.

‘We shall be back before it falls.’

*

The moist surface mud on the woodland path could not but remind Noelle of the funeral. She had been surprised that Melvin had not stipulated for cremation, but the Will had proved to be immaterial at almost all points.

At the funeral it had drizzled persistently, but now it was merely a matter of a penetrating moisture in the air. Noelle was wearing her stylish mackintosh, but the man was
seemingly
unprotected. Noelle feared that his trousers would lose their crease, even that the entire fine fabric of his suit might lose texture and buoyancy. Already his shoes were streaked and smeared. Noelle was wearing boots.

‘Are you sure you want to go through with this?’ she asked him.

‘I mean to drive out some of the megrims,’ he said.

They descended the slope to the clearing. The recurrent raininess had left nothing but a mush. One could no longer distinguish plastic bag from squashed balloon, cigarette pack from snapcorn box. Natural forces were mounting a
liquidation
of their own.

‘Ane now for the next glade!’ admonished the man jovially.

‘We can’t possibly,’ cried Noelle. ‘The bushes are soaking. You’ll utterly wreck your suit. I hadn’t realised.’

‘She made no reference to his hat, which was even more inappropriate.

‘I haven’t been noticing the weather very much lately,’ said Noelle.

‘We’ll be through in an instant,’ said the man. ‘If you’ve done it already, you’ll know that.’

‘She surmised that Melvin’s fate could not but be in his mind, though of course he would never speak of it, perhaps never again.

‘It’s just your suit,’ said Noelle. ‘I know it’s not very
difficult
.’ She must not permit him the slightest doubt that she had at least once been through, had seen his house. ‘You really need to dress up for a thing of this kind in weather like this.’ Melvin had always overdone it, as he overdid so many things, but of course he had been basically right. She had always seen that.

‘I’ll take off my hat,’ said the man, ‘and then you’ll feel better.’

And, under his lead, they were through in no time. On the other side, Noelle had to admit that she could detect no particular damage to his clothes, apart from his shoes; and that even her own elegantly flowing mackintosh seemed unscathed.

The man had been laughing for a moment, but now the two of them stood silently in the next glade. The tree
structures
, the pendant greens and browns, seemed to Noelle more mysteriously architectural than ever. They too brought back the funeral to her, but she realised that many things would do that for some time to come, possibly for the rest of her life, which in any case might not be a long one, as Melvin’s had proved not to be.

‘It has an atmosphere,’ said Noelle, in the end. ‘I admit that.’

‘Yes,’ said the man. ‘But you are almost the only being who would feel it. You are a wonderful person.’

All the time there was a faint tinking and tapping which Noelle had certainly not been aware of on the previous occasion. She realised that in the then circumstances she might well not have noticed it. She said nothing about it. It reminded her of a visit she had paid with a German business party to
Das
Rheingold
in English at the Coliseum. She had not understood a word or appreciated a note of it, though at the end the Germans had been very courteous and affable about it.

‘They all kissed my hand,’ said Noelle out loud. ‘Every single one of them.’

The man looked at her.

‘I
am
so sorry,’ said Noelle. ‘I was uttering my thoughts. I must be very tired.’

‘Of course you are tired, dear, sweet Noelle,’ said the man.

‘You hardly know whether you are on your charming head or your pretty feet.’ He looked at Noelle’s boots. ‘But we shall change all that. Slowly but surely.’

It would have been uncouth of Noelle not to smile, though noncommittally.

‘The house you mentioned stands at the other side of the glade?’ enquired the man, not too obviously humouring her. He had resumed his hat.