The Unsettled Dust (2 page)

After (in my view) insufficient discussion, the Bovil project was agreed to and the hottest and most thrusting of the hotheads put in charge of the actual works, a man named Hand. I myself didn’t think he was altogether an Englishman, but it was obvious that he was very young for the degree of responsibility in which he had involved himself, so I was asked to look after him during the first stages of the work, as I was twenty or more years older and had gained experience from a wide variety of different jobs. Hamish Hay thorn, the National Secretary of the Fund, wrote to Miss Agnes
Brakespear,
reputedly the more businesslike sister, to ask if I could stay at Clamber Court while I was launching the scheme. The Fund expects people whose properties have been accepted to help in this way, as the need may arise; though sometimes Fund employees find themselves offered only an attic and very simple fare. This had by then happened to me several times, and I was quite prepared for it at Clamber Court. (Nowadays, of course, in my case it hardly ever happens, because I have learned to enter into the different foibles of the Fund’s tenants.) I remember that Miss Brakespear took a long time to answer at all, and all the while the Bovil scheme was held up; but we heard from her in the end, and off I went that very afternoon. I arrived in good time for dinner, though that, as I have just said, might not have meant very much.

There was a long tradition that the great gates on the main road were opened only for family weddings, family funerals, and visits of the Sovereign, and the smaller gate further up the same road had been padlocked by the Fund’s Regional Representative, because it had proved impossible to find a tenant for the adjoining lodge, owing to the noise of the traffic; so that I wound my way in my Mini through the lanes leading to the eastern entry, as I had done two years before. It had perhaps been not quite as much as that, because now it was earlier in the spring, with not yet a leaf on any of the big, old trees: in fact, not yet officially spring at all. This time, the man at the gate was wearing a hat, which he touched when opening for me.

My spirits rose as I saw that the long, winding drive was as spruce as before. All the hedges within view had been properly laid and many of the farm gates had been renewed. The hero huntsman when at length I reached him, was enshrined among complex traceries of water, and the doomed quarry adrip with it. The house, I thought, as I completed the finishing stretch up to the wide parterre of rectangular stones before the double staircase, looked immaculate but
unfunctional
, like a vast Staffordshire model. When I stopped my engine and stepped out, the complete silence contributed to the illusion. I stood for a moment looking down the slow descent to the great gates, and watching big, black rooks wheel like sheets of burnt newspaper between the bare trees, the only life there was.

‘Hullo,’ said a casual voice from above. ‘Come in.’

Standing with her hands on the balustrade at the top of the two flights of steps was a woman; plainly one of my two hostesses, though I had never then knowingly seen either. I wavered, as one does, between ascending the right-hand steps or the left, but she said nothing and just watched me.

‘I’m Olive Brakespear,’ she said as I arrived, and held out her hand. I should have expected the hand to be cold, as it was one of those fine March days, which often seem the chilliest of the year. But it was not. ‘You’re my landlord.’ In my experience, the tenants always either said something like that or, alternatively, did everything to pretend that the relationship was the other way round.

Miss Brakespear, however, was an unusual figure. She was well above average height for a woman (and six or eight inches above mine), and remarkably slender and well-shaped, though tough and wiry looking. The last impression was reinforced by the fact that she was wearing worn brown riding breeches, worn brown riding boots, and a dark-blue shirt, open at the neck and with the sleeves rolled up. Her face, neck and forearms were all tanned and brown, even though it was the end of the winter. Her face was striking because she had strong, prominent bones, large, melancholy eyes, and a big, rectangular mouth, but some might have said that her head was too long, her cheeks too sunken. She had straight reddish-brown hair, starting rather far back on the brow. It was glossy and well-kept, like the mane of a
race-horse
, but worn shoulder-length and curled outwards at the ends, after the fashion which prevailed during the Second World War. It was very difficult to guess how old she was. Her physical style was one which is eminently durable.

‘I was watching the rooks,’ she said. ‘Sometimes when the trees are bare and the light beginning to go, I do it for an hour at a time.’ Looking at her in her blue shirt, I am sure I must have shivered. ‘Come on in, or you’ll get cold,’ said Miss Brakespear.

The big, oblong, pillared hall contained only formal
furniture
, though I was pleased to observe a heap of the Fund’s official, blue-covered, guidebook [?] to the house. The wide door had lain open while Miss Brakespear stood outside, so that the cavernous room was cold and echoey, especially as there was no fire. It was also dim, as evening was descending, and Miss Brakespear had not turned on the light.

She went before me up the dark main staircase, taking two steps at a time with her swinging stride. Impeded by my bundle, I followed her much less gracefully.

We turned leftwards along a high, wide passage which traversed the first floor of the house, with big white doors opening into silent rooms on either side. I had not previously been upstairs, because the rooms open to the public were all below. Miss Brakespear’s step in her riding boots was sharp and swift, whereas I am sure that I merely shuffled. At the eastern end of the passage, Miss Brakespear opened the door of my room. At least I had not been relegated to one of those designed for occupation by the servants.

It was a big, square, dark red room, with a heavy dado, two windows looking down the long avenue, a modern double bed, and a general look of having been furnished by a good contractor in, perhaps, 1910.

‘Turn on the light, if you like,’ said Miss Brakespear; ‘unless you prefer the dusk, as I do. There’s a bathroom opposite. It’s all for you, because nowadays there’s never anyone else on this side of the house. My sister and I sleep at the other end. Elizabeth Craw, our housekeeper, sleeps upstairs, and the two girls in the village. You’ll find the whole house quiet for your work until the open season begins at Easter. Come down for a drink when you’re ready. In the music room to the left of the hall.’

She strode away down the dark passage, leaving my
bedroom
door open. She had a rich and liquid voice, really rather beautiful; and a casual inflection which one felt never varied, no matter what she was saying or to whom. I noticed that she had not mentioned her mother, who was supposed to live somewhere in the house also.

I shut the door and stood in the middle of the room waiting. I might well have been waiting for the twilight to become more like darkness, so that, even by Miss Brakespear’s standard, I could turn on the light with a good conscience. Then I realised how absurd this was, and pressed the switch. The result was disappointing. The only light in the room came from three rather faint bulbs attached to a brass frame which the 1910 contractor had suspended from the plaster rose in the centre of the coffered ceiling. They would effectively illumine neither a reader in bed nor a maker-up or report-writer at the heavy dressing table. I felt that from the park my room must look little more luminous than in the year the house was built.

I unpacked a few things and stowed them away. I set my book hopefully by the side of the bed (Christopher Hussey’s
The
Picturesque,
I see in my Diary that it was). I cased the room for heat of any kind. There was none. I wondered if I should change into something darker, but decided that I could decide while taking my drink, as it was still early enough to change after it, if that seemed appropriate. I crossed the
passage
to the bathroom.

Here the electric light seemed a little stronger. I looked at my hands as one does after a journey, to see how
travel-stained
they are. They were filthy. I was astonished, and as I turned the tap of the washbasin (of course, there was nothing like that in my bedroom), I worried about having shaken hands with Miss Brakespear. Then I realised that the grime had spread from darker patches at the tips of my fingers, and that I had probably picked it up in my bedroom. And only then did I remember about the dust I had noticed on my previous visit to the house. The matter had not lately been in my mind. I remembered also about the memo on the subject which I had sent to old Blantyre, the impoverished country gentleman who acted as the Fund’s Regional Representative in that area. Thinking about it now, I was almost sure that Blantyre had never even sent an acknowledgement; so that, almost certainly, he had taken no action whatever. I let the water run and run, but it never ran hot.

I remembered the beautiful music room quite well. As I stood in the dark hall outside the thick, closed door, I could just hear the sound of a piano within. Real music in the music room of a British mansion is today so rare that at first I took it for granted that the wireless had been turned on, but when I opened the door and entered, I saw that Miss Brakespear was herself playing. She did not stop when I walked in, but merely indicated with a movement of her head that I should sit down. The gesture seemed quite friendly but she did not smile. I suspected that Miss Brakespear smiled seldom. In here a big log fire burnt: the supply of logs, rough and knotty, being piled high in a vast, circular bin of chased brass, itself gleaming like a yellow furnace. I know nothing about music but it seemed to me that Miss Brakespear played the piano much as she talked; beautifully, but with a casualness that was not so much indifference as the reflection of melancholy and resignation. There was no music before her, and no light by which she could have read it: quite possibly she was
improvising
, though she seemed to my ignorance to be doing it with depth and fluency. I daresay this was nonsense on my part, but as she played on and on, I found that I was pleased to warm myself right through at rather long last, and to listen to her and watch her dim shape by the light of the fire. I could see that she was still wearing her riding clothes, with the tips of her boots on the pedals.

I am not sure how much time passed in this way; but certainly it was quite dark outside the uncurtained windows, when the door opened and a third person stood there. It was another woman. I could not see her at all clearly, but I could see the shape of her dress and the outline of her hair. She stood for a while with the door still open behind her. Miss Brakespear went on playing, as if in a trance with herself. Then the newcomer shut the door and turned on the light: more effective lighting than in the rooms above. At once, Miss Brakespear broke off.

‘Dreaming?’ asked the newcomer; none too agreeably, I thought.

Miss Brakespear made no direct reply. ‘Agnes,’ she said, ‘this is Mr. Oxenhope, at once our landlord and our guest. Mr. Oxenhope, let me introduce my sister, Agnes.’

The other Miss Brakespear (hereafter I must call them Olive and Agnes, though I do not find it comes very naturally) seemed little interested. ‘How do you do?’ she said in an offhand way from the door.

‘How do you do?’ I replied.

Now that the lights were on, I glanced about for dust.

‘You really are a fool,’ said Agnes to her sister, and walked over to the fire. One could have said she spoke in affectionate derision, as is the way within a family (the alternative
commonly
being silence); but I might rather have called it habitual derision, accepted derision.

Olive closed the piano and got up. At that exact distance from me, and by fairly strong artificial light, her neck, inside the open collar of her dark shirt, looked more withered and less shapely than I had thought. ‘How did the meeting go?’ she asked quietly.

‘Exactly as expected,’ replied Agnes, standing before the blaze, her feet slightly apart, her hands behind her back. She was of an entirely different physical type from her sister: a squarish, fattish woman at about my height, with a thickening face and neck, dark eyes and abundant dark hair in a style more fashionable than her sister’s. She wore a plain dress in thick, purple wool, and black, high-heeled shoes. She might have been described by an enemy as too heavily made up, but that is a difficult problem for a woman of her build and period of life: even though I should not have cared to assess her exact age within a range of perhaps twenty years. As will be gathered, she seemed very much more the customary Englishwoman than her sister; and she had something of the frustration and suppressed, long-lost feeling that goes with the customary Englishwoman, however banal the customary manifestation of it. When one spends one’s time going round the different properties of the Historic Structures Fund, one grows to learn the essential characteristics of the customary Englishwoman.

Olive had unlocked an ebony and ivory cabinet and was getting us drinks. There was no further reference to the
meeting
that had been mentioned. Indeed, there was silence. I knew that it was for me to help things along, but I could think of nothing to say. Agnes saved me the trouble.

‘What are you feeling for?’ she asked.

It seemed appallingly observant of her.

‘I thought I’d dropped my handkerchief,’ I improvised, perhaps more readily than convincingly.

‘Mr. Oxenhope’s visit has nothing to do with the house,’ said Olive conciliatingly. It was excellently intended, no doubt, but the form of words suggested that she too had cottoned on. Because I had, of course, been feeling (as Agnes had put it) for dust. And, what was more, I had been doing it without being aware of it. Needless to say, it was very discourteous of me, socially speaking.

‘And his gropings have nothing to do with his
handkerchief,’
said Agnes drily. ‘With
either
of his handkerchiefs: the one in his sleeve or the pretty one in his breast pocket. Do you carry three handkerchiefs, Mr. Oxenhope?’