The Unsettled Dust (21 page)

It will be noticed that I am being discreet with names. I think it is best because the man himself was so discreet in that way, as will be apparent later. Moreover, at no time did I become a close friend of the pair. One thing, however, must have had importance.

The Battersea flat (not quite overlooking the Park) did
exhibit
some of the man’s paintings. I might compare them, though a little distantly, with the once controversial last works of the late Charles Sims: apparently confused on the surface, even demented, they made one doubt while one continued to gaze, as upon Sims’s pictures, whether the painter had not in truth broken through to a deep and terrible order. Titles of the Sims species, ‘Behold I Am Graven on the Palm of Thy Hand’ or ‘Am I Not The Light in the Abyss?’, would have served with this man’s pictures also. In fact, with him there was no question of titles, not, I thought, only out of
compliance
with the contemporary attitude, but more because the man did not appear to see his works as separate and possibly saleable objects d’art. ‘I found that I couldn’t paint what people might want to buy,’ he said, smiling beneath his weak nose. His wife, seated on a hard chair and again oddly dressed, said nothing. As a matter of fact, I could imagine quite well these strange pictures being ingathered for a time by fashion’s flapping feelers, though, obviously for entirely wrong reasons. I remarked to the two of them that the pictures were among the most powerful and exciting I had ever seen, and what I said was sincere, despite a certain non-
professionalism
in the execution. I am not sure that I should have cared to live surrounded by such pictures, as they did, but that is another matter. Perhaps I exaggerate the number: there were, I think, three of these mystical works in the living room, all quite large; four in the matrimonial bedroom, into which I was conducted to look at them; and one each in the small bedroom for visitors and in the bathroom. They were framed very casually, because the painter did not take them seriously enough; and mingled them on his walls with framed proofs from the art books, all perpetrated at the fullest stretch of modern reproductive processes.

I went there several times to dinner, perhaps six or seven times in all; and I reciprocated by entertaining the two of them at the Royal Automobile Club, which at that time I found convenient for such purposes, as I was living alone in
Richmond
. The Battersea dinners were very much of a pattern: my host did most of the talking; his wife, in her odd clothes, seemed to say less and less; the food, cooked by her, was perfectly good though a trifle earnest; I was treated very
consciously
as a guest. From this last, and from other things, I deduced that guests were infrequent. Perhaps the trouble was that the establishment lacked magic. The painter of those pictures should, one felt, have had something to say, but everything he brought out, much though there was of it, was faintly disappointing. He seemed eager to welcome me and reluctant to let me go, but entirely unable to make a hole in the wall that presumably enclosed him, however long he punched. Nor, as will be gathered, can his wife be said to have been much help. Or, at least, as far as one could see. Human relationships are so fantastically oblique that one can never be sure.

Anyway I fear that the acquaintanceship slowly died, or almost died. The near-death was slow because I made it so. I felt, almost at the beginning, that anything quicker would have meant a painfulness, conceivably even a dispute.
Knowing
what I was doing (within the inevitable – exceedingly narrow – limits), I fear that I very slowly strangled the
connection
. I was sad about it in a general sort of way, but neither the man nor his wife had truly touched anything about me or within me, and associations that are not alive are best amputated as skilfully as possible before the rot infects too much of one’s total tissue and unnecessarily lowers the tone of life. If one goes to parties or meets many new people in any other way, one has to take protective action quite frequently, however much one hates oneself in the process; just as human beings are compelled to massacre animals unceasingly, because human beings are simply unable to survive, for the most part, on apples and nuts.

Total death of the connection, however, it never was. The next thing that happened was a letter from a firm of solicitors. It arrived more than four years after I had last seen the
Battersea
couple, as I discovered from looking through my old engagement books after I had read it; and two years, I believed, after the last Christmas Card had passed between us. I had moved during that latter period from Richmond to Highgate. The letter told me that my Battersea acquaintance had died (‘after a long illness,’ the solicitors added) and that he had appointed me joint executor of his Will. The other executor was his wife. Needless to say, it was the first I had heard of it. There was a legacy which the testator ‘hoped I would accept’: the amount was
£
100, which, I regret to say, struck me at once as having been arrived at during an earlier period of Britain’s financial history. Finally, the letter requested me to communicate as soon as possible with the writers or directly with their client’s wife.

I groaned a little, but when I had reached the office where I worked before my marriage, I composed a letter of sympathy and in a postscript suggested, as tactfully as I could, that an evening be named for a first meeting of the executors. The reply came instantly. In the smallest number of words possible, it thanked me for my sympathy and proposed the evening of the next day. I put off an engagement to meet my fiancée and drove once more to Battersea.

I noticed that my co-executor had abandoned the unusual style of costume she had previously favoured, and wore an unremarkable, even commonplace, dress from a multiple store. Perhaps it was her response to the inner drive that until recently swept the bereaved into black. In no other respect could I observe a change in her.

She did not seem broken, or even ruffled, with grief, and she had little more to say than before. I did try to discover the cause of death, but could get no clear answer, and took for granted that it had been one of the usual bitter maladies. I was told that there was no need for me to put myself to trouble. She would do all there was to be done, and I could just come in at the end.

I did remark that as an executor I should have to see a copy of the Will. She at once handed the original to me in silence: it had been lying about the room. It was simple enough. The body was to be cremated, and the entire estate was left to the testator’s wife, except for my
£
100, and except for the fact that all the testator’s pictures were to be offered to the National Gallery of British Art; if refused, to a long list of other public galleries, ten or twelve of them; and if still refused, to be burnt. I saw at once why I had been brought into the
settlement 
of the estate. I had been apprehensive ever since I had heard from the solicitors. Now I was terrified.

‘Don’t worry,’ said my co-executor, smiling faintly. ‘I dealt with that part myself while he was still alive. None of the places would touch the pictures with a bargepole.’

‘But,’ I said, ‘as an executor I can’t just leave it at that.’

‘See their letters.’ She produced a heap of paper and passed it over to me. ‘Sit down and read them.’

She herself drew back her normal hard chair, and sat half watching me, half not; but without taking up any other
occupation
.

I thought that I might as well settle the matter, if it really were possible, there and then. I checked the letters against the list in the will. Every named gallery was accounted for. All the letters were negative; some not. The correspondence covered rather more than the previous twelve months. Many public servants are slow to make up their minds and slower to commit themselves.

‘Did he know?’ I asked.

That was another question to which I failed to get a clear answer, because she merely smiled, and even that only slightly. It seemed difficult to persist.

‘Don’t worry,’ she said again. ‘I’ll look after the bonfire.’

‘But don’t
you
want to keep the pictures?’ I cried. ‘Perhaps you’ve lived with them so long that they’ve become overfamiliar, but they really are rather remarkable.’

‘Surely as executors we have to obey the Will?’

‘I am certain you can keep the pictures, as far as the law is concerned.’

‘Would
you
like to take them? Bearing in mind,’ she added, ‘that there’s about a hundred more of them stored in
Kingston
.’

‘I simply haven’t room, much though I regret it.’

‘Nor, in the future, shall I.’

‘I’d like to take
one
of them, if I may.’

‘As many as you wish. Would you like the manuscripts also? They’re all in that suitcase.’ It was a battered green object, standing against the wall. I think it was largely her rather unpleasant indifference that made me accept. It was quite apparent what would happen to the manuscripts if I did not take them, and one did not like to think of a man’s life disappearing in a few flames, as his body.

‘When’s the funeral?’ I asked.

‘Tomorrow, but it will be quite private.’

I wondered where the body
was
. In the matrimonial bedroom? In the small room for guests? In some mortuary?

‘We neither of us believed in God.’ In my experience of her, it was the first time she had taken the initiative in making such a general pronouncement, negative though it had proved to be.

I looked at the pictures, including the one I had mentally selected for myself. She said nothing more. Of course, the pictures had been painted a number of years earlier: perhaps before the painter had first met her.

She offered me neither a cup of coffee nor a helping hand with the picture and the heavy suitcase down the many flights of stairs in a Battersea block of flats. Driving home, it occurred to me that for the amount of work involved, my executor’s legacy was not so inadequate after all.

The picture has travelled round with me ever since. It is now in the room next to the one which used to be the nursery. I often go in and look at it for perhaps five or six minutes when the light is good.

The suitcase contained the tumbled manuscripts of the art books, apparently composed straight on to the machine. They were heavily gashed with corrections in different coloured inks, but this did not matter to me, because it had never been in my mind to read them. All the same, I have never thrown them away. They are in the attic now, still in the green
suitcase
, with labels stuck on it from Mussolini’s Italy. To that small extent, my poor acquaintance lives still. He must
presumably
have felt that I, more than most, had something in common with him, or he would not have made me his executor.

But the suitcase contained something else: a shorter, more personal narrative, typed out on large sheets of undulating foreign paper, and rolled up within a thick rubber band, now rotten. It is to introduce this narrative, so strange and so intimate, to explain how it came my way and how it comes to be published, that I have written the foregoing. The sheer oddity of life seems to me of more and more importance, because more and more the pretence is that life is charted, predictable, and controllable. And for ‘oddity’, of course, one could well write ‘mystery’.

Under the will, a publication fee belongs to the widow, who plainly holds the copyright. I give notice that she has but to apply. Remembering that last evening, on the day before the funeral, I am not sure that she will. But we shall see. The rest I leave to the words of my poor acquaintance.

*

Yesterday I returned from three weeks in Belgium. While there, I had an experience which made a great impression on me. I think it may even have changed my entire way of looking at things; troubled my soul, as people say. Anyway, I feel that I am unlikely ever to forget it. On the other hand, I have learned that what one remembers is always far from what took place. So I am taking this first opportunity of
writing
down as many of the details as I can remember and as seem important. Only six days have passed since it happened, but I am aware that already there are certain to be gaps bridged by imagination, and unconscious distortions in the interests of consistency and effect. It is possibly unfortunate that I could not make this record while I was still in Brussels, but I found it impossible. I lacked the time, or, more probably, the application, as people always say of me. I also felt that I was under a spell. I felt that something terrible and alarming might happen as I sat by myself in my bedroom writing it all down. The English Channel proves to have loosened this spell considerably, though I can still feel all those textures on my hands and face, still see those queer creatures, and still hear Madame A.’s croaking voice. I find that, when I think about it, I am frightened still, but attracted overwhelmingly also, as at the time. This, I believe, is what is properly meant by the word fascination.

As others may read this, even if only in the distant future, I set forth a few basic facts. I am a painter, and 26
years old: the age when Bonnington died. I have about
£
300 a year of my own, so can paint what interests me; at least I can while I remain on my own. Until now I have been quite happy on my own, though this fact seems to upset almost everyone I know. So far I have had very little to do with women, mainly because I cannot see that I have anything to offer that is likely to appeal to them, and because I detest the competitive aspect of the relations between the sexes. I should hate it for a woman to pity me, and, on the other hand, I should hate to be involved with a woman whom I had to pity; a woman, in fact, who was not attractive enough to be in the full sex war, and who might therefore, be available for such as me. I should not care to be involved with a woman who was anything less than very beautiful. Perhaps that is the artist in me. I do not really know. I feel that I should want only the kind of woman who could not conceivably want me. I cannot say that the whole problem does not trouble me, but, by the standard of what I have read and heard, I am surprised that it does not trouble me more.