The Unsettled Dust (28 page)

‘Rufo’s in there already,’ said the child conversationally. ‘You see you’re the last.’

‘I’ve said I’m sorry.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’ This was uttered with that special
magnanimity
only found in the very young.

The little girl waded on, and Clarinda struggled after her. There was no sign of anyone else: indeed the place looked a hilltop of the dead. The lumpy saturated grass and the rank and stunted vegetation compared most unfavourably with the handsome trees behind.

There was one place where the briars and ragged bushes were particularly dense and abundant, constituting a small prickly copse. Round the outskirts of this copse, the child led the way until Clarinda saw that embedded in its perimeter was a rickety shed. Possibly constructed for some agricultural purpose but long abandoned by its maker, it dropped and sagged into the ground. From it came a penetrating and repugnant odour, like all the bad smells of nature and the stockyard merged together.

‘That’s it,’ said the little girl pointing. They were still some yards off, but the feral odour from the shed was already making Clarinda feel sick.

‘I don’t think I want to go in there.’

‘But you
must
. Rufo’s in there. All the others changed long ago.’

Apart from other considerations, the shed seemed too small to house many; and Clarinda could now see that the approach to it was thick with mud, which added its smell to the rest. She was sure that the floor of the shed was muddy almost to the knees.

The child’s face was puckered with puzzlement.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Clarinda, ‘but you know I don’t want to change at all.’

Clearly she was behaving in quite the wrong way. But the child took a grip on the situation and said, ‘Wait here. I’ll go and ask.’

‘All right,’ said Clarinda. ‘But I’ll wait over there, if you don’t mind.’ The child seemed not to notice the awful smell, but Clarinda was not going to be the first to mention it.

‘
There
,’ said the child, pointing to an exact spot. Clarinda took up her stance upon it. ‘Mind you don’t move.’

‘Not if you hurry.’ The smell was still very detectable.

‘Quite still,’ insisted the child.

‘Quite still,’ said Clarinda.

Swiftly the child ran three times round Clarinda in a large circle. The light was so clear that Clarinda could see the drops of water flying up from her feet.

‘Hurry,
’
urged Clarinda; and, the third circle complete, the child darted away round the edge of the copse in the direction from which they had come.

Left alone in the still moonlight, Clarinda wondered whether this were not her great chance to return home to safety and certainty. Then she saw a figure emerging from the dilapidated hut.

The figure walked upright, but otherwise appeared to be a large furry animal, such as a bear or ape. From its distinctive staggering uncertainty of gait, Clarinda would have
recognised
Rufo, even without the statements of the little girl. Moreover, he was still leaning upon his long crook, which stuck in the mud and had to be dragged out at every step. He too was going back round the edge of the copse, the same way as the child. Although he showed no sign of intending to molest Clarinda, she found him a horrifying sight, and decided upon retreat. Then she became really frightened; because she found she could not move.

The hairy slouching figure drew slowly nearer, and with him came an intensification of the dreadful smell, sweet and putrid and commingled. The animal skin was thick and
wrinkled
about his neck and almost covered his face, but Clarinda saw his huge nose and expressionless eyes. Then he was past, and the child had reappeared.

‘I ran all the way.’ Indeed it seemed as if she had been gone only an instant. You’re not to bother about changing because it’s too late anyway.’ Clearly she was repeating words spoken by an adult. ‘You’re to come at once, although of course you’ll have to be hidden. But if s all right,’ she added reassuringly. ‘There’ve been people before who’ve had to be hidden.’ She spoke as if the period covered by her words were at least a generation. ‘But you’d better be quick.’

Clarinda found that she could move once more. Rufo, moreover, had disappeared from sight.

‘Where do I hide?’

‘I’ll show you. I’ve often done it.’ Again she was showing off slightly. ‘Bind your hair.’

‘What?’

‘Bind your hair. Do be quick.’ The little girl was peremptory but not unsympathetic. She was like a mother addressing an unusually slow child she was none the less rather fond of. ‘Haven’t you got that thing you had before?’

‘It was raining then.’ But Clarinda in fact had replaced the black scarf in her mackintosh pocket after drying it before the Carstairs’ kitchen fire. Now, without knowing why, she drew it out.

‘Go
on
.’ Clarinda’s sluggishness was making the child frantic.

But Clarinda refused to be rattled. With careful grace she went through the moonlit ritual of twisting the scarf round her head and enveloping her abundant soft hair.

The child led her back half-way round the copse to where there was a tiny path between the bushes. This path also was exceedingly muddy; ploughed up, as Clarinda could plainly see, by innumerable hoofmarks.

‘I’d better go first,’ said the little girl; adding with her
customary
good manners, ‘I’m afraid it’s rather spiky.’

It was indeed. The little girl, being little, appeared to advance unscathed; but Clarinda, being tall, found that her clothes were torn to pieces, and her face and hands lacerated. The radiance of the moon had sufficed outside, but in here failed to give warning of the thick tangled briars and rank whipcord suckers. Everywhere was a vapour of ancient
cobwebs
, clinging and greasy, amid which strange night insects flapped and flopped.

‘We’re nearly there,’ said the little girl. ‘You’d better be rather quiet.’

It was impossible to be quiet, and Clarinda was almost in tears with discomfort.

‘Quieter,’
said the little girl; and Clarinda did not dare to answer back.

The slender muddy trail, matted with half-unearthed roots, wriggled on for another minute or two; and then the little girl whispered, ‘Under here.’

She was making a gap in the foliage of a tall round bush. Clarinda pushed in. ‘Ssh,’ said the little girl.

Inside it was like a small native hut. The foliage hung all round, but there was room to stand up and dry ground beneath the feet.

‘Stand on this,’ whispered the little girl, pointing to a round, sawn section of tree, about two feet high and four in diameter. ‘I call it my fairy dinner table.’

‘What about you?’

‘I’m all right, thank you. I’m always here.’

Clarinda climbed on to the section of tree, and made a cautious aperture in the boscage before her.

The sight beyond was one which she would not easily forget.

Clearly, to begin with, this was the maze, although Clarinda had never seen or heard of such a maze before. It filled a clearing in the copse about twenty or thirty yards wide and consisted of a labyrinth of little ridges, all about nine inches high. The general pattern of the labyrinth was circular, with involved inner convolutions everywhere, and at some points flourishes curving beyond the main outer boundary, as if they had once erupted like boils or volcanic blow-holes. In the valleys between the ridges, grass grew, but the ridges
themselves
were trodden bare. At the centre of the maze was a hewn block of stone, which put Clarinda in mind of the Stone of Scone.

Little of this, however, had much immediate significance for Clarinda; because all over the maze, under the moon, writhed and slithered and sprawled the smooth white bodies of men and women. There were scores of them; all apparently well-shaped and comely; all (perhaps for that reason) weirdly impersonal; all recumbent and reptilian, as in a picture Clarinda remembered having seen; all completely and
impossibly
silent beneath the silent night. Clarinda saw that all round the maze were heaps of furry skins. She then noticed that the heads of all the women were bound in black fillets.

At the point where the coils of the maze surged out beyond the main perimeter were other, different figures. Still wrapped in furs, which distorted and made horrible the outlines of their bodies, they clung together as if locked in death. Down to the maze the ground fell away a few feet from Clarinda’s hiding place. Immediately below her was one of these groups, silent as all the rest. By one of the shapeless figures she noticed a long thick staff. Then the figure soundlessly shifted, and the white moonlight fell upon the face of the equally shapeless figure in its arms. The eyes were blank and staring, the nostrils stretched like a running deer, and the red lips not so much parted as drawn back to the gums: but Clarinda recognised the face of Mrs. Pagani.

Suddenly there was a rustling in the hiding-place. Though soft, it was the first sound of any kind since Clarinda had looked out on the maze.

‘Go away, you silly little boy,’ muttered the little girl.

Clarinda looked over her shoulder.

Inside the bower, the moonlight, filtered through the veil of foliage, was dim and deceitful; but she could see the big eyes and bird-of-prey mien of the other child. He was still wearing his bright blue hooded garment; but now the idea occurred to Clarinda that he might not be a child at all, but a well-proportioned dwarf. She looked at the black ground before stepping down from the tree trunk; and instantly he leapt at her. She felt a sharp, indefinite pain in her ankle and saw one of the creature’s hands yellow and clawlike where a moonbeam through the hole above fell on the pale wood of the cut tree. Then in the murk the little girl did something which Clarinda could not see at all, and the hand jerked into passivity. The little girl was crying.

Clarinda touched her torn ankle, and stretched her hand into the beam of light. There was duly a mess of blood.

The little girl clutched at Clarinda’s wrist. ‘Don’t let them see,’ she whispered beseechingly through her tears. ‘Oh please don’t let them see,’ Then she added with passionate fury, ‘He always spoils
everything
. I hate him. I hate him. I hate him.’

Clarinda’s ankle hurt badly, and there was palpable danger of blood poisoning, but otherwise the injury was not severe.

‘Shall I be all right if I go?’

‘Yes. But I think you’d better run.’

‘That may not be so easy.’

The little girl seemed desolated with grief.

‘Never mind,’ said Clarinda. ‘And thank you.’

The little girl stopped sobbing for a moment. ‘You
will
come back?’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Clarinda.

The sobbing recommenced. It was very quiet and despairing.

‘Well,’ said Clarinda, ‘I’ll see.’

‘Punctually? That makes all the difference, you know.’

‘Of course,’ said Clarinda.

The child smiled at her in the faint moonlight. She was being brave. She was remembering her manners.

‘Shall I come with you?’

‘No need,’ said Clarinda rather hastily.

‘I mean to the end of the little path.’

‘Still no need,’ said Clarinda. ‘Thank you again, though. Goodbye.

‘Goodbye,’ said the little girl. ‘Don’t forget. Punctual.’

Clarinda crept along the involved muddy path: then she sped across the soft wet sward, which she spotted with her blood; through the gate where she had seen Rufo and down the hill where she had seen the pigs; past the ill-spelled notice; and home. As she fumbled with the patent catch, the church clock which kept ward over Mrs. Pagani’s abode struck three. The mist was rising again everywhere; but, in what remained of the moonlight, Clarinda, before entering the house, unwound the black scarf from her head and shook her soft abundant locks.

The question of Mrs. Pagani’s unusual dwelling-place arose, of course, the next morning, as they hurriedly ate the
generously
over-large breakfast which Mrs. Carstairs, convinced that London meant starvation, pressed upon them.

‘Please not,’ said Clarinda, her mouth full of golden syrup. She was wearing ankle socks to conceal her careful bandage. ‘I just don’t want to go.’

The family looked at her; but only Dudley spoke. ‘Whatever you wish, darling.’

There was a pause; after which Mr. Carstairs remarked that he supposed the good lady would still be in bed anyway.

But here, most unusually, Mr. Carstairs was wrong. As Dudley and Clarinda drove away, they saw the back of Mrs. Pagani walking towards the church and not a couple of
hundred
yards from their own gate. She wore high stout boots, caked with country mud, and an enveloping fur coat against the sharpness of the morning. Her step was springy, and her thick black hair flew in the wind like a dusky gonfalon.

As they overtook her, Dudley slowed. ‘Good morning,’ he shouted. ‘Back to the grindstone.’

Mrs. Pagani smiled affectionately.

‘Don’t be late,’ she cried, and kissed her hand to them.

After Elizabeth ultimately died, it was inevitable that many people should come forward with counsel, and doubtless equally inevitable that the counsel be so totally diverse.

There were two broad and opposed schools.

The first considered that Stephen should ‘treasure the memory’ (though it was not always put like that) for an indefinite period, which, it was implied, might conveniently last him out to the end of his own life. These people attached great importance to Stephen ‘not rushing anything.’ The second school urged that Stephen marry again as soon as he possibly could. They said that, above all, he must not just fall into apathy and let his life slide. They said he was a man made for marriage and all it meant.

Of course, both parties were absolutely right in every way. Stephen could see that perfectly well.

It made little difference. Planning, he considered, would be absurd in any case. Until further notice, the matter would have to be left to fate. The trouble was, of course, that fate’s possible options were narrowing and dissolving almost weekly, as they had already been doing throughout
Elizabeth’s
lengthy illness. For example (the obvious and most pressing example): how many women would want to marry Stephen now? A number, perhaps; but not a number that he would want to marry. Not after Elizabeth. That in particular.