The Unsettled Dust (35 page)

‘I don’t feel so much like a swim, after all,’ said Mark Tremble. ‘I’ll dress too and then we’ll both have a drink. I feel we could both do with one.’

‘I’m very sorry about it,’ said Stephen. ‘I apologise.’

*

‘What have
you
been doing all day?’ asked Stephen, as soon as he was back and had changed out of the garments currently normal in the civil service, casual and characterless. ‘I hope you’ve been happy.’

‘I found this on the roof.’ Nell was holding it in both her hands; which were still very brown. It was a huge lump: mineral, vegetable, who could tell? Or conceivably a proportion of each.

‘Your father would be interested.’

Nell recoiled. ‘Don’t talk like that. It’s unlucky.’ Indeed, she had nearly dropped the dense mass.

It had been an idiotic response on Stephen’s part; mainly the consequence of his not knowing what else to say. He was aware that it was perfectly possible to attain the roof of the building by way of the iron fire ladder, to which, by law, access had to be open to tenants at all hours.

‘I could do with a drink,’ said Stephen, though he had been drinking virtually the whole afternoon, without Thread even noticing, or without sparing time to acknowledge that he had noticed. Moira, the coloured girl from the typing area, had simply winked her big left eye at Stephen. ‘I’ve had a difficult day.’

‘Oh!’ Nell’s cry was so sincere and eloquent that it was as if he had been mangled in a traffic accident.

‘
How
difficult?’ she asked.

‘It’s just that it’s been difficult for me to make the arrangements to get away, to leave the place.’

‘But we
are
going?’ He knew it was what she was thinking about.

‘Yes, we are going. I promised.’

He provided Nell with a token drink also. At first she had seemed to be completely new to liquor. Stephen had always found life black without it, but his need for it had become more habitual during Elizabeth’s illness. He trusted that Nell and he would, with use, wont, and time, evolve a mutual equilibrium.

At the moment, he recognised that he was all but tight, though he fancied that at such times he made little external manifestation. Certainly Nell would detect nothing; if only because presumably she lacked data. Until now, he had never really been in the sitting room of the flat since his return. Here, the new tendrils on the walls and ceiling struck him as resembling a Portuguese man-o’-war’s equipment; the
coloured
, insensate creature that can sting a swimmer to death at thirty feet distance, and had done so more than once when Elizabeth and he, being extravagant, had stayed at Cannes for a couple of weeks. It had been there that Elizabeth told him finally she could never have a child. Really that was what they were doing there, though he had not realised it. The man-o’-war business, the two victims, had seemed to have an absurd part in their little drama. No one in the hotel had talked of anything else.

‘Let’s go to bed
now
,’ said Stephen to Nell. ‘We can get up again later to eat.’

She put her right hand in his left hand.

Her acquiescence, quiet and beautiful, made him feel
compunctious
.

‘Or are you hungry?’ he asked. ‘Shall we have something to eat first? I wasn’t thinking.’

She shook her head. ‘I’ve been foraging.’

She seemed to know so many quite literary words. He gave no time to wondering where exactly the forage could have taken place. It would be unprofitable. Whatever Nell had brought in would be wholesomer, inestimably better in every way, than food from any shop.

As soon as she was naked, he tried, in the electric light, to scrutinise her. There still seemed to be only the one mark on her body, truly a quite small mark by the standards of the moment, though he could not fully convince himself that it really was contracting.

However, the examination was difficult: he could not let Nell realise what exactly he was doing; the light was not very powerful, because latterly Elizabeth had disliked a strong light anywhere, and he had felt unable to argue; most of all, he had to prevent Nell seeing whatever Mark Tremble had seen on his own person, had himself all the time to lie facing Nell or flat on his back. In any case, he wondered always how much Nell saw that he saw; how much, whatever her
utterances
and evidences, she analysed of the things that he
analysed
.

The heavy curtains, chosen and hung by Elizabeth, had it seemed, remained drawn all day; and by now the simplest thing was for Stephen to switch off what light there was.

Nell, he had thought during the last ten days or ten aeons, was at her very best when the darkness was total.

He knew that heavy drinking was said to increase desire and to diminish performance; and he also knew that it was high time in his life for him to begin worrying about such things. He had even so hinted to Arthur Thread; albeit mainly to startle Thread, and to foretoken his, Stephen’s, new life course; even though any such intimation to Thread would be virtually useless. There can be very few to whom most of one’s uttered remarks can count for very much.

None the less, Nell and Stephen omitted that evening to arise later; even though Stephen had fully and sincerely intended it.

The next morning, very early the next morning, Nell
vouchsafed
to Stephen an unusual but wonderful breakfast – if one could apply so blurred a noun to so far-fetched a repast.

Stephen piled into his civil service raiment, systematically non-committal. He was taking particular trouble not to see his own bare back in any looking-glass. Fortunately, there was no such thing in the dim bathroom.

‘Goodbye, my Nell. Before the week-end we shall be free.’

He supposed that she knew what a week-end was. By now, it could hardly be clearer that she knew almost everything that mattered in the least.

But, during that one night, the whole flat seemed to have become dark green, dark grey, plain black: patched
everywhere
, instead of only locally, as when they had arrived. Stephen felt that the walls, floors, and ceilings were beginning to advance towards one another. The knick-knacks were dematerialising most speedily. When life once begins to move, it can scarcely be prevented from setting its own pace. The very idea of intervention becomes ridiculous.

What was Nell making of these swift and strange
occurrences
? All Stephen was sure of was that it would be unwise to take too much for granted. He must hew his way out; if necessary, with a bloody axe, as the man in the play put it.

Stephen kissed Nell ecstatically. She was smiling as he shut the door. She might smile, off and on, all day, he thought; smile as she foraged.

*

By that evening, he had drawn a curtain, thick enough even for Elizabeth to have selected, between his homebound self and the events of the daylight.

There was no technical obstacle to his retirement, and never had been. It was mainly the size of his pension that was affected; and in his new life he seemed able to thrive on very little. A hundred costly substitutes for direct experience could be rejected. An intense reality, as new as it was old, was burning down on him like clear sunlight or heavenly fire or poetry.

It was only to be expected that his colleagues should shrink back a little. None the less, Stephen had been disconcerted by how far some of them had gone. They would have been very much less concerned, he fancied, had he been an acknowledged defector, about to stand trial. Such cases were now all in the day’s work: there were routines to be complied with, though not too strictly. Stephen realised that his
appearance
was probably against him. He was not sure what he looked like from hour to hour, and he was taking no steps to find out.

Still, the only remark that was passed, came from Toby Strand, who regularly passed remarks.

‘Good God, Stephen, you’re looking like death warmed up. I should go home to the wife. You don’t want to pass out in this place.’

Stephen looked at him.

‘Oh God, I forgot. Accept my apology.’

‘That’s perfectly all right, Toby,’ said Stephen. ‘And as for the other business, you’ll be interested to learn that I’ve decided to retire.’

‘Roll on the day for one and all,’ said Toby Strand, ever the
vox
populi.

Mercifully, Stephen’s car had been restored to a measure of health, so that the discreet bodywork gleamed slightly in the evening lustre as he drove into the rented parking space.

‘Nell, we can leave at cockcrow!’

*

‘I forgot about buying you that dress.’

He was standing in his bath gown, looking at her in the wide bed. The whole flat was narrowing and blackening, and at that early hour the electric light was even weaker than usual.

‘I shan’t need a dress.’

‘You must want a change sometime.’

‘No. I want nothing to change.’

He gazed at her. As so often, he had no commensurate words.

‘We’ll stop somewhere on the way,’ he said.

They packed the rehabilitated car with essentials for the simple life; with things to eat and drink on the journey and after arrival. Stephen, though proposing to buy Nell a dress, because one never knew what need might arise, was resolved against dragging her into a roadside foodplace. He took all he could, including, surreptitiously, some sad souvenirs of Elizabeth, but he recognised plainly enough that there was almost everything remaining to be done with the flat, and that he would have to return one day to do it, whether or not Nell came with him. In the meantime, it was difficult to surmount what was happening to the flat, or to him. Only Nell was sweet, calm, and changeless in her simple clothes. If only the nature of time were entirely different!

‘You’ll be terribly cold.’

She seemed never to say it first, never to think of it.

He covered her with sweaters and rugs. He thought of offering her a pair of his own warm trousers, but they would be so hopelessly too wide and long.

Islington was a misty marsh, as they flitted through;
Holloway
pink as a desert flamingo. The scholarly prison building was wrapped in fire. Finsbury Park was crystal as a steppe; Manor House deserted as old age.

When, swift as thoughts of love, they reached Grantham, they turned aside to buy Nell’s dress. She chose a
rough-textured
white one, with the square neck outlined in black, and would accept nothing else, nothing else at all. She even refused to try on the dress and she refused to wear it out of the shop. Stephen concurred, not without a certain relief, and carried the dress to the car in a plastic bag. The car was so congested that a problem arose.

‘I’ll sit on it,’ said Nell.

Thus the day went by as in a dream: though there are few such dreams in one lifetime. Stephen, for sure, had never known a journey so rapt, even though he could seldom desist from staring and squinting for uncovenanted blemishes upon and around the bright coachwork. Stephen recognised that, like everyone else, he had spent his life without living; even though he had had Elizabeth for much of the time to help him through, as she alone was able.

Northwards, they ran into a horse fair. The horses were everywhere, and, among them, burlesques of men bawling raucously, and a few excited girls.

‘Oh!’cried Nell.

‘Shall we stop?’

‘No,’ said Nell. ‘Not stop.’

She was plainly upset.

‘Few fairs like that one are left,’ said Stephen, as he sat intimately, eternally beside her. ‘The motors have been their knell.’

‘Knell,’ said Nell.

Always it was impossible to judge how much she knew.

‘Nell,’ said Stephen affectionately. But it was at about that moment he first saw a dark, juicy crack in the polished
metalwork
of the bonnet.

‘Nell,’ said Stephen again; and clasped her hand, always brown, always warm, always living and loving. The huge geometrical trucks were everywhere, and it was an
uncircumspect
move for Stephen to make. But it was once more too misty for the authorities to see very much, to take evidence that could be sworn to.

The mist was more like fog as they wound through Hare wood’s depopulated community. Hare wood really should marry Doreen as soon as it becomes possible, thought Stephen, and make a completely new start in life, perhaps have a much better type of youngster, possibly and properly for the cloth.

Stephen was struck with horror to recollect that he had forgotten all about the costly book which had been almost certainly intended for Harewood, and which Harewood would be among the very few fully to appreciate and rejoice in. The book had not really been noticeable at first light in the eroding flat, but his lapse perturbed Stephen greatly.

‘A fungus and an alga living in a mutually beneficial relationship,’ he said under his breath.

‘What’s that?’ asked Nell.

‘It’s the fundamental description of a lichen. You should know that.’

‘Don’t talk about it.’

He saw that she shuddered; she who never even quaked from the cold.

‘It’s unlucky,’ she said.

‘I’m sorry, Nell. I was thinking of the book we left behind, and the words slipped out.’

‘We’re better without the book.’

‘It wasn’t really our book.’

‘We did right in leaving it.’

He realised that it had been the second time when, without thinking, he had seemed ungracious about the big step she had taken for him: the second time at least.

Therefore, he simply answered. ‘I expect so.’

He remained uneasy. He had taken due care not to drive past the crumbling rectory, but nothing could prevent the non-delivery of Harewood’s expensive book being an odious default, a matter of only a few hundred yards. To confirm the guilt, a middle-aged solitary woman at the end of the
settlement
suddenly pressed both hands to her eyes, as if to prevent herself from seeing the passing car, even in the poor light.

The ascending track was rougher and rockier than on any of Stephen’s previous transits. It was only to be expected, Stephen realised. Moreover, to mist was now added dusk. At the putative Burton’s Clough, he had to take care not to drive over the edge of the declivity; and thereafter he concentrated upon not colliding with the overgrown stony waymark. Shapeless creatures were beginning to emerge which may no longer appear by daylight even in so relatively remote a region. Caution was compelled upon every count.