The Unsettled Dust (3 page)

‘No,’ I replied calmly. ‘We were sitting here in the dark and I thought the handkerchief had fallen out of my sleeve.’

‘I believe you, Mr. Oxenhope. Sitting in the dark is the only thing my sister really likes doing.’

‘Not altogether,’ said Olive. ‘As you might guess, I like riding too. Do you ride?’

‘I’m afraid I don’t.’ As a matter of fact, I had thought of trying to take it up when I began to realise what my work with the Fund would be like, but Hamish Haythorn had strongly advised me against it, saying that it was a mistake to meet the tenants on their own ground. I have since wondered whether Haythorn’s view was not affected by the fact that he could neither ride himself nor be conceived as capable of it. But no doubt this was mere malice on my part.

‘Just as well for you,’ said Agnes. ‘Going riding with my sister is an act of desperation.’

‘I’m sorry all the same,’ I said, looking at Olive as I spoke, and trying to meet her eyes, because, self-sufficient though she seemed, I was growing sorry for her, as well as for myself.

‘Sherry?’ asked Olive, either avoiding my glance or being unaware of my intention. ‘Or gin?’ Or pascado? Pascado is an aperitif that Agnes brings back from one of her committees. It is Elizabethan and based on quince juice. Or would you prefer a whisky?’

I thought that I had better make some effort to appease Agnes, so volunteered for the pascado.

‘Very few people like it,’ said Agnes.

The evening continued to be uneasy.

The sisters were, at the least, utterly bored with one another. Such communication as they attempted was confined to jibing and belittlement. As at the start, most of the attacking seemed to come from Agnes; but I thought this might have been partly because Olive gave the impression of having years ago said all she had to say, and of by now preferring to sit in silence. Later that evening it seemed to me, however, that Olive on several occasions struck home on her own; though Agnes each time behaved as if she were too stupid to
understand
. It might have been the fact of the matter, but I doubted it. The sisters had obviously been committed to this form of exercise for years, and every sentence and every small action had overtones and undertones soaring and sinking beyond the apprehension of any outsider. I, of course, attempted intermittently to make ‘general conversation’, but Agnes was antagonistic, and Olive, though perfectly polite, was
indifferent
and world-weary. One might have said that Olive knew it all already, but I doubted whether she really did. I suspected that she fought off knowing, and that it was really Agnes who knew much more. One often finds this with women of Agnes’s type. I perhaps make it all sound as if I was having a dreadful time, and it is certainly true that I was not enjoying myself; but by then I was surprisingly accustomed to such family sessions in the houses I visited. I had found them to be common: perhaps as patrician standards merge with plebeian ones, and there is less opportunity for the graces of
entertainment
as distinct from the utilities. The new conditions take different people in different ways, but are seldom to the advantage of the guests.

There seemed to be no question of any clothes being changed for dinner. When we entered the dining-room, the big, polished table was as dusty, beneath the shaded candles, as it had been when I saw it two years earlier in the sunlight; and the tall, grey woman who stood there waiting for us, was recognisably she who had watched my writing on it with my ringer. Supposing that Agnes would be observing me, I tried to avoid all reaction.

Dinner was good and the wine excellent, but conversation there was almost none. The presence of the grey servant (still, by the way, in a grey nylon wrapper) seemed to prevent the sisters even from bickering. I felt that very little ever went into the house: not even ordinary news, let alone what are called ideas. It would be very difficult for the Brakespear sisters to have many friends. Apart from foodstuffs and
practicalities
, I felt that almost nothing and nobody entered but the public visitors in summer: by definition aloof and alien; merely staring in through the bars, and, even then,
uncomprehending
of everything that mattered, even when (occasionally) qualified to discriminate between Meissen and
Nymphenburg.

And, as I had seen for myself, the visitors to Clamber Court, though, according to Haythorn, increasing slightly in number, were powerless to dispel the dust. On the dining-room table it was so thick it marked my cuffs. I observed circles left in it by platters or glasses that had been removed, became
inconspicuous
within minutes, and by the time the meal was finished, had almost vanished, though not quite, when one carried the exact spot in one’s mind and looked keenly. But the fare was fine. In very few of the Fund houses, if any, had I been offered such wine (let alone anywhere else). I knew this even though I was by no means a connoisseur; little more than of music.

Back in the music room after dinner, a wry discussion started about the ethics of coursing. I could contribute little. The sisters disagreed about reafforestation, and later about the flowers that were being planted for the benefit of the summer visitors. My views were hardly sought. I imagine that Agnes would have despised them and Olive pitied them. Ultimately, Agnes said she must get on with the accounts, and sat by the fire making entries in a black book, with a pile of bills and receipts on the floor at her feet. ‘You won’t mind being treated as one of the family,’ she had said to me before starting this labour.

Olive suggested that I might care to look for a book in the library. It was well known to be a very fine library, largely assembled by a Lord St. Adrian of the early eighteenth century and hardly disturbed since. But I said that I was in the middle of a book I had brought with me, and that I might fetch it down from my bedroom in a moment. I made no further move, because I always have difficulty in reading when in the company of others, let alone the company of strangers. Instead, I turned over the pages of
Country
Life
and
Field,
dusty back numbers of which lay about the room, looking almost unopened. They would have to be burnt or stacked before the public season opened.

Olive merely sat in front of the fire, with her long legs stretched towards it. Her eyes remained open, but almost expressionless; too resigned, I thought, even to look sad. I was sure that she would have returned to the piano, if Agnes had not been there. Olive was by no means in her first youth, but there was something appealing about her, and, though it may not be a suitable comment for even this confidential record, I thought, by no means for the first time in such surroundings, what an odd way it was for people of opposite sexes to spend the evening, when, after all, there was nothing ahead that any of us could be sure of but infirmity, illness, and death. It is strange that people train themselves so carefully to go to waste so prematurely.

Every now and then, Agnes wondered sharply whether I would mind adding something up or working something out for her; and surprisingly bristly some of these small tasks of hers proved to be. Olive never even sighed. In the end, the grey servant appeared (the sisters addressed her as ‘
Elizabeth
’) and brought in a large bowl of fruit.

‘What time would you like breakfast?’ Agnes asked me.

‘What time would suit you best?’ I responded politely.

‘Elizabeth will bring it to your room,’ said Agnes. ‘We go our own ways.’

I suggested a time and the grey servant departed.

‘I understand that you’ll be fully occupied throughout the day?’ asked Agnes.

‘Very fully,’ I replied, remembering what I was there for and in for.

‘Then we shall see you as tonight?’

I expressed assent and gratification.

Over oranges and apples, the evening ended. Agnes ate nothing, but, as well as an apple, I accepted from Olive a whisky, and she herself consumed a noticeably stronger one. Already, on our first evening together, we were running out of generalities.

‘More whisky?’ asked Olive after a munching silence.

I accepted, though it was unlike me. She refilled my glass to the same strength as her own. The curious dust lay all around me in the warm light.

There was some clattering with bolts and chains, some checking of locks and hasps: all Agnes’s work.

‘Don’t wait,’ she said, but we did, and all ascended the stairs together.

The sisters turned to the right, where I turned to the left, but I had not even shut the door of my imperfectly lighted room when I heard familiar steps approaching along the
passage,
and Olive stood in the doorway.

‘I just came to say I’m sorry we’re so dull.’ She spoke in her usual non-committal voice, but softly; perhaps so that Agnes could have no chance of overhearing.

‘I’m sorry I don’t ride,’ I said; and I still think it was clever of me to think of it so quickly.

‘Yes,’ said Olive. ‘It’s a pity. Especially when we can do so little to entertain you. The company of two middle-aged sisters who don’t get on isn’t much fun.’

‘I don’t see you as middle-aged at all,’ I replied. Whether I did or not, I saw Olive as most attractive, especially at that moment, when she stood slender and poetical in my doorway, and both of us were about to go to bed.

But she made no response. She did not even smile. There was merely a moment’s silence between us.

Then she said, ‘I apologise for us. Goodnight,’ and walked quickly away.

I found myself thinking of her for a long time, and being kept from sleep by the thought.

*

My breakfast arrived at the exact moment I had named. The grey factotum woke me when she knocked. Having fallen asleep belatedly, I had then slept deeply. It seemed very cold. Without thinking about it, I swept the dust off the polished bedside table with my pyjama sleeve. Then I realised that the grey Elizabeth, who was putting down my tray on the table, might take my action as a slight.

‘The dust seems to blow in again as soon as it’s swept away,’ I said, shivering in my unheated bedroom, and in the tone of one making an excuse for another. ‘There must be some dusty new industry near the house.’

‘It blows off the drives,’ said Elizabeth. ‘The drives are always dusty.’

‘If that’s what it is, I think something might be done. I’ll have a word with Mr. Blantyre about it. He might arrange to have the drives tarmacked – anyway, near the house. The dust is really rather terrible.’ After all, I was one who had some indirect responsibility in the matter.

‘Terrible, as you say,’ said Elizabeth non-committally. ‘But please don’t bother. There’s nothing to be done about it.’ She spoke with surprising authoritativeness; as if she, and not the Brakespear sisters, were the Fund’s tenant – or, rather, perhaps, still the landowner.

To argue would naturally have been a mistake, so,
continuing
to shiver in the cold of the morning, I asserted that the coffee on the tray would suit me well and that there was no need to change it, as she had suggested, for tea.

I found it hard to accept Elizabeth’s explanation of the omnipresent dust. It was true that the drives were dusty, noticeably so, quite like what I imagine country roads to have been in the early days of motoring, when veils and goggles had to be worn, and the back of the neck thickly muffled; but there was so
much
dust in the house, and with so many of the windows shut, at least during the winter. For example, I had not opened mine on going to bed the previous evening, though this was contrary to a rule of health from which I seldom depart. I drew on, over my pyjamas, the heavy sweater I had brought against the river winds; poured out excellent hot coffee with a shaking hand; chewed scrambled egg and toast; and resolved to pay Blantyre a visit, even though it meant driving more than forty miles each way, to discover why still no action seemed to have been taken on my memo of two years before.

I put on all my thickest garments, descended, looked in the cold state rooms for the sisters, failed to find them, and decided simply to depart as had been agreed the previous night. As I drove away in my Mini, I observed my wake of dust with more conscious care. There certainly was a cloud of it, a rare sight nowadays in Britain, but I still found it hard to believe that all the self-renewing, perennial dust of Clamber Court came from the two drives, long though they were.

I noticed that the water in the bowl of the huntsman
fountain 
was patched with ice, though the jets still spurted frigidly upwards and sideways. The immaculate fountain was a symbol of the whole property: cold but kempt, as one might say. And one could only suppose that the responsibility and burden lay upon Miss Agnes Brakespear. Nobody who lacks direct knowledge of such a task can know how heavy it is in the conditions of today. I, with my increasing professional experience in such concerns, thought I could understand how irritating Olive Brakespear’s attitude might be to Agnes
Brakespear.
Olive still behaved, however diminished her force, as if Clamber Court maintained itself; still took the house, in however reduced a degree, at its own valuation when built. The struggle lay with Agnes; and no doubt the better part of the nation owed her a debt, and others like her. All the same, I knew which of the sisters was the one to whom my greatest debt was owed. I thought sophistically that there would be little purpose in keeping up Clamber Court unless someone had at least an inkling of the style associated with dwelling there. It was a sentiment of a kind often to be discovered in the Fund’s own literature. Olive Brakespear also served. Still, it seemed hard that dedicated Agnes should be additionally encumbered with so much dust. The cold wind blew it around me. It penetrated cracks in the bodywork, however shut the windows.

I drove towards the little house which young Hand had leased beside one of the broken-down locks. It had been unoccupied for years, having neither gas nor electricity, neither water, except from the river, nor a road; so that Hand did not have to pay very much for it, which was just as well, as the Fund was all too heavily committed in other directions on his behalf. I had to leave my car by the roadside and cross two freezing fields by a muddy path. Hand and a group of six or eight other youthful enthusiasts were frying bacon on a primus stove while the wind whistled through the broken windows. A row of Hounsfield beds, all unmade after having been slept in, was almost the only approach to furniture. The party seemed to be dressed entirely in garments from those places known as ‘surplus stores’. In every way, it was an odd background for a project under the auspices of the Historic Structures Fund, though no doubt it had a certain pioneering value in its own way.