The Unsettled Dust (6 page)

Basil Blantyre, who has since, unfortunately, died (still in harness), was already nearer to eighty than to seventy, and sensibly reluctant to leave the warm fire in March weather; but he welcomed me in most cordially, though I had not been able to tell him I was coming. There was a telephone at Clamber Court, but I had never heard it in use, and I thought that a call to the Fund’s local luminary could, if overheard, cause only trouble. Blantyre most kindly made me a cup of instant coffee with his own hands. He lived quite alone, his wife having never fully recovered (as I had been given by Hamish Haythorn to understand) from the shock of the
bankruptcy
and the compulsion to leave the house where the Blantyre family had lived, reputedly, since the Middle Ages. To Blantyre, as to me (and others), the Fund had proved a welcome haven from life’s storm.

‘I want the lowdown on Clamber Court and the Brakespear sisters,’ I said, pushing back the scum on the hot coffee.

‘There was a lot of sadness in the family. I speak of the time before Clamber was settled on the Fund.’

‘There hasn’t been much happiness since, judging by what I’ve seen and heard.’

‘What can you expect, Oxenhope? People don’t like losing their houses and still living on in them. That, at least, Millicent and I were spared.’

Quite possibly this was a form of sour grapes, as the
Blantyre
house had been much too far gone for any decision but demolition.

‘There may be more to it than that,’ I said. ‘What splendid coffee! There seem to me some very odd goings-on at Clamber Court.’

‘So I have heard,’ said Blantyre, looking away from me and into the blazing logs.

‘To start with, the Brakespear girls appear to have no
visitors.
Apart, of course, from the public.’

‘Poor old dears!’ exclaimed Blantyre vaguely.

‘They’re not as old as that. I acknowledge that I myself find one of them quite attractive.’

‘So-ho!’ exclaimed Blantyre in the same vague way. It was manifest that he had long ago lost all touch with the Clamber situation.

‘And then,’ I said, ‘the house is full of dust.’

‘Yes,’ said Blantyre. ‘I know. That’s just it.’

‘That’s just what?’ I asked, putting down my cup. The second half of the contents was thick and muddy.

Blantyre did not answer. After a pause, he answered with another question.

‘Did you see anything else? Or hear?’

‘See,’ I said, lowering my voice, as one does; even though it was still the middle of the morning. ‘Not hear.’

‘You saw
him
?’
asked Blantyre.

‘I think so,’ I said. ‘I suppose so.’

‘And
it
?
You perhaps saw
it
as well?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘This very morning, as a matter of fact.’

‘You don’t say so.’ Blantyre turned back towards me.

‘If what I saw was the same it.’

‘I have no doubt of it,’ replied Blantyre.

‘I first saw the dust, the ordinary dust, when I visited the house two years ago. I went incognito, you know.’

‘You should never do that,’ said Blantyre very seriously.

Coming from a man almost twice my age, I let the reproof go.

‘At the time I sent you a memo on the dust,’ I said.

‘I don’t wonder. Many people do.’

‘You mean that there’s nothing to be done about it?’

‘What do
you
think about that?’ asked Blantyre. ‘Now that you’ve had more experience.’

‘The servant says it blows in off the long drives.’

‘So it does,’ said Blantyre. ‘In a way.’ Here he started
coughing
rather alarmingly, as if the dust had entered his own lungs.

‘Can’t I get you something?’ I asked.

‘No, thank you,’ Blantyre wheezed. ‘Just give me a minute or two. You haven’t finished your coffee.’

I swallowed a little more, and then sat looking into the fire, as Blantyre had done. Before long, his breath seemed to be coming more easily.

‘Will you please tell me the story?’ I asked, still staring at the logs. ‘All within the four walls of the Fund, of course.’

‘You mean that I shan’t last long? That I ought to pass it on before I go?’

‘Of course not. I never thought of such a thing. After all, the Brakespear girls must know, and almost certainly,
Elizabeth,
and doubtless others.’

‘Not many others,’ said Blantyre. ‘Or only village tales. If the Fund has to have official knowledge of the story, it is my successor I should tell, but I don’t know who he’ll be and I daresay I shall never meet him, so I’m prepared to tell you. You’ve been
staying
in the house, I believe? Spending nights there?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And still am. All thanks to young Mr. Hand.’

‘There’s a good lad,’ said Blantyre unexpectedly. ‘It’s a bad thing for England that they’re not more like him.’

‘Who knows if you’re not right, but you can be glad you don’t have to work with him.’

‘Men of the best type are seldom easy to work with. Being easy to work with is a talent that often doesn’t call for any other talents in support of it.’

I said nothing: again remembering Blantyre’s age. This time the gulf between the generations positively yawned at my feet.

‘If you’re called upon to live in the house,’ said Blantyre, ‘you’ve possibly a claim to the story. Not that I’ve heard of actual harm coming to anyone. Not physical harm, anyway. Only to Tony Tilbury, who was killed. But he was just run over.’

‘I don’t follow,’ I said.

‘The one certain fact is that Tony Tilbury was run down and killed early one morning by a car which Agnes Brakespear was driving.’

‘Oh,’ I said, feeling a little sick.

‘Olive Brakespear saw it happen from one of the windows. That’s another fact: at least, I suppose so. There is
considerable 
doubt as to how far her account of the details can be relied on.’

‘I shouldn’t have thought it was an easy place to have an accident of that kind; especially with nothing else about.’

‘You’re not the only person to have thought that, and, in fact, if it hadn’t been for Olive’s evidence, Agnes would have been in serious trouble. A manslaughter charge, at least. Even murder, perhaps.’

‘Who
was
Tony Tilbury?’

‘He was a fine-looking young chap; descended from one of Queen Elizabeth’s admirals. I met him myself several times, when we were still in the old place. But then I think you may have seen for yourself what he looked like. If we understood one another just now. The thing was that Tilbury and Olive Brakespear were in love – very much in love, people say – and Agnes objected.’

‘You mean she was in love with him herself?’

‘Perhaps,’ said Blantyre. ‘That’s one of the many things that no one knows, or can be expected to know, unless one of the sisters speaks up, and I should say that’s pretty unlikely by this time. But there’s no doubt at all about the rows it all caused between them. There were plenty of people who were quite prepared, or said they were, to swear to having seen Agnes setting about Olive, and even threatening to kill her.’

‘That seems an unlikely thing to threaten before witnesses.’

‘It’s what people said. Whether they would really have taken an oath on it when it came to the point, is, needless to say, another matter. It never did come to a point of that kind, because Olive swore at the inquest that she had seen the whole thing from one of the windows and that the car had quite obviously got out of control. She swore that she saw Agnes struggling with it and doing all she could be expected to do. Even so, there were a lot of unanswered questions, when it had come to running down a solitary man in all that open space. And, apparently, Olive at one point half-admitted that she couldn’t
really
see, because of all the dust which the car had stirred up. Agnes made a big thing of the dust too, in her own evidence. She put a lot of the blame on it. In the end the Coroner gave Agnes the benefit of the doubt, and the jury brought in Accidental Death. I daresay the dust was pretty decisive, however you look at it. It can get into people’s eyes, like smoke. That’s not the only dusty verdict I’ve known to come from a coroner’s jury. Inquests often take place in. rather a rush, oddly enough; though I didn’t attend the one on Tony Tilbury.’

‘Why did people suppose he was standing about all by himself at that hour of a winter morning?’

‘It wasn’t winter,’ said Blantyre. ‘It was pretty near
midsummer.
Hence all the dust.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I hadn’t realised.’ Blantyre waited for me to go on. ‘At Clamber there seems dust enough at any time. Even so, what was Tilbury doing?’

‘Agnes and Olive told a story about Tilbury sleeping badly and often going out in the early hours to walk about the park. I daresay it was more or less true. But what people said was something different. They said that on the morning in question, Tilbury was about to elope with Olive. A far-fetched thing to do, in all the circumstances, but the two of them were said to have been driven to it by Agnes’s behaviour. The idea seems to me to leave a lot of unanswered questions also. And I don’t know that there’s any real evidence for it at all. Tilbury’s own car – a racing sort of thing – was found in the background along the drive, but there was nothing very remarkable about that. As a matter of fact, I’m not sure that the whole business, queer though it was, would have started so many tales, or at least kept the tales going for so long, had it not been for one or two other things.’

‘What were they?’ I asked.

‘In the first place, Olive had a complete breakdown after the inquest – or so, once again, it was said: I suppose one can’t be certain even of that. All that is certain is that she was missing for more than a year. And when she came back, she had changed. She had intended to be a professional pianist, as you possibly know: perhaps before she met Tony Tilbury. Even that was odd: the effect that Tilbury appears to have had on her. Tilbury was an agreeable young chap, and
good-looking,
of course, but perfectly ordinary, as far as I could ever see; and it was hard to imagine why a sensitive, artistic creature like Olive should be so gone on him in particular. Because I think she really was gone on
him.
I don’t think there’s much doubt about that. I’m told they behaved quite absurdly together, even in public. Anyway, when she came back, after more than a year, from wherever it had been, she’d given up music and gone nuts on riding; and not the usual sort of riding either, but endless treks all by herself. She still does it, or did, the last I heard. But you’ll probably know more about that than I do.’

‘Olive still plays the piano as well,’ I said. ‘Whenever Agnes lets her.’

‘I see,’ said Blantyre, looking me in the eye. ‘Well, there you are. I mean as to the relationship between them. You’ve summed it up from your own observation.’

‘I’d believe almost anything about their relationship. But what’s the next reason why people still talk?’

‘Do you have to ask? You’re not the only one to have seen things and heard things – or to have
said
they’ve seen and heard them. Not that I wish to reflect any doubt upon you personally, you understand.’

‘Elizabeth told me that no one sees anything more than once. At least, she said that no one sees what I now take to have been Tilbury’s figure more than once?’

‘Did she now? That’s a new superstition to me. But it
follows
a familiar line, of course, and when things like that are alive at all, they always grow. Also I haven’t been to Clamber for some time, though that’s probably something I shouldn’t admit. I just don’t like the place, and, between ourselves, I don’t go out much more than I can help in any case, unless it happens to be set fair weather.’

‘Elizabeth implied that people have seen him in many
different
rooms in the house.’

‘I suspect,’ replied Blantyre, ‘that he’s just
in
the whole place, and that the people who see him, do so when they happen to be in the right mood. What exactly that means, I have no idea, but none of the theories that are supposed to explain these things, goes very far, as you may have noticed. “All telepathy”, people say, for example. What does it mean? Whether it’s true or not? It gets one almost no distance at all, though it may perhaps just be worth saying. I claim no more for what I have just suggested about Tony Tilbury at Clamber.’

‘And, from what you say, we know no more about what those three people were doing all up and about so early in the morning?’

‘Not a thing. Nor ever shall, in all probability. Of course the father had died years before. As a matter of fact, he killed himself: so much seems certain, though they succeeded in hushing it up, and I’ve never come upon so much as a rumour as to his reasons. The older people who knew him just say he always seemed depressed or always seemed aloof, or some such word. All in all, they’re not a lucky family. The mother went queer after her husband’s death, though she’s still alive.’

‘I was told in the Fund offices that she lived in the house.’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Blantyre, smiling a little. ‘It’s the sort of thing that I should be notified about officially, wouldn’t you say? I suspect it’s another example of the growth that takes place in the absence of facts. Or have you heard the old thing screaming in the night above your head?’

‘Never,’ I replied.

‘Well, I hope you don’t. It’s not a pleasant sound, I assure you,’

Blantyre spoke as if it were one with which he was thoroughly familiar.

‘And that reminds me.’ he went on. ‘I shouldn’t be
frightened
of Clamber, if I were you, or let it get me down. I mention this because that might be the tendency of some of the things I’ve said. I think it is quite unnecessary. It’s true that I don’t like the place, but it’s far more true that no one was ever hurt by a ghost yet, unless he made use of the ghost to hurt himself. Ghosts don’t hit you over the head: you do it yourself when you’re not thinking about it, and blame them for it because you can’t understand yourself. A homely
illustration
, but all the records confirm the truth of it. It’s only in fiction that there’s anything
really
dangerous. And of course old houses do tend to dust up when their families no longer own them: though that’s not a line of thought we are
permitted
to pursue. So now let me make you another cup of coffee.’