Dusty Answer

by Rosamond Lehmann

She started running; and wondered why; and ran as hard as she could.

  As she opened the front door, she stopped, aghast. The telephone bell was screaming, screaming, screaming.

  Telegram for Judith Earle. From Paris.

  ‘Father died this evening. Come tomorrow. Mother.’

  As she hung up the receiver silence in a vast tide flowed in and drowned the house, his house, as if for ever.

  He had been deep in the business of dying while she, his daughter – No. She must not think that way; she must just think of him dead. What an extraordinary thing … Last time she had seen him had he looked as if he were going to die? There came a doubtful indistinct picture of him – yes – going upstairs to bed, early, not later than ten o’clock. She had looked up the staircase and seen him near the top, mounting with a hand on the bannister; going to bed so early, looking – yes – a little feeble; the bowed back and slow yielding step, the slightly laborious stair-mounting of a man getting old – yes – a delicate elderly man, a little frightening, a little pathetic to see unexpectedly: for could youth then really depart? He had been young and he had come upon old age. Some day she too – she too … yes, for a moment she had thought that. And now he was dead.

  She crept to the library and switched on all the lights and stared at the portrait of a young man. That handsome youth had lived, grown old and died. He had begotten a daughter who was looking at him and thinking these things. But the cold portraits of people held them bound for ever in unreality; they could not die: they had not lived.

  She sank into a chair, burying her face in her hands, seeking for a memory that would make her know that he had lived and died.

  She was very small and he, very kind and noble, was taking her to hear the child-genius play. Her excitement was too great to bear: she too would be a child-genius; and when the violin came it wrought on her so violently that she was sick where she sat. He had been deeply disappointed in her, his kindness and nobility turned to disgust.

  At night, every night for a long time, with the night light burning, he had sat on her bed and sung softly to her. He sang ‘Uncle Tom Cobley’,

  ‘All along out along down along lea …’

  Ah the haunting echo, the loneliness of that! Over and over he sang the names of the mysterious company of men, but so softly that the slipping syllables wove round her hazily and fled before she caught them. Then he sang of a golden apple.

  ‘Evoe, evoe, wonderful way

  For subduing – subduing the hearts of men …’

  Evoe, evoe … The sound started a pang, a question, a stir of rich sadness that went aching on, through the twice-sung whisper of the sibilants, right on after the fall, the lingering soft pause and fall of the last words.

  At the end he sang ‘Good night ladies’. When he had finished she said ‘Again’; and he sang it again and yet again, always more low, till finally it was nothing but a plaintive sigh. She lay listening with eyes shut, weeping with sorrow and delight.

  ‘Good night ladies, we’re going to leave you now –’

  That was so sad, so sad!

  ‘Merrily we’ll roll along, roll along, roll along,

  Merrily we’ll roll along on the deep – blue – sea.’

  She saw a dim swaying far-stretching line of lovely ladies all in white, waving good-bye upon a dark sea-shore. The great ship faded away over the waves, bearing further and further the deep-throated chorus of singers. The long line swayed, reached vainly forward. Their white hands glimmered. She saw them fade, alas! fade, vanish out of sight.

  Oh, he had known how to stir mystery in a child. He had turned sound inside out for her, making undreamed-of music, – and pictures besides, and light and colour. He had seemed to forget her for weeks at a time, but when he had remembered, what a more than compensating richness had come into life! She had planned to grow so beautiful and accomplished that he would be proud of her and want her with him always. They were to have travelled together, famous father and not unworthy daughter, and they were to have discussed very intellectual topics and she was to have looked after him when the steps, going upstairs, started, really started, to have that feebleness … He was to have lived to be very old and go upstairs on her arm, cherished by her.

  No more lessons in Greek: no more hearing him softly open his door to listen to her playing, – (though he never praised her, what praise that had been!) No more talk – now and then, when he remembered her, when his eyes dwelt on her with interest – of books and pictures and music and famous people he knew. No second proud visit to Cambridge with him, no seeing him sigh, smile, dream from an old don’s window over Trinity Great Court in the sun, after the lunch-party. The three elderly bachelors had smiled at her, embarrassed by her presence, doubtful as regards the attentions due to a young lady. They had been shy with her, courteous, careful and elegant of speech, a little dusty altogether, but gentle like their rooms, like the old gold light falling outside on ancient buildings. She had listened to them all savouring and playing with words, quoting Greek, saying ‘Do you remember?’ He had seemed so distinguished, so brilliant, a man ripe and calm with knowledge. And afterwards he had shown her the colleges and the Backs and promised to come often to see her when she came up. He had talked of his youth and for a moment they had trembled on the verge of shared emotions: no more of that, no hope of future rich Cambridge occasions.

  No more watching his intent and noble profile in the lamp light, stooped hour after hour over his writing, opposite the bust of Homer. Once or twice he had looked up and smiled at her as though vaguely content to have her with him. His desk was empty for ever. That was pathetic; it would bring tears if dwelt on; it made him so human.

  Did it hurt to die?

  Now in a flash she remembered the question:

  ‘Daddy, does it hurt to die?’

  Years ago. Grandmamma had just died. When he came to say good night to her in bed, she had asked him that.

  He had remained silent and brooding. His silence filled her with terror: her heart beat and, red and panic-stricken, she stared at him. He was going to tell her something dreadful, he knew something so terrible about Grandmamma, about death and the way it hurt that he could not speak … He was going to die … She was … Oh God! Oh Jesus!

  At last he had sighed and said:

  ‘No, no. It doesn’t hurt at all to die.’

  She had flung herself weeping into his arms, and he had clasped her in silence; and from his quiet, pressing shoulder, comfort had poured in upon her.

  It did not hurt at all to die, it was quite all right, he had said. He had just died.

  She looked about her, at the brooding room. Nothing but loneliness, helplessness, appalling silence. She was cold too, shivering.

  A little while ago she had been next door. Now the house would all be dark, shut to her. Supposing she were to run back to them with her tidings, surely they would help, advise, console: for they were her friends.

  ‘Roddy, Roddy, my father’s dead.’

  He was standing with Tony’s arm around his shoulders, remote, indifferently smiling. He did not like grief, and Tony kept him from her. Her time was far away and long ago.

  ‘Julian, my father’s dead.’

  He was bowed over the child; and he raised his head to listen, but made no answer. He had plenty of his own sorrows; and he feared she would wake the child.

  But Martin might be told, Martin would listen and comfort with large and inarticulate tenderness. He would be standing under the cherry tree, waiting, just as she had left him. She ran to the window.

  There was nobody in the garden. A faint light was abroad, – it might be the small rising moon or the dawn – making the cherry tree pale and clear. It seemed to float towards her, to swell and tower into the sky, a shining vision.

  Then death, lovely death, lay at the heart of enchantment. It was the core of the m
ystery and beauty. Tomorrow she would not know it, but tonight no knowledge was surer. And he whom they were to mourn was – in one minute she would know where he was, – one minute.

  She leaned out of the window.

  Now! Now!

  But the cherry tree was nothing but a small flowering cherry tree. Before her straining eyes it had veiled itself and withheld the sign.

  Part Three

  1

  Judith, looking dazed, shut the door of the Mistress’s room behind her, and after a quarter of an hour’s wandering, found her way back to her own room. She sat on a hard chair and said to herself: Independence at last. This is Life. Life at last is beginning; but rather because it seemed so much more like a painful death than because she believed it.

  She surveyed the four walls in which her independence was to flower. They were papered in sage green with perpendicular garlands of white and yellow rosebuds. There was a desk, a kitchen chair, a cane table, a narrow iron bedstead behind a faded buff curtain; and a distinctive carpet. It was of a greenish-brown shade, striped round the edge with yellow and tomato-colour, and patterned over with black liquorice-like wriggles.

  ‘But I can’t live in ugliness …’

  A clamorous bell roused her from a state of apathetic despair; and she opened her door and crept along in the wake of the click of heels and the laughter of many voices.

  This was Hall – huge, bare, full of echoes and hard light, whiteness and cold blue curtains … blue and high like twilight above ice and snow when the full moon is rising.

  ‘I can always think of that and not mind if nobody talks to me…’

  Down one wall, a row of black frocks and white aprons at attention; at the top of the room, High Table beginning to fill up: black garments, grey, close-brushed intellectual heads, serious thin faces looking down the room, one young one, drooping a little: piles of chestnut hair and a white Peter Pan collar. Crowds of dresses of all colours, shapes and sizes, all running about briskly, knowing where to go; a sea of faces bobbing and turning, chattering, bright-eyed, nodding and laughing to other faces, sure of themselves.

  ‘Margaret, come and sit here … here … here! Next to me! Sylvia, next to me … Is there a place for Sylvia?…’

  ‘I am lost, lost, abandoned, alone, lost,’ thought Judith wildly and pounced for the nearest chair and clung to it. She was between two girls who stared at her, then looked away again. She bowed her head: the old terror of faces engulfed her.

  There fell a silence. A voice like a bell went through the room, calling: Benedictus benedicat. And then came a roar, – a scraping, an immense yelling that rose to the ceiling and there rolled, broke, swelled again without pause. Beneath its volumes she felt herself lost again; but nobody else appeared to have noticed it.

  ‘Can I pass you the salt?’ said her neighbour.

  ‘After you,’ said Judith earnestly.

  ‘Thanks.’

  The conversation swirled on around her.

  ‘Who d’you think’s engaged? Three guesses … Let’s look at the tombstone. Soup how classically simple … just soup … Take a hundred dirty dishcloths, soak them in hot water, add a few onions … Dorothy’s bobbed her hair. It suits her. It doesn’t suit her … My dear, who is that girl next to you? … I’ve done six hours every day this vac … May you be forgiven … Well anyway, four regularly … I’m going to work this term, seven hours solid, no dances … I’ve got to … you should have heard the jawing I got from Miss Marsh because I only got a third in Part I … Well I think that was jolly good: I shall think myself jolly lucky if I get the same … Old Marsh has lost every human instinct… D’you know Sibyl Jones has done ten hours every day for two months? … She’s bound to collapse … Third years ought to be more sensible at their age … I say, I do believe Miss Ingram’s dyed her hair. I’m sure it’s a different colour … D’you suppose she’s in love ? … I knew a girl at Oxford who overworked most fearfully, and she woke up one morning and every hair on her head had come off and was lying on the pillow beside her, looking like a nasty practical joke. Rather a jar, wasn’t it? But she took to a wig, my dears, a flaxen waved wig and it was such an improvement that she left off her glasses and became quite flighty and took to powdering her nose as well, so it was a blessing in disguise; and then her Maths coach proposed to her and they got married, and all I wonder is whether he got a shock or whether she’d warned him, because I s’pose she takes it off at night and she’s as bald as an egg without it; but I suppose anyway baldness doesn’t matter in true love … It’s a warning isn’t it?’

  ‘Pleasant idiocy,’ said Judith very quietly in the yell of laughter that followed. ‘Idiotic pleasantry.’

  ‘Did you speak?’ said the girl on her other side.

  ‘N-no.’

  ‘I suppose you’ve come up for a little visit? I wonder whose guest? …’

  ‘No, no. I’ve come up for good – I’ve just arrived. I came up a day late. I –’

  ‘You mean you’re a fresher?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But you’re at the wrong table!’ said the girl, horrified. ‘There’s your table at the other end of the room. This is a second year table.’

  ‘Oh dear! How awful! Does it matter? I couldn’t recognize anybody and nobody told me anything … I don’t know a soul …’ She felt the shameful tears coming. Such a bad beginning …

  ‘Never mind,’ said the girl almost kindly. ‘It doesn’t matter for once. And you’ll soon get to know people. Isn’t there anyone here from your school?’

  ‘I’ve never been to school. This is the first time I’ve ever been away from home …’ Stupid weakening thing to say, inducing self-pity, bringing more tears.

  ‘Oh really?’ said the girl, and added politely after a pause:

  ‘Do you know Cambridge?’

  ‘A bit. I came once with Da— my father. He simply adored it. He was always coming back. That’s why he wanted me to –’

  ‘Oh really? How naice. I expect he’ll often be running up to see you then, won’t he?’

  She turned her head away in silence. Never, never would he be running up to see her, to rescue her. Why had she mentioned him? He had vanished and left her stranded among creatures who dared to assume he was still alive …

  Trips. Labs. Lectures. Dons. Vacs. Chaperons. The voices gabbled on. The forks clattered. The roof echoed.

  ‘Ugly and noisy,’ muttered Judith. ‘Ugly and noisy and crude and smelly …’ You could go on for ever.

  There were eyes staring from everywhere, necks craning to look at her …

  ‘But I can abstract myself. I can ignore their rudeness …’

  It was the moonlight filling the blue that made it so cold and pure. Above the icefields and the snow lay the cold translucent pastures of the air …

  She studied the row of faces opposite her, and then more rows, and more, of faces. Nearly all plain, nearly all with a touch of beauty: here and there well-cut heads, broad white placid brows; young necks; white teeth set in pleasant smiles; innocent intelligent lovely eyes. Accepting, revealing faces they were, with no reserves in them, looking at each other, at things – not inward at themselves. But just a herd, when all was said: immature, untidy, all dull, and all alike, commonplace female creatures in the mass. How boring it was! If you could see Mariella’s clear thorough-bred face among them, – would that too get merged?

  That was where she should be humbly sitting, among those quieter heads, right at the end. There was a light there, flashing about: the tail of her eye had already caught it several times. She looked more closely. It was somebody’s fair head, so fiercely alive that it seemed delicately to light the air around it: a vivacious emphatic head, turning and nodding; below it a white neck and shoulder, generously modelled, leaned across the table. Then the face came round suddenly, all curves, the wide mouth laughing, warm-coloured …
It made you think of warm fruit, – peaches and nectarines mellowed in the sun. It seemed to look at Judith with sudden eager attention and then to smile. The eyes were meeting her own, inquiring deeply.

  ‘Who’s that?’ said Judith excitedly, forgetful of her position.

  ‘Oh, one of the freshers. I don’t know her name.’

  Her name, her very name would be sure to have the sun on it.

  All at once Judith found courage to eat her pudding.

  Another scraping of chairs, and they were all on their feet. Someone, highly flushed, flew to the door at the edge of the dais and wrenched it open, holding it back while the Mighty streamed slowly out. They were gone. The girl returned, even more highly flushed.

  ‘My dears! Do you think they saw me giggling? Bunny, you were a beast to make me giggle! Did I do it all right? I thought I’d never get it open in time. Miss Thompson looked so severe: but did you see what a sweet smile I got from Miss Ingram? Oh what an experience! Hold me up someone.’

  Willing hands supported her limp form. The roar broke out again, pouring out of Hall along the corridors.

  Judith went back to her room and sat by the window. Outside, the dusk was chill and deep. The treetops were all round her window. It was like being in a nest, to sit here with all the highest boughs swirling round the pane. If only the corridors did not echo with high voices and strange feet, if only you could forget the carpet, if only you could turn round and see Martin – (not Roddy – he was too unreal a memory to bring consolation) it might be possible to be comforted.

  The feet were less frequent now, the voices quieter. What were the mysterious animals doing? The vast building was full of them, streaming in and out of their burrows, busy with their strange separate affairs.

  Night, dropping across the flat fields of Cambridgeshire had blotted out a dim west slashed with fire. The tree trunks threw up their branches in a stiff black net and caught a few stars.

  Now shut your eyes and see the garden at home, the summer sun wildly rich on the lawn, hear the hot whirr and pause of the mowing machine; smell the mown grass mixed with the smell of roses and pinks and lavender; see the white butterflies dancing above the herbaceous border; see Mamma, going slowly up the steps with a basket of sweet peas, pause and draw up the striped Venetian blind; because now it is evening; the sun is behind the massed, toppling dark-green luxuriance of the unmoving chestnut trees, has drained its last ray out of the rooms and left them warm, throbbing and wan. Now it is night. Go down to the river: they are all there, waiting in the dark for you … Now there is only Roddy, coming close, just touching your shoulder, his head bent to look into your lifted one. Listen and hear him say: ‘Darling’… of course it had been in fun. But his rich voice goes on whispering and repeating it … His eyes drown again and again with yours …