The Unburied

by Charles Palliser

  I stood there waiting to see who would emerge from the doorway which led down from the organ-gallery. Eventually, realizing that nobody was going to come down those steps, I turned and in a trance I made my way along the transept towards the door.

  As I stepped through it and pulled it shut behind me my eyes were almost dazzled by unexpected whiteness. The air was filled with movement as myriad drifting snowflakes turned black and white when they caught or lost the moonlight. While I had been inside, the snow had begun to fall in earnest and enough had descended to cover the cobbles and roofs. I had not realized that I had been in the building for long enough for that to have happened. Always, with the first snow of the winter, the world was reborn. Involuntarily I remembered my childhood – hurrying through the snow with my nurse to watch the skaters on the nearby pond, coming back from school at the end of my first half when the coach laboured through deepening snow as it approached London, and waiting for my father to return on Christmas Eve when I knew I would be allowed to stay up late and sip hot punch with my parents. The memories moved me so deeply and seemed so innocent in contrast to what I had just experienced that I felt tears coming to my eyes.

  And then it happened. I record only what I saw and believed at the time. The reader must be patient with me.

  About sixty yards away in the pale moonlight and clearly distinct against the snow, there was a black figure standing at the entrance to the alleyway into which Austin had vanished. But this was not Austin. It was far too tall. The face was that of the being I had just seen in the organ-loft. If he were a mortal being, I knew of no way he could have got from there to where he now was without my having seen him for I had watched the stairway from the gallery and then walked straight out of the only unlocked door of the Cathedral. And once again the figure seemed to be looking at me. A long contemptuous stare. Then it turned away and entered the mouth of the alleyway making ungainly movements as it went. It was limping and that made it seem like some wounded creature dragging itself away, filled with pain and misery and rage.

  I had seen William Burgoyne. I was sure of it. In that case, the world was not as I had imagined it. The dead could walk again, for a man who had died two hundred years ago had appeared before me. That meant that all that I believed – all the decent, rational, progressive ideas by which I lived – were childish games that could only be played in the daylight. When it grew dark then the real powers reassumed their place and they were irresistible, irrational and evil.

  I don’t know how long I stood there – ten minutes, fifteen, half an hour – for never had time seemed to me so illusory. When I came to myself I looked at the snow-covered cobbles. I could see in the faint moonlight that the surface of the snow between where I was and where the figure had stood was untouched. If it was anything but some insubstantial being, it could not have got there without leaving traces in the snow!

  I wanted to get away from that place, and yet to return to Austin’s house was unthinkable. I could not bear the thought of being confined and least of all in that old house that now seemed to me to be full of mocking shadows, of half-heard voices muttering in the creaking of the ancient timbers. I hastened along the side of the Cathedral in the opposite direction, passed under the entrance and found myself in the silent High Street. I set off fast and at random. How long I strode around the sleeping streets I do not know.

  The town’s peacefulness reassured me that the world of ordinary life, of the patterns of sleep and work, still existed, for what I had seen was like a cry of agony in the middle of a chamber concert – a glimpse of pain and anger powerful enough to raise a man from his death two hundred years after the event. I let my legs carry me where they would and I hardly knew where they took me. Wherever I passed, my footsteps were the only stains upon the light dusting of snow that now lay upon the town. I remember that at one moment I was climbing a gently sloping hill along a curving road lined with big villas, each with a wrought-iron balcony and verandah and painted wooden shutters, and I remember pausing near the summit to look down at the houses and their long gardens that led down to a little stream sheltered by weeping willows all along its length, and I remember thinking that it must have been charming in the summer although the trees were now silent and gaunt in the winter moonlight. I thought of the parents and children and servants sleeping inside them, and sighed as I imagined what a pleasant place those dwellings would have been to grow up in or to bring up a family.

  From up here the little town lay before me like a child’s toy, my sight of it slightly misted by the falling snow. In the centre the dark shape of the Cathedral thrust upwards from the low roofs around it, and as I thought of the dark little Close huddled in its shadow I felt an unwillingness to return there out of the clear air of the hilltop.

  After a few minutes I set off. I descended the hill again by a different way and saw nobody until at last in some street on the edge of the town – more like a country lane with its thatched cottages and rutted carriageway than a town street – I met a milk-cart driven by a burly young man who called out a cheerful greeting. This communication with a breathing human being brought me back to my senses. Now I hurried back towards the centre of the town, taking as my landmark the spire of the Cathedral that loomed up against the dark sky. After a few minutes I was so close to it in among the houses that I could no longer see it. And then I heard its clock sound the half-hour and knew I was near it. It was half-past three. I was completely lost among narrow back-streets and gardens until I found myself in one of the lanes I had taken after losing sight of Austin. Suddenly I smelt butter and ginger. Something was baking! I followed the smell. As I turned into a long narrow street I saw only one light along its whole length. It was a street of tall old houses of faded red brick, now somewhat dilapidated with the paint on the doors and window-frames peeling and the wood rotted beneath it. All of them had several bell-pulls and name-plates – sure signs that they had been made down into separate dwellings. I went up to the sole window where there was a light and looked in.

  There was a gap in the frayed curtains and through it I could just see a part of Austin’s face and the lower part of his body. He was sitting in a chair and talking but I could not see whom he was addressing. I saw him raise a glass to his mouth and drink. I strained to hear and could just make out a murmur of voices – one of which was a woman’s. I could not tell if she was the only other person in the room with Austin or if there were more than those two. And then as I watched, a hand which seemed too large for a woman’s but whose fingers were slender and delicate, reached towards Austin and rested for a moment on his knee in a strangely intimate gesture.

  Austin smiled at his invisible companion with such tenderness, his face illuminated with such evident happiness, that I had a sudden memory of him looking at me that way many years before and felt a sharp stab of regret, remorse, even jealousy. I only looked for a few seconds, terrified that he might glance out and see me, though I suppose that the lights inside the room would have turned the window-panes into black mirrors. I backed away from the window and walked down the street in a daze.

  So that was his great passion – a squalid liaison with a woman of the town in this shabby district. What a fool I was not to have thought of that as a reason for his going out in the middle of the night! I was horrified at the idea that he might find out that I had followed him. And at the same time, I was astonished. The Austin I had known had never gone in for mercenary amours – as many of our contemporaries at the University had done. Indeed, he had never been involved with women at all, as far as I knew. I had never had a moment’s unease on that score during his friendship with my wife.

  I thought of him hurrying through the dark and silent streets to his lover. How ridiculous at his age. And yet how enviable. I found I had to pause and take a deep breath as I thought of the sheer naked shamelessness of my friend’s indulgence in this adventure.

  At the end of the street I seemed to come to my senses and found that I knew where I
was. I was at the corner with the street which led to the alleyway in which I had lost Austin. I retraced my steps. Now it occurred to me that the affair might not be what I had assumed. Perhaps Austin was truly in love with some woman who was worthy of his love. Yet their meeting like that in the middle of the night implied that their relationship was in some way illicit. Was she married? Was she even the wife of a colleague or one of the men attached in some capacity to the Cathedral? In that case, who could she be? I thought of the cycle of disappointment, excitement, resentment and desire through which I had not been forced for two decades. Who was this imperious, unreasonable creature who had such power over him – summoning him, perhaps, to come to her in the middle of the night regardless of the risks? Recalling him, it might be, after a period of anguished banishment, during which he might have had to watch her smiling with affection upon a rival. When I remembered what I had suffered, I hardly knew whether to envy or to pity him.

  Then a horrible idea came to me about who the woman might be. I could not believe that it could be true. How could such a woman find Austin worthy? And yet it occurred to me that the real Austin, the Austin I had known if he still existed, might be worthy, for the best qualities in him were admirable. And of all women in the world she would be the one to find and encourage them for, as I had seen, it was characteristic of her always to think the best of people and try to understand and forgive their worst actions. What horror it was to reflect that it is often the very generosity of the lover which makes an unworthy beloved seem deserving.

  I went back to the house, shaking the snow off my boots before I went inside, and took a lighted candlestick up to the sitting-room. I had determined upon a certain course of action. Austin’s behaviour was of a piece with other strange acts since my arrival: his watching me that afternoon in the Close, his abrupt changes of mood and swings from friendliness to resentment. The circumstances now – the fact that it was the middle of the night, the snow, the figure I had just seen – all of these factors seemed to mean that I had stepped out of the ordinary world and was therefore allowed to take measures that I would not normally permit myself. I had begun to think that there might be a connection between the theft of the miniatures – if they were indeed what had been taken – from Dr Sheldrick on Tuesday night and the odd business of the package that had mysteriously arrived inside Austin’s front-door.

  I crossed to the armoire. The doors were solid and when I tried them, I found they were indeed locked.

  I scrutinized the room for any other clues. It struck me that the bookshelves were the tidiest thing in the house. Did that mean that Austin never touched his books or, on the contrary, that he was so devoted to them that he was careful to keep them in order? Because of the orderliness, it was striking that on one of the shelves there was a single volume out of place and lying on its side. Noticing that it had a book-mark inserted in it, I picked it up and found that it was a collection of fairytales and bore inside a gummed label indicating that it was from the library of Courtenay’s. On an impulse I took it up to my room, made ready for bed and got under the covers.

  I opened the volume at the place where the book-mark had been put and, finding that it was the beginning of one of the stories, began to read it. My attention wandered, however. Could it be that I had imagined the figure I had seen in the organ-loft and again in the Close? It was true that I had drunk several glasses more than was customary during the course of the evening. Now that I considered it, I could explain some of what I had seen, but not everything. It might be, for instance, that I had stood on the steps for longer than I had realized and that the falling snow had covered the traces of the figure I had seen before I had thought to look. Yet the fact remained that he could not have got from the organ-loft to where I had seen him without passing a few feet in front of me. Even now that I was tucked up in bed I was unable to feel amusement at my superstitious terror for I still had a strange feeling that I had seen something from another world or another time. Austin’s remark about being damned – that his mysterious passion had led him to perdition – came unbidden into my mind. The creature I had seen that night was evil – even damned – if that word meant anything.

  Curious to know what Austin had been reading, I forced myself to peruse the tale open before me. To my surprise, although it was a conventional enough story of a brave young prince and a beautiful princess and an enchanted castle, I found it profoundly disturbing.

  When I had finished it, I lay for some time thinking again about certain passages in my life. After about an hour I heard Austin creeping into the house and up the stairs. It was another half-hour before I was able to fall into an uneasy slumber.

  Thursday Morning

  Austin probably slept worse than I did, for when I came down for breakfast at a quarter to seven he was not there. I prepared coffee and toast for both of us and he descended a few minutes later looking pale and haggard. I waited in the hope that he might say something about what had happened during the night and, as a result, neither of us spoke more than a few sentences while we ate our breakfast. I noticed that his hand was shaking as he lifted the cup to his lips. He seemed to be avoiding my gaze and I was trying to do the same for I felt embarrassed in case he had by some means discovered that I had followed him. He might have seen me or, it now occurred to me, have noticed traces of melted snow in the hall when he returned.

  At last he spoke: ‘I will wait for you outside the Library when it closes.’

  ‘Whatever for?’

  He looked at me in apparent surprise: ‘Have you forgotten that old Mr Stonex is expecting us to tea this afternoon?’

  For a moment I could not think what he was talking about. Then I realized that the name he had uttered was familiar. Of course! It had been mentioned by the elderly banker yesterday as that of his ancestor who had purchased the house. ‘But it was for tomorrow that he invited me. Us.’ I couldn’t imagine how Austin knew of this.

  ‘Today. He meant today.’

  ‘I’m certain he said tomorrow. Friday.’

  ‘He has altered it.’

  ‘But Austin, how do you know about it? I forgot to mention to you that I met him yesterday when I went to read the inscription.’

  ‘I am aware of that.’

  I was astonished. Was he admitting that he had been spying on me? Feeling suddenly embarrassed on his behalf and not wanting him to say any more about his strange behaviour, I went on: ‘I didn’t even think you would want to come. How do you know he has changed the date?’

  ‘How do I know? Because he told me. I happened to meet him yesterday evening. I myself forgot to inform you of it last night.’

  ‘But how did he come to learn that you are a friend of mine? I’m sure I didn’t tell him.’

  ‘There are no secrets in this town,’ he said flatly, and it seemed that I had to be content with this. ‘So I will meet you outside the Library when it closes and we will go there together.’

  I nodded. It was strange. If Austin had not been watching me yesterday afternoon while I conversed with the old gentleman at the back of the New Deanery, why should he have spoken to Mr Stonex? My suspicion that he had been following me must be correct. And he had presumably wanted to find out what had passed between me and the old man.

  A few minutes later Austin, who had made a hasty toilet but still looked ill-shaven and untidy, was ready to leave. I had waited for him so that we would leave the house together. When we opened the door we found that several inches of snow had fallen in the last few hours. We trudged in silence through the almost immaculate whiteness.

  As we reached the door of the transept, we passed two boys. One had hold of the other and I smiled at Austin, wondering if he saw them as reminders of our youthful selves, but he appeared not to have noticed them. The bigger boy, who glanced at Austin with contempt, was in what I assumed to be the required dress of the Grammar School – blue gown and knee-breeches with buckled shoes – while the other wore a plain black jacket and breeches a
nd was presumably a Choir School pupil. I remembered that Austin had talked of the rivalry between the two institutions which this vignette seemed to belie. As we passed them, the younger boy was saying something – or trying to say something for he stammered agonizingly – about being late and getting into trouble.

  A moment later I looked round and saw that the larger boy had seized the other by the neck and was stuffing a snowball down the back of his collar. The younger one struggled and his antagonist hit him quite hard twice on the chest in rapid succession. I was about to turn back but I saw him release the smaller boy who ran off. Austin – unlike the ever-vigilant schoolmaster of my childhood – gave no sign of having noticed.

  We reached the end of the Cathedral in silence and parted with another reminder from Austin of our appointment. At that moment I saw young Quitregard rounding the corner of the ambulatory and we greeted each other and covered the last few yards together. I mentioned the incident I had just witnessed and he said he had seen the Choir School boy a few minutes earlier, remarking that he himself had a brother at the school. It was a few minutes before half-past seven when we reached the Library, whose great door Quitregard unlocked.

  ‘Were you a pupil there yourself?’ I asked.

  ‘I was at Courtenay’s – the Grammar School.’

  ‘I’m surprised that brothers should be sent to the two institutions,’ I said as I stamped my feet on the mat just inside the door to get the snow off my boots.

  ‘I can’t sing a note, you see.’

  ‘Even so I am puzzled, for I understood that the two schools detested each other.’

  He laughed. ‘The boys fight each other, of course. But I don’t believe there is any official ill-will between the schools.’