‘I’ve changed my mind. Can I please stay the night too?’
‘Of course you can, dear. I always thought it would be the best thing. I hated leaving you in that gloomy house.’
‘Yes, it was a gloomy house, wasn’t it?’
Kay Steiner looked at Noelle. ‘Well,’ she ventured, ‘in all the circumstances –’
‘No. It was not that only.’
‘Really? In that case you’d better all move in here until Franklin gets back.’
‘Kay. Are you in love with Franklin?’
‘Of course I’m in love with Franklin. Don’t ask such silly questions. Now take off your boots and your wet clothes. These smart macs never keep out the rain, do they? I’ll lend you some clothes, if you like. We’re exactly the same size. Perhaps I ought to tell you that Judith is a little feverish. I think it’s because she fought so hard on the way here. She’s been refusing anything to eat or drink, and she’s been screaming. It’s nothing to worry about, of course. I’ll lend you a thermometer so that you can take her temperature yourself during the night.’
*
Noelle entered the dining room in Kay’s clothes, less sophisticated than her own, but not necessarily less expensive, or less fashionable.
Kay had laid the table beautifully, and with pink lighted candles; all as if it had been a special occasion. She was hard at work in the kitchen. The many surfaces were strewn with comestibles and accessories. Kay wore an apron publicising British Airways. The British Ley land Cook Book lay open.
‘I see no reason why we shouldn’t make the best of things,’ said kind Kay. ‘I’m glad you like that sweater. It’s my favourite. It was given me in rather romantic circumstances.’
They consumed several glasses of sherry and a whole bottle of wine. Franklin Steiner belonged to a wine club connected with a well-known firm, which made the selections: neither costly top table nor cheap plonk.
‘Let’s have coffee in the lounge,’ said Kay ultimately.
‘Tell me,’ said Noelle, while Kay was filling the two cups. ‘Have you ever taken a lover? Since you married Franklin, I mean.’
‘Yes,’ said Kay. ‘I’ve taken, as you call it, several. But you don’t take milk, do you?’
‘No milk,’ said Noelle. ‘But you might stick in a spoonful of sugar.’
‘You shouldn’t, you know,’ said Kay, but affectionately, understandingly.
‘I know I shouldn’t,’ said Noelle.
Kay passed across the cup. All the things belonged to a set which Franklin had bought somewhere upon impulse at an auction.
‘Does it make any difference?’ asked Noelle.
‘To what, dear?’
‘To your feelings for Franklin. To the nature of your marriage.’
‘Most certainly not. How serious you are!’
‘Yes,’ said Noelle. ‘I think I am serious.’
‘It takes all sorts,’ said Kay.
Noelle began to stir her coffee. ‘Did you ever know a man calling himself John Morley-Wingfield?’
‘If you mean was he one of them, the answer is no. Mine didn’t have names like that.’
‘He may be a neighbour,’ said Noelle. ‘But you never heard of him?’
‘Never,’ said Kay. ‘And I don’t believe you did either. You’ve just dreamed him up.’
*
Wearing Kay’s solidly pink nightdress, Noelle lay unsleeping in one of Kay’s beds. As Kay had no children, there were no fewer than four spare rooms in the house; and as Kay was Kay, all four were always available. It was just as well at such times as this.
The door opened quietly. In the stream of light from the passage, Noelle could see Agnew’s wild head.
‘Mummy.’
‘What is it, darling?’
‘Who was that man you were walking with after I came here? Was it Daddy?’
Certainly the almost total darkness was something of an immediate relief to Noelle.
‘Of course it wasn’t Daddy, Agnew. It was someone quite different. But how did you see him?’
‘Mrs. Steiner was making a fuss about Judith, so I was bored, and just ran home. What man was he, Mummy?’
‘He was a friend of Daddy’s, who couldn’t come earlier. There are always people like that in life. You must never let them upset you.’
‘Mummy, are you going to marry him?’
‘I don’t think so, Agnew. I’m not proposing to marry anyone for some time yet. No one but you.’
‘Really not, Mummy? Why did you go for a walk with him if he was only Daddy’s friend?’
‘He wanted to take me out of myself. It was kind of him. You know it’s been a difficult day for me, Agnew.’
‘Are you sure that’s all, Mummy?’
‘Quite sure, Agnew. Now get into bed with me for a little while, and we’ll say no more about it, if you please, not even think about it.’
Agnew put his arms round her, squeezing himself tightly against her breasts; and all was peace until the morrow.
RAVISSANTE
I had an acquaintance who had begun, before I knew him, as a painter but who took to ‘compiling and editing’ those costly, glossy books about art which are said to sell in surprising numbers but which no person one knows ever buys and no person one sees ever opens.
I first met this man at a party. The very modern room was illuminated only in patches by dazzling standard lamps beneath metal frames. The man stood in one of the dark corners, looking shy and out of it. He wore a light blue suit, a darker blue shirt, and a tie that was pretty well blue-black. He looked very malleable and slender. I walked towards him. I saw that he had a high, narrow head and smooth dark hair, cut off in a sharp, horizontal line at the back. I saw also that with him was a woman, previously invisible, though, as a matter of fact, and when she had come into focus, rather oddly dressed. None the less, I spoke.
It seemed that I was welcome after all. The man said something customary about knowing almost none of the guests, and introduced the nearly invisible woman to me as his wife. He proceeded to chat away eagerly but a little anxiously, as if to extenuate his presence among so many dark strangers. He told me then and there about his abandonment of painting for editorship: ‘I soon realised I could not expect my pictures to sell,’ he said, or words to that effect. ‘Too far-fetched.’ About that particular epithet of his I am certain. It stuck in my mind immediately. He offered no particulars, but talked about the terms he got for his gaudy pictorial caravanserais. I have, of course, written a little myself from time to time, and the sums he named struck me as pretty good. I avoided all comment to the effect that it is the unread book which brings in the royalty (after all, modern translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey are said to sell by the hundred thousand, and the Bible to be more decisively the best seller of all with every year that passes); and observed instead that his life must be an interesting one, with much travel, and, after all, much beauty to behold. He agreed warmly and, taking another Martini from a passing tray, described in some detail his latest business excursion, which had been to somewhere in Central America where there were strange things painted on walls, perfect for colour photography. He said he hoped he hadn’t been boring me. ‘Oh, no,’ I said. All the time, the man’s wife had said nothing. I remark on this simply as a fact. I do not imply that she was bored. She might indeed have been enthralled. Silence can, after all, mean either thing. In her case, I never found out which it meant. She was even slenderer than he was, with hair the colour (as far as I could see) of old wheat, collected into a bun low on the neck, a pale face, long like her husband’s, and these slightly odd, dark garments I’ve mentioned. I noticed now that the man had a rather weak, undeveloped nose. In the end, the man said would I visit their flat in Battersea and have dinner? and I gave my promise.
It will be noticed that I am being discreet with names. I think it is best because the man himself was so discreet in that way, as will be apparent later. Moreover, at no time did I become a close friend of th
e pair. One thing, however, must have had importance.
The Battersea flat (not quite overlooking the Park) did exhibit some of the man’s paintings. I might compare them, though a little distantly, with the once controversial last works of the late Charles Sims: apparently confused on the surface, even demented, they made one doubt while one continued to gaze, as upon Sims’s pictures, whether the painter had not in truth broken through to a deep and terrible order. Titles of the Sims species, ‘Behold I Am Graven on the Palm of Thy Hand’ or ‘Am I Not The Light in the Abyss?’, would have served with this man’s pictures also. In fact, with him there was no question of titles, not, I thought, only out of compliance with the contemporary attitude, but more because the man did not appear to see his works as separate and possibly saleable objects d’art. ‘I found that I couldn’t paint what people might want to buy,’ he said, smiling beneath his weak nose. His wife, seated on a hard chair and again oddly dressed, said nothing. As a matter of fact, I could imagine quite well these strange pictures being ingathered for a time by fashion’s flapping feelers, though, obviously for entirely wrong reasons. I remarked to the two of them that the pictures were among the most powerful and exciting I had ever seen, and what I said was sincere, despite a certain non-professionalism in the execution. I am not sure that I should have cared to live surrounded by such pictures, as they did, but that is another matter. Perhaps I exaggerate the number: there were, I think, three of these mystical works in the living room, all quite large; four in the matrimonial bedroom, into which I was conducted to look at them; and one each in the small bedroom for visitors and in the bathroom. They were framed very casually, because the painter did not take them seriously enough; and mingled them on his walls with framed proofs from the art books, all perpetrated at the fullest stretch of modern reproductive processes.
I went there several times to dinner, perhaps six or seven times in all; and I reciprocated by entertaining the two of them at the Royal Automobile Club, which at that time I found convenient for such purposes, as I was living alone in Richmond. The Battersea dinners were very much of a pattern: my host did most of the talking; his wife, in her odd clothes, seemed to say less and less; the food, cooked by her, was perfectly good though a trifle earnest; I was treated very consciously as a guest. From this last, and from other things, I deduced that guests were infrequent. Perhaps the trouble was that the establishment lacked magic. The painter of those pictures should, one felt, have had something to say, but everything he brought out, much though there was of it, was faintly disappointing. He seemed eager to welcome me and reluctant to let me go, but entirely unable to make a hole in the wall that presumably enclosed him, however long he punched. Nor, as will be gathered, can his wife be said to have been much help. Or, at least, as far as one could see. Human relationships are so fantastically oblique that one can never be sure.
Anyway I fear that the acquaintanceship slowly died, or almost died. The near-death was slow because I made it so. I felt, almost at the beginning, that anything quicker would have meant a painfulness, conceivably even a dispute. Knowing what I was doing (within the inevitable – exceedingly narrow – limits), I fear that I very slowly strangled the connection. I was sad about it in a general sort of way, but neither the man nor his wife had truly touched anything about me or within me, and associations that are not alive are best amputated as skilfully as possible before the rot infects too much of one’s total tissue and unnecessarily lowers the tone of life. If one goes to parties or meets many new people in any other way, one has to take protective action quite frequently, however much one hates oneself in the process; just as human beings are compelled to massacre animals unceasingly, because human beings are simply unable to survive, for the most part, on apples and nuts.
Total death of the connection, however, it never was. The next thing that happened was a letter from a firm of solicitors. It arrived more than four years after I had last seen the Battersea couple, as I discovered from looking through my old engagement books after I had read it; and two years, I believed, after the last Christmas Card had passed between us. I had moved during that latter period from Richmond to Highgate. The letter told me that my Battersea acquaintance had died (‘after a long illness,’ the solicitors added) and that he had appointed me joint executor of his Will. The other executor was his wife. Needless to say, it was the first I had heard of it. There was a legacy which the testator ‘hoped I would accept’: the amount was £100, which, I regret to say, struck me at once as having been arrived at during an earlier period of Britain’s financial history. Finally, the letter requested me to communicate as soon as possible with the writers or directly with their client’s wife.
I groaned a little, but when I had reached the office where I worked before my marriage, I composed a letter of sympathy and in a postscript suggested, as tactfully as I could, that an evening be named for a first meeting of the executors. The reply came instantly. In the smallest number of words possible, it thanked me for my sympathy and proposed the evening of the next day. I put off an engagement to meet my fiancée and drove once more to Battersea.
I noticed that my co-executor had abandoned the unusual style of costume she had previously favoured, and wore an unremarkable, even commonplace, dress from a multiple store. Perhaps it was her response to the inner drive that until recently swept the bereaved into black. In no other respect could I observe a change in her.
She did not seem broken, or even ruffled, with grief, and she had little more to say than before. I did try to discover the cause of death, but could get no clear answer, and took for granted that it had been one of the usual bitter maladies. I was told that there was no need for me to put myself to trouble. She would do all there was to be done, and I could just come in at the end.
I did remark that as an executor I should have to see a copy of the Will. She at once handed the original to me in silence: it had been lying about the room. It was simple enough. The body was to be cremated, and the entire estate was left to the testator’s wife, except for my £100, and except for the fact that all the testator’s pictures were to be offered to the National Gallery of British Art; if refused, to a long list of other public galleries, ten or twelve of them; and if still refused, to be burnt. I saw at once why I had been brought into the settlement of the estate. I had been apprehensive ever since I had heard from the solicitors. Now I was terrified.
‘Don’t worry,’ said my co-executor, smiling faintly. ‘I dealt with that part myself while he was still alive. None of the places would touch the pictures with a bargepole.’
‘But,’ I said, ‘as an executor I can’t just leave it at that.’
‘See their letters.’ She produced a heap of paper and passed it over to me. ‘Sit down and read them.’
She herself drew back her normal hard chair, and sat half watching me, half not; but without taking up any other occupation.
I thought that I might as well settle the matter, if it really were possible, there and then. I checked the letters against the list in the will. Every named gallery was accounted for. All the letters were negative; some not. The correspondence covered rather more than the previous twelve months. Many public servants are slow to make up their minds and slower to commit themselves.
‘Did he know?’ I asked.
That was another question to which I failed to get a clear answer, because she merely smiled, and even that only slightly. It seemed difficult to persist.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said again. ‘I’ll look after the bonfire.’
‘But don’t you want to keep the pictures?’ I cried. ‘Perhaps you’ve lived with them so long that they’ve become overfamiliar, but they really are rather remarkable.’
‘Surely as executors we have to obey the Will?’
‘I am certain you can keep the pictures, as far as the law is concerned.’
‘Would you like to take them? Bearing in mind,’ she added, ‘that there’s about a hundred more of them stored in Kingston.
’
‘I simply haven’t room, much though I regret it.’
‘Nor, in the future, shall I.’
‘I’d like to take one of them, if I may.’
‘As many as you wish. Would you like the manuscripts also? They’re all in that suitcase.’ It was a battered green object, standing against the wall. I think it was largely her rather unpleasant indifference that made me accept. It was quite apparent what would happen to the manuscripts if I did not take them, and one did not like to think of a man’s life disappearing in a few flames, as his body.
‘When’s the funeral?’ I asked.
‘Tomorrow, but it will be quite private.’
I wondered where the body was. In the matrimonial bedroom? In the small room for guests? In some mortuary?
‘We neither of us believed in God.’ In my experience of her, it was the first time she had taken the initiative in making such a general pronouncement, negative though it had proved to be.
I looked at the pictures, including the one I had mentally selected for myself. She said nothing more. Of course, the pictures had been painted a number of years earlier: perhaps before the painter had first met her.
She offered me neither a cup of coffee nor a helping hand with the picture and the heavy suitcase down the many flights of stairs in a Battersea block of flats. Driving home, it occurred to me that for the amount of work involved, my executor’s legacy was not so inadequate after all.
The picture has travelled round with me ever since. It is now in the room next to the one which used to be the nursery. I often go in and look at it for perhaps five or six minutes when the light is good.
The suitcase contained the tumbled manuscripts of the art books, apparently composed straight on to the machine. They were heavily gashed with corrections in different coloured inks, but this did not matter to me, because it had never been in my mind to read them. All the same, I have never thrown them away. They are in the attic now, still in the green suitcase, with labels stuck on it from Mussolini’s Italy. To that small extent, my poor acquaintance lives still. He must presumably have felt that I, more than most, had something in common with him, or he would not have made me his executor.
The Unsettled Dust Page 16