The Unsettled Dust

by Robert Aickman

  ‘Mais out,’ said Madame A., as I could not withdraw my gaze from the figure. ‘C’est la naissance d’un succube.’

  But at this point I think I had better stop trying to remember what was said in French by Madame A. In the first place, I cannot succeed in doing so, though her very first words, those that I have set down, remain clearly with me. In the second place, Madame A. soon disclosed that she could speak English perfectly well – or rather, perhaps, and as I oddly felt, as well as she could speak French. There was something about her which suggested, even to an unsophisticate like me, that she was no more a native of Belgium or France than she was of Britain. I am trying to set down events and my feelings exactly as they were, or as nearly as possible, and I am not going to pretend that I did not sense something queer about Madame A. from the very start, because there is nothing in the whole story of which I am more certain than of that.

  And now there she was, standing dumpily before the big, bright fire with her long bare arms extended, almost as if to embrace me.

  Yes, despite the impending autumn, despite the blazing fire, her arms were bare; and not only her arms. Her hairy legs were bare also, and her dull red dress was cut startlingly low for a woman of her years, making her creased bosom all too visible. My absurd impression was that this plain red scrap of a garment was all she was wearing, apart from the golden slippers on her small, square feet.

  And yet old she certainly was; very old, as she had said in her letter. Her face was deeply grooved and grained. Her neck had lost all shape. Her stance was hunched and bowed under the weight of time. Her voice, though masterful, was senile. I imagined that her black hair, somewhat scant, but wiry and upstanding, could only be dyed. Her head was like an old, brown egg.

  She made me sit and sweat before the fire, constantly urging me nearer to it, and plied me with cognac and water. She herself remained on her feet, though, even so, her corrugated brown cheekbones and oddly vague black eyes were almost on a level with mine. The chair in which she had put me, had wings at the level of the sitter’s head, thus making me even hotter, and, every now and then, as she spoke, she leant forward, put a hand on each of these wings, and, for emphasis or to indicate a confidence, spoke right at my face, coming almost near enough to kiss me. She appeared to drink very little herself, but she made me drink far more than I wanted, praising the quality of the brandy and also (little did she know, I thought) the power and strength of my youth. Her very first question when we had settled ourselves was: how old had I said I was? And, she continued, born in Scorpio? Yes, I replied, impressed but not astonished, because many people have this particular divination, even though the materialists say otherwise. And how do you interpret that? I went on; because different people emphasise different aspects. Secrecy and sensuality, she croaked back. Only the first, I smiled. Then I must direct myself to awakening the second, she replied rather horribly.

  And yet, I thought, how hard I am, how unsympathetic, after all; and, at the same time, how weak.

  She did soon begin to talk about art, and the painters she had known long, long before. Perhaps she thought that this was the topic which would awaken me. She tended to lose the way in her long, ancient chronicles, and to fill or overfill my glass while she recovered direction.

  It was noticeable that she seemed neither to admire nor to have liked any of the men she spoke of, many of whom were and are objects of my particular regard. At least I hope they still are: an object of admiration is impaired by hostile criticism of any kind, however ill judged, and there is nothing the admirer can do to mend the wound, even though his full reason may tell him that the critic has no case. Madam A.’s comments were hardly reasoned at all and thus all the more upsetting. They were jeers and insinuations and flat rejections.

  ‘X.,’ she would say, ‘was an absurd man, always very dapper and with a voice like a goat.’ ‘Y!’ she exclaimed. ‘I had a very close friendship with Y. – as long as I could stand him.’ ‘Z.’s pictures were supposed to be philosophical but really they’re not even successfully pornographic.’ All the time she implied that my own enthusiastic assessments were grotesquely immature, and, when I argued back, sometimes with success, because she was not much of a hand with logic and not too accurate with her facts either, she flattened me with personal reminiscences of the comic or shady circumstances in which particular works had come to be painted, or with anecdotes which, as she claimed, showed the painter in his true colours.

  ‘J.,’ she asserted, ‘was madly in love with me for years, but I wouldn’t have used him as a pocket handkerchief when I had the grippe, and nor would any other woman.’ Madame A. had a fine turn of phrase, but as I knew (though we did not mention) that J., painter of the most exquisite oriental fantasies, had hanged himself in poverty and despair, her line of talk depressed and disconcerted me very much. I felt that in too many cases, even though, I was sure, not in all, her harsh comments were true, even though doubtless not the whole truth. I felt that, true or not by my standards, so many people (among the few interested at all) would agree with these comments as thereby to give them a kind of truth by majority vote. I felt, most sadly of all, that what I have called harshness in Madame A. was simply a blast of life’s essential quality as it drags us all over the stones; artists – these selected divinities of mine among them – included.

  As so often, it would have been better not to know.

  ‘K.!’ croaked Madame A. ‘K. worked for three years as a police spy and it was the happiest period of his life. He told me so himself. He was drunk at the time – or perhaps drugged – but it was the truth. And you can see it in his pictures if you only look. They are the pictures of a self-abuser. Do you know why K.’s wife left him? It was because he was impotent with a real woman, and always had been. He knew it perfectly well when he married her. He did it because she had inherited a little money and he was on cocaine already and the good God knows what else. When I read about K.’s pictures being bought for the Musée Royal des Beaux-Arts, I laugh. I laugh and I spit.’ And Madame A. did both. She had a habit of snatching at the neckline of her red dress as she spoke, and dragging it yet further down. It seemed by now to have become an unconscious reflex with her, or tic.

  ‘L.,’ she said, ‘started as a painter of enormous landscapes. That was what he really liked to paint. He liked to spend days and weeks entirely by himself in Norway or Scotland just painting exactly what lay before him, bigger all the time. The trouble was that no one would buy such pictures. They were competent enough but dull, dull. When you saw them lined up against the walls of his studio, you could do nothing but yawn. And that’s the way people saw them when he hoped they might buy them. You couldn’t imagine anyone ever buying one. You wanted only to get out of the studio and forget about such dull pictures. All those pictures of L. that you talk about, the “Salomés” and “Whores of Babylon”, weren’t what he liked at all. He turned to them because two things happened at once: L.’s money ran out and at about the same time he met Maeterlinck. He met Maeterlinck only once, but it did something to him. Maeterlinck seemed fashionable and successful, and L. couldn’t see why he shouldn’t be too. But it really wasn’t in the little man, and before long he gave it all up and became a fonctionnaire, as you know, though it was a bit late in the day for that.’

  ‘No, madame, I didn’t know.’

  ‘Why, he’s alive still! He’s got the jumps, some kind of disease that gives you the jumps. The “Whore of Babylon” might have given it to him, but he never got near enough to her to make it possible. L.’s alive all right – just. I used to go and see him when I still went out. He liked to borrow my old art papers. I’ve got hundreds of them, all from before the war. Ah, les sales Boches,’ added Madame A. irrelevantly, but as many people do in Belgium and France from force of habit.

  Despite everything, I suppose my eyes must have lighted up at the mention of the pre-war art journals. In such publications is often information not to be found anywhere else and information of
just the sort that I found most valuable and absorbing.

  ‘Ah,’ croaked Madame A. almost jubilantly. That’s better. You are getting accustomed to me, hein?’ She grasped my hands.

  By now, she was flowing on in English. It was a relief. At one moment, she had spoken several sentences in a language I could not even identify. She had doubtless forgotten about me, or was confusing me with someone else.

  ‘But you look hot,’ cried Madame A., releasing me. ‘Why do you not remove your jacket?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ I replied, ‘I could walk round the room and look at the pictures.’

  ‘But certainly. If you wish.’ She spoke as if it were a remarkably ridiculous wish, and perhaps discourteous also.

  I struggled away from her, and proceeded from picture to picture. She said nothing while I promenaded, but remained standing with her back to the fire, and her short legs well apart; gnomic in more than one sense. I cannot say that her eyes followed me with ironical glances, because her eyes were too vague for such a thing. The light in the room, though picturesque was quite unsuited to the inspection of pictures. I could see hardly anything. At the end of the room away from the street and away from the fire, it was almost dark. It was absurd for me to persist, though I was exceedingly disappointed.

  ‘It is a pity my adopted daughter is not here,’ said Madame A. from the brightness. ‘She could entertain you better than I can. You would prefer her to me.’

  She spoke in a tone of dreadful coyness. I could think of no convincing reply. ‘Where is your adopted daughter?’ I asked lamely and tamely.

  ‘Away. Abroad. With some creature, of course. Who knows where?’ She cackled. ‘Who knows with whom?’

  ‘I am sorry to have missed her,’ I said, not very convincingly, I am sure. I was indignant that I had not been invited for some hour when I could see the pictures by daylight.

  ‘Come back over here, monsieur,’ cried Madame A., pointing with her right forefinger to my hot armchair and then slapping her knee with the palm of her hand, all as if she were summoning a small, unruly dog. It was exactly like that, I thought. I have often seen it, though I have never owned a dog myself. I forbore from comment and returned reluctantly to the hot fire. Madame A., as I have said, was commanding as well as coy.

  And then an extraordinary thing happened. A real dog was there in the room. At least, I suppose I am now not sure how real it was. Let me just say a dog. It was like a small black poodle, clipped, glossy, and spry. It appeared from the shadowy corner to the right of the door as one entered. It pattered perkily up to the fire, then round several times in a circle in front of Madame A, and to my right as I sat, then off into the shadow to my left and where I had just been standing. It seemed to me, as I looked at it, to have very big eyes and very long legs, perhaps more like a spider than a poodle, but no doubt this was merely an effect of the firelight.

  At that moment there was much to take in fairly quickly, but one thing was that Madame A., as I clearly realised, seemed not to see the dog. She was staring ahead, her black eyes expressionless as ever. Even while I was watching the dog, I divined that she was still thinking of her adopted daughter, and was entranced by her thoughts. It did not seem particularly remarkable that she had missed the dog, because the dog had been quite silent, and she might well have been so accustomed to seeing it around the house that often she no longer noticed it. What puzzled me at that stage was where the dog had hidden itself all the time I had been in the room with the door shut.

  ‘Nice poodle,’ I said to Madame A., because I had to break the silence, and because Englishmen are supposed to be fond of dogs (though I am, comparatively, an exception).

  ‘Comment, monsieur?’ I can see and hear her still, exactly as she looked and spoke.

  ‘Nicely kept poodle,’ I said, firmly sticking to English.

  She turned and stared at me, but came no nearer, as at such moments she usually did.

  ‘So you have seen a poodle?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, and still not thinking there was anything really wrong, ‘this moment. If it’s not yours, it must have got in from the darkness outside.’ The darkness was still on my mind, because of the pictures, but immediately I spoke, I felt a chill, despite the blazing fire. I wanted to get up and look for the dog, which, after all, must still have been in the room; but at the same time I feared to do any such thing. I feared to move at all.

  ‘Animals often appear in here,’ said Madame A. huskily. ‘Dogs, cats, toads, monkeys. And occasionally less commonplace species. I expect it will have gone by now.’

  I think I only stared back at her.

  ‘Sometimes my husband painted them.’ It was the only reference she had made to her husband, and it was one which I found difficult to follow up. She dragged down the front of her dress in her compulsive way.

  ‘I will talk to you,’ said Madame A., ‘about Chrysothème, my adopted daughter. Do you know that Chry so theme is the most beautiful girl in Europe? Not like me. Oh, not at all.’

  ‘What a pity I cannot have the pleasure of meeting her!’ I said, again trying to enter into the spirit of it, but wondering how I could escape, especially in view of what had just happened. On the instant, and for the second time, I regretted what I had said.

  But Madame A. merely croaked dreamily, staring straight ahead. ‘She appears here. She stays quite often. For a quite long time, you understand. She cannot be expected to remain longer. After all, I am far from being her mother.’

  I nodded, though it was obscure to what I was assenting.

  ‘Chrysothème!’ cried Madame A. rapturously clasping her hands. ‘My Chrysothème!’ She paused, her face illumined, though not her eyes. Then she turned back to me. ‘If you could see her naked, monsieur, you would understand everything.’

  I giggled uneasily, as one does.

  ‘I repeat, monsieur, that you would understand everything.’

  It dawned on me that in some way she meant more than one would at first have thought.

  One trouble was that I most certainly did not want to understand everything. I had once even told a fortune teller as much; a big-nosed but beautiful woman in a tent when I was a schoolboy.

  ‘Would you like to see her clothes?’ said Madame A., quite softly. ‘She keeps some of them here, to wear when she comes to stay.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I should.’ I cannot fully analyse why I said it, but I said it. Madame A. being what she was, I could claim that I was given very little voice in the matter. Perhaps I wasn’t. But that time it didn’t arise. I undoubtedly chose.

  Madame A. took me lightly by the wrist and drew me out of the chair. I opened the big door for her, and then another big door which she indicated. There were two on the opposite side of the landing, and she pointed to the one on the right.

  ‘I myself sleep in the next room,’ said Madame A. on the threshold, making the very wall sound like an invitation. ‘When I can sleep at all.’

  The room within was darkly panelled, almost to the ceiling. The corner on the left behind the door was filled by a panelled bed, with a coverlet of dark red brocade. It seemed to fill more space than a single bed, but not as much space as a double bed. From the foot of it, the plain, dark panelling of the wall continued undecorated to the end of the room. In the centre of the far wall stood a red brocaded dressing table, looking very much like an altar, especially as no chair stood before it. On the right was a window, now covered by dark red curtains, of the heavy kind which my Mother used to say collected the dust. Against the wall on each side of this window stood a big dark chest. There were several of the usual art nouveau lanterns hanging high on the walls, but the glass in them was so heavily obscured that the room seemed scarcely brighter than the dim landing outside. The only picture hung over the head of the bed in the corner behind the door.

  ‘What a beautiful room!’ I exclaimed politely.

  But I was looking over my shoulder to see if the black dog had emerged through the open door on the other si
de of the landing.

  ‘That is because many people have died in it,’ said Madame A. ‘The two beautiful things are love and death.’

  I went right into the room.

  ‘Shut the door,’ said Madame A.

  I shut it. There was still no sign of the dog. I tried to postpone further thought on the subject.

  ‘Most of her clothes are in here,’ said Madame A. She pulled at the panelling by the foot of the bed, and two doors opened; then another pair; then a third. All that part of the bedroom panelling fronted deep cupboards.

  ‘Come and look,’ said Madame A.

  Feeling foolish, I went over to her. All three cupboards were filled with dresses, hanging from a central rail, as in a shop. If they had been antiquarian rags or expectant shrouds, I should hardly have been surprised, but they were quite normal women’s clothes of today; as far as I could tell, of very high quality. There were garments for all purposes: winter dresses, summer dresses, and a great number of those long evening dresses which one sees less and less frequently. All the dresses appeared to be carefully looked after, as if they were waiting to be sold. It struck me that in that direction might lie the truth: that the dresses might never have been worn. Certainly the room looked extremely unoccupied. Apart from the dresses, it looked more like a chapel than a bedroom. More like a mortuary chapel, it suddenly struck me; with a sequence of corpses at rest and beflowered on the bier-like bed behind the door, as Madame A. had so depressingly hinted.

  ‘Touch the clothes,’ said Madame A., reading my mind. ‘Take them out and see the marks of Chrysothème’s body.’

  I hesitated. Unless one is a tailor, one instinctively dislikes the touch of other people’s clothes, whoever they may be; and of unknown strangers’ clothes not least.