Antique Dust

by Robert Westall

  Then she said, suddenly more sensitive than I’d known her, ‘You don’t like the place, do you, Geoff?’

  ‘It feels wrong.’

  ‘We’re not going to feel it; we’re going to draw it.’ And the brave invulnerable smile came back, like a highwayman putting on his mask. I think, in that moment, I fell in love with her.

  And knowing that, I still didn’t stop the awful thing that happened.

  ‘Cor, sir, there ain’t half a niff down there,’ said Henry Win­terbottom, sticking his nose through the gilded grille. ‘What is it, the bog?’

  ‘Clot,’ said Jack Hargreaves. ‘That’s the Crip. Dracula’s down there.’ He started chewing avidly at Henry’s filthy neck, until Henry gave him a punch that sent him rattling against the ironwork.

  ‘Yer mean . . . bodies?’ Henry’s eyes glowed with what might have been described as an unearthly light. ‘Bodies all rotting, with their eyes falling out an’ the flesh hanging off their bones, an’ skulls.’

  ‘Can we go down an’ get one out of the coffin, sir?’ asked Jack Hargreaves.

  ‘No,’ I said firmly.

  ‘Aw, sir, please. We wouldn’t do it no harm. We’d put it back, after.’

  ‘It’s unhygienic, shows no respect for the dead, and besides, the grille’s locked,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ said Jack Hargreaves, rather professionally. ‘Reckon you could pick that lock, Winterbottom?’

  ‘Try me.’

  But I shooed them on and got them distracted in brass-rubbing a knight in armour, to the sound of tearing rubbing-paper, and cries of ‘Stupid bastard’ and ‘You did that.’

  I prowled on; I couldn’t keep still in that place. It wasn’t just the cold. I thought I’d come prepared for that, with a quilted anorak and three sweaters. No, I kept having, not delusions, not even fears, but odd little anxieties . . . preoccupations. I had the conviction the walls weren’t vertical . . . or was it the floor, that seemed to slope down towards the middle of the nave? Certainly the floor was hollow; no one could walk on it and listen to the echo of his footsteps without realizing that. Then . . . the windows didn’t seem to be letting in as much light as they should. I kept going outside to check if the sky was getting cloudy, but it was still bright and sunny, thank God, and I went back feeling the better for it.

  Then I stared at the cross in a side-chapel. It just looked like two bits of wood nailed together. I mean, it was just two bits of wood nailed together; but though I’m not a religious sort, I tend to see any cross as a bit more than two bits of wood nailed together.

  And that smell. Or niff, as Henry would have it. It wasn’t strong, but it was everywhere; you never got it out of your nostrils. The only thing I can liken it to was when I got in a new lavatory-bowl at the shop; it had to be left for the sealant to dry overnight, so the builder stuffed wet paper down the hole, but the biting black smell of the sewer filled my shop and dreams all night.

  For a while, till lunch, the children made things better. There’s an atomic bomb of enthusiasm in a lively class of thirty-five let loose from school for the day. I could almost feel their vitality invading every part of the dark affronted silence. But, little by little, the silence absorbed it . . . Lunchtime was still happy, with the children asking what the big house was for. But they were curiously reluctant to get back to work afterwards, and then the grumbles started.

  ‘Miss, this Sellotape won’t stick!’

  ‘Sir, me pencil’s broken again.’

  Dorinda was a tower, a fury of strength, coursing round the church non-stop. I began to realize just how hard a good primary teacher can work. But the complaints began to overtake even her speed. Soon, in spite of both our efforts, only half the children were working; the rest were standing round in little dispirited groups.

  Then there was a god-awful scream from the chancel: one of the younger girls screaming, on and on. Dorinda ran, I ran. The child was standing tearing at her cheeks with her fingers, eyes shut and a noise issuing from her open mouth like a demented steam-whistle.

  ‘It’s a spider, miss. Behind that man’s head.’ They pointed to the recumbent effigy of the tenth Lord Tattersham, who had a smirk of dying satisfaction on his face, and who appeared to have been carved from some singularly pale and nasty Cheddar cheese.

  ‘Garn, only a spider . . .’ Henry flicked with his hand behind the tenth lord’s ear and the spider dropped to the floor. We all gaped; it was impressively huge. Henry raised his hobnailed boot . . .

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s just an ordinary spider – just got rather old and big – a grandspider, maybe!’

  There was a thin and nervous titter; then I picked up the spider and let it run up my anorak. ‘They’re very useful,’ I said. ‘If it wasn’t for them, the flies of the world would poison us all.’ I carried the spider out, saying encouragingly to him, ‘Come on, Eustace.’ It seemed important just then to dispel fear, discourage killing. When I got back, most of them were working, and the cheerful noise was back.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Dorinda. ‘You wouldn’t make a bad teacher, you know.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘But I am a good dealer. Eustace’ll fetch a pound for somebody’s stuffed spider collection.’ She looked as if she half believed me, then turned away laughing. That was good, too. Though I thought there was something a little shaky in her laugh.

  I went to check my pile of gear by the door. Cameras, gadget-bag. But also my first-aid kit and two big lanterns. I had come prepared for a siege. Two large thermos-flasks of coffee; a box of Mars bars. I hadn’t the slightest idea what I was expecting, but nothing good.

  A memorial on the wall caught my eye.

  TO THE MEMORY OF THOMAS DORE

  AN HONOURED AND PAINEFUL

  SCHOOLEMASTER

  LAY PREACHER AND BENEFACTOR OF THIS

  PARISH.

  HE PUBLICKLY REBUKED VICE AND

  DISCRETELY PRACTISED VIRTUE

  AND LEFT HIS INTIRE ESTATE

  TO BUY TRACTS FOR THE POOR.

  THIS MONUMENT WAS ERECTED BY

  PUBLIC SUBSCRIPTION

  AMONG HIS GRIEVING FRIENDS AND PUPILS

  MDCCX

  BLESSED ARE THEY THAT REST IN THE LORD

  There was the crash of a drawing-board, the tinkle of paperclips and a wail of ‘Oh, miss, he’s tore it!’

  ‘Thomas Dore, where art thou,’ I muttered. ‘We could do with some reinforcements.’

  But there was no crack of thunder in response, no rending of the tomb, only echoing cries of ‘Henry’s took my rubber, sir.’

  I did my utmost; I whizzed up and down with my flashgun and camera, taking pictures of everybody working; I gave out coffee, then followed up with a round of Mars bars. But more and more, in my rounds, I came across a scatter of work abandoned. And more and more I found children gathered miserably in the shelter of the porch, on any excuse: a stone in the shoe; the need for a loo; feeling faint, feeling sick. I ferried many across to the loos in the house. Their eyes caught the butterflies in the entrance-hall. The demands to go to the loo reached epidemic proportions as word of the butterflies got back; one would have thought cholera or dysentery was raging.

  In the end, I made a bargain with them. If they’d go back and finish their work and clear up nicely, I’d fix a quick trip round the butterflies.

  ‘That’s bribery,’ hissed Dorinda in the live-silkworm room.

  ‘Do you want to put on a good exhibition or not?’ I hissed back, reaching forward just in time to stop Henry stuffing three live silkworms into an empty cigarette packet (though all the display-cabinets appeared locked and sealed . . .).

  I must admit I was glad to see Tattersham church fading back into the dusk in my rear-view mirror as I herded the minibus towards home like an anxious sheepdog. I was just grateful that nothing really bad had happened . . . even though the minibus ahead seemed full of the fluttering shapes of swallowtail butterflies.

  They tumbled out of the transport happily enough in t
he school-yard. In fact, they’d sung the first two lines of old pop-songs over and over, all the way home, a sure sign of well-being.

  ‘Where’s he taking you tonight, miss?’ inquired Jack Hargreaves, loudly.

  ‘What do you mean?’ bridled Dorinda.

  ‘ ’e’s taking you to the flicks, ain’t he? Your feller? I mean, ’e’s not stingy . . . they’ve got Elvis on at the Roxy.’

  ‘It’s a cowboy film, miss – “Love me Tender”.’

  ‘Oh, it’s lovely, miss – he gets killed in the end,’ chorused the girls.

  ‘It’s dead wet,’ chorused the boys.

  ‘Let me run you home,’ I said to her tactfully, as she was about to explode.

  When I dropped her, I said, ‘What about old Elvis, then?’

  She invited me to a point-to-point at Meersden on Saturday; and it poured all afternoon. I can’t think of a worse punishment than that.

  There, the whole thing might have died. But it rained all Sunday as well, and I spent the time in my little darkroom, developing the photographs I’d taken in the church. They’d come out remarkably sharp, for flash, and I blew them up to ten-by-eight, to console her. They’d look quite nice round the classroom walls . . . the one thing I couldn’t make out was a face that appeared in one, peering round one of the tombs. It wasn’t my face, and it certainly wasn’t Dorinda’s. Far too ugly. And as it had a bald head, it certainly wasn’t one of the children’s.

  It was well back in the harsh shadows thrown by the flash, watching two of the girls rubbing a brass-lettered tablet set in the floor. The girls were very intent (or pretending to be very intent) on what they were doing, and were obviously quite unaware of being watched. The face didn’t look like a real person, somehow; I might have put it down as the face of an effigy from one of the tombs, except that the eyes were dark and alive and watching. It worried at my mind all the time I was printing and developing. I kept on going across to the print where it was hanging up to dry, and staring at the face; I think I was trying to reason it out of existence, as a trick of the flash on a piece of crumbling stonework. As a projection of my own eye and mind. But it looked . . . it looked, let’s face it, hungry and evil. I didn’t like the thought that I was making it up out of my own imagination; I’ve always had a down-to-earth trouble-free imagination.

  Anyway, I ran down to the school with the photographs on the Wednesday and the kids were pleased to see me, and so was Dorinda – and so, by a miracle, was the Headmistress. The kids had been busy, working from what they’d done in the church, and the lively results hung all over the walls. It appeared that as soon as they’d got back into the classroom, they’d come back to rumbustious life and produced the best stuff ever seen. So good that an inspector had been summoned. I was introduced to him: a pushy young man who went wild over my photographs and said it was seldom that a school manager took such an interest, and who went on about having the whole exhibition laid out in the foyer at County Hall. I wondered whether he was just angling to get a date with Dorinda, but his enthusiasm seemed genuine enough and had sent the Head into seventh heaven.

  I pointed out the strange watching head in the photograph. Dorinda insisted it was a trick of the light. But Jack Hargreaves said, ‘Yeah, sir, he was there. An old bloke. He didn’t say nothing. Just hung around in the shadders, watching the girls, dirty old sod. I thought ’e was the caretaker.’

  The Headmistress gave Dorinda a very funny look, and Dorinda went a bit pale. The Inspector changed the subject rather quickly, and went back to his praise of the drawings of cross-eyed cherubs and the very fine picture of a tomb that Henry was busy on. It had a mournful draped lady on top, in the Regency style, and the inscription:

  TO THE MEMORY OF MARY CRAIG

  A WOMAN OF EXEMPLARY PIETY AND

  DISCRETION

  WHO WAS CALLED HENCE AT THE EARLY AGE OF

  29

  YET HAVING IN AN EMINENT DEGREE ATTAINED

  THAT

  ‘You’ll have to hurry and finish this,’ said the Inspector.

  ‘Can’t sir – this is as far as we copied. We had to rush at the end.’

  ‘Pity,’ said the Inspector. ‘It certainly can’t be hung up in County Hall in that unfinished state.’

  I saw a look pass from Henry to Jack Hargreaves; I thought it was a look of pure disgust. How wrong I was, I was only to discover later.

  On Monday morning at the shop, the phone rang, sounding like trouble. It was the Head, and even over the phone I could tell she was tight-lipped and shaking with fury.

  ‘You’d better get down here straight away, Mr Ashden. I knew this church business would lead to nothing but trouble. I feel I must call a meeting of the managers, but I think you are entitled to be consulted first.’

  I covered the mile to school in record time. The Head was waiting just inside the entrance, and pounced immediately. She was tight-lipped and shaking. She led me to the hall where Dorinda’s exhibition had been hung before going to County Hall. She gestured a quivering hand at the big central exhibit. It was Henry and Jack Hargreaves’s drawing of the Regency tomb; the draped lady on top still looked like a wilting lettuce-leaf, but the inscription had been completed:

  TO THE MEMORY OF MARY CRAIG

  A WOMAN OF EXEMPLARY PIETY AND

  DISCRETION

  WHO WAS CALLED HENCE AT THE EARLY AGE OF

  29

  YET HAVING IN AN EMINENT DEGREE ATTAINED

  THAT MATURITY

  WHICH CONSISTETH NOT IN LENGTH OF DAYS

  DIED MDCCLXXX

  Unfortunately, other words had been scrawled over this chaste message, huge words in a wild hand. Words like ‘whore’ and ‘strumpet’ and ‘doxy’.

  ‘That,’ said the Head, ‘is what comes of ill-advised expeditions.’ She led me to her office. The Inspector was there, rather white round the gills in the face of such massive female wrath. And Dorinda, who if anything looked rather red in the face, and defiant.

  ‘Have you faced the lads . . . with this?’ I asked.

  ‘Certainly not.’

  ‘Can I see them?’ I asked, as calmly as I could. ‘I think it might stop us making fools of ourselves.’

  ‘What do you mean, Mr Ashden?’

  ‘I mean these are not words commonly found in the twentieth-­century child’s vocabulary.’

  The Inspector nodded; he was no fool. The Head picked up that nod, and Henry was duly summoned.

  ‘Henry,’ I said. ‘Suppose I was to send you out for a strumpet . . . where would you go to get one?’

  Henry looked at our assembled faces warily; too old a hand not to smell trouble coming a mile off. But then a look of genuine bafflement came over his face. ‘Music-shop?’ he offered.

  ‘That’s a trumpet, Henry.’

  ‘Cake-shop?’ A flicker of a grin crossed his face.

  ‘That’s crumpet, Henry.’

  ‘Dunno, sir.’ His face was utterly still again.

  ‘So, Henry, what would you call . . . a woman . . . who took money for going with men?’

  Henry’s face froze in a look of pure horror. Never had such words been uttered in this holy of holies.

  ‘You may answer, Henry,’ said the Head, without moving her lips at all.

  ‘A . . . tart, miss. On the game. Or a scrubber.’ The whites were showing all round his eyes.

  ‘So if you didn’t know what a strumpet was, Henry, why did you write it on your picture of the tomb?’

  ‘Cos it was on the tomb when Jack an’ I got there, Saturday afternoon, sir. We didn’t know whether to copy it or not, but we thought it must be official.’

  I beat the Inspector to our cars by a full ten yards . . .

  ‘Never in my forty years as a servant of God have I known such a thing,’ boomed the Reverend Ernest Lacey. ‘One opens one’s church to schools for the benefit of the community as a whole, and this happens. Children today . . .’

  ‘Can you suggest,’ I said, ‘how children today could pos­sibly
have reached up that high? I mean, is there a ladder available that they could have used?’

  The young police-sergeant whom Lacey had brought with him nodded thoughtfully.

  ‘There is no ladder,’ said the Reverend Lacey. ‘They must have brought one with them.’

  ‘On their bicycles?’

  ‘That’s an adult’s work, sir,’ said the sergeant. ‘You can tell by the sweep of their arm, in the lettering.’ He stood up on a pew, and stretched up. ‘Big fellow – almost as big as me. That’s adults, Reverend.’

  ‘Disgusting.’

  ‘Henry,’ I said. ‘Was that bald man here again, when you came?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Henry, very chastened. ‘He was hanging about, peeping at us. Didn’t say nothing. I thought he might stop us, but he didn’t say nothing. He’s only really interested in girls . . . He was a rum ’un, though.’ Henry blushed delightfully, and stopped.

  ‘Why, Henry?’

  ‘Can I whisper, sir?’ He drew close. ‘Jack Hargreaves reckoned he were only wearing a shirt . . . a raggy shirt, all dirty. Reckon he was one o’ them, sir.’

  ‘One of what, Henry?’ asked the Head in dire tones.

  ‘An escaped lunatic, miss,’ said Henry, dissimulating. ‘A nutter.’

  ‘Nutter or not,’ said the sergeant, ‘if it’s adults, it’s a crime. Now if you’ll pardon me, Reverend, I’ll take evidence. Then you can get the place cleaned up.’ He went to the tomb and began to scrape some of the black paint of the vile lettering off with a knife, into a little envelope. I noticed the paint could not have been dry; it came off the white marble too easily. I saw the sergeant wrinkle his nose.

  We left him and drove back to school, the Head emitting sighs all the way, like a dragon cooling down after breathing fire; and Dorinda making subtle little self-righteous noises that seemed to be demanding an apology from her superior.

  My shop-bell rang while I was brewing coffee. It turned out to be the young uniformed sergeant from the church. I offered him a cup; he drifted round my shop looking at things.

  ‘It’s all paid for, sergeant,’ I said, half sharply, half a joke.

  ‘That’s all right, sir,’ he said soothingly. ‘I’m into old things a bit myself. That’s a nice Viennese regulator . . . the trade price is twenty pounds, I see.’