Antique Dust

by Robert Westall

  She crawled out of sight beneath an overhang, but I could still hear her shouting to the child.

  ‘Hang on, Ronny! Mummy’s coming . . . it’s all right, darling.’

  With a groan, against all sense, I swung myself over the edge after her.

  Within six feet, my foot slipped and I nearly fell. Every trick I knew, I used. I found a bit of a chimney, and went down it, with my back braced against one side, and my feet braced out against the other. It worked, just, till I got to that overhang, and there I could see no way over at all. I heard her call, desperately.

  ‘Hurry, hurry, help me! I’m stuck.’

  But there comes a moment when you face stark reality. When all hope and faith and courage run away like sand through your fingers, in the face of the inevitable rock. I knew that I was trapped: a step forward was a step into nothingness; a step into death. In spite of her cries, I had to go back up. Somehow I’d missed the way she’d taken. Well, if I got back up, I could try again. I’d be no good to her as a broken heap of blood and bone at the foot of the cliff . . .

  A lot easier said than done. I had already come a long way on footholds no mountaineer in his senses would have used. For a long time, I could not move up at all. And then I got out my handkerchief and wiped the slick of mud carefully off what looked like the least crazy of the footholds. Then I wrapped the hanky round my fingers to give them extra dry-traction and heaved up with all my strength.

  My foot slipped; then, on the very edge, held. I felt muscles crack, felt my lungs suck breath like a dying man, felt the pain grow in my shoulder-blade like seeping acid.

  And I was there; I’d gained two feet in height and I was exhausted, trembling in every limb. I breathed deep to quieten my middle-aged heart, and started wiping the next handhold with my handkerchief, looking with hate at the Coke-can and crisp-bags wedged safe, indestructible, within a foot of my nose. They served only to remind me that I was a middle-aged bag of heavy flesh and frail bone . . . Steady, old lad!

  And that was how it went on. Twice I despaired; twice I prayed to a God I hadn’t prayed to since I left school. He must have heard me. Because somehow I was lying on the sodden grass of the cliff-top, waiting for a heart to quieten that I thought would never quieten again. Listening, listening for her, and only hearing the endless shouting of the lighthouse.

  In the end, I got to my feet; my hip-bones ached, my knees shook, my ankles turned under me. In the dusk, the lighthouse had begun to flash. The fog was thicker, turning the light into a faint, fuzzy aureole which I thankfully made for, staying well clear of the cliff-edge. She must be dead . . . perhaps the police would listen to me now. I felt a dreadful sense of guilt at being still alive, and yet overwhelmingly thankful it wasn’t me who’d died.

  There was a tall figure, standing on the next rise of the cliff-top. I shouted . . .

  She turned. Pale blur of face, and blowing hair.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she called.

  ‘Are you?’ I said, staggering up to her, full of thankfulness.

  ‘Yes. It’s quite easy if you know the way.’

  ‘Where’s . . . the boy?’

  ‘He wasn’t there. You were right. It must have been a gull. Did you get lost? What can we do now?’

  ‘I can’t go . . . much further . . . I’m knackered. Let’s have something to drink . . . if that café’s still open. We can . . . sit and think.’

  She walked alongside, silent, obedient. But I could feel her pain, her terror, mounting again, coming to me through her silence.

  The café was open, thank God; though the owner had taken in his balls and buckets and whirling windmills, and seemed reluctant to serve me, glancing at his watch.

  ‘Two teas, please!’

  He gave me a curious glance, then poured out two teas from a well-stewed pot, adding fresh hot water and punishing the soggy tea-leaves with a spoon. I turned to her, called out over my shoulder, ‘Do you take sugar?’

  ‘Half a spoonful,’ she said, low and weary. I spooned in half for her, and three spoonfuls for me. Then I looked up and caught the proprietor watching me, like I was some kind of nut-case. In fact he stared at me so strangely that I looked down at myself, to see what he was staring at.

  My trench-coat gave the answer. One of the lapels was torn, and the whole thing was plastered with drying and cracking grey slime. I must have looked like a tramp. I paid him hurriedly in case he thought I couldn’t afford to pay at all, and carried the teas to the table, where the mist was starting to lay a dew on the bare pine boards.

  ‘Look at the state I got myself into,’ I said. ‘You haven’t got a spot of it on you . . .’

  ‘I knew the way,’ she said, with a weary, twisted half-smile that made my heart turn over, knackered though I was.

  I drank my tea; at least it was hot and sweet, and my mouth was like a desert. I drank it so enthusiastically that it ran scalding down my chin. She didn’t touch hers; just sat staring at it.

  ‘Don’t you want it?’ I asked. ‘Can I get you something else?’

  She shook her head, her face hidden by her hair. ‘I can’t touch a thing. I’m too worried about Ronny. Would you like my cup as well?’

  ‘Not sweet enough for me. I’ll get myself another.’

  The proprietor was staring at me more fixedly than ever; probably wondering what a tramp like me was doing talking to someone as beautiful as she was, at this time of night. I carried my cup back; I’d bought her some chocolate, which I laid beside her cup. ‘You must eat,’ I said gently. ‘You must keep your strength up.’

  But she just shrugged. I said, ‘Look, we can’t stay here all night. We can’t search in the dark. These cliffs will be a deathtrap now. Are you staying at an hotel? Shall I take you back there? We could ring your husband . . .’

  She looked at me very straight, very close. She leaned nearer to me, across the table, than she ever had before. ‘I have no husband,’ she said. Her words had a kind of faint promise in them; her scent, that sea-like scent, came to me on the wind. ‘I have no hotel, either. You’ll have to find me one.’

  I had a vision: of finding her an hotel; of helping her up the stairs of some near-empty place, her leaning against me with helpless weariness. Of taking her in my arms, in some bare, cheerless bedroom . . . I looked up. She knew. She didn’t seem to mind. Then she leaned further towards me . . . reached out a hand and nearly put it on my wrist.

  ‘Look – there’s one more place I think he might be. Can we just look there? After that, I’ll know it’s hopeless for tonight. You’re right: these cliffs are a death-trap in the dark. If he’s not there, I’ll come with you . . . we can do it your way. I’m past caring what I do . . . you can do what you like . . . only come with me to this one place, first . . .’

  The proprietor came out and began putting up the shutters of the café, blotting out, one by one, the bands of lamplight that fell across the empty table and us. My loins tingled with a cold, crazy excitement.

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Let’s go. Where is this place?’

  ‘We’ll have to be careful,’ she said. ‘It’s very steep and very dark.’

  As I was about to rise, there was the distant sound of a car coming very fast down the Bill towards us.

  ‘Hey,’ I said, settling back on the hard, damp wooden chair. ‘That looks like somebody in a hurry. Help at last?’

  The car headlights swung across her. But there was no trace of fresh hope in her face; only a deepening sense of loneliness.

  The car drove to the car park, and stopped, cut its lights. I wondered whether it could be the police; it was a big car, a Zephyr, the kind the police sometimes use. Two people got out; one each side, the way the police do. But it was too dark to tell if they were police or not. Their footsteps on the rock came towards us, drawn by the last lights of the café. Then I heard their voices: women’s voices, rather urgent, calling to each other. They switched on torches, to help them across the uneven ground.

  Policew
omen? I didn’t think they let policewomen drive the big cars.

  She rose and said, ‘It’s not help; let’s go.’ Rather urgently.

  ‘Sit down. This won’t take a minute; they might be willing to help. They’ve got torches.’ Reluctantly, she sat down again.

  The women came up to us; sat down at the table on either side of us. One biggish woman; one tall, but slender. I looked at the big one’s face, a request on my lips.

  ‘What the hell have you been up to?’ said Dorinda. ‘Just look at the state of you.’ She reached across a proprietorial hand, and began to wipe my lapel with her loose glove. The touch of her hand was heavy with . . . anger?

  I frowned. She looked different . . . very solid, somehow. The full curve of her cheekbone; the bright red of her lipstick; the yellow fat glint of her big gold ear-ring. She seemed some­how . . . more solid than solid, more real than real.

  I looked the other way . . . Claire, Claire with her big brown lovely eyes full of worry for me. I remember thinking the guy who’d married beautiful Claire must be a lucky man. She too seemed different; more solid than solid, more real than real. And in the cold night, a breath of real warmth came off her.

  Why did they feel more warm and solid . . . than Mrs Smyth­son? Just the warmth of the car, while we’d been wandering around in the cold?

  I looked at Mrs Smythson, starting introductions.

  ‘Dorinda . . . I’d like you to meet . . .’ I stopped.

  Mrs Smythson wasn’t there. Only an empty gap on to the night. She didn’t get up, or walk away . . . but she wasn’t there any more, and the night-wind blew through the gap where she’d been, across her cold un-drunk cup of tea, and the red wrapper of the uneaten chocolate.

  ‘Where are you?’ I said, stupidly.

  Dorinda grabbed me by the hand. ‘Geoff, Geoff, pull yourself together. Who the hell are you supposed to be talking to?’ I looked from one to the other. Dorinda looked outraged; Claire looked very, very worried for me.

  ‘You’re not going to believe this,’ I said, ‘but I think I’ve spent the last three hours with a ghost.’

  Because it all came back to me in a flash. The way she’d got me to open the car-door for her. The way she’d never touched me. The way she hadn’t drunk her tea. The way the policeman had looked out of the police-station window . . . he must have heard me babbling about what seemed to him a totally empty car. And the way she’d climbed down a cliff where there were no footholds . . . a cliff that was death to descend . . . she had been luring me to my death and she’d damned near done it. If I hadn’t been a wily old mountaineer, I’d be a pile of human rubbish washing at the cliff-foot.

  And then the hair stood up all over my head.

  ‘You can come out now, sergeant,’ called Dorinda, arrogantly, commandingly. I heard the Zephyr’s door open and shut again; the heavy beat of a constabulary tread. ‘He’s stopped being potty, I think – for the moment,’ she added reassuringly.

  ‘I’m not sure potty’s the word, madam.’ It was my old enemy from the police-station.

  ‘Sergeant Yarwood rang us about you – he was worried. So we came as fast as we could. Good job he did,’ Dorinda added, ‘with you sitting alone at a table with two cups of tea, babbling to yourself.’

  ‘There’s a bit more to it than that,’ said the sergeant, taking the empty chair and blocking out the night, comfortably. ‘You see, there was a Mrs Smythson. She used to come here for her holidays, most years. And she did have a son called Ronny – a little lad with red hair. They were a regular sight round here – they loved it, for some reason best known to themselves. The husband was never with them, though – too busy he always was, to come on holiday.’

  ‘And the child drowned . . .’ said Claire sadly.

  ‘No, madam – as far as I know, the lad’s as right as you or me, only living in California – he’ll be ten by now.’

  ‘But . . .’ said Dorinda.

  ‘But the husband and wife . . . the husband had a lot of fancy women – a company director, I think – you know the sort. And he’d send his wife and kid down here for a holiday, and then he’d make hay while the sun shone, back in London. Well, a lady got her hooks into him and it seems she was too good a chance to turn down. An American woman – daughter of one of those big financial empires. She came to him with a lot in her hand. But seemingly she couldn’t have children herself – she wanted the boy as well – Ronny. And one morning they came and took the kid from his bed early, while the wife was walking on the Bill here. When she got back, the kid was gone, with them. On his way to America and never coming back.’

  ‘There are courts for that kind of thing,’ said Dorinda indignantly.

  ‘I believe money talks in the American courts, madam. Anyway, she wasn’t that sort of lady – not a fighter. She . . . went out of her mind, madam. Thought the kid was lost on Portland Bill, where they’d been happy. She must have come to us a dozen times. We took her seriously at first; then we made inquiries, and it all came out. But she wouldn’t believe it – kept on coming to us, asking us to help her search.’

  ‘She should have been put in hospital,’ said Dorinda.

  ‘That’s not for the police to say, madam. We’re not in the habit of putting people in hospital. And the social services couldn’t do anything either . . . she wasn’t a danger to anybody else, and they couldn’t prove she was a danger to herself – till she’d done it.’

  ‘Done what?’ asked Claire in a low voice; though we all knew the answer.

  ‘Drowned herself from this very place, three years ago. Her body was washed up in a little cove that way . . .’ He jerked his head towards the direction I’d come from.

  I remembered the faint scent of her perfume . . . fog and salt and seaweed.

  ‘We’ve had a lot of hoax calls since then, madam, about the little boy with red hair and a blue anorak. Always from men . . . some young . . . some quite middle-aged.’ He looked at me.

  ‘She must be very lonely,’ said Claire.

  ‘Aye, madam. Though I don’t know why she should be.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Dorinda.

  The sergeant leaned a little closer. ‘This is off the record, madam. Between you and me. It wouldn’t do to have it appearing on any police report . . . more than me job’s worth. But I have a sort of responsibility for the Bill, madam, when I’m on duty. Not official – but I was born here, and I’ve known every nook and cranny since I was a lad. So when there’s trouble up here, they tend to send for me.’

  ‘And?’ said Dorinda, impatiently.

  ‘And . . .’ said the sergeant, ‘there’s always been accidents on the Bill – it’s a dicey place even in daylight in summer . . . people fall, people get drowned, once in a while. But there’s been a lot more fallen and been drowned these last three years. And nearly all men, barring one little girl, and that was a true accident, for her mother was with her. And very much the same kind of men, madam . . . decent fellers who’ve lost their way a bit, and come to stare out to sea. Going bankrupt . . . broken marriages . . . fellers on their own. Is your business all right, sir?’

  ‘My business is flourishing,’ I said, shortly.

  The sergeant cast an eye at Dorinda, and Dorinda had the grace to flinch.

  ‘Well, you’ve got him back safe and sound this time, madam. And he’s as sane as you or me, I do assure you. You’d just best look after him, that’s all.’

  And for once, Dorinda had nothing to say.

  The Ugly House

  I suppose I am growing old. All my restlessness seems to have gone, and I miss it. I still watch the girls go by, but I stay to finish my beer now. I suppose I am happy with Dorinda. My kids are growing up, and I think of their problems instead of my own.

  The separate shop in town is gone, sold at a good profit. But I still sell antiques at Barlborough Hall; the servants’ hall is my patch now, and Dorinda respects it. With our weekend conferences and dinners for rich Americans, we prosper and ar
e busy.

  Until the Rotary lunch last week, I thought the ghosts were gone, too. (Rotary is the one thing I still bother to keep up in town.) And there I met a little balding chap from the Council called Dave Dobson, ordinary as pie, you would have thought. But odd things still happen to people, even though they no longer seem to happen to Geoff Ashden.

  This was the story he told me in his own words.

  ‘It’s incredible,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what you people have been doing.’

  ‘There’s been problems,’ said Tetley.

  I glared at him; Tetley had problems all right. A thinning-hair problem that wouldn’t be solved by combing a few greasy strands over a lard-white pate. A weight problem that creased his suit-jacket dramatically, now he had it buttoned against a biting Essex wind. An eating-lunch-at-his-desk problem; egg on his green zippered cardigan. God, don’t let me stay in local government as long as Tetley . . .

  But, to the problem in hand. The unfinished approach-road. To the hypermarket that was due to open in two months’ time. Already the hypermarket’s red-brick, blank-eyed bulk dwarfed the thatched roofs of Besingfield. If it opened without a completed approach-road, it’d choke the High Street with cars. And choke the Council with complaints. All of which would land on my desk.

  ‘There’s your problem,’ said Tetley. ‘The Ugly House.’ My eye followed the smooth sweep of the approach-road through the rubble and grass of neat bites of demolition. To where it stopped in the middle of nowhere, at a pair of closed gates with glassless iron lamps on each gatepost. Behind, the Ugly House had a kind of cramped solitariness, like the last stump in a toothless mouth. Stone, so blackened you couldn’t tell what kind of stone. But each carefully masoned block was huge. There was a crumbling, illegible date above the front door. The three-storey house leaning dramatically leftwards, on baulks of timber like crutches. It had a miserable sooty grandeur, like the lodge of an ancient hospital or Victorian mortuary.