Come to Dust

MOVING slowly on account of her arthritis, the gray-haired Princess climbed her castle’s marble staircase. She had charming blue eyes, a tender expression, a weak chin; and in spite of her ancient jewelry and new mourning, both elaborate, she looked more like the wife of an English vicar than of an Italian nobleman.

At the top of the stairs she paused and looked out a narrow window. Immediately below was the village, a cream-colored honeycomb of buildings enclosed by the castle’s stalwart walls. Outside the walls were sloping vineyards roofed over by tightly woven leaves. Beyond was the bright green campagna, dotted here and there by terra-cotta ruins of the kind that made nineteenth-century tourists fill their Journals with sincerely pompous references to the Insignificance of the Works of Man as compared with those of the Almighty. In the distance glittered the Mediterranean. Over the entire scene late afternoon sunlight lay thick as cream over a black-market dessert. How do people manage without sun, thought the Princess, vaguely remembering the pale springs, yellow summers, dark winters of her youth in East Anglia.

Another shallow marble staircase led to a tiled landing. Behind a studded wooden door was a spiral of stone steps to a lumber room that was part of a nest of attics stretching the length and breadth of the castle.

Here, framed in the birds’ nests that punctuated the eaves, were the elements of an antique shop: dim canvases from which there peered an army of smiling Madonnas and cupids; a few swords and halberds (most of these had been liberated as souvenirs by the German Army); urns around whose lips heavy wreaths of fruit still ripened, minus here a leaf, there a branch; parchment-bound books, and shawls over whose original patterns had been superimposed those designed by industrious moths. Packs of cards, broken dolls, desiccated fans, floated on the surface of silver rivers of dust; and at the further end of the room, indicated by golden fingers of sunshine, were massive trunks bought long ago by people who never envisaged air travel for themselves.

In these trunks, with which footmen now buried in Abyssinia or North Africa had once dealt tenderly, were rugs, boots, saddles, gloves, cutlery — several generations of squirrels’ hoards, now likely to prove useful to the villagers below who had been plundered by the Germans and were still uncompensated by their government.

Thirty-five years ago the Princess, who was then young Mary East the schoolmaster’s daughter, had ransacked less picturesque attics on behalf of school White Elephant Stalls or vicarage Sales of Work.

the young girl had sometimes felt it wasn’t right the local poor should depend on others’ leavings for coal and comfort; the middle-aged woman often thought it was wrong that the local poor should, after a lifetime of overwork, depend for survival upon her willingness to share with them a fortune neither she nor her husband had earned.

Now that her husband was dead, the Princess did not know what to do with the thoughts he had left buzzing in her brain like bluebottles in a meat safe. Sighing, she went to a window and with her forefinger drew patterns in the dust that rimmed it.

A jeep was rushing along the main road to Rome. With her mind’s eye the Princess saw the buckled combat boots, the green fatigues, the rangy gumchewing figures good-naturedly distributing caramels for junior, cigarettes for papa. Mama’s and sister’s turn would come later.

Sighing again the Princess went to a heavy leather trunk that reminded her of the days when she had learned to eat off gold plate, to waltz on marble floors.

Shaking her head and muttering to herself—a habit that had grown on her since her husbands death — the Princess heaved up the massive lid. Rugs to the right, boots to the left — what a lot these old trunks contained; motoring goggles well, after all, one never can tell what’s going to come in useful; a fencing mask — I must say I can’t think of any immediate use for that; a box of tin soldiers, mostly chipped — dear me what regular magpies they were; a chamber pot—and cracked too, well really; six rosaries—they’ll be glad of those, poor souls; a leather jacket — just right for Giuseppe, excellent; Aunt Angelica’s water colors - no wonder she had to be put in a home, though as to that, look at William Blake; a stuffed parrot— no, one must draw the line somewhere; a thick rug — and the moths seem to have been quite forbearing too; binoculars — one never knows, maybe the Military Government . . . good gracious, w hat on earth is this?

This was a shabby leather writing case won by Mary East more than thirty years ago, as first prize in a croquet tournament. Gazing at it unrecognizingly (“can a mother’s tender care cease towards the child she bare, yes she may forgetful be”) the Princess thought vaguely of green grass, the click of ball against mallet, the whiteness of a starched blouse buckled into the tight belt of a black serge skirt.

As its lid was raised, the writing case gave off a faint smell of mildew. Inside, crouched like a beaten animal prepared for a last spring, was a soft mass of letters, notebooks, programs. Foreign stamps overlapped each other with an out-of-date disregard for frontiers: long-pressed primroses slithered from between the India paper pages of broken-backed prayer books; a Scripture Reading Association Leaflet, heavily underlined in pencil, had got mixed up with a soiled dance program to which was still attached a pale pink scrap of blunted pencil; from a split snapshot stared an English cottage, its windows all eyes; a paper packet of hairpins marked a long-neglected place in Littlejohn’s Shorter Latin. Idly, the Princess opened this book. An excerpt from Julius Caesar. Our men, she read, our men crossed the river (successfully), our men stormed the fort (successfully), the garrison surrendered to our (successful) men. Nostri nostri nostri. How she had disliked our men, she remembered, her half-forgotten childhood assaulting her and with it the knowledge that one day, and that not so far distant, she would die and be put in a box in the earth.

2

PERFUNCTORILY as a cook who has suddenly lost interest in her work, the Princess stirred the faded, softened papers. As she did so a sheet that had retained more crackliness than the rest attracted her attention. Headed by the printed address of a now obsolete Workingman’s Educational Society it was marked “Paris 1920“ in neatly penciled script. Having been in Paris then— her first job that had been — the Princess looked at it curiously.

Beneath the neat heading the writing was small and erratic, the letters pressing into each other incontinently as people in a queue. “Destroy R’s letters,” she read, and again “Destroy R’s letters, underlined. “Give impression of being happy. But tell papa have been unwell. Return library books. Give my new shoes to the maid. Leave no proof. Give possessions away beforehand, thus avoiding having to make Will. Make sure R. cannot be blamed.”

Flushed with shock the Princess sat heavily down on a near-by trunk. Absently she stretched a jeweled finger in a patch of receding sunshine.

Unconscious of doing so, she slid her feet out of their buckled slippers. That was better. All the same she didn’t feel well, she didn’t feel well at all. A shiver ran through her. Her soft chin began to tremble. People could say what they liked, there was a lot to be said for the old Indian custom of immolating the widow on her husband’s funeral pyre. Fumbling for the lorgnette she did not need,

the Princess looked again at the sheet of paper.

Immediately, she saw her nineteen-year-old self: a prosperous French family’s English Miss, angular, morbidly scrupulous, blushing easily. Felt-hatted, serge-coated, she emerged from the tall gray house in the Rue de Bellechasse and led her sailor-suited charges, Aline and André, to the Luxembourg gardens. Both dead now, thought the Princess, pressing her fingertips against her forehead. Aline had had what is called a natural death — in childbirth: André an unnatural one at the hands of the Gestapo. With a pang the Princess remembered André’s thin neck and knobbly knees. He had always asked too many questions for the comfort of the adults around him. He would come to a bad end, they said. The only person capable of managing him had been his grown brother, Roger: Roger, the R. whose let letters Mary East had intended destroying before she killed herself.

What a banal story it had been: the young foreign governess in love with her employer’s eldest son, the flashing young man returned from Military Service for an interlude of spoiling before entering papa’s business and marrying papa’s partner’s pretty daughter.

Although she was now in mourning for another man, a far better man than Roger, a man to whom she had been entirely devoted and who had made her happy for twenty-five years, the Princess could not prevent this paper scrawled with her adolescent writing from troubling her by its record of the worst personal anguish she had ever known. And in view of the fact this anguish had nearly killed her, it was repulsive to the Princess to realize she could no longer visualize Roger. What had Roger been like, as a person?

Slumped in the attic of her Italian castle, the middle-aged Englishwoman fought with her dulled memory to resurrect a French boy who had, unknown to her, been killed several years ago, in Syria.

At first, she could seize only on details. Roger’s Aunt Henriette—who had to be humored because she might make him her heir — had given him a particularly ugly tie over which he and Mary had spent precious time laughing. Whenever Roger raised his eyebrows disdainfully in the course of a political discussion with his father, the latter flew into a rage and addressed his son as “Monsieur.” Roger wore a signet ring and was very fond of spaghetti. Roger got easily excited about long past law-cases. ... The Princess drew a deep breath. It was no good. None of these details amounted to anything. The handsome person, the intransigent personality, all that had been essentially Roger was gone, leaving her only a recollection of the grief he had caused her.

He had loved her, that much she did remember, and had wanted her to become his mistress and remain his mistress after he was married. 11 is parents had set him up in an apartment of his own. Day after day Mary had waited for the telephone call that might prove kinder than the previous one. No air-raid siren subsequently a fleeted her as those telephone calls had done. And even when the call came she had had to lower her voice if anyone came into the room alongside, to disguise her meaning if anyone crossed the vestibule. How angry this had made Roger, how bitterly he had enjoyed provoking her to cry “When shall I see you?” He never remembered the five times she hadn’t said it, only the sixth time when she had. Small, black, ambiguous as the Delphic oracle, the telephone became a third person in their lives, a menacing, distorting, misinterpreting third person who almost taught Mary to hate a world she had until then viewed with extreme welcomeness.

Neither upbringing nor temperament had led Mary to consider suicide a good method of solving the insoluble. But one night her longing for Roger combined with the misery his sarcasm had provoked to drive her to take an overdose of sleeping pills. Unfortunately her constitution was excellent. Having overslept she awoke, dizzy and petulant, only to provide Roger’s mother with an opportunity to jeer at the younger generation. People don’t want to work nowadays.

Roger was married. Mary attended the ceremony

—and was too busy keeping Aline and André in order to give way to her wretchedness. All she could, and did, do in subsequent weeks was to exteriorize her unhappiness by dressing somberly as a black beetle. But, at last, on one of those spring days when music seems to rise from the ground, perfume to drop from the trees, she went out with her black shirtwaist changed for a white one. In the Luxembourg gardens, where she had so often waited for Roger, her pallor and freshness attracted a stranger, a Serbian student, who whispered ardent compliments into her quickly turnedaway cars. This was the last straw. Her white shirtwaist appeared to her in the guise of an infidelity. Having quit her job she took the first employment that offered, which happened to be that of Lady’s Companion to an American dowager bound for Florence. And it was here that she was espied — an earnest, straw-hatted figure poring over a Baedeker by the unworldly Prince who chose her as a gifted amateur chooses a dingy canvas, knowing how lovely it will be when cleaned and repaired. Trained by unkindness, she was an ideal receptacle for kindness. An exceptionally happy marriage ensued.

The afternoon sunlight had vanished. But still the Princess sat on the attic trunk. For the first time, it occurred to her that it was strange she had never thought of killing herself for lack of the husband she had loved with a love so much stronger than had been her passion for Roger. With a sigh she folded away the paper and, putting her feet back in their buckled slippers, began to count the blankets for which she had come here. Then she ambled do downstairs.

From the landing windows she could see the bright lights of Rome’s seven hills glittering across the plain. The crickets were beginning their evenings gossip. From the garden rose the smell of tobacco flowers. Roger was vanished, her husband was absent. What remained, for her?

Blankets, muttered the Princess, as she climbed down the last marble staircase. They need more blankets than I’ve got. No use sitting about in mourning while people need blankets. Who said that? Not Roger, certainly. Then it must have been her husband. Guido had never believed in mourning.