The Unsettled Dust Read Online Free PDF Page A

driving more than forty miles each way, to discover why still no action seemed to have been taken on my memo of two years before.
    I put on all my thickest garments, descended, looked in the cold state rooms for the sisters, failed to find them, and decided simply to depart as had been agreed the previous night. As I drove away in my Mini, I observed my wake of dust with more conscious care. There certainly was a cloud of it, a rare sight nowadays in Britain, but I still found it hard to believe that all the self-renewing, perennial dust of Clamber Court came from the two drives, long though they were.
    I noticed that the water in the bowl of the huntsman fountain  was patched with ice, though the jets still spurted frigidly upwards and sideways. The immaculate fountain was a symbol of the whole property: cold but kempt, as one might say. And one could only suppose that the responsibility and burden lay upon Miss Agnes Brakespear. Nobody who lacks direct knowledge of such a task can know how heavy it is in the conditions of today. I, with my increasing professional experience in such concerns, thought I could understand how irritating Olive Brakespear’s attitude might be to Agnes Brakespear. Olive still behaved, however diminished her force, as if Clamber Court maintained itself; still took the house, in however reduced a degree, at its own valuation when built. The struggle lay with Agnes; and no doubt the better part of the nation owed her a debt, and others like her. All the same, I knew which of the sisters was the one to whom my greatest debt was owed. I thought sophistically that there would be little purpose in keeping up Clamber Court unless someone had at least an inkling of the style associated with dwelling there. It was a sentiment of a kind often to be discovered in the Fund’s own literature. Olive Brakespear also served. Still, it seemed hard that dedicated Agnes should be additionally encumbered with so much dust. The cold wind blew it around me. It penetrated cracks in the bodywork, however shut the windows.
    I drove towards the little house which young Hand had leased beside one of the broken-down locks. It had been unoccupied for years, having neither gas nor electricity, neither water, except from the river, nor a road; so that Hand did not have to pay very much for it, which was just as well, as the Fund was all too heavily committed in other directions on his behalf. I had to leave my car by the roadside and cross two freezing fields by a muddy path. Hand and a group of six or eight other youthful enthusiasts were frying bacon on a primus stove while the wind whistled through the broken windows. A row of Hounsfield beds, all unmade after having been slept in, was almost the only approach to furniture. The party seemed to be dressed entirely in garments from those places known as ‘surplus stores’. In every way, it was an odd background for a project under the auspices of the Historic Structures Fund, though no doubt it had a certain pioneering value in its own way.
    Unfortunately, I arrived considerably later than the hour we had agreed; though this did not surprise me, as I had always said that the time insisted on by Hand was far too early, especially as it was still winter – officially and in every other way. They were sarcastic about my lateness, and they were hardly of the type to appreciate my concern with the worrying problem of the dust; which, therefore, I did not even mention.
    I shall say little more of the Bovil Restoration Project: partly because most of the details are already well known (at least among those likely to be interested in them), and have been the subject of an exhaustive Report, edited by Hand himself (though I myself think an independent editor would have been better); and more because it is my sojourn at Clamber Court that I am describing, upon which the Project impinged hardly at all. The two parts of my life at that time were almost in watertight compartments, to