The Man Who Wanted To Smell Books. Elspeth Davie
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she lifted her head and gazed, without hatred, up the steep stairs towards the attic. They noticed then what they had never seen before – the extraordinary determination of her chin, so like the chins in all the framed photos of the house, but now to be seen jutting out with a witch-like ruthlessness which outdid all the rest.
‘Sell or burn.’ She murmured these words, as she gently closed the door behind her. Less than a week ago it would have seemed as though the devil himself had spoken, but now they stood around savouring them, listening for more. But there was silence in the house, except for the sly creaking of the bed as Edith climbed into it again.
The auctioneer’s men started to work early the next afternoon. The gaps in corridors and cupboards widened behind them as they tramped about, and great spaces opened out in the rooms whose surfaces had already been smoothed of ornament. They worked slowly and cautiously, half expecting that the inmates of the house, who stood about crossing items off lists, would change their minds, or stampede to the front steps to say a last goodbye. But there was no interruption, and when they came to the attic they had the place to themselves.
Downstairs, the family – all five of them – were sitting round the table in the dining-room. There was nothing on the table, and they sat silently in the fading light, looking before them and listening as intently as people at a séance, waiting for the vibrations to start. The first indication of movement in the attic was the faint smell of dust which sifted down to them from three floors above – a familiar enough smell, but one which this evening gave to their nostrils a sensation lively as the tingle of snuff. Then they knew that the soft quilt of stuff on top was being gradually moved. It was not much yet, but they could feel it slowly lifting from them, as though a heavy swathe of hair was being lifted up and cut from their aching heads. Next they heard the grinding of things being forced painfully from the positions they had held for years, and the formidable thud and rattle as they were dragged down from stair to stair on to the landing below. It seemed as though the whole house was splitting from the top; and automatically the family below raised their hands to their heads. When they removed them again the noise overhead had stopped. Up there was silence and emptiness. Still the grinding and thudding went on in the corridor beside them, but a pressure had been removed from the top of their skulls and from the nerves at the back of their necks. It was even easier to hold up their heads, they discovered, and they lifted them quickly now to watch Edith who had got up from the table and was whipping off the photos from the mantelpiece and windowsill, from desks and bookcases and the tops of china-cupboards. In a few seconds the eyes which had not wavered for years – eyes grave, wistful, stern and piercing, but all terrible in their watchfulness – and disappeared. The photos, in a neat pile with faces down, had been placed in a corner of the sideboard. It was as easy as that to be rid of onlookers. The people round the table allowed themselves to smile at the audacity of this idea, but nevertheless a conspirator’s brightness shone from their own eyes as they glanced about.
Though relieved of the pressure in their chests and heads, they slept badly that night. Like people unused to a rarefied atmosphere, they were restless and their nerves were on edge; and after twelve o’clock the wind began. At first it was only a breeze from the open windows – a welcome fluttering of curtains and loose papers breaking the stillness. In half an hour the wind had risen to a hysterical note, and gusts of rain, sharp as nails, struck tiles and windows and swept through the chips of gravel on the path, grinding them together with a sound like pebbles grinding on the shore. In the early hours of the morning, when the gale was at its height, the house, without its ballast, shook like a hollow ship at sea, and from all parts came a drumming, a rattling and a banging as though doors and windows had been suddenly prised open to let the furies in. But nobody got up to investigate. As though by a mutual agreement from they day before, they lay rigid the whole night through – letting the house rip.
In the morning Edith was up first. The others, waking slowly from their first, deep sleep, heard her voice calling to them from overhead, and giving themselves time for only a glance at the flooded garden, they dressed and went up to find her. She stood in a corner of the empty attic, surrounded by all the buckets and basins she had collected together and listening with interest to the variation of notes struck from them by the rapid drops of water falling from the roof. Craters and grey rings of damp covered the celling and the floor was thick with drifts of plaster which had blown far and wide, so that even the webs in distant corners were hung with a fine white dust.
‘But there is more to see down below,’ said Edith, after they had listened to a full range of musical notes for some time. Following her down through the house, they were soon aware that, in the attic, they had only seen where the softening-up had taken place – a crumbling at the top which had convulsed the body of the building with more spectacular results.
The house had plainly given up. It had allowed the screws to loosen and the hinges to crack, and let the watery blisters rise under the face of paint. Tiles, sticking grimly to the roof through the storms of years, had been lifted in a matter of minutes, like slices of bread off a board. The glass lay everywhere. Long splinters were piled under the broken windows, and shining crumbs of it, fine as sugar, crunched under their feet in odd corners as they moved about. Throughout the morning they came on the fragments inside old shoes or in the folds of newspapers. They cut their fingers on it in the fringes of rugs and down the sides of armchairs. In every fireplace a heap of soot had fallen and lay, thickly quilting hearths and rugs and thinning out to sift with the leaves and plaster around passages where the cold wind still blew. It was difficult, they discovered, to get out of their own front door. Pushing against a bank of sodden leaves and twigs, they came face to face with a great, jagged branch which had fallen against the steps, and was still quivering and clawing at the door with a persistency which made them draw back at once into the hall with a feeling of panic. For as long as the scraping went on they remained inside, whispering and peering occasionally out into the garden through the slot of the letter-box.
Only when the wind had died down did they begin to hear the complaint of the house itself. There was a creaking and a wheezing about them, and a far-off rattling of unidentified broken things from places which they had not yet investigated. They could hear the heavy shifting of the house through all its loosened boards and joints, like a patient cautiously turning over to feel which of his limbs pain him most, and from overhead a faint whine and whistle in the chimneys and a half-hearted hiss as another puff of soot came down. But above all it was the huge sighing of the building which they heard, as a last gust of wind blew through it from end to end. They recognized it at once as a sigh which came from the bottom of its heart – a heart from which, in the last week, they had extracted as much life-blood as it was possible to take away without a complete collapse ensuing. The foreboding which, since morning, had increased in all of them except Edith, they now diagnosed in one another as the growing pangs of guilt.
Edith had now to work harder than she had ever done before to disperse the atmosphere of this guilt which hung about the place and threatened to thicken and congeal in the empty spaces where they had felt such light-heartedness only a few days before. She set about the task bravely, but at times it was too much even for her.
‘It is a case of complete breakdown, I am sorry to say,’ she would remark, as she came across further signs of damage in the next few days. ‘We have done everything we could for it all these years. No people could have done more. But now is the time to make a change. Luckily for us, we have done most of the moving already – we have only ourselves to take away now. If other people can move themselves, so can we.’
But they were not convinced. Indeed if they had taken pickaxes and sledge-hammers to the house, they could not have felt more responsible for the damage. Nevertheless, it could perhaps be patched and propped again. The harm was extensive but not, after all, so serious. If necessary they could even pack the place up with furniture again – they could replace and rebuild and reorganize, and in a few years they might manage to make up to the house something of what it had lost and suffered at their hands. They would take it upon themselves.
‘We will take it upon ourselves.’ This was the phrase they repeated over and over again in answer to all the consolation and suggestion which Edith offered them. Already they were sagging under the weight. Again they had begun to assume the resigned, identical expressions of a united family –