The Man Who Wanted to Smell Books Read online

  ‘You must begin with this room, Clara,’ she cried, suddenly sitting up straight and staring about her sharply. ‘That bureau over there has worried me for a long time. You see how it is packed with letters and papers which must be burned at once. No, of course they are not valuable. Why should they be? I don’t intend to look over them. They must simply be taken out, bundle by bundle, and put on that bonfire. It is better than choking the chimney. Yes, Clara, of course I mean what I am saying! I am not ill and I am not joking.’

  Just before darkness fell that evening, Clara came slowly from the bedroom and down the stairs with her arms full of papers. Her brothers followed her out into the garden, keeping some little distance from her, like sober attendants on a bride, and automatically catching at the white strips and ribbons of paper which blew about her in the wind. At first the flames did not seem strong enough to consume the dense wads of superior notepaper, but after a while the sheets blew open, revealing for a glaring second time-honoured secrets of home and business, scraps of ancient family scandal and a smattering of long-forgotten endearments. Exclamation marks and question marks quivered together on the paper, and formidable lists of figures curled up swiftly into scrolls of fire. When the flames died down there was nothing left but some flimsy black scales floating in the air, and a grey ash on the ground.

  The fire had not brought any colour to Clara’s face. She was paler than ever as she walked upstairs again to Edith’s room. It was her sister who was flushed, as though the flames had burned her cheeks.

  ‘The men can help you tomorrow,’ was all she said. ‘It is a beginning, anyway.’ She turned to the wall without another word and Clara left the room.

  ‘The doctor said it was particularly important not to give in to her,’ she said to her brothers as she wished them goodnight. They could not tell from her voice whether this was an apology or a challenge, and she looked preoccupied – uncertainly opening and shutting drawers and continually glancing about the room as she spoke as though sizing the place up after a long absence.

  ‘What is this?’ she asked, picking up an object from the sideboard as she was turning to leave.

  ‘What is that?’ replied James, looking uneasily at it. ‘Why, Clara – what are you talking about? You can see it is a brush with a curved handle. It has been there for years – and with a tray to match. There are two others like it in the drawer.’

  ‘Yes, that is true – and what are they all for?’ said Clara with unaccustomed sharpness.

  ‘What are they for? Why, surely they are crumb-brushes, Clara. You must have known they were for brushing crumbs off a tea-table!’

  ‘Then must there be three of them?’ exclaimed Clara. ‘Do we make more crumbs than anybody else, in this house? Is it likely that this one will get worn out with brushing in our lifetime – that there must always be two in reserve? It is very unlikely that I, at any rate shall use another brush while I live – far less the two of them. Do you even know how old I am?’

  ‘But of course, Clara,’ her brother replied hurriedly, ‘and there are certainly not an excessive quantity of crumbs about the place. Why must we discuss the brushes, if it upsets you? They were not ours, in the first place. You have forgotten that they came to us with the napkin rings and hot water bottles when Aunt Helen gave up her house. If they are not used, they can be handed down. What has your age to do with it, Clara? You are too sensitive about that. We remember you are the youngest. And we do not expect you to use three crumb-brushes.’

  Clara tossed her head and left the room. But her brothers remained standing together long afterwards, apprehensively staring about them, and puzzling over the meaning of various objects which they had caught sight of for the first time.

  Two days later, in the absence of the gardener, Clara made her own bonfire – a magnificent affair, far bigger than the last, and lighting the whole garden up to the tops of the highest trees. When the three brothers came out of the house to see it they exclaimed in admiration. This time they could show little interest in what was being burned, for great flames destroyed the boxes and packets before they could be identified, but they drew nearer, step by step, to warm themselves, and their eyes shone outrageously in the light. Every now and then, as the garden grew darker, the fire threw a shimmer of light upon the front of the house. When this happened the woman and the three men stood motionless to stare at the quivering windows and wagging chimneys and at the grey stone which swelled and trembled as though it were no more solid than parchment. Now Joseph, the oldest man, went striding off quickly towards the house and returned in a few minutes with a heap of papers which the flames tore from his hands and devoured with a roar as soon as he had thrown them down.

  ‘Papers are not enough to keep it going,’ said Clara as the fire subsided again. She went back to the house, running this time, and returned, out of breath, with a couple of heavy wooden trays.

  ‘There was no time to pick and choose,’ she explained. ‘I took the largest of the half-dozen behind the sideboard. At any rate they will keep it going while we find more stuff.’

  They waited for a moment to see the flames lick round the tray-handles which were carved in the shape of crouching monkeys, gripping melons between their fingers.

  ‘What a sin to waste them – and all the people who must be wanting trays!’ cried Clara, shuddering with disgust and pleasure. All four of them now started to run towards the house, looking back over their shoulders to judge how long the fire might last. Clara sped upstairs – but not to her sister’s room. For the moment she had almost forgotten about Edith. Instead she ran to a spare bedroom, and opening the drawers of a large chest, she began to shake out rolls of cloth and undo the great bags of woollen underwear. Mothballs bounced about the floor as she dug down into the piles with her fingers, but at last she had pulled out as big an armful as she could carry. The men were in the garden before her, however, making for the corner where a thin smoke still rose, and carrying between them as many inflammable objects as they had been able to lay hands on. With their awkward loads and anxious faces, they had the look of people working to save their possessions from a burning house, having caught up the first things which came to hand. James, in the lead, was carrying a basket-chair, piled up with raffia table-mats which he tossed on, one after the other, when he was still some distance away from the fire. Bursts of flame and a crackling like a forest going up forced them to stand aside when the chair went on; and the work-baskets, tea-cosies, clothes-brushes and picture-frames which followed the chair were lost at once in a blaze which sent sparks flying far above the chimneys of the house. This was no ordinary fire. It was more exhilarating than an explosion of sky-rockets. Beyond the vibrating circle where they stood, they caught glimpses of a house which appeared to rock gently on the quaking ground. Clouds, flowers and iron railings trembled together, and the agitation of their own faces made them appear to one another like persons undergoing, moment by moment, the most violent changes of emotion from quivering despair to the wildest glee. When the time came for Clara to unwrap her bundles of underwear their spirits were dampened.

  ‘Perhaps they will smother the fire,’ said Clara as she threw on the pants, vests and combinations bequeathed from uncles and great uncles who had died young, long before they could wear a hole in the wool. But when she saw the flames slowly eating through the outer layer she added: ‘There must be thousands of people who could do with them – people without a stitch to their backs. What a waste and a sin!’

  But the sin and the shame of it stirred them to even greater efforts, and they prodded at the fire until it leapt up again to devour a clothes-horse and a couple of small wooden cake-stands in a matter of minutes.

  It was dark before the fire at last fell apart into a smouldering heap of ashes. Clara and her brothers were so exhausted with their orgy of destruction that they could scarcely stand upright, but as they approached the house they lifted their heads and stared up at it boldly. A little of the stuffing had already
been taken out of it – even through the darkness they could feel that. The stone did not seem as smooth to them now. They could imagine it dented, here and there, where the surface caved in over certain hollow patches, odd corners which were not packed so tightly as before, and in spite of their exhaustion they felt a quiet satisfaction in the evening’s work.

  After super Clara went up to see her sister. She was sitting up in bed, reading, looking fresh-cheeked and rested, and she glanced up with a smile when her sister came in. There was no mention of bonfires, but Clara asked casually, as she drew the curtains: ‘I suppose you will be getting up tomorrow?’

  ‘Hardly so soon,’ replied Edith. ‘No, not yet – it is not quite time for me to get up and come downstairs, if that is what you mean. But I will certainly dress and get up for tea in my bedroom. That will be a beginning and help to cheer you all up.’

  They were not cheerful as they brought up the heavy trays to her room next afternoon, but they sat with an expectant air, talking absentmindedly and listening for the sound of the lorry which arrived at this hour every week to remove the rubbish. They heard it at last a long distance away, coming up the steep road below their garden wall, and while it laboriously turned the corner of their drive, they excused themselves one by one and went out to meet it, accompanying it for the last few yards of the way as though guiding a triumphal car to the chosen place. When the three dustbin men saw this place – not the mean pair of ashcans, nor the paltry pile of tins, papers and grass-cuttings, but a great hillock of soft stuff, studded with glinting ornaments – they stopped some distance off and approached it reverently on foot. In five minutes, having prodded through the top layer, they returned to the family who were waiting nearby.

  ‘Say – what’s going on, here?’ asked one, pointing to what he held up in his other hand – a green china mermaid, who also pointed with a puzzled air to the wave on which she sat. ‘Are you moving off or what? Sure, that’s a funny way to be doing it – clearing out all the fancy stuff and hanging on to the plain. Maybe you’ve made a mistake, folks. We’re not buying and we’re not selling and we’re not mending and we’re not shifting the stuff to any other place. There, it’s on the lorry – Cleansing Department – and that’s us. In other words – your things are for the dump!’

  But as they only backed away, nodding and smiling, he went after them.

  ‘Tell us what’s up,’ he shouted. ‘For all I know you’ve got heirlooms and all tucked away under that little pile! And what about her?’ He brandished the mermaid in front of them, but James waved him back nervously and angrily, exclaiming: ‘Take it away! Take them all away! There is nothing to discuss. There is illness here – a nervous breakdown in the house. The things are to be removed in the normal way, and there is nothing more to be said!’ Still shouting he disappeared with the rest of them inside the house.

  The men now got to work on the pile with gusto and without wasting further words. The inmates of the house might be cracked, but the stuff they unearthed was unbelievably whole – basins and ewers, teapots and metal trays which had not taken a dint or a crack in fifty years, china baskets of unchipped violets and draped dancing figures without a pointed toe or finger missing. They lay together, smugly shining there amongst beaded shoes and piled soup-plates, as though on their usual spring-clean outing.

  The family did not come out again, but the men worked on in frenzied enthusiasm in case they might suddenly appear with a changed mind about their possessions. They now went at the pile without plan or method, scarcely looking at the stuff, but grimly lifting up the clinking armfuls towards the lorry. Small ornaments fell and were ground underfoot as they staggered about, and they began to shout and threaten one another over each coveted piece. Like some deep archaeological site, the heap revealed layers of life in the history of the house – layers which, although only laid down that morning, contained objects which had not, before that, seen the light of day for a generation. The flimsier stuff, skimmed from the tops of drawers and shelves, had been deposited first, and this the rising wind took up and whirled along with the dust and leaves. Clawing at the ground, the men ran, shouting, after ghostly, lacey evening gloves which spread themselves against tree-trunks, and oriental fruit-baskets and initialled collar-boxes which bowled, lightly as hoops, in front of them.

  At last, the furious slamming of the lorry doors brought the whole family to the windows in time to see the men drive off at a breakneck pace down the drive and around the corner. Behind them, where the dazzling hillock had stood, there was now only a churned-up patch of ground where fragments of glass and china lay, and on the long grass nearby stray ribbons and tassels hung mournfully. When the dust from the lorry had settled, the others looked at Edith who had stood beside them in her dressing-gown and was now turning to go back to her room.

  ‘You are surely not going back to bed, Edith,’ said Edgar reprovingly. ‘Not now. Not after you have seen all the changes that are going on these days. Will we expect you down for supper tonight? Surely you will dress and come down for a little while and tomorrow you will feel yourself again. Don’t pretend you haven’t noticed the gaps in the cupboards and the open space on the top landing. We have heard you opening and shutting the drawers all morning.’

  ‘I feel a different person – I admit it,’ Edith replied as she walked away, ‘– different, but not absolutely better yet. You certainly cannot hurry an illness like mine, Edgar. In a day or so. One more day, perhaps, will make all the difference. It depends on so many things.’ Her eyes rested for a moment on the things as she looked back from her bedroom. Calmly she stared through the other doors and at the heavy brass lamp on which a nymph, still smiling, writhed in an effort to hold up the fringed parchment shade, and beyond that to a massive wardrobe with its magnificent false top, and at the bursting trunks wedged so tightly under the beds that the mattresses above had grown hideously deformed over the years. Finally 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 be
low 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.