The Unsettled Dust by Aickman Robert

Author:Aickman, Robert [Aickman, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780571294510
Publisher: Faber
Published: 2012-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

RAVISSANTE

I had an acquaintance who had begun, before I knew him, as a painter but who took to ‘compiling and editing’ those costly, glossy books about art which are said to sell in surprising numbers but which no person one knows ever buys and no person one sees ever opens.

I first met this man at a party. The very modern room was illuminated only in patches by dazzling standard lamps beneath metal frames. The man stood in one of the dark corners, looking shy and out of it. He wore a light blue suit, a darker blue shirt, and a tie that was pretty well blue-black. He looked very malleable and slender. I walked towards him. I saw that he had a high, narrow head and smooth dark hair, cut off in a sharp, horizontal line at the back. I saw also that with him was a woman, previously invisible, though, as a matter of fact, and when she had come into focus, rather oddly dressed. None the less, I spoke.

It seemed that I was welcome after all. The man said something customary about knowing almost none of the guests, and introduced the nearly invisible woman to me as his wife. He proceeded to chat away eagerly but a little anxiously, as if to extenuate his presence among so many dark strangers. He told me then and there about his abandonment of painting for editorship: ‘I soon realised I could not expect my pictures to sell,’ he said, or words to that effect. ‘Too far-fetched.’ About that particular epithet of his I am certain. It stuck in my mind immediately. He offered no particulars, but talked about the terms he got for his gaudy pictorial caravanserais. I have, of course, written a little myself from time to time, and the sums he named struck me as pretty good. I avoided all comment to the effect that it is the unread book which brings in the royalty (after all, modern translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey are said to sell by the hundred thousand, and the Bible to be more decisively the best seller of all with every year that passes); and observed instead that his life must be an interesting one, with much travel, and, after all, much beauty to behold. He agreed warmly and, taking another Martini from a passing tray, described in some detail his latest business excursion, which had been to somewhere in Central America where there were strange things painted on walls, perfect for colour photography. He said he hoped he hadn’t been boring me. ‘Oh, no,’ I said. All the time, the man’s wife had said nothing. I remark on this simply as a fact. I do not imply that she was bored. She might indeed have been enthralled. Silence can, after all, mean either thing. In her case, I never found out which it meant. She was even slenderer than he was, with hair the colour (as far as I could see) of

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