The Dust Diaries by Owen Sheers Page B

Guardian , even 10 Downing Street, but there are none to anyone who could be guessed at as a lover. There is over fifty years of your correspondence here. I have to assume that the rumour was just that. A rumour.
    The windows of the library have passed through grey to a deep blue to black, and it is time for me to go. I place the fragments of you back in their envelopes, tie the boxes with string and hand them in to the librarian. As I walk out through the marble-floored hallway I pass under the huge stone head of Cecil Rhodes, set in a backlit alcove above the entrance. The light casts a long shadow from his angular jaw across the wall and the irony of your letters being kept here, in the library of the man whose actions you spent a lifetime working against, does not escape me. I carry on out into the street where autumn leaves are falling through the shafts of street lights and a line from a Yeats poem comes to mind: ‘ the yellow leaves fell like faint meteorsin the gloom ’. Pulling my coat about my neck I walk on down the road, my breath fogging before me, wondering, as your photographs and letters make their journey back into the darkness of the stacks, if it is always this way: the light and the dark, the stone and the paper, the money men swallowing the spirit men in boxes.
    On my way out of Oxford I pass my old college and I decide to go in and take a look. As I stand with my back to the street the library squats at the far end of the front quad, its lit windows casting long gold rectangles on the lawn in front of it. To the right of the library is the old bell tower and then the chapel, ornate in the corner. I walk towards the arches of its stained-glass windows, through a scattering of students leaning on their bicycles, talking.
    At the chapel evensong is about to begin, so I walk inside. Epstein’s anguished Lazarus stands bound and huge in the ante-chapel, its Hopton Wood stone pale in the dim light. He looks over his shoulder up the aisle towards the altar (or appears to—his eyes are closed) and there is something pained about his face. As if he is regretful, a reluctant waker, unwillingly disturbed from the dead.
    Walking under the pipework of the organ I feel the beauty of the building shed itself over me, its distilled atmosphere entering the body like clean air. A carved reredos covers the end wall behind the altar and I remember how I once came in here alone, when the place was empty, and spent an hour up close with the saints there, studying their faces, the details of their fingernails and skin creases, each one an individual. I never took part in the religious life of the college, but this reredos had always drawn me. It made me think of Jude the Obscure and the craftsmen who made it, the dust on their hands as they coaxed each of these saints from the stone, as if they had always been there, waiting for the tap of the chisel to break them into existence.
    I take a seat at the back, on the right, but first I check for a wood carving under a misericord that my grandmother once showed me. Lifting the folding seat, I find that sure enough, it is there. Two people caught having sex with impressive contortion, conker-coloured, hidden under the dark wood of the seat.
    The choir file in, extravagant in their surplices, the ruffs holding their heads as if on platters. Boys as young as ten or eleven alongside the older students of the college. I catch glimpses of trainers and jeans under the heavy red cloth of their cassocks. They peel off into facing rows, and stand there serious, their faces lit by the candles that burn on tall holders before them. The students bear marks of their lives before and after this service—highlighted hair, the odd earring, travelling bands on a wrist—but the younger boys are more timeless, their neat haircuts parted like wet feathers across their heads. The whole thing seems a little ridiculous. But then the organ rouses itself and they sing, their mouths opening