Free The Unsettled Dust by Robert Aickman Page A

and had to leave early the next morning, so I didn’t see much of Helsinki, but it is astonishing what you can do with even an hour or two if you really want to, and I shall never forget the shape of the Great Church against the starry sky, or the view from the Kauppatori across the straits to the fortified island on the other side. There was a kind of mystery about them I have never met anywhere else. It was July or August, and in Finland never quite dark; which added to the beauty of it, even though I had no particular wish for the full midnight sun. I fancy that daylight all the time would be worse than darkness all the time. Staring out across the sea from the Kauppatori at midnight wasn’t so much Mr. Purvis’s kind of thing, but he was very good about it all the same, recognising that I was travelling abroad for the first time, and bought us both a Finnish liqueur called Mesimarja.
    ‘The next morning we set off for Unilinna, where we arrived about lunch-time. We passed four nights there in all. It is not a very large town and as we spent most of our time moving about it to look at various houses, I got to know it quite well. It was a beautiful place. It lay, like so many Finnish towns, on the narrows between two lakes, but it also spread over several lake islands all connected by bridges, so that it was often difficult to recollect whether you were on the mainland, so to speak, or on an island. In Finland the difference between mainland and island is often indistinct. There are supposed to be tens of thousands of lakes, many of them linked together, as at Unilinna, and there are rivers also, even canals. The sea-coast is broken up into islands in just the same way. The main impression I had of Finland was of life being mingled with the water in every direction. In between the lakes are ridges of rocky hills, mostly a hundred feet or two hundred feet high, and all covered with conifers. They look right there, of course, even if they look wrong and ugly round here. I gathered that most of the conifers I saw round Unilina belonged to the firm in which Mr. Danziger had an interest. Every autumn they were floated down to the sea in rafts for export.
    ‘Unilinna was very much a watering place for holidaymakers . It had a gay front with flags, as if it had been the seaside. The steamers lined up along it, going to different spots on the lake, some of them taking all day to reach. The steamers burnt only wood and gave off a wonderful smell, which sometimes you noticed all over the town. At one end of the front was an enormous ruined castle. It was the single proper tourist attraction I had time to see. The outside was magnificent, but I discovered that the outside was about all there was to it, as far as I was concerned. The inside was given up to open-air plays, and they weren’t much use when you couldn’t speak more than a few words of Finnish. Yes, I did manage to pick up just a little, but long plays in verse were something different. Nor, of course, were they right for Mr. Purvis either. He liked to sit outside a café passing the girls in review. They were every bit as gorgeous as the Swedish girls, but not so elegantly dressed. Looking at them was as near as ever I got to them.
    ‘There were gypsies too; real, opera gypsies with dark faces, flashing eyes, and brightly coloured clothes. They were to be met with all over the town, but especially in the market, which, as far as I could see, spread all the way along the waterfront every morning, but seemed to disappear almost completely after about midday. The gypsies would half come up to you and half speak, but draw quickly away, almost vanish into the air, when they realised you couldn’t speak their language, any of their languages. For I was given to understand that many of them were Russian gypsies, fled since 1917 from the Bolsheviks. If this was true, they were in fact the first Russians I ever knowingly met. If, of course, gypsies can properly be described