The title, like much else in Aickman's surreal miniature of marital discord, is deeply ironic.  The complete phrase from Shakespeare's sonnet, cited as the story's epigraph, runs "Beauty, whose action is no stronger than a flower"; but by the time the tale has run its course, Beauty will have ended a young marriage and drawn real blood.  Irony is also present in the name of Nesta, the female protagonist from whose point of view the first third of the tale is told.  Besides suggesting "love nest", with its dual connotations of cosy conjugality and illicit eroticism, her name is a variant of Agnes, which means "chaste".  While apparently in the process of transforming into an impossibly desirable siren, Aickman's Nesta locks her husband out of her bedroom.

At the beginning of the story Nesta is being nagged by her husband-to-be, Curtis (his name means "courteous") to "do something about her looks".  The story's very first words are Curtis' fatal utterance which, in their final conversation, Nesta will throw back at him:  "Naturally I  don't care, because I love you.  I'm thinking entirely of you"  (UD 95).  Presumably Curtis assumes he is thinking of Nesta because of his own feeling that "beauty, although it had its place, was not to be lived with" - the harsh lesson of a youthful affair with a very beautiful woman, which has left him "a far more desperate character" than the resigned and temperamentally moderate Nesta.

Nesta, for her part, believes that "whatever they might say to one, it was a woman's appearance that men really cared about; and indeed she thought that she well understood their point of view."  However, she does not accede to Curtis' wishes because she is "afraid that if she took the step demanded of her, and it did not end in reasonable success, then Curtis would jilt her"  (UD 95-96).

This is hardly a promising beginning.  Curtis wishes to marry Nesta, we are told later, "neither for passion nor even for a well-kept home, but for sentiment"  (UD 104); near the end he pleads "If only things could be as they were" (UD 108); yet we first see him cajoling his fiancé to try and emulate the old flame on whom he apparently burnt his fingers years before.  Despite his rather ramshackle rationalisation that it is all for Nesta's sake, Curtis is "horrified" at himself for trying to persuade her to change her looks; but he persists nevertheless, at least until they are married.  From the day of the wedding, he never refers to the matter again; but it is precisely at this point that Nesta perceives that "to the generally accepted rule about men Curtis was no exception", i.e. that a woman's looks are of paramount importance to him.  She regards his decision to drop the matter as "possibly the worst symptom"; she cannot welcome it because "having been long self-occluded, she was greatly wishful of change and adventure"  (UD 96).

Gary William Crawford (RA 44-45) puts most of the responsibility for Nesta's problem onto Curtis' complacency after the wedding; but to me the matter seems less clear-cut.  We are told that Nesta "acquired an impersonal dissatisfaction" with her new way of life, which previously she would have considered "ecstatic" assuming she thought it possible at all.  As for Curtis, his "passion might be somewhat guarded, but it was neither infrequent nor frightening; his general consideration for her was admirable; and he provided her, starved as she was of affectionate outlet, with continuous opportunities to assist and look after him".  Certainly the last part sounds like masculine condescension, but there is no indication that such "opportunities" are at the root of Nesta's dissatisfaction, or that she objects to them at all.  The real trouble is more elusive:  "Only he no longer suggested that she should seek advice about her appearance; no longer remarked that every woman did so or wasn't a woman"  (UD 97).

It seems to me that the problem has less to do with Curtis' complacency, and still less with any feminist aspiration of Nesta's, than with the murky and rather dubious nature of both lovers' motives.  Whatever sentiment Curtis may feel for Nesta, it does not prevent his trying to turn her into something other than who she is; while Nesta's feelings for Curtis seem at least partially a reaction to loneliness; we are not, for example, told that she is "truly resigned to the wintry consequences" of her plainness, but that "she had long regarded  herself" as such (UD 95; my emphasis).  Indeed, as noted above, she does not even trust Curtis' affection enough to risk the possibility of a beauty treatment going wrong; it is only once her fears have been assuaged by eight or nine months of marriage that she is able to indulge her "romantic sensitivity" (UD 97) and her wish for adventure and change.  The lack of genuine closeness or understanding between Nesta and Curtis is later made apparent in a note about their sleeping arrangements:  "For reasons unacknowledged by either, they had occupied separate rooms from the start"  (UD 104).

Having decided to change her looks, and answered an advertisement (in a periodical called "Flame"), Nesta is granted an appointment by letter.  "There was no need to confirm it, stated the letter; apparently in no doubt that Nesta would haste to attend."  She does, in fact, hesitate at the sight of the house; although clean and well kept, it is in a street which is suffering "continued social descent" and "the general effect was somehow so cheerless that Nesta upon beholding it as she stepped out of the taxi, immediately decided to go home" (UD 98).  She is prevented from doing so by the appearance of Mrs de Milo, the woman with whom she made the appointment:  "Nesta was unequipped with the ruthlessness which might have enabled her to act on impulse and bolt"  (UD 99).  This assessment of Nesta's character makes an interesting contrast with the way she appears shortly before walking calmly and deliberately out of her marriage:  "Curtis was reminded of a clawed goddess with a beautiful immemorial face which he had once seen in company with that earlier woman in his life" (UD 109).

Mrs de Milo is statuesque in appearance and clinical in demeanour:  "an ageless woman with a white smooth face, Grecian nose, and large but well-shaped breasts.  She wore an elegant white overall of medical aspect, gleaming with starch.  Her black hair, very thick and glistening, was parted in the middle and drawn into a carefully composed bun."  The symbolism of her name is obvious but still effective: though well-shaped, with a white smooth face and a carefully composed hairstyle, the Venus de Milo is over two thousand years old, made of stone and famously lacks the wherewithal for embraces.

We are not told what happens at Mrs de Milo's, but Curtis' initial response appears to Nesta as "nothing less than complete non-recognition" (UD 99).  To Curtis, Nesta admits only to a change of hairstyle and, while he changes into "one of his older suits" for dinner, Nesta "looked at herself yet again in the expensive, but not very beautiful hanging glass which had been her father-in-law's wedding present" (UD 100).

This short episode of the story contains a couple of interesting touches.  Curtis wears his older suits for dining alone with his wife, presumably because he does not feel the need to keep up appearances before her, as he evidently does before even their best friends (UD 102-3).  The looking-glass, a gift from Curtis' father, shows that masculine concern with women's appearance is present in an earlier generation of Curtis' family.  The mirror's lack of beauty is perhaps a silent comment on Nesta's own; a tactful father-in-law would hardly buy a glass whose charms outshone its recipient's.  At a later point in her transformation, Nesta acquires a full-length, lavishly decorated glass which "might have come from a Venetian palazzo which had been redecorated in a late period" (UD 105); and one of the last things she does before leaving Curtis forever is apparently to look at herself in it  (UD 110).  Presumably, by this point, she is confident that her beauty outshines even that of a looking-glass from an Italian palace.

The last we see of Nesta's point of view is at the end of another short episode, in which Curtis takes rather violent exception to her having painted her nails:  "Nesta remembered having read in some cynical book that although a woman's appearance is what a man most cares about, yet, too often, the more she does about it the less he cares for the result and for her" (UD 101).  The remainder of the story is told from the viewpoint of Curtis, who finds himself increasingly estranged from Nesta as her character, and perhaps her body, continue to change.  Within a few weeks of her visit to Mrs de Milo, Curtis comes "to dread his return home in the evening" (UD 103).  She starts to dress extravagantly and eccentrically; Aickman does not provide details, except that Curtis believes her clothes lack "even the justification of being in the mode" (UD 102) and that a "misty" dress she wears later in the story is "entirely white but not in the least bridal" (UD 106).  The implication here seems to be that the dress is too revealing, but in light of their subsequent (and final) argument, when Nesta claims that her elaborate make-up and constant nail-filing are for Curtis' own protection, it might equally well be taken that the "mist" leaves very little to be seen.

Nesta's transformation (S. T. Joshi calls it a "slow degeneration" (MWT 224), but again I am not sure it's possible to be so definite) incorporates a number of changes.  She seems to be constantly filing her nails (UD 102) and "endlessly employing her elaborate manicure case and green taffeta covered beauty box" (UD 104).  It appears to Curtis that she manages the household "more and more impersonally," so that it seems "in the charge not, as is desirable, of benevolent and invisible fairies, but rather of recent graduates from a College of Domestic Science"; one is reminded of Mrs de Milo's clinical white coat.  The candles on the dining-room table are "stuck in writhing silver candelabra" and Curtis must use a "beautiful alien soup spoon" (UD 105-6).  Cold, serpentine and foreign, the beauty which was not to be lived with has invaded Curtis' home.

Meanwhile, Nesta herself gets into the habit of wearing veils, and before long is "never to be seen by Curtis without one" (UD 104).  Apparently as a result of this, "his idea of Nesta's features fell into increasing indirectness and even distortion."  The only part of Nesta's face which Curtis can sometimes see - her mouth - seems also subject to a change in his perception, "growing more and more sensual as he brooded upon it.  Before long he wanted merely to kiss her mouth more than once he had wanted entirely to possess her" (UD 105).  This seems simply an instance of partial concealment being more erotic than revelation; but slightly later a more tangible alteration is implied: "red as a new wound . . . Nesta's mouth seemed miraculously to have changed its shape" (UD 106).

Finally, Curtis starts an argument over Nesta's presumed extravagance.  He has done this before, only to be brushed off with, "Have you been asked to pay any bills?  Extra bills?"  (UD 103).  This time, Nesta states, "I am paying. You are getting the benefit without paying."  Her first sentence at least seems to be true, since "many months had passed since all this began, and indeed there had been no bills for any of it" (UD 106).  But when Curtis, unappreciative of the "benefit" he is getting, asks for them to resume their former life and tries to kiss her, his cheek is deeply cut by her fingernails: "every one of her painted nails had been sharpened to a deadly point".  He assumes she has sharpened them deliberately, but Nesta claims that the opposite is true: "This is the way they grow.  I keep trying to blunt them.  To file them down and make them look socially acceptable.  The way you want them"  (UD 107-8).

This seems to contradict Joshi's assertion that "the entire story urges us to find actual horror in the wife's increasing disregard for social convention" (MWT 232).  Although it is far from clear that Nesta is entirely concerned with Curtis' wishes (her very next statement is, "The more I file them, the sharper they get"), there is no unambiguous indication that she is not telling the truth about her attempts to mitigate the changes in herself.  However, there is also no unambiguous indication that she is telling the truth.  When she invites Curtis to compare her unveiled face with a photograph of herself as she was, he does not look at the picture but violently tears it up; and "except that she was now elaborately made up, Curtis was still unable to define the change in her" (UD 109).  According to Nesta, her elaborate make-up is another attempt to protect Curtis:  "It's become so difficult trying to make myself like it [the photograph] that I should have to stop trying anyway.  There are limits even to make-up, you know."

Nesta may, as she claims, have physically changed beyond Curtis' recognition, while artfully concealing the transformation; or the change may be in her own mind, a process interpreted by Curtis (UD 104) as some sort of mental breakdown.  But since we are given no concrete information about either Nesta's appearance (whether before or after Mrs de Milo) or that of the photograph, it is impossible to say for certain.  We are told that Curtis "was for a moment far from sure that really she looked any different from the way she had looked on the day he married her"; but, like Nesta explaining the sharpness of her nails, Aickman immediately qualifies the statement so that the ambiguity remains:  "As far as one could see; and behind her white veil.  Apart from her hands, of course" (UD 109).

I am far from certain what purpose all this ambiguity is meant to serve.  Aickman's stories are generally enigmatic, but not usually in the sense of giving facts with one hand and then snatching them away with the other, as happens constantly in "No Stronger than a Flower".  Perhaps, since the larger part of the story, including the ending, is from Curtis' point of view, the narrative's uncertainty as to Nesta's condition simply reflects Curtis' own lack of understanding.  Indeed, that note that he was "far from sure that really she looked any different" comes immediately after the following:

"Perhaps what I need is an ugliness salon. You don't happen to know of one?"

"I've never seen you look so beautiful."  He had ceased to play his appointed part, and spoke his thought.

"But you don't want me all the same? Not now? Not really?"

"Of course I want you. You're my wife.  If only things could be as they were.  That's what I want."

She picked up an exquisite decanter, one of their new acquisitions, and filled a delicate wineglass. "You know, I had no idea," she said, "how deep it goes.  Most people know nothing. Nothing.  It goes to the very bottom of life."  She drained the glass.  A drop of the red wine hung on her mouth.  She licked her lip.

"What does? I don't understand you." (UD 108)

Whatever the physical changes ambiguously implied by Curtis' "I've never seen you look so beautiful", Nesta's pronouncement "It goes to the very bottom of life," at least demonstrates her psychological transformation from the woman who, at the beginning of the tale, "had a temperamental distaste for extreme measures".  Presumably, what goes so deep is Mrs de Milo's beauty treatment, the kind of beauty which, in the sentimental domesticity which is Curtis' idea of life, has no place and cannot be tolerated.  Curtis' admitted lack of understanding causes Nesta to reason that "As you don't understand me, you can't want me," to give up her efforts to resemble her photograph ("There are limits even to make-up, you know.  Besides, why should I?") and, finally, kiss Curtis goodbye (on the "invisible" and, naturally, unseeing back of his neck) and, heard but unseen, walk out of his life.

Works Cited

Aickman, Robert.  The Unsettled Dust.  London: Mandarin, 1990.  (UD)

Crawford, Gary William.  Robert Aickman: An Introduction.  Baton Rouge, LA: Gothic Press, 2003. (RA)

Joshi, S.T.  The Modern Weird Tale.  Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2001. (MWT)



Philip Challinor
21 April - 23 April 2005