Perhaps we’d better just take a weekend first, Stefan and I.
‘John, I thought I’d go up to London for a weekend and see that Islamic Exhibition. Could you cope with the children?’
‘Of course, lovey. Do you good to get away; you’ve been looking a bit peaked. I’ll have something in the oven for you on Sunday night. And how about getting yourself a new coat? I’ve got my examiner’s fee coming for that Ph.D.’
‘But you wanted that for some new binoculars.’
‘Oh, the old ones are all right. Honestly.’
And as he stood there, his eyes shining with delight at my coming treat, I felt my beautiful, sophisticated affair curl up and die beneath my feet.
If I sought out Trudy, the last of my special friends, it was because I knew exactly what she would say and I needed to hear her say it. She was a bit older than the rest of us, a Quaker who taught in a comprehensive school and still had time to bake her own bread, cope cheerfully with a brood of teenage children and secure for her husband the peace he needed to write his history books.
‘Helen, no one can tell another person what to do. But you know what I think. Keeping faith, being truthful, sticking to your bargain – these things weren’t meant to be easy. But without them – well, I don’t think there’s any way forward.’
‘I … must put him out of my mind?’
Trudy looked at me, a fearful pity on her face. ‘Absolutely, love. For ever. No backsliding. Because once you marry and have children you can no longer confine the paying to yourself. Others pay, always, when you grab and cheat. Oh, Helen, don’t look like that. Have a bun, love – have a big cream bun.’
I took it and ate it. A bun from Hades, from an Egyptian tomb.
That night I wrote to Stefan and said no, there was nothing for us and we must not write or meet again. At least that’s what I meant to say. My ‘no’ took five desperate pages. Like everything I did concerning him it became, somehow, an act of love. So I tore it up; did nothing.
Well, it was over now. I had stood up to be counted and the reckoning had gone against me. Kirsty’s way was no use to me, nor Elaine’s, though both were right for them. It was Trudy who spoke for me.
Or was it? One day, waiting on a windy corner for Vanessa to come from school, I remembered my old tutor at college when I went to her with some problem. She was a refugee from Hitler and what she had said was: ‘When you get to heaven, Helen, they won’t ask you if you’ve been Moses or Abraham. They’ll ask you if you have been you.’
Only who was ‘I’? It seemed I did not know.
All that summer I went into myself with a pickaxe, trying to cut out cant, hypocrisy, fear … seeking desperately for a solution which, however tentative, should be my own. Then, at the end of August, I went to a concert. It was Haydn’s The Seasons and when I came out of the concert hall I knew what I was going to do.
Oh, I know it’s a foolish, imperfect answer; I can see a hundred ways in which it might fail. But I’m going to take one day and one day only of every season of the year and spend it with Stefan. It’s my pledge (on the heads of my children, I pledge this) not to grab one hour more, not to write or phone in between or lapse into the furtive delight of an affair. But once in every summer, once in autumn, once in winter and once in spring, I’m going to be with him.
Tomorrow is our first day. A year has passed and it’s autumn once again. No Russian birches this time, no great man’s grave. But I’ll buy a bunch of asters at the station and perhaps, somehow, they’ll know, the Brides of Tula, and pray for me.
WITH LOVE AND SWAMP NOISES
IT WAS the kind of place you go to to get out of the rain or to amuse an ancient relative with a passion for stuffed ptarmigans, assegais and the less important kinds of mummy. A tiny, old-fashioned museum – The Havelock, they called it – tucked away in one of those quiet grey squares between the London Library and St James’s.
A place in which one might have expected to meet anything – except one’s fate.
It was November – somehow it always seems to be in that part of London – with the bobbles on the plane trees swirling out of the mist and splayed leaves on the pavement. My wife wouldn’t come – she had an ‘engagement’ and because I suspected what that engagement was, it was with the familiar ache gnawing at my stomach that I paid my entrance fee, walked past the bust of William Havelock in his pith helmet and found myself gazing into the placid eyes of an aardvark standing solidly astride his piece of painted veld. A family of white-tailed gnus stared from a glass case, a sea-lion reared its majestic chest from a mahogany plinth. It was very quiet.
I wandered past a case of exotic butterflies, models of outrigger canoes in bark, dice made out of knuckle-bones … Havelock clearly had collected everything. Then suddenly out of a door marked ‘Private – Staff Only’ there erupted a girl … A knock-kneed, tangle-haired girl carrying a hippopotamus harpoon, a bell-jar of stuffed willow grouse and a cardboard box.
It was all too much. The cardboard box slipped, fell and a dark and unpleasantly mottled object rolled across the floor. A shrunken head, not in the best state of preservation. I retrieved it. She thanked me, apologised, smiled. Then she put down her load again and said, ‘Are you enjoying yourself? Would you like me to show you round?’
I must, I suppose, have said yes. At any rate she showed me round. No, what am I saying? She gave me that museum, she laid it at my feet. I felt she would have torn the exhibits from the walls and put them in my cupped hands, so demented was she to share, to give.
‘It’s such a lovely place – no one ever comes, but they should. Look, that’s a naked sea slug – they’re very rare in Britain – don’t you like those purple tentacles? And those silk moths are descended directly from the ones belonging to the Emperor Wu-Ti – the one who bred the Heavenly Horses, you know – and we have the best collection of East Indian sea-shells in the world; a dear little professor sent them from Kuala Lumpur. Did you know that some shells are whorled sinistrally and some dextrally? I didn’t until I came to work here.’
Her hand hovered above my sleeve; her heart too no doubt – on mine, on anybody’s … A cornucopia of a girl who went on talking even on an inward breath. And suddenly I imagined her making love like a football supporter, lurching out into the night afterwards to assault total strangers with her happiness.
‘Listen!’ she said. We had come to a case of stuffed roe deer: a stag and a hind prancing over some rather wilted heather. She pressed a button and suddenly the museum was filled with an extraordinary mournful, honking sound.
‘They’re roe deer rutting noises,’ she said, her plum-coloured eyes glistening with pride. ‘Mr Henry had them put in. He was our last director, he’s just retired. We’ve got some swamp noises too, in the other room, to go with the dinosaur bones. Would you like to hear them?’
But at swamp noises I stalled and excused myself. It wasn’t until I let myself into the fiat and my stomach-ache returned that I realised it had disappeared during the last few hours. And yet who could I blame? I had wanted to get married, not Vivian. She had warned me all along that she couldn’t bear to be tied. ‘ If you start being jealous, Paul, it’s the end,’ she had said. So I wasn’t jealous. There was just this incessant pain in my guts. I suppose that’s all jealousy is. Just pain.
The next day I went back to the Havelock with my new bunch of master keys and let myself in at the back, walking down corridors cluttered with specimen cabinets, old wall charts and piles of skins towards the director’s office. Though it was early, I was surprised to see a number of people already at work, A gorgeously dressed and rather pregnant Arabian lady was sorting osprey eggs, an ancient, bald little man assembling ichythosaurus bones, a boy in tattered jeans hammering at a display case …
In the director’s office I began to search for a list of employees. My brief when I got the job had been to streamline the place, reduce expenses, modernise – or else. It looked as though some pretty heavy staff cuts wo
uld be first on the list. But in installing roe deer rutting noises, Mr Henry seemed to have shot his bolt. I could find nothing relevant.
In the end I went to see my second-in-command, Mr Biggers, the taxidermist. I had met him at my interview and knew him to be a level-headed and sensible sort of bloke.
‘Mr Biggers, I’m a bit puzzled about the number of people working here,’ I said. ‘I thought we only employed four full-time members of staff.’
Mr Biggers pushed aside a dodo-head cast, dropped a pickled skin back into its barrel and drew out a stool for me.
‘Ah, yes,’ he said. ‘Well, a lot of people do work here, but they’re not exactly members of staff. They’re voluntary, as you might say.’ There was a pause, then he added, ‘ They’re by way of being friends of Flossie’s.’
‘Who’s Flossie?’ I asked. But I was only playing for time; I knew of course. In this situation, the imprint of the football supporter was writ large and clear.
‘Miss French. The assistant curator. Her name,’ said Mr Biggers, ‘is Florence.’ He sighed and I loved him for it. ‘Flossie has this odd sixth sense. If someone comes into the museum who is sad or in trouble in some way, she always seems to know. Then she charges out front and shows them round.’
I scowled. This was a bit close to the bone.
‘She’s very fond of this place. You might say her enthusiasm is contagious. People start regarding it as home.’
‘But this is impossible! These people are handling highly valuable articles. Look, would you ask Miss French to come to my room straight away.’
She came, saw me and flinched. ‘Oh! You should have told me you were the new director. Letting me show you things…’
‘It was my first naked sea slug,’ I said briskly. ‘Please sit down, Miss French. I want to ask you about these friends of yours who’ve taken to working here. The Asian lady for example?’
‘Oh, that’s Mrs Rahman,’ she said, her face glowing with pride in her protégée. ‘ She’s expecting a baby and she’s very lonely because her husband is doing a degree or something; they were very scientific with her in the hospital, so she came here to have a cry. She wants to have her baby by the Leboyer method, you see and they wouldn’t—’
‘By the what?’ Vivian didn’t want children and the whole scene was one I had blotted out.
‘Oh, it’s lovely! You have the baby in the dark with beautiful music and you don’t thump it and it smiles when it’s bom. There’s a lot about massage too and warm oil and putting it on the mother’s stomach when—’
Too late I regretted my question. ‘So she came in here to cry. And what then?’
‘Well, I took her to my room for a cup of tea and now she’s sorting out the Harrington Egg collection. It’s been lying around since 1890 all in boxes, because no one’s had time to do it and she’s found some amazing—’
‘But is she qualified? Does she know what she’s doing?’
Flossie frowned. ‘I suppose she isn’t qualified on paper, but she has the gentlest hands I’ve ever seen – like the antennae of butterflies, they are. I can’t imagine her ever breaking anything and she’s so patient. Also she’s terribly generous. She buys all the coffee and sugar and biscuits for break – she insists – and the petty cash is absolutely flourishing!’
I was liking this less and less. ‘And the little old man?’
‘Uncle Laszlo, do you mean? Well, I found him in the back one day, sort of rootling among the ichthyosaurus bones; he’d got lost, I think. It’s sad because he’s retired and lives in this awful hotel with no one to care for him – all his people stayed behind in Hungary in 1956. He must have been some sort of professor, I reckon. His hands are a bit shaky now, but he’s absolutely brilliant with bones.’
‘Oh, my God!’ I could see it all: medical disasters, insurance scandals, enquiries … ‘And that guy in jeans doing the carpentry?’ Obscurely, he had annoyed me most. ‘Your boyfriend?’
She flushed. ‘No,’ she said shortly. ‘Matt’s American. He went through the drug scene when he was still in nappies and he’s been through some bad times. As a matter of fact, I found him kind of passed-out behind the stuffed bison in that alcove where Brian sleeps.’
‘Brian?’
‘Only in the winter.’ She was on the defensive at last. ‘He’s a pavement artist and in the summer he likes to sleep in the park. He’s very careful – it was because of him that we found the leak in the dark-room roof.’
I picked up one of Mr Henry’s treasures – a specimen tube simply and coyly labelled ‘CYST’ and turned it over in my hands.
‘They’ll have to go, Miss French. Every one of them.’
She stood there, knock-kneed as ever, taking it.
‘Look,’ I said. ‘ I don’t know if Mr Henry told you, but this museum is financially on the rocks. Our endowment’s been reduced to nothing by the inflation and unless we can get a grant from the Natural History Commission we’re finished.’
‘We’ll have to close, do you mean?’
I nodded. ‘Just so. And the first thing Sir Godfrey Peters and his Commission are going to ask me is why this museum is full of geriatrics and pregnant women and tramps.’ A pause. Then she said gently, ‘Could … they just finish what
they’re doing? They’ve all worked so hard.’
I frowned, calculating. ‘The Commission’s due in mid- February.
That’s three months from now. All right, they can finish the jobs
in hand but that’s all. Do you understand?’
‘Yes, Mr Bellingham. I understand.’
There followed some of the most exhausting weeks of my life. Three months was not nearly long enough for what needed to be done. Havelock had had connections all over the world and hardly a week passed but some ancient general or intrepid lady entomologist died and left us their collection of Peruvian rhinoceros beetles or a tin trunk of mysterious shards. It seemed to me that unless we could make some kind of order out of the muddle and get some of the stuff on display, the Commission would make short work of us.
So we set to work. And I have to say here and now that rancour was not one of the football supporter’s vices. She kept her lame dogs out of my way in her room and turned herself into a kind of sloe-eyed helpmeet out of the Old Testament, contantly at my side. We staggered about with drawers and specimen boxes, we sorted, we classified. We turned out rusty tins labelled ‘Henderson’s Breast Developer’ or ‘Colman’s Original Mustard’ and found now a valuable effigy, now a collection of mouldering pupae which crumbled at our touch. And always, even at the end of the most gruelling day, covered in dust and tottering with exhaustion, her demented enthusiasm remained undimmed.
Three weeks after my arrival she knocked at the door of my office as I sat in solitary state, drinking my coffee with the CYST.
‘Uncle Laszlo’s finished the ichthyosaurus. He was wondering if you’d like to see it?’
I followed her into her room. The old man had on his hat and coat; scrupulously he was getting ready to leave now that his task was done. I thought how tired he looked, how old.
The ichthyosaurus took up two trestle tables and so far as I could see he had made a flawless job of it.
‘Thank you. That will make a most valuable exhibit.’
Uncle Laszlo took up his briefcase. ‘There are some pterosaur bones in the cupboard in Mr Bigger’s room,’ he said. ‘ I think they are complete. If they could be assembled, they would make an interesting comparison.’
‘Are you sure?’ I asked sharply.
‘That it is a pterosaur, I am sure. That it is complete, I cannot say.’
‘Well, you’d better find out,’ I said.
Uncle Laszlo looked at me and then quietly he took off his hat and coat. After all, he did not look so very old. It was only when a sort of sigh spread around the room and Flossie lurched radiantly towards me with the second cup of coffee that I realised what I had done.
After that things went downhill rapidly. F
lossie appeared next day carrying a swathe of wild silk, priceless stuff the colour of the sea. ‘Mrs Rahman’s father-in-law sent it from Quittah. Would you mind terribly if we used it to display the Abyssinian pottery on?’
I said no, I didn’t mind. Gradually it turned out that I didn’t mind Brian, on leave from his pavement, wiring the display cases for concealed lighting, or Matt repainting the frieze in the main hall. Mrs Rahman moving on from the Hartington Egg Collection to the Kashmiri dried ferns was another thing I didn’t apparently mind too much. As for Flossie putting in a fourteen-hour day, that had always been all right with me.
Soon I abandoned not only my principles but the CYST, taking coffee with the rest of them in Flossie’s room and giving them the benefit of my views on Leboyer, the political situation in Afghanistan and the efficiency of Yoga in licking drugs. It got so that when Flossie vanished one morning, obeying her sixth sense, and came back with a tragically widowed Brigadier, it was I who gave him the Madagascan ivories to sort.
I began to be hopeful. The Havelock, like a woman who is loved, began to glow, to shine.
‘They can’t close us, Paul, we’re so beautiful,’ said Flossie, gazing entranced at her newly mounted shrunken head. And removing a mother-of-pearl coconut scraper from her tangled hair, I was inclined to agree.
My happiness was the greater because Vivian, for the first time since our marriage, was taking an interest in my work. ‘I was thinking, Paul, if the Havelock is in trouble financially we ought to get going on the social side a bit. Have some fund-raising parties and things? I’d need some new clothes, of course…’
Gratefully I made over my salary cheque and Vivian, looking unbelievably stunning, sallied forth in search of American philanthropists, captains of industry and eminent scientists who might interest themselves in the Havelock and its fate.
I had it all sorted out in my mind, of course. Sir Godfrey and his Commission were due on February the twelfth. A week before that I was going to clear out the volunteers, give Flossie a holiday (I saw no way of making that girl into anything that remotely resembled the curator of a natural history museum) and only Mr Biggers, myself and the staid secretary would be there to present accounts and conduct them on a formal tour.