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 flat 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 would 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 protegee. ‘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 born. 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 Hartington 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 alclass="underline" medical disasters, insurance scandals, enquiries… ‘And that guy in jeans doing the carpentry?’ Obscurely, he had annoyed me most. ‘Your boy friend?’
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.