Lewis put on his jacket, pocketed his wallet and said, “Walk you to the tube?”
Jane slipped her arm through his and squeezed tightly. We could tell she was relieved to have told someone about William, even if the conversation hadn’t gone the way she’d wanted.
We turned to leave. If we lost track of Jane we’d have to make our way back to her flat on our own, which meant there was a chance we might get lost, spend hours or days making mistakes in direction. The boy suddenly called out, “It was the dog’s name! He was brown and white and he liked crusts of bread and I named him.”
So out we went, giddy from our progress, the boy imploring from the back of the group, “Can we please, please, please try not to forget.”
We haven’t forgotten the dog. And we haven’t forgotten what Jane said about writing a book. But things are different now. We bristle when the subject comes up. The night a few weeks ago when she pushed her Whitmore files under the bed, some of us stormed out, and some of us stood over her while she was sleeping and called her a liar. So now, when Gareth steps onto the stage to place a jug of water and a glass on the low table beside the lectern, and Jane goes up on her toes to see if William is standing in the crowd nearby, some of us are wishing her well and some of us are just wanting the production over with. The boy, full of pent-up energy, is zooming around, while the girl walks in circles around Jane the way children sometimes do, running their fingers around the bell of a skirt or along the silky waves of a curtain.
“Come here, sweetie,” the one with the soft voice says, and the girl wanders back to us.
“Who’s that?” the girl asks when she’s back in the fold, and we turn to where she’s pointing, to the marble bust of the museum founder sitting on its pillar at the far side of the stage.
“That’s Mr. Chester. Edmund Chester,” we say, and his name feels good coming out of our mouths, the sure shape of it.
This is the wonder of names. Like the press of a footprint in the snow: proof that someone has been there.
9
There is a scattering of applause during Gareth’s introductory speech when he mentions that the Chester Museum has been exhibiting the work of individual collectors for one hundred and forty-two years. He waits until the applause subsides, nods to acknowledge it, and then continues. “Edmund Chester was a man of his time, of the Industrial era, in that he valued and upheld the two most prevalent ideals of his age: progress and mastery. For Edmund, society’s ability to move forward and look back simultaneously was a wonder. The men that he admired, those he surrounded himself with, strove to understand the world in new ways, to mechanize it, simplify it and coordinate it, while also preserving and revelling in the past and in the fortitude of the elements. Men of his generation didn’t rest on their inheritances; they used their money and titles to ferret out new possibilities, business models, technologies, remedies and inventions, formulae that could be shared amongst all kinds and classes of people, that could affect how all members of society lived their lives. The associations to which Edmund belonged, the fraternity to whom we — as inheritors of this collection — owe a debt of gratitude, believed that they had come of age in an era of optimism and vitality, one that was a means to a new kind of power, a power that was not exempt from accountability. Those who didn’t invest in factories or inventions supported local homes, schools and civic institutions. Like Edmund they believed that knowledge mattered, that our history, values and society were reflected in how we regarded and understood the material world — a material world that wasn’t limited to the creatures and specimens found in nature but one that extended to those things we made ourselves.”
Jane can detect a hint of anger in Gareth’s voice, a gruffness that she’s only heard a few times, most distinctly when he announced the museum’s closure. He has been the director and head curator at the Chester for almost thirty years, and he helped vote in the very government that is cutting museum funding. Jane knows that when Gareth was a young boy his mother brought him here once a summer, packing sandwiches and a canister of tea. After they wandered through the museum they’d lunch in the park across the street because it wasn’t gated then and anyone could use it. Seeing his interest in the diorama of exotic animals — the mounted wolf and the moose whose great antlers had been hung with pondweed — his mother bought him a book on mammals. In the year that followed, whenever he was stuck inside the house because of pollen counts and the cotton that seemed to puff up in his chest, she’d give him quizzes on the mammals’ Latin names, on their subspecies, diets and habitats.
Gareth had told all this to the Minister when he’d invited him to tour the museum a month ago. As Jane trailed behind them, she heard Gareth explain that he knew what it was like to visit a museum and carry the experience back into the world. Even back then, Gareth said, he knew that the scientific instruments and plant models he saw in those cabinets had applications and counterparts in the landscape he walked through every day to school. The Minister seemed to see it otherwise: he thought of museums like the Chester as a series of dimly lit rooms where things that were interesting but no longer relevant were shelved. He barely glanced at the displays, seemed to take more interest in the walkway carpet. “Cutting the museum’s funding is a mistake,” Gareth had said. Jane knew he thought it was a poorly conceived cost-cutting measure by a government that specialized in being shortsighted, that was ignorant about the finite nature of resources, whether natural, manmade or ephemeral. Gareth understood the black-and-white economics, but not the sense of it. He had done his best to appeal the decision, but no one in power had budged.
What, Jane wonders now, would Edmund Chester make of the museum’s closing? Of the longcase clock auctioned off to a private buyer in the south for a coastal home he’d hardly set foot in, of the birds going to a lawyer, the Darwin collection to a bank executive, of the whale bones being shipped to a failing aquarium halfway around the globe? Even the specimen jars that were part of the original collection had been packed into padded cases and would soon be driven down the road to the Natural History Museum, where they’d be left in storage because that museum did not have room to display them.
Edmund had not been ashamed to admit that he loved things. In his letters and journals he praised everything from a piston to a pendulum, a cluster of mushrooms in the woods to his factory — a place he loved for the way it expressed a working order, a procedural seamlessness, though he also knew from his own encounters with misfortune that order was an illusion. Jane thinks that the museum was his refuge in this way — a perfect expression of the largely mysterious world, of the gaps in mankind’s knowledge, of the delight of the newly discovered, all under the shelter of one roof. For Edmund, the collection must have been like a giant puzzle, and he’d occupied himself with fitting one piece into the next, whole years spent expanding the imagined frame. The museum was his way of capturing the accomplishments and wonder of men’s lives in rooms that testified to their efforts and erudition — men like Arthur Nicholson and Perry Humphrey, men like Norvill Farrington, who, in those early years, held up the scarab beetle on its card of paper and explained to those gathered how the wings made a chirring sound, a mode of vibration that caused the body to sing.
What would Edmund Chester have said he’d accomplished, if he’d had time to say so on his last day on earth? Jane thinks of him as a man of science. His pleasure was in the “how” of the world, its palpability, its reverberations. Even when lifting Charlotte’s chin with his hand in the happy years of their marriage he had probably marvelled at how her eyelids lowered the slightest bit; how her lips parted in anticipation. His life was one of constant study: measuring inches of cloth by hours, assembling fossils bone by articulated bone, weighing his grief against his joys, his discoveries against his losses. In the end perhaps he would have said he had offered people a glimpse of the wonder of the world; he’d helped expose its mysterious workings.