‘In Xanadu did Kubla Khan . . .’ I whisper.
‘Is all of this our garden, Mum? Right down to there? And over there?’ Leo asks me with his arms outstretched. I stop staring at the glass structure and look where he’s pointing.
‘We’ll have to go and find out. I tell you what, why don’t we walk all round the house first and see if we can find the entrance to the museum?’
‘I love museums. Is there a museum?’
I almost ask him what he thinks that kitchen was. ‘I told you fifty times. It’s Daddy’s grandfather’s museum.’
Leo takes up a chant of, ‘You told me, you told me,’ meaning that he knows I’m right and can remember the fifty times that I explained it. Singing makes him walk faster and I join in his song, although that’s hard when he changes key every other line.
When we turn the corner of the house, hedging starts to line the path; to our right is woodland, dark and tangled. The gap between the trees and the house is under shadow and it’s momentarily cold. There are inviting tracks through the wood but we stick to the gravel path around the edge of the house. ‘It’s going to take us all summer to explore all this,’ I say, more to myself than Leo.
Leo gasps and I look up. A peacock struts across the path in front of us. ‘Make him put his tail up,’ Leo shouts, ‘Like Daddy did.’ He starts searching the edge of the path for a suitable blade of grass.
This was one of Richard’s party tricks, every time we visited a zoo or a country house. He would take a broad piece of grass, hold his hands together – palms facing and fingers knitted – and stretch the grass between the tops and bottoms of his thumbs, pressing them tight against each other. Then he would put his mouth against the heel of his hands and blow. The rude squeak it made would almost always, after a few dud goes, result in the peacock looking indignantly at him and fanning its spectacular tail in annoyance.
Leo finds the right piece of grass. ‘This one. Come on, Mummy, before he walks off. Hurry.’
This isn’t going to go well. It’s another of those moments, ones I’m used to, where Leo remembers that I’m not Richard and that those wonderful things that went with Richard are gone forever. It breaks his heart every time.
I stretch the piece of grass taut between my thumbs and blow.
The sound is hideous: loud, rude and perfectly peacock. His tail goes first time and he shakes his bottom as he circles, the eyes on the end of each feather quiver and sparkle in the sun.
I could cry.
Leo cannot contain his excitement and chases after the peacock with a fresh piece of grass. He is the image of Richard when he’s laughing. I imagine a younger Richard, with other peacocks, perfecting the trick. Why did I never ask him where he learnt to do it? Was it here? It’s an unusual skill to have, but Richard was an unusual person.
We keep going, anti-clockwise, round the building and there – on the front side of the house but at the other end to where we went in last night, is the ticket office. It’s a real museum. You can’t see the dome from here and, for a second, I wonder what else hides behind the grey-painted turnstile, the misty window of the kiosk.
I pat my jeans’ pockets, I’ve got money. I wouldn’t put it past Araminta to make us pay. And maybe we should pay. That wasn’t in any of the discussions about gas bills or broadband: there wasn’t a set number of museum passes for the year. Would Richard have paid? That’s a simple answer – Richard wouldn’t have come here. I cajoled and encouraged him: after we had Leo I’d go as far as to say I begged him. But the answer was always a flat – immovable – no.
‘Well, we’re here now,’ I say to the stubborn ghost of Richard, ‘Come what may.’
There’s an old man behind the desk at the entrance. He sits in what could loosely be called a ‘gift shop’, a collection of dusty toys and 1950s postcards and a brightly coloured ice cream freezer. I grimace at the idea of Leo living so close to an ice cream shop, and anticipate months of push-me-pull-you rows.
‘Two please.’ I smile at the man. ‘One concession?’ he asks.
‘Yes, one student please. And one adult.’
He tears pink paper tickets from a roll, more slowly than I would have thought was possible. ‘Have you been before?’
I want to tell him that we were here all night, that we’ve seen the ancient kitchen and had our first disagreement with Araminta, but that’s not going to help. ‘We haven’t,’ I say and play nice.
‘Down this corridor is Gallery One, start in there – most people do – and then go on to Gallery Two after that. Then Three and Four. They’re numbered, you see.’
It’s not the most sparkling museum tour I’ve ever had.
‘Do you have a map?’ Ghost Richard laughs beside me: he thinks I’m funny.
‘We don’t. But they’re all numbered, you see.’
Leo and I set off down the corridor. There are a few boards explaining the nature of the collection, but I can’t really stop and read too much of them without losing Leo’s attention. And then, right in front of us, is a picture of Leo’s great-grandfather.
The genes are strong. The photograph is monochrome but Richard’s dark hooded eyes – and Leo’s – are there. The thick hair, almost black and poker straight, is the same. His face is narrower than Leo’s and his cheeks more chiselled than Richard’s but the likeness is unmistakable. ‘This is a picture of Daddy’s grandfather.’
‘Why is he wearing that hat?’
‘He was an explorer. This is his camp. See his tent behind him?’
‘Is that a real gun? I would be great with a gun.’ Leo starts to spin round, his imaginary gun held up to his shoulder but, for the sake of the painting, I touch him lightly on the arm and he stops.
In the painting, Colonel Hugo is sitting in a fold-up chair outside a canvas tent. He wears a pith helmet and desert fatigues. His legs are stretched out in front of him, gaitered up to his knees, and a rifle lies along the length of his legs, down to his crossed ankles.
‘It is definitely a real gun,’ I say.
‘What did he do with it?’
And this bit I do know. I know that Richard’s grandfather was a Victorian conservationist, and that meant that he shot, stuffed, and brought to England thousands of animals from all over the world. He believed he was preserving them for posterity and education and, in that, Richard supported him 100 per cent. The one beef that Richard could have had with this museum – Richard the committed vegetarian who couldn’t bear the death of so much as an insect, Richard the lifelong green campaigner – he didn’t have at all. Whatever kept Richard from this place, it wasn’t the stuffed animals: I always felt that it was something far more human.
Leo is bored with waiting and has answered his, pretty fatuous, question for himself. He is walking off down the corridor.
There is an archway on the left-hand side. The sign the man in the booth promised looms up in front of us: Gallery One. Leo, fractionally ahead of me, slips round the corner into the room and gasps.
I stifle a scream.
*
The animals are stuffed, just as Richard told me. And they’re mainly displayed in twos, exactly as he said: an ‘ark of death’ he called it. What is so incredible, what made Leo gasp and me scream, is the scale of it. The humans stand in a relatively small spot in the middle and the animals take up the rest of the space: virtual reality designers of the present day would have trouble making anything so amazing. The gallery is huge, a lantern of glass in the ceiling lets in enough light to cast eerie shadows around the room.
Every animal is posed, mostly with another of its species, as if it is mid-breath, so lifelike it feels that they are about to place one hoof or claw or foot in front of the other and walk right towards us. Their glass eyes twinkle with the reflected sunlight and I prepare for the inevitability of seeing one blink.
Okapi bend to drink from a pond as a hippo roars up at them, its peg teeth snarling. Giraffes splay their elegant legs to reach leaves from the small trees growing
– although they can’t be real – here and there through the scene. At the back, walking between the scene on our left and the scene in front of us, no bars to contain the animals except for the glass that keeps them from the centre of the room, the biggest elephant I’ve ever imagined strolls – benign – above the other animals. The sheer height of him throws my gaze to the floor of the display and I’m amazed to see snakes, mid-slither, and tiny rodents – frozen in terror – looking up at the snakes’ pointed tongues. I’ve never seen anything more real in all my life and yet, at the same time, it is the stuff of nightmares.
‘Are they alive, Mummy?’ Leo’s voice is unsteady. His hands flutter on his thighs.
I reach out and take his hand, stilling the nervous movement. His fingers weave between mine and I squeeze hard. ‘They’re dead. Stuffed.’
‘They’re not stuffed,’ says a cold voice behind me and I remember that, as this house gives, it instantly takes away: a seesaw of expectation and emotion. ‘They’re mounted. The skins are stretched over frames of wood, and then posed in lifelike positions. It’s infinitely superior to stuffing.’ Behind her, a zebra looks at me with contempt. I move my head slightly to one side and, as I suspected, every pair of black glass eyes follows me.
‘Mrs Minta,’ says Leo, turning to face her. ‘Are these your animals?’
‘They’re not my animals.’ She is softer when she speaks directly to Leo. ‘They are your great-grandfather’s animals.’
‘Why did he put them in here?’
‘He was a collector. He loved animals and travelling, and he wanted all the people who lived here – who didn’t have television or the internet – to see them too.’ She sounds almost human.
‘It’s . . . I can’t . . .’ I’m almost lost for words. ‘It’s barbaric.’
‘Really?’ Her question is rhetorical, a way of letting her breath freeze the room, of spreading ice across the parquet floors and up through my feet. ‘I’m sorry that you think so.’ A mouse looks up at me in support of her: I swear its whiskers are jiggling in disgust, its little brown nose twitching towards the bad smell.
‘What’s “barbaric” mean?’ Leo walks up to the glass. It runs from the floor to the ceiling and he bumps his face against it when he leans forward to look in. ‘Ow.’
‘Watch out, Leo,’ Araminta chips in before I can. ‘The glass has to stay very clean so you can see in.’
It’s making me feel light-headed, my palms are sweating. ‘All those poor dead animals.’
Leo turns round to look at me. Behind him a tiger lies on its side, bathing in the shafts of sunlight, its orange stripes as vivid as when muscle rippled beneath them. ‘But they’re dead, Mum. Like the fox.’ He looks thoughtful, sad.
The animals stare at me: judge and jury. They wait, in silence, for me to speak. Araminta stands in front of them, as if she is about to command the vast army to attack. I imagine the teeth and claws and wings and hoofs: the noise they would make, the squawking, the bellowing, the accusing.
‘The fox?’ Araminta’s head swivels: for a moment I think it will rotate a full 360 but her owl eyes settle on me, burn into my conscience.
‘Mummy killed a fox. Poor fox.’
‘It ran in front of my car. I didn’t see it till it was too late. I’m so sorry.’
She does not blink. ‘But you decided not to say, not to tell me. Even when I was looking for her.’
‘Her?’
‘She had cubs. She has been teaching them to hunt out on the lawn in the evenings.’
‘I . . . I didn’t know it, she, was your fox.’ I am burning with guilt, with embarrassment. I inhale deeply to keep myself from crying. It is bad enough to be responsible for that little death, without this inquisition.
‘We have a tradition of foxes being safe here.’ She speaks to Leo but, simultaneously, glares at me. ‘Colonel Hugo refused to let the local Hunt onto the land. He thought hunting with hounds was inhumane, barbarous.’
I resist the urge to gesture around me, at these hundreds of animals, dead as door nails. A vulture hovers, wings outstretched to the width of my arms, behind Araminta, literally backing her up.
‘We could get the fox and put him in here.’ Leo is trying to be helpful.
Araminta shakes her head. ‘We can’t get into these cases – we would accidentally take little bugs in, mites, and they would eat the animals.’
‘How did the animals get in?’ Leo asks. It’s a good question.
My mind sees the animals, two-by-two, coming down a wide plank in the drive, descending from the mouth of a huge wooden ship and walking, trotting, flapping, their way into this room. I can hear the noise they made as they settled into position, the snorting, growling, trumpeting.
Araminta points at the back of the case in front of us. ‘There, do you see?’ she asks Leo. ‘There are two big doors hidden in the landscape.’
We lean forward and I can just make out the top edges of the doors in the painted background behind the animals.
‘But you mustn’t ever open them.’ Araminta says and looks at us very seriously. ‘It would be catastrophic.’
‘The animals are very beautiful,’ says Leo. He strokes the glass.
‘They were beautiful. Before someone shot them.’ I mutter it, mostly to myself. Araminta is angry enough already: I don’t want to get into a debate with her but I can’t keep my mouth shut either.
Araminta stands beside Leo. She peers into the case. Doleful fawns gaze back at her, their dead brown eyes convincingly wet. ‘The Victorians didn’t know that some animals would become extinct one day,’ she says. ‘Do you know what extinct means?’
Leo nods his head.
‘This is a West African Black Rhino. There aren’t any left alive. Not one.’ She points at the rhino, at his wide shoulders, his thick wrinkled skin. ‘Should we put him in a cupboard where no one can see him?’ She looks at me when she says this, the set of her shoulders challenging me to respond. She’s made this argument before.
‘Or should he be in here so people can learn? So we can talk about the fact that the rhino’s family are all dead and that we need to take care of the planet, even species we don’t see or know about?’ She exhales loudly, showing that she’s done, the lecture is over.
Leo presses his face too close to the case. His lips leave a moist kiss on the glass.
‘Yuck, Leo,’ I say. ‘Wipe that off.’
He stands up straight, running the glass with the edge of his shirt sleeve. ‘I think the animals are very beautiful. I like them.’ Team Araminta.
She looks at me for a moment, victory held tight behind her thin lips, then leaves as quietly as she came in.
To: Simon Henderson
From: Cate Morris
Subject: Not Even About Food
Mail: We looked around the museum – not in any detail but as much as Leo could take in/enjoy – I can’t say I felt the same way – and then we had to give up and go to the supermarket. I needed to know that there was still a real world out there, still normal people who do dull shit like shopping or spitting.
I bought pizza and bottles of water and washing powder. I bought wine.
I was coping, I was, until I saw the emperor penguin. Have you seen it? It’s not much shorter than me and it’s in a wooden case – still in its original packaging. Next to it, in a glass display panel, is a letter from Ernest Shackleton offering the penguin as a gift to Colonel Hugo. And that’s not the weird bit. The weird bit is the second letter, the answer from Colonel H, from Richard’s very own grandfather – that never got sent. He explains, in terribly polite terms – not wanting to cause offence – why he can’t possibly accept the gift of an emperor penguin. AND IT’S BECAUSE IT DOESN’T MATCH. Because Hugo’s exhibits are from non-Antarctic environments and it DOESN’T MATCH. A penguin. Not wallpaper, not kitchen chairs, a penguin – a penguin almost as tall as me. Is that what I’m here to learn, Simon? That it wasn’t only Richard who was bonkers? That it was his grandfather, a
nd his grandfather’s father: the whole bloody lot of them. That they were all utterly utterly mad. For generations and generations.
Is this when I become truly grateful for Leo’s extra chromosome? Is that the only thing that might save him?
C xxx
Chapter Five
The making of Leo Morris turned out to be far harder than Richard or I had thought it would be. We were young and fit, we assumed we would have as much sex as possible and then a tiny Richard or a miniature me would appear. The first part was easy enough but the second proved almost impossible.
All around us our friends were hatching in droves – except Simon; every time he met a suitable girl she’d turn out to be too high maintenance or unwilling to wait while he went off on yet another expedition.
One by one, our couples friends – and even a few single ones – dropped out of the restaurant meals and the theatre evenings and stayed in with their new wonder – or wonders as it turned out for a couple of them.
But for Richard and me, nothing. We didn’t worry about it: time was on our side and we knew these things aren’t always as easy as people would like, but it was still hard every time I shopped for another baby present or wrote out the message – the one we longed to hear – on a congratulations card.
And then, out of nowhere and with no intervention other than our silent pleading with the universe, we got Leo. It was a perfect pregnancy, marked out at first by summer strolls through London parks and, later, by Christmas shopping trips around the traditional stores, breathless with excitement at how different our shopping would be for the next Christmas and all the ones after that, how much our priorities would have changed by then.
There were a few raised markers in some of the tests, but none of them claimed to be definite, just that they might indicate a higher risk of Down’s syndrome. We concentrated on the words ‘might’ and ‘risk’ rather than worrying unnecessarily. And then, in the last scan of my pregnancy, they found that Leo had a tiny hole in his heart, tiny but still a significant danger for his minuscule body. That was far more of a worry than any chromosome condition might or might not be.
Where We Belong Page 5
