Observatory Mansions: A Novel

by Edward Carey

  Francis Orme remembered – 3.

  … So that I, seeing girls and boys sleeping in beds, remembered a time when I was in possession of fifty-four porcelain dolls. The Time of Dolls boasts as its characters: myself, Master Francis Orme, then only recently after the Time of White Gloves, and fifty-four porcelain dolls. These dolls had belonged to my paternal grandmother and they were said to be extremely rare and valuable. Mother had not let me touch them. They lay in their various white cardboard boxes, lined with protective tissue paper, in those distant and out-of-bounds attic rooms of Tearsham Park. However, during the Time of Mother’s Greatest Unhappiness, which coincided with the Time of Dolls, my mother kept herself locked in her bedroom and so was unable to see me up in the attic. I took the dolls from their boxes and, standing them all on their dainty feet, imagined myself married to every single one of them and saw myself living happily in the seclusion of the attic rooms of Tearsham Park. I saw myself, I remembered, strolling about nonchalantly under the pressures of marriage, and wherever I saw myself I was pursued by fifty-four diminutive porcelain wives. During the second stage of the Time of Dolls I undressed all the dolls and examined them very studiously. I became an expert in the anatomy of dollkind. (At the waxworks I once tried to examine the wax flesh under the clothes of the wax people. The wax people did not have wax bodies, the wax people had bodies made of polystyrene and fibreglass – some of them, the ones with long dresses, even had wooden stumps for legs.) The third stage of the Time of Dolls, and sadly the last, found me returning all the still-unclothed dolls to their white boxes and numbering each of them. I found enough white cardboard around Tearsham Park to fashion for myself a somewhat larger white box. This I labelled fifty-five. I would lie down, also naked, save for my white gloves, in my box and meditate. The Time of Dolls ended abruptly: Mother, out of her room once more, though paler and thinner, discovered (naked) me with my fifty-four (naked) porcelain wives and divorced me from them immediately. The last time I saw my wives, I remembered, was during the auction that took place on the lawns around Tearsham Park. The dolls were clothed then and fetched an exceedingly high sum. (All but one, who managed to escape. Lot 192.)

  Twenty remembered – 6.

  Twenty, recovering progressively from her amnesia, thought of all the dogs of Tearsham Park Gardens. She told of how she had passed the time with them. She recounted unmentionable things. Unmentionable I say here because the appalled Peter Bugg refused to share them with me. She cried tears of remorse about all those dirty deeds. I wasn’t always like that, was I? No. She remembered now, she remembered a flat with the number twenty on the door. She hadn’t always been the Dog Woman of Tearsham Park Gardens. I’ve done such ugly things. She had done them for the love of Maximilian, whom she missed, she recalled, acutely.

  Claire Higg remembered – 5.

  Twenty’s recollection of her, then quite recent, dog days reminded Claire Higg of those innumerable days of time equally ill-spent, though not in such unmentionable pursuits, that she had passed in front of her television set. I’ve lost so much time, she realized, aloud, tearing all the pictures of the deceased moustache man from her walls. What have I done?

  She had been doing precisely nothing for over seven years and the sudden shock of it made her pull the television plug out of its socket and vow never, not for a single second, to watch her television again.

  There was only one face for me, she remembered aloud, ripping the cut-outs of the moustache man into a thousand fragments. He was pale, she remembered. His photograph was on that wall. Look there, it was there! But it was there no longer.

  Twenty remembered – 7.

  And Twenty, seeing Claire Higg ripping up the magazine cut-outs of her moustache man, remembered another moustached man. This moustached man, she recalled with excitement and a slight laugh, did not have perfect teeth. This moustache man she remembered seeing outside the flat with the number twenty on it, and inside it too. He was, she exclaimed, her husband. But his marriage status and hair growth were temporarily all she could remember of him.

  Then, exhausted as they all were, and momentarily out of memories, it was decided that another break should occur. They all left Claire Higg to her turned-off and unplugged television. Peter Bugg, after he had visited his own flat, knocked on the Orme family’s door. It was then that he told me of all those remembrances that had been breathing upstairs in flat sixteen. He carried with him a photograph of a man, his father, which he said he could no longer share his rooms with. Though, he said, he could not bear to destroy it either. Could Francis, he asked, take care of it for him, just for a while. I could. He said, also, that he was being troubled by a certain matter which would not allow him to rest, and though he could not yet bring himself to share it with anyone, would Francis, if the time came, be willing to listen to it. I would.

  Then Peter Bugg, troubled, crying and sweating on his way out, whispered a terrible thing:

  Do you know where Chiron is?

  And left without waiting for a response.

  A short voyage around the memory of the

  teaching methods of Peter Bugg, as remembered

  by Francis Orme.

  After the death of Emma it was decided, principally by Mother, that I should be made to read and write. Father spoke of his old tutor. Mother wrote to him and finding that Bugg was then temporarily, as Bugg put it, out of work, employed him. My parents had decided not to send me to school, partly because of what I called my unwillingness and they called my limited ability, but also partly because Father had never been to school, so that it somehow made sense that I shouldn’t go either. I was taught exactly what my father had been taught in his childhood. The years of civilization’s progression between Father’s schooling and mine were ignored or else believed insignificant, and so for a long while I was prepared for a world that no longer existed.

  Peter Bugg, my new teacher, reeked of history; there seemed to be nothing modern about him. His pale body looked as if it had long since died and his clothes seemed to have been tailored two or three generations earlier for people that belonged in black and white photographs. Bugg was a small man. He had a tiny, unmuscular body from the corners of which came matchstick arms and legs. His neatly parted hair was so black that it accentuated the pallor of his skin. He had a huge head, which looked as though it belonged to someone else. I believed that this was because he was always exercising his head, but never his body.

  I remember the first day I heard his raspy voice, we were in the large drawing room:

  So this is the little scholar. Stand straight now. Chin up. We’re to be chained together. Those hands of yours, those grubby fingers will be firing off essays before long. I shall call you boy. You shall call me sir. If you disagree I’ll call my ruler and he’ll call you cry baby bunting. Let’s shake hands now. We shan’t again till I’ve finished my work or it has finished you.

  Father?

  This is Mr Bugg, Francis. He was my professor, now he’ll be yours. He was younger than me when he came to teach; I was his grown-up pupil, nearly ten years his senior. Term only began for me when Mr Bugg’s school was on holiday. Mr Bugg is an intellectual. He’s the author of a pamphlet entitled The Benefits of Corporal Punishment in Education.

  A mere squib.

  He has also read three thousand, six hundred and thirty-three different books.

  Actually it’s six thousand, eight hundred and sixty-nine, now. I’ve investigated into deeper oceans of cognisance since you last saw Chiron.

  Chiron is Mr Bugg’s ruler. There he is now.

  Would you like to meet Chiron, boy?

  Chiron makes his first appearance. Chiron was a long, thick piece of polished mahogany. I nodded in reply to Mr Bugg’s question, believing that to be polite. It was polite. It was also foolish.

  Put out your hand, flat, palm up.

  I met Chiron. Chiron stung.

  Next time it’s the knuckles. That’s Chiron.

  Father!

 
Run along to lunch now, Francis. Lessons begin tomorrow. Enjoy your freedom.

  Seven o’clock sharp.

  The benefits of corporal punishment in education.

  My father averted his eyes and let the education begin. He knew – how the memory must have stung his hands – he knew what I was in for. He had trembled through the nights of his early manhood trying to sharpen his brain. He tried to keep up, to stand equal with his teacher, but fell behind and Chiron was sent to catch him up. He’d struggled through a tempest of syllables and written words that blurred in his tear-filled eyes. He’d kissed his hands as they shook hours after, when the lessons had finished for the day, when he was free but his red, swollen knuckles wouldn’t let him forget. He’d been called: Blockhead, Simpleton, Fathead, Mooncalf, Ignorance, Indolence. He’d crawled on the nursery floor, bit the table legs in his hysteria, he’d worked himself into black holes of distraction and distress. He’d bawled till he vomited, he couldn’t sleep for fear that day would come again, he had pulled his hair out and groaned with terror when the clock doomed seven times. And yet here again was Peter Bugg, ready to pelt knowledge into his ignorant son.

  I wrote my quaking A, B, Cs with Chiron hovering and swooping above and about me. I traced my Ands, Hows and Becauses on the school foolscap. I drew a margin every day in the corner of my page and slowly, with throbbing hands, wrote out my feeble pencil marks. Between breakfast and lunch I clawed through centuries of grammar on the axis of my blunt pencil tip. Between lunch and five o’clock I swam, sinking, rising and spluttering along the choppy surfaces of arithmetic conducted by the lightning shocks of a mahogany ruler called Chiron.

  And every evening, appalled and cowering, I would be pulled by the lobe of my left ear into the drawing room where my pedagogue would endlessly inform my mother that I was not worthy of his tutelage. I had to say, Dear Mother, I am so sorry, I will try harder. And sometimes the tutor, infuriated by my sloth, would send me out with twenty pieces of paper of which the first had inscribed at its head: I am an idiot, weak and ungrateful x 1,000. I’d run to the kitchen and passing pages to Cook and the other domestics we’d all work on a sheet of the lines. My handwriting unjoined and large was quick to copy. We made easy work of the punishment and drank hot chocolate or peppermint tea as we all sat, pencils in hand, around the large oak table. I hadn’t come up with this idea. Father had. He’d done the same when he was a child. Sometimes he would join in the writing game; he’d agreed to becoming an idiot, weak and ungrateful.

  One day we were all busy with our pencils in the kitchen when we heard a calm voice which made our hair stand erect with terror:

  What’s going on here?

  It was Peter Bugg.

  I was locked up in the nursery in order to write a novel which consisted of one sentence, endlessly repeated: I am a deceitful, wicked and hideous child. I had already had a long if rather one-sided conversation with a strip of mahogany.

  I was however learning.

  I could read and write.

  I was progressing.

  The fall of Peter Bugg.

  About six months after Peter Bugg arrived, and shortly before Christmas, it was decided, principally by my mother, that I should be given a reward for my endeavours. Asked what I would like I replied immediately that I wanted see the museum of the wax people again. Bugg would accompany me, a taxi drove us past the frozen fields into the city.

  Bugg called the taxi to a halt outside the city’s largest toyshop, and though I protested he insisted we at least look in. Every child, I remember him saying, adores a toyshop, particularly at Christmas time. That day it was Bugg who played with the toys and I, strangely assuming the role of the adult, who watched over him as he picked up toy after toy with ecstatic giggles. Look at this and look at this and look at this. I remember seeing him transform, he seemed so happy now. All the bitterness had fallen from his face, I could feel him enjoying himself for the first time in years. He worked puppets, fired toy revolvers, pressed the buttons that released the torpedoes on little electronic games. He cuddled teddy bears, shot with bow and arrow, attempted to launch kites. He pulled me by my hand leading me from one object to another, grinning and shrieking in excitement. Look at this and look at this and look at this. I presumed my tutor was unwell, that he was experiencing some kind of fit, or that perhaps his extraordinary behaviour was an attempt at mimicking the obsessions of children and that he would very soon tell me – No, Francis, this you must never do. You must work hard, nothing but misery befalls those young adults who indulge in their childish ways when they should be growing up and studying hard. Those children become failures, their ways end in the prison.

  But Bugg played on. Instead it was all Look at this and look at this and look at this with him. He was, truly, happy. We only left the toyshop after he was discouraged by a shop assistant from mounting a rocking horse:

  Excuse me, sir, but I don’t think that’s designed to take people your size, do you?

  In that moment he seemed to gain decades of life, lose all hope and love from his face. Peter Bugg began to cry, we hurriedly left the toyshop. He cried throughout our visit at the waxworks, in front of the wax figures. And each time I tried to stand by one of my wax friends and achieve some stillness, if only outer, I would be disturbed by his perpetual sobbing. How adult, how mature and brave he made the wax people seem. But I do not think my tutor looked at a single one of them. He sobbed and shuddered the entire visit. Finally, embarrassed and insulted by him in front of my wax friends, I suggested that we went home. He nodded sulkily, and let me lead him by his hand from the museum.

  In the taxi on the way home Bugg dried his eyes and composed himself to appear unchanged in front of my parents. I began to wonder how I had felt so threatened by him before, this man who played with toys and wept like a child when challenged. And I began to understand that if I could control myself in the nursery, if I could pretend that the ruler didn’t hurt me, then I might be able to defeat little man Peter Bugg.

  Acquiring such discipline took me several months. I allowed my knuckles to be ripped and bloodied without attempting to protect them or even to attend to them afterwards. At first Bugg reacted to my seeming nonchalance by striking me harder or in different places – on the top of the head, on the back of the neck, across the ribs. But gradually he expressed his exasperation at my sluggishness by prolonged outbursts of vituperation, which were always fascinating to watch. He’d snort, his pale face would mutate into a phenomenal sepia, he’d grind his teeth between sentences, working himself up in a fit of expressiveness, and stamp his shoes to give weight to his words. And the words themselves would pour out in hatred, soaked with spittle and froth: all the fruits of his considerable vocabulary around the theme of stupidity, but even these were soon exhausted and he’d be forced to retreat to stamping his feet or whining in frustration. These tantrums were exceptionally watchable, even desired as welcome interruptions from Latin or Mathematics. He’d eventually steady himself by sitting with his back to me and muttering favourite chapters of the campaigns of Julius Caesar, or by setting himself some labyrinthine equation and deftly solving it. By degrees his incensed skin would take up its more accustomed white and the lesson would recommence.

  My knuckles were healing.

  Chiron grew grey with dust.

  Muting mahogany.

  Occasionally, and unexpectedly, he’d return to his old ways and thrash me again. Perhaps they were such a part of his teaching methods and so natural for him that he scarcely realized what he was about. This is being generous. I suspect he enjoyed delivering the punishment, I suspect he found the recipient’s reactions profoundly satisfying. A satisfaction, perhaps, that was never equalled by anything else he did or saw. Perhaps it was his secret passion. Perhaps now I’m being less than generous.

  It was on one of those odd days when Bugg returned to abrupt and momentary violence that Chiron was sentenced to eternal, long-awaited retirement.

  I had, not unusu
ally so, been charged with the indolence crime and Chiron, in an instant, shed his skin of dust and broke open the knuckles of my right hand in a single stroke. For once, because I had relaxed my self-discipline, I vocalized my pain. Bugg grinned.

  Three o’clock the next morning, I tiptoed in the blackness towards a certain book-filled bedroom in which a certain book-filled gentleman was full of dreams of books. Peter Bugg with his black locks locked up in a hairnet was deeply dreaming, talking in his sleep with gentlemen and emperors of long, long ago. His door was opening but he did not know. His lids were closed with the weight of history. His library mind could not see that his library-cum-bedroom had been invaded, not by barbaric Goths, come to sweep away civilization, but by a single school-aged boy dressed in pyjamas, dressing gown and slippers, complete with an up-to-no-good look on his round face.

  Peter Bugg had a bed companion, not imaginary, very real. The companion lay tucked up beside him. Neither male nor female the companion was nevertheless his virtual wife. If it had a voice it would have been crowing its master to arms. But it had none and did not call out when it was lifted from the bed and taken away from book-night and walked down to Tearsham Park cellar where it was thrown into a cold, damp tunnel and left there for ever. The same tunnel where my exhibition was, years later, to join it. The ruler became lot number fifty-two.

  The criminal, then all smiles, returned to his nursery and sweet dreams of murdered rulers.

  Adieu to Chiron, crawled over by insects who took him for a mere piece of wood, left alone down there for so many years, without books, without voices, without knuckles, with nothing to do. How did it feel to feel such loneliness?

  All around Peter Bugg.

  Of course he screamed, Kidnapped! Of course I was the only suspect. Of course the whole house was searched. But nobody found Chiron. And I insisted on my innocence. Everyone knew that I had taken the ruler, but they had no proof. I put on an exemplary display of sinlessness and even led the search myself. We went through all the servants’ rooms, Father’s library, Mother’s drawing room. They upturned everything in the nursery. They scoured the garden, they sifted through the fields. Where could that ruler be?