He never told her that her presence in his life made him happier than anything else and that he loved her with an ache because he knew the limits of her love for him. He knelt before her on their wedding night knowing that he was not the man for whom she’d left a life. They were never equal but for some years the power passed from one to the other without debate. Only while Iris grew into motherhood and her museum career, he got left behind, and the only way to stop himself disappearing was the blunt act of sex. He was looking for another woman on a different train. One who hadn’t been rescued already.
Now David lives in a soft room. The bed billows, the chair too. There are spongy blocks and a drooping plastic table ledge attached by fuzzy bolts to the wall. He likes to sit at the table, picking up crayons and putting them down. As time goes by and he forgets what he wants, he will do less and less. He won’t be able to think of anything he needs or wants to change or that doesn’t happen already, and so will have no reason to act.
the unknown object
A meeting is called at the museum where it is announced that the stores are to be sold. They have been given seven years to prepare and as yet there is no confirmed destination. A property of such size is so valuable that nothing can justify its use but it is also protected and cannot be torn down. It will become another set of priceless rooms.
Iris and Max are asked to lead a team that will catalogue the non-accessioned items – all the unnumbered objects in the unopened boxes scattered throughout the stores. They’ll spend the next seven years opening boxes with little or no idea of what’s in them. Iris is thrilled.
It’s like being young again and knowing nothing and hoping so much. Everything will be a surprise.
I know, says Max, but you’re going to have to catalogue these surprises.
Despite all the care that’s taken in numbering and cataloguing collections, every museum has objects that don’t officially exist because they haven’t yet been given a number. In the past this museum had far more money to make acquisitions than it had staff to evaluate objects. No one is sure but there are thought to be thousands of unnumbered items in the stores, many in boxes that have never been opened.
Iris places a box on a table. It is maybe fifty years old. This is a guess but an informed one. The name of the auction room scribbled on its side suggests that its contents are likely to be medical artefacts and so she must prepare for the hazards of asbestos, formaldehyde, lead paint and sharps.
She photographs every side of the box before she opens it and then photographs the packaging – a kind of wool she hasn’t seen before. She lifts the object onto the table and photographs the number painted on its base. This could be given by an auction house, a hospital inventory or another museum. There’s a second mark, very faint, which looks like a series of letters. She photographs that too. She’ll add another number, for this museum, but it won’t be permanent. The aim of every intervention now is that it can be undone.
The object has several components and each detachable part must be given its own number and photographed next to a card with that number written on it. There is an auction house slip, which Iris photographs as well as a torn tag, even though it is so tattered that it’s unreadable. Both are placed in plastic envelopes. The twine that must have attached the label to the object is of particular interest to Iris as it is of a fibre she hasn’t seen before. Unusual plant matter suggests overseas origins. She decides to send it for analysis if the object itself is important enough to justify the cost.
There is a growing interest among researchers and curators in the containers that the objects arrive in as well as those in which they’re displayed. Some of the original glass cases from the galleries have been sent off for analysis and are about to become objects themselves. One day there will be a museum of containment that will contain nothing at all.
weakness allowed to remain
Iris decides that she must wait at least three months before introducing Raif to her daughters but the pressure of concealing him from them becomes too much. She starts to mention him, first as a friend who told her something interesting and then my friend Raif and then Raif. She mentions him while they’re eating one evening and Lou rolls her eyes, which makes Kate giggle.
Mum, says Kate, can you talk about someone else?
Kate’s twirling her fork in her pasta, staring at it rather than look at her mother. She’s embarrassed, thinks Iris. I am an embarrassment.
What do you mean? she says. I talk about all my friends.
No you don’t, says Kate.
Shut up, says Lou. It’s her private life. It’s private.
Iris is trying to process a number of things at once. That Lou and Kate are growing apart. That she assumed she could always tell what her girls felt and wanted but evidently hasn’t been paying attention. That she is spoken of as her. There is so much to catch up with that she doesn’t respond and the three of them sit there in a new kind of silence, carefully finishing their food.
*
A week later, Iris tells them that she has some news.
Is it Dad?
Is he dead?
He might have another stroke, says Kate. It says they usually do.
Mum, says Lou. Would you be sad if he did?
Listen. The thing is, I’ve started something with someone.
She means she’s got a boyfriend, says Lou.
I know what she means.
Iris waits. She doesn’t know how to begin.
I want to go and watch telly, says Kate.
Me too, says Lou, who is already on her way out of the room.
That night she can hear them shouting in their room and she stands on the stairs and listens.
But Iris is married!
It doesn’t count! Not if David’s—
David’s what?
All the arguments she and David had in that house, thinking that if the door was closed the girls wouldn’t hear them. They must have heard everything. When Lou comes in and slips into bed beside her, it is Iris who bursts into tears.
You don’t have to meet him and I won’t mention him again, not even his name. Nothing’s going to change.
I’ve got pain, Mum.
I thought it was a good idea to say something but it made it sound as if it’s a big deal and it’s not and nothing will change.
Of course it will.
But you and Kate. It made you fight.
I’m tired, Mum. I’ve got pain.
I promise you … Where are you going?
To make myself a hot-water bottle.
*
When Lou tells Kate that Iris actually cried, they decide they should make her happy by asking to meet Raif. It’s Iris’s birthday and so they suggest he comes to tea. Iris has bought a cake and expects them to turn off the film they’re watching and chat. He asks them about school and they offer brief polite responses while Iris finds it impossible to speak. Then Kate starts to ask questions.
Are you forty-eight too?
No, I’m almost forty-two.
Why haven’t you got any children?
My wife was sick and then she died.
Was she like Mum?
She was from Estonia. It’s a small country on the Baltic coast that used to be—
It was in the Cold War, says Lou. We did it at school.
She was in a war? asks Kate.
Not really. But it was a very difficult time.
Why?
Glad to have something to talk about, he explains what Liis’s life had been like, and mentions her father and her trip to New York, and as he’s doing this he remembers that he hasn’t told Iris what he now knows. So he sticks to the story of her father defecting and the choice she had to make.
What was her name? asks Kate.
Liis Must.
He spells it.
Is she famous?
No.
But we could look her up.
I don’t think there’s anything. It was all such a long time ago.
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Iris sees his discomfort and mistakes it for pain.
Why don’t you watch the rest of your film? she says to the girls. We’ll clear up.
In the kitchen he tells her about what Ava discovered and Iris just nods. She doesn’t ask what it’s done to him or why he couldn’t tell her before. Nor does she urge him to probe the matter further. She leans against him and they sit there, shoulder to shoulder, not pretending to solve anything.
That night Kate and Lou do a search on Liis Must. Nothing that comes up is in English except for one article with a headline about a daughter’s dilemma. They click on it but it’s behind a paywall and at that moment a message pops up from one of Lou’s friends with a picture of a boy and they forget all about their mother’s friend, his dead wife and her war.
I like Raif, Lou tells Iris because she can see that her mother is worrying.
I like him too, says Kate. So can we stop talking about him now?
*
Raif was not the only person invited to Iris’s birthday tea. The girls had phoned their grandmother Jean and left a message asking her to come down as a surprise. They’d looked up trains and could advise her on how best to cross the city. Lou left all the details in a careful, clear voice and they sent their love. Jean had not rung back. They knew not to tell Iris this and so it became, for Kate and Lou, one of those capsules of sadness that ought to dissolve but never do, something they were getting used to.
it won’t change anything
Raif wants to talk about Iris too. He starts with his mother. They’re sitting side by side on the sofa and she’s picking as usual at a mark that isn’t there.
I’m afraid it didn’t work out with Helen.
Bridget nods carefully. Does she know Helen? Is this news good or bad?
I’ve met someone else, he says.
Bridget actually howls. These are words she’s heard before and they have direct access to her heart. She has been wrenched back thirty years to her beloved husband turning over in bed, taking her face in his hands and saying, with horrifying tenderness, I’ve met someone else.
Raif does not know this.
It’s nothing, he says, taking her hand. Nothing serious.
Met on a train, of all places! shouts Bridget. Someone else!
Not on a train, at a museum.
I know where you met!
It won’t change anything, he says in desperation, and just like that, Bridget is calm.
He has hit on the words that thirty years ago calmed her. Her fists unclench and she turns to meet his eyes, wary of what she’ll find there.
It won’t change anything, she echoes.
Everything will be exactly the same.
He draws his mother towards him so as to comfort them both. He will not mention Iris for now.
Bridget will never understand who Iris is and Raif will never know about what happened between his parents forty years ago and how much this has to do with how he is formed. Determined not to pass on our pain, we carry it in ways that can be seen. It might become a great swelling in the throat, an adaptation in how we move, an inability to see or swallow.
*
When Raif tells the triplets about Iris, they immediately want to meet her. He suggests tea at the museum rather than at either home. Iris sees three cheeky little sprites who don’t know how to be a grown-up version of themselves because there isn’t one. She doesn’t yet know that this is just who they are for Raif.
How old are you? asks Ashley.
Are you divorced? adds Emily. Or have you never been married?
You look married, puts in Jessica.
They’re used to people being charmed by their rudeness. Raif finds it exhilarating. It paralysed Helen but provokes quite a different response in Iris.
I’m forty-eight, I have two daughters who are about to become nightmares. I have a husband who will live whatever time is left to him in a locked ward. I’ve got a mortgage and debt. I’m shorter and plainer-looking than you expected. I’m going to spend the next seven years unpacking boxes and packing them again because that is my job. I’m glad I’ve got one. I met Raif right here, in that doorway, and now we are where we are and who knows what that means. How old are you?
The triplets are insulted and then enchanted. For Raif it’s as if Iris has stepped out from behind a wall. He hopes that getting close to her will entail more occasions like this.
sometimes we are in the same city
Iris and Raif leave the museum hand in hand – neither beautiful nor certain nor young. They move slowly, trailing their memories and gravities, weights and measures, categories and labels. We know how this works and what we bring.
I don’t want to live with you, she says. And I don’t want to marry you. I’m not doing those things again.
She probably will.
They have got far enough not to repeat themselves and they look at the past differently now – as all that has led to their beginning.
Do they understand that their capacity to go forward together comes from the very thing that’s held them back? Repetition teaches us how to recognise our true nature as we’re returned again and again to the aspects of ourselves that we cannot reshape. We learn how to say I cannot do or be or live like this and if we’re lucky we also learn how to say That is what makes me happy. I will pursue and cherish that.
The past is always breaking down and rebuilding. And repetition, like memory, is never perfect: the original is always altered a little in the act. And the idea that two people can take up a line and feel its pull wherever they are is too simple. Life in the city is one of constant revision, diversion and impediment. Nothing proceeds straightforwardly. Lovers can only hope to find themselves in the same place and, if they’re lucky, looking in the same direction.
They’re there now, on the corner, waiting to cross. You can’t see them from the hill or the seventy-second floor and you won’t know them when they pass. But let them pass. Let them walk on into the afternoon. These will be their simplest days for some time to come.
Acknowledgements and sources
All of the objects mentioned in this book are in the Science Museum, London, and the Wellcome Trust’s collections. I encountered most of them when the museum gave me their first artist’s residency in 1995. I am grateful for their interest and support. I’m also grateful to the Wellcome Trust for the Engagement Fellowship which enabled me to pursue this work.
I am indebted to Paul Fletcher, Bernard Wolfe Professor of Health Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge, for conversations about everything from visual memory to disinhibition to metaphor, and to Dr Ruth Horry at the Wellcome Collection, who talked to me about objects and conservation, and introduced me to the copy of the Babylonian model of a sheep’s liver. Thanks are also due to the conservator Jenny Mathiasson, formerly of the Whipple Museum of the History of Science. Their generosity, interest and insight have been invaluable.
The quotations in the section on the bone skate come from William Fitzstephen (1180), Fitz-Stephen’s Description of the City of London, translated by Samuel Pegge (London: B. White, 1772). The balloonists’ adventure related in that on the cloud mirror is drawn from James Glaisher, Travels in the Air (London: Bentley, 1871). The section on the wonder box includes lines from H. G. Wells, Floor Games (London: Frank Palmer, 1911). The section on the lancet includes a quote from ‘The history and evolution of surgical instruments: VI The surgical blade: from fingernail to ultrasound’, Dr John Kirkup, Annals of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, 1995; 77: 380–88.
The section on the jealousy glass includes a quote from The Young Gentleman and Lady’s Philosophy, in a continued survey of the works of nature and art; by way of dialogue, Vol. II, Benjamin Martin (London: W. Owen, 1781).
The excerpt from ‘Venus’ by Malcolm Lowry is reprinted by permission of SLL/Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc. Copyright by the Estate of Malcolm Lowry.
I would like to thank Sarah Chalfant and Alba Ziegler-Bailey at the Wyli
e Agency, my copyeditor Silvia Crompton, my editor Mitzi Angel and all at Faber: Rachel Alexander, Kate Burton, Emmie Francis, Anne Owen and Jonny Pelham.
Thank you to my close readers, and thank you to my closest ones.
About the Author
Lavinia Greenlaw has published five collections of poetry, most recently A Double Sorrow: Troilus and Criseyde. Her first novel, Mary George of Allnorthover, received France’s Prix du Premier Roman Étranger. Her two books of non-fiction are The Importance of Music to Girls and Questions of Travel: William Morris in Iceland. Her writing has appeared in frieze, the London Review of Books and the New Yorker, among other publications.
Also by the Author
poetry
NIGHT PHOTOGRAPH
A WORLD WHERE NEWS TRAVELLED SLOWLY
MINSK
THE CASUAL PERFECT
A DOUBLE SORROW: TROILUS AND CRISEYDE
fiction
MARY GEORGE OF ALLNORTHOVER
AN IRRESPONSIBLE AGE
other works
THE IMPORTANCE OF MUSIC TO GIRLS
QUESTIONS OF TRAVEL:
WILLIAM MORRIS IN ICELAND
THOUGHTS OF A NIGHT SEA
(with Garry Fabian Miller)
AUDIO OBSCURA
(with Julian Abrams)
JOY DIVISION
(with Michael Bracewell and Glenn Brown)
Copyright
First published in the UK in 2018
by Faber & Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
This ebook edition first published in 2018
In the City of Love's Sleep Page 22
