by Jane Healey
It was not just air-raid sirens that woke the house, for inevitably the increase in general terror levels had brought a return of Lucy’s nightmares too; nightmares that I did my best to soothe but could not stop. Nightmares which, with their occasional hysterical force, threatened to reveal our secret relationship, when the housekeeper or a servant came running and found me already in her rooms, woken up from an evening doze with the scream of the woman I loved beside me, and which eventually forced me to retreat to my cold bedroom the moment Lucy started to yawn—not wishing to keep her awake nor for the both of us to fall asleep accidentally. Our nighttime hours together became smaller and smaller, more precious and precarious.
Thirty
If only Lockwood could be untethered from the world, set loose to float somewhere safe, if only all the terrors of the war could be swept away. If only Hetty did not have to leave one day, when the museum did.
I was used to any moments of happiness, any months of contentment, being dashed by nerves and nightmares, and so I tried to remind myself to savor every minute with Hetty, basking in the warmth of her love, our little cocoon of joy and pleasure.
I reveled in getting to know another body just as well as I knew my own—the soft hollow of her belly when she lay down; the angle of her hip bones, like pottery shards; the whorl of the grain of hair between her thighs; a scar on her shin with dots where a doctor had made his stitches; her lopsided rib cage. She had moles that speckled her body like decorations from some absentminded god—one on her left breast, five on her stomach, a row down her left calf, one on her backside, and two on the nape of her neck. When I was studying her body, when she was studying mine, and making me gasp and shake, there was no room in my head for worries and fears.
I had tried to teach myself to ignore things that might not be real, to rationalize huddled shapes that I saw in the corners of a dark room or the whisper of the wind that sounded like dragging footsteps in the hall, to tell myself that dreams were just dreams, so is it any wonder that I had been trying to push down my true feelings for Hetty, trying to tell myself that any romantic love, desire, that I thought hummed between us was just another phantom? And just as that hidden attic room had been revealed as truth, so had Hetty’s feelings for me—except one was a gut-wrenching, painful truth and the other was luminous, thrilling, revelatory, heavenly. Was this why every husband I had tried to imagine had been as shadowy as a spirit and as unsatisfactory as a puppet?
I thought that I had ruined everything that night we slept in the drawing room, that I had made her uncomfortable with my advances. But then to have her turn up at my door, trembling and so very brave; to think of how the stars had to be aligned for the director of the museum collections evacuated to Lockwood to also be the woman I fell in love with, who fell in love with me in return, astonished me.
Was I too happy now? Would this all come crumbling down? Would my bad nerves prove too much for her, my nightmares?
The air-raid sirens were like a knife slicing through our pleasant afternoons, our bucolic evenings; the rudest interruption of the outside world; a horrid reminder that I had responsibilities beyond Hetty—responsibilities to the house and its inhabitants. Each time the siren blared, it seemed to demand an accounting from me, like the roar of some wailing beast rattling against the walls of the house. How was I going to keep them safe; how was I going to protect Lockwood?
Or was the noise of the siren, I sometimes wondered—as I woke panting from a nightmare, convinced that I had heard the same sound blaring through my dreams—the roar of a beast inside the house braying to get out? Some monstrous creature trapped in another hidden room, its hackles bristling with hot fur, its teeth bared. For the siren blared within the walls of Lockwood itself, did it not? As if the true danger was inside those same walls, and not from the planes gliding through the sky so high above us.
And when I emerged from sheltering in the basement, fleeing toward the light of the day, I could not shake the notion that someone had been in the upper levels of the house, stalking through the corridors, rifling through the rooms, while we were hidden underground. I could not help but notice each time that certain things in my bedroom—clothes, trinkets, books—seemed out of place from where I had left them, and that one day when I had looked in the mirror over my mantelpiece that I knew had been cleaned just before the siren screamed, I saw, in the bright light of the September afternoon, the ghostly outline of a handprint that did not match mine.
Thirty-One
Is this too much, us together, right now? Does it only add to your worry?” I asked Lucy one night as we lay next to one another on top of her bed, sweltering in the heat of a warm September.
“No, you are a comfort, a haven in the middle of the storm of my mind,” she said, eyes roaming my face, palm curving around my neck.
Was I selfish for believing her, or was I simply trusting in her ability to decide for herself?
“I might ask you the same,” she said. “Am I not a burden to you? Can you love a mad thing like me?”
“You are not mad; nightmares and bad nerves are not madness,” I said, squeezing her shoulder, feeling the sharp edges of the bones underneath. If I called her mad might I not have to call myself the same?
She turned onto her back. “Every time I think I have escaped the nightmares, they come back, scampering after me, hunting me.”
“Is it memories of your mother?”
“Sometimes,” she said. “Sometimes it’s other things, odd images and scenes, strange sensations. Sometimes I have the normal kind of dream where one is being chased by some great four-legged beast, but then the beast catches me before I can wake, and I am surrounded by it, smothered by it, like I’m drowning in its fur, trapped there. I know it sounds so silly when I say it out loud, but the timbre of the dream, the terror I feel . . .” She exhaled a long, shaky breath.
My heart was tripping in my chest, but then dreams of being hunted by a beast, and being caught, were common dreams, were they not? “But the museum,” I said, propping myself up on my elbows, “and the animals, they don’t trigger your nightmares or make them worse, you’re sure?”
“I am sure, Hetty, they’re not new nightmares. I’m not a martyr, I would go and stay somewhere else for the duration of the war if I was distressed by your collection. God knows we have the money to rent out a series of lovely homes for me.”
What she was saying might be true—for she had never looked at my animals with terror or fear, only wonder and fascination—but I knew that even if it were not, it was exceedingly unlikely that she would leave Lockwood, for Lucy’s world was getting smaller as her nerves were getting worse.
First it was that she did not want to venture further than the grounds of Lockwood, to traipse through the sunny fields or walk up to the village; and then that she only wanted to walk in those parts of the gardens which had a clear view of the entirety of the house—the front lawn, the orchard, the walled garden, the rose garden, and the flower beds around the little pond; and finally, that she did not even want to leave the house. The progression of this was not quite linear, there might still be days now and then when I could coax her out to the gardens, but I feared what the end to this was—how soon would it be until she could not leave her room, her bed? I hoped that I was only being alarmist and tried my best to help her, not to push her too insistently, but to encourage her, even as each air-raid siren seemed to undo both her and my hard work. What effort could counteract the might of an entire army; where could she hide from the war itself? Would she have to wait until the damned thing was over to find any true peace again?
I observed and cataloged the signs of her anxiety, as if this could bring me answers, and—a cynical part of me thought—as a way of not thinking about my own troubled nights. The way she trembled when I tried to persuade her to sit on the terrace, getting all the way down the stairs before she clutched at the end of the banisters as if she were being swept out to sea and whispered, no, no, as though unfat
homable horrors awaited her. The way she tapped her fingertips on tabletops or on her thigh, hands as quick as hummingbirds, if I had managed to get her outside. The way she apologized over and over again for being ridiculous. The way that tears might spill from her eyes if she was particularly distressed, as she muffled quiet high-pitched keens into a cushion, while I tried to soothe her, rubbing my hand along her back ineffectually, as if I was trying to calm an animal that knew it was being sent to slaughter.
“Is it that you don’t feel safe away from the house, or that you worry that the house isn’t safe without you there?” I asked her one evening as she sat in her bath and I bathed her gently with a sponge—not because she was an invalid that could not do such a task for herself, she was not helpless or feeble, but because I liked to care for her. I liked that what we were together, who we were to one another, seemed such a myriad of things: friend, lover, mother, daughter, kin.
“It’s both,” she said with a weary sigh.
I did not say that there was a cruel irony in her anxiety causing her to stay inside, confining her behind walls and doors, in her ever-narrowing sphere of safety. For she was still afraid of the dark, still afraid of being locked inside, even as some part of her wished to shut herself away from the world.
Once, I was too scared to even close my eyes, she had told me, speaking of the blue room and its aftereffects, even with the lights on, as if my eyelids were doors themselves that might trap me in the dark. The sedatives helped with that but they also trapped me in my dreams, made me woozy, made the real world seem unreal, like I had never woken up at all.
There was no peace for her to be found anywhere, and the comfort I could give her was not absolute, for one person could not stand against the might of Lockwood and its memories, its hidden rooms and ghostly traumas.
The doctors, when she allowed them to visit, had said that rest, and certain pills, would help, that she should take to her bed, but she refused the drugs and tried her best to potter about the house instead of hiding under her blankets, fought against being cloistered even as some forceful part of herself wished so desperately to be.
I had left the site of my unhappy childhood, but her nerves, and circumstances, had kept her here, walking down the same corridors, waking in the same room, while the horrors of her past lay behind locked doors and bricked-up walls. Even without her memories, this house was not a welcoming home—the unsettling number of empty rooms with their sheeted furniture that made one think you were the ghost, haunting a shut-up house; the rows of blacked-out windows, the creaks and murmurs of old floors and walls—it was certainly working its brooding effect on me. Surely a charming little cottage somewhere, a fresh start, a house with no uninhabited wings for the mind to wander through and get lost in, would be the trick—although I never mentioned this to her because it sounded foolish, and because I feared it would give away my own desire for us to live somewhere small and humble by ourselves, away from here.
My mind was searching for my own escape route, and not only from my continued nightmares, because when I was not with Lucy, I was with the museum, where I was fighting a terrible invasion of my own, of beetles and moths, pests that threatened the entire collection of skins and taxidermy, and it was a battle I was losing.
The environment inside Lockwood Manor was not an ideal location for the specimens I had helped evacuate from London, but it was the best that could be done when the other option was the utter devastation of the Blitz, which by now had already irrevocably damaged smaller museums and collections that had not been able to leave. The long gallery was difficult to keep warm during winter and to cool during summer; the roofs, walls, and windows of the manor were tired and patchworked, their cracks letting in all manner of beasts, foxes and cats and birds that had to be shooed away. The fluctuations of temperature and humidity wore at the furs and organic materials of the collection and aged the wood of the cabinets and crates. Bones could swell and shrink and split with changes in the environment. On one cold day which followed an unseasonably warm day before it, I had heard, from a cabinet in the long gallery, the snap of a bone, so loud, so clearly bone snapping right through, that I cried out as if it had been one of my own breaking. And yet all this was somewhat manageable, expected, compared to the influx of insects.
It started when I saw a pile of dust underneath the mounted oxen and, when I studied it with a magnifying glass, I found frass, the droppings of insect larvae, and casts, the skin the insects shed as they grew from larvae. Then it was a race against time to prevent the insects from spreading. I cleaned and vacuumed and dusted down on my hands and knees with a bright lamp to search for eggs in creases and folds, covering my face with a mask as I sprayed insecticides and potions on the mounted animals that ranged up and down that long gallery and its rooms. I ordered more mothballs and hid them around the rooms like a macabre treasure hunt, spread sticky insect traps in all corners, and used my magnifying glass to search for tiny chinks and holes in floorboards and wooden skirting boards for so long that when I stood up the world seemed gigantic and strange.
I had cataloged four different pests and counting in quick succession: carpet beetles, hide beetles, carpet moths, and casemaking clothes moths. Most of the cabinets were safe—and within them the slides and eggs and shells and study skins which were not mounted—but not all, because even wood could contract and expand, as if it remembered being alive, cracks opening up in its side, as if it were in conspiracy with the insects.
I had to open up some of the specimens to clean them and I trawled through the detritus of past taxidermists, discovering the secrets of these animals and their particular insides—for every taxidermist has their own favorite tools, their own methods of mounting and combinations of sawdust, clay, wood, cloth, newspapers. Little scraps of newspaper could tell me the very day that an animal was being brought back into a half-life from its previous flat existence, teased into three dimensions. The careful work that the scientists, hunters, and taxidermists had done was under threat; nature appeared to have had enough and wanted to reclaim these trophies, with the insects as its infantrymen.
It was enough to make one paranoid. I would walk along the long gallery and pause, believing that I had heard the scurrying of tiny feet, the susurration of miniature jaws gnawing on my charges; fearing that if I turned my back, a great plague of insects would appear, a flood of them. It was as if someone was conducting them, waving a baton, a wand, ushering them in waves of attack, I thought wildly, my eyes dry with lack of sleep, my heart sprinting like an animal whipped, my body starting at every creak even if I was the one who had made it by walking across the floorboards.
And in the course of opening up cabinets and crates and drawers that had not been touched for months, I discovered something else; a large crate that had contained a collection of elephant ivory on its arrival at Lockwood was now bare of all but sawdust and empty sacking.
When I discovered it, I kneeled slack-jawed by the crate, trying to remember the last time I, or one of the movers, perhaps, had crowbarred open the lid, and then I started to cry, silently, tiredly, thinking that this was surely it, the last nail in the coffin of my continued employment.
But if I told no one about it, I thought frantically, and entirely unprofessionally, an hour later, hammering the lid back into place, then no one would know about it, not until the collection was back in London and even a few weeks after that, as the boxes and crates were slowly opened—and by then the blame could not possibly be solely placed on my shoulders. But even with the crate closed, its missing contents still leached their way into my dreams as a beast made from bones, with four bristling tusks, bucked and rattled down the corridors of Lockwood after me.
And then there were the letters from soldiers abroad, sent on from London, looking for advice about exotic pests and vermin—and how could I be an authority on that, when I could barely keep my own animals safe?
What if I cannot do this? I had begun to think. What if I cannot save the
museum; what if everything I do is only making things worse? Work had always been my salvation, but now it felt like a curse. I could not seem to save my animals, or Lucy; I could not bloody sleep, or quieten my hysterical fears.
* * *
After school restarted in September, Lucy invited the local evacuated children for a trip to the museum, eager to do her bit to cheer them up, if only for an afternoon, for we had all heard about those poor souls that had been lost in London and knew that their parents were still living through the horrors of the Blitz. She asked the cook to make animal-shaped biscuits with sugar saved from our fortnightly rations and was hunting for an atlas that she could use to show them where each animal had come from.
“I want a proper big map for them to look at,” she was saying, as she perched on the top rung of the ladder in the library, finger running down the spines of heavy books, while I watched from the carpet below.
“If I was better at drawing, I could make a large map on some wallpaper and pin it up,” I said.
“Oh, I am terrible at drawing too,” she said, clambering down, forehead creasing delicately.
I glanced behind us to check the door was still closed and then stepped forward to kiss her. She startled and then kissed me back, clutching my face in her hands.
