by Jane Healey
“What was that about?” she asked afterward, with a smile, fingers touching her lips. She had stopped wearing her red lipsticks so often since we started kissing, and when I saw her around the house with her lips a natural peach, I sometimes felt a jolt of electricity, a warm proprietary glow.
“You looked darling, standing there, with your little frown,” I said.
“What a silly thing to say,” she said, pretending to be angry, and then kissed me again. “Wait,” she mumbled into my mouth, her body stilling. “A globe, that’s what we need.” She pulled away.
I needed a moment to remember our last conversation. “Do you have one?” I asked.
“No, but my father does. Come with me,” she said, dragging me out of the library and across the hall to his office. She tried the door but it was locked, and with Lord Lockwood away I thought our very short-lived quest was at an end. “Stay here, I’ll get the key,” she said.
I stood, staring at the door that I had looked at before every awful encounter with her father, feeling the shiver of a transgressive thrill.
“Got it.” She reappeared, holding up two keys, and unlocked the door. I followed her inside.
There was a lingering masculine smell in her father’s office—tobacco, leather, sweat—and the furnishings were as uninspired as ever, dull and dark and lacking any feminine flourish.
“It’ll be through here—I haven’t been in here for years,” she was saying, bypassing the huge mahogany desk to unlock the second door behind it, the door to his personal library, which I had not even seen from the windows, since it looked out on a private courtyard in between the ballroom and the long gallery.
The door swung open with a creak and she fumbled for the light switch. I entered the illuminated room in a daze, walking into a nightmarish vision.
There were vast shelves of books in the double-story space—leather-bound and old, and protected behind glass with brass lock and key—but it was what else he had hidden away in here that had shocked me.
The floor was covered with half a dozen animal skins—zebra, lion with head and mane, polar bear, tiger with its tail, clouded leopard, wolf.
There was a mounted North American brown bear, rearing up on its hind legs, by one wall, opposite a polar bear doing just the same; an Asiatic lion and a Bengal tiger bracketing the sofas.
There was a stuffed panther and a stuffed wolf, the same ones Lucy had mentioned that she had not seen for many years, and a whole wall of mounted hunting trophies—stag, antelope, bison, lion, boar—alongside rifles and spears and swords.
And there, next to the working fireplace, was my missing jaguar.
And there, propped up against a wall of bookshelves, was my missing ivory.
I turned around to face a startled-looking Lucy. “Did you know?” I demanded. “Did you know he had all this here, that he had stolen the jaguar and my ivory?”
“I didn’t, I swear it,” she said, shaking her head, moving toward the towering brown bear as if she was being pulled to it, reaching out a hand to it before recoiling. “I haven’t been in here for years; no one has. I think the housekeeper is the only one he lets clean his rooms.”
The same housekeeper who had listened to my woes about the damned jaguar and said she would do her best to help find it.
“I found the globe,” Lucy said in a small voice, standing next to it, her body tucked behind the polar bear.
I was still circling the room, noticing more and more of the Major’s treasures—ivory figurines dotted around on shelves, fur cushions, a fox fur stole draped over a sofa as if left behind by the last female visitor, antlers used as a hat stand, snakeskin curiosities, a goblet made from a ram’s horn. The sense of ownership, the arrogance of taking museum items for his own collection, as if no one would notice them missing, or more likely, not caring if they did, infuriated me.
“How can you stand him, your father?” I implored. I felt teary-eyed at the scene before me, impotent in the face of it. “He’s a liar, a thief. He’s a tyrant.” I swore.
She was tracing the continents on the globe. I studied her face for reminders of his but found none. “He’s set in his ways,” she said, looking at me pleadingly.
“He’s rude and cruel. He wouldn’t understand this”—I motioned between us—“us. You know that, don’t you?”
“He’s my father, Hetty,” she said. “I don’t know what you want me to say. I know he’s not the nicest of men, but beggars can’t be choosers, and he’s all I’ve got left now.”
“You’ve got me,” I said.
But what about when the war ended? What about when I left Lockwood? Those were the questions I could see on her face.
I turned away, throat thick with sorrow and anger, covering my mouth with the back of my hand.
This room was everything I disliked about natural history collections—the emphasis on the hunter; the animals posed as threats when they were the ones killed, often with a single shot from behind; the hoarding of all this natural wonder behind a locked door for the benefit of a single rich man. If a man’s office, his private rooms, can be said to resemble his soul, then Major Lord Lockwood was a brutish huntsman at heart.
“I’m going to get Paul. We need to carry the ivory and the jaguar back to their proper places,” I said, leaving her there, a girl surrounded by snarling beasts.
* * *
Naturally, when the Major returned to the house from his travels a few days later, it was he who came storming into my office to accuse me of trespassing where I did not belong.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing? My office and library are off-limits, that was explicit in the contract I signed with the museum,” he said furiously, almost shouting, looming over the desk I sat behind.
“And where in the contract did it say you could purloin what you wanted for your own private collection, that you could steal from us?” I asked, voice shaking with anger.
“Steal,” he jeered. “Once again you lose control of your wits, Miss Cartwright. There is no need to be hysterical,” he said, when he was the one who had entered the room like a crazed bull.
“I can take out the copies of letters if you like, the ones I sent to London and the other evacuated departments, asking about the jaguar that had gone missing,” I offered.
“You needn’t bother,” he said, leaning back from the desk, hiding his beastliness under a cool sneer again. “That would only prove you believed it was missing.”
“It was missing; you stole it and hid it in your private, locked room.”
“Yes, a locked room. It was safe as houses in there, unlike some of your other animals.”
“It’s your house; if things have been going missing, it’s your fault,” I said, standing up.
“You never reported the ivory missing,” he said, fingering the vole skull on my desk distastefully. “That doesn’t reflect well on you.” His eyes cut to mine. “And I doubt the museum director will be keen on you braying about missing things when you’ve found them again. What a waste of paper those angry letters would be. Come, come, now, Miss Cartwright.”
“You won’t accept any blame for this?”
“Blame for what? Your specimens are inside the house and they are safe.” He shrugged meanly and neatened his dark tie that stood out from the blinding white of his crisp shirt. “But if I find out you’ve trespassed in my locked rooms again, I’ll have you fired, and that’s a promise. No one will hire you again. I’m very thorough in my dealings, Miss Cartwright, unlike some people.”
And with that threat made, he swept out of the room.
Thirty-Two
My father was particular about his belongings, his trophies, his paintings, his silver, his taxidermy.
As a child, he told me off for trying to ride his panther, and he wouldn’t let me touch it, but I was allowed sometimes to visit his office and look at it, while he scratched his pen across letters and talked brusquely on the telephone.
“I wish they would co
me back to life, I wish I could hear it purr,” I said one afternoon sitting cross-legged in front of it, nose to nose, my tongue furred by the toffee my father had slipped me from his desk drawer.
“Hear it growl, more like, as it hunted you. You’re a brave girl, but a beast like this would eat you for dinner,” he said, and then reached over to tickle my neck.
“Don’t you wish you could see it alive?”
“I have, my doll,” he said with a wave of his particular brand of cigarette, whose scent lingered in rooms he had left hours ago. “I’ve seen all the great beasts in the jungles and on the savanna; I’ve hunted them. But if you’re wanting a magic spell to bring this creature back to life, you’d have to ask your mother,” he said, his voice changing, turning silky, so that I knew she had just entered the room. “She’s the witch in this house.”
A frisson passed between the two of them, a language I didn’t understand—my mother at the door, wearing a satin dress and with her hair loose around her shoulders, her lips red as cherries; my father in his smart suit, his shining leather shoes that creaked with every shift of his feet as he lounged in his office chair. Sometimes when they were together it was as if no one else existed, and I was so jealous I ached.
“Tell me the story of how you met Mother, please, Father,” I begged, knowing that otherwise he would call for my nurse at any moment to have me ushered out of his office so my mother and he could do whatever they did behind locked doors.
He hummed. “I found her in the jungle. Didn’t I, my love? Running through the trees with mud on her knees and an impish smile that made me fall in love with her on first sight. Her parents warned me off her. She’s too wild, they said, but I wanted what I wanted.”
My mother had her arms crossed, her head resting against the doorframe. “My husband’s a liar,” she said. “It was my mother who warned me against him. Never trust an Englishman, she said.”
“The same mother who lied to me about your age?” my father replied with a snort. “Oh, yes.”
My mother ran a hand across her collarbone. “We met at a ball, don’t you remember, darling? I wasn’t even out properly yet, and you couldn’t keep your eyes off me. You begged me for a dance and I refused and so you watched me and you followed me and scowled at all the men I danced with and then you turned up on the steps of my house the next morning and begged me to marry you.”
“A lie,” he said, and leaned back in his seat. “I never begged.” She raised an eyebrow and wound her way toward him.
“Your mother tells tall tales,” he pronounced, staring at her unblinkingly and stubbing his cigarette out in his ivory ashtray, and then he called for my nurse as I knew he would and I was whisked away to my nursery.
It was a phrase he used again, over the years, in unhappier times when my mother was ill in bed, when she had been dosed with sleeping tonics to stop her from raving about spirits and strange beasts haunting her. Your mother tells tall tales, he would say to me carefully, and people love gossip. Words are powerful things, my dove, you must remember that.
My mother’s stories changed from day to day, from hour to hour. I would question her on something she had said—about an acrobat troupe that was to attend a ball at Lockwood, or the pet parrot she told me she taught tricks to as a child—and she would deny any knowledge of the conversation. Don’t be silly, she would say, I never said anything of the sort.
If I had asked her afterward about locking me in the blue room she would have denied it. I never did that, she would have said with a nervous flick of her hair, what an imagination you’ve got.
But sometimes, the things she said were more urgent; sometimes when she told me them she begged me to remember them, as if knowing she would forget.
“Remember that she’s here,” she had said several years before her death, clutching my hands when I found her in the library staring at the flowers on the mantelpiece, “that she’s waiting. You won’t forget, will you?” she asked, shivering, face creasing into childish pain.
“I won’t forget,” I said.
Another time, not long before she died, she was adamant that she wouldn’t live to see old age. “Remember,” she begged, “if anything happens to me, that I predicted it, that I knew it would happen.”
Not a half an hour later she was in the kitchen, tasting the cook’s new desserts with a frown of concentration, and I knew that if I asked her about our earlier conversation she would brush me off with a laugh and lean across the table to pass me the cake tin so that I could have a slice.
* * *
Were there different versions of my mother, did she walk into a room one person, and walk out another? Were there a hundred different mothers here, each in their own room? Did she know that other her—or hers, plural? Were there more than one of her inside her own body?
Was that my fate too, I wondered as Hetty dozed beside me after our lovemaking; would I forget things that I had done, would another me be cruel and mad, while I was helpless to stop it?
I stared at her sleeping, her eyelashes pale as a moth’s wing, her hand lying open as if waiting for my own hand.
“Cross my heart and hope to die,” I whispered, and took her hand, squeezing her fingers gently and wishing she was awake too and could squeeze mine back.
Thirty-Three
After a day of three separate air raids, with the mood inside the basement shelter best described as almost belligerent, Lucy pleaded with me for something productive she could do to help calm her whirring mind. I put her to work in my office, organizing letters into different trays. It was a pleasingly domestic scene, me at a writing desk answering the letters while Lucy spread out on my main desk sorting them, calling out a choice word or an interesting passage, while the sun tracked across the room, the light warming and then dipping toward dusk. And yet it was also an oddly transgressive scene, for I knew that her father had forbidden her from any involvement in the museum. How could he begrudge her doing secretarial work like this? Could he not see the way it enlivened her, being useful, learning and setting her mind to things other than the house and her past?
In moments like this I could not help but think I could have it all—the museum and Lucy—that I could put into play the plan that I had yet to tell even Lucy about, that of her coming to London and working for the museum. She was independently wealthy and thus could volunteer with the great number who already did, without the need to worry about a wage, although of course I would fight for her to be properly employed just as I fought for the other women. We might live near one another in the city, and visit regularly, or even take rooms together somewhere; and in London, the night was never truly dark; the city’s gleaming lamps and advertisements and bars and theaters lent the air a glow that snuck through any closed curtain.
Of course, how to remove her from a house she did not want to leave at any cost was the great sticking point, along with her father’s prohibition. But I would not abandon her here, alone, when the war was over—if it was ever over—I vowed that I would try to save her, that when the trucks came to collect the animals and transport them to their rightful home, she would come too, that I would whisk her away, out from under her father’s nose and from this horrid house.
Not for the first time, I thought that all this would be easier if I were only a man. I could marry her then, and she would be under my protection, not her father’s, and we could legitimately get our own house, have our own family.
Be sensible, Henrietta, I heard the memory of my mother say, her favorite phrase.
Did the Major’s manner rub me the wrong way because his disdain was so close to my mother’s; or would it have affected a different Hetty—a Hetty who grew up with a loving, tender parent—just the same? I had yet to receive a reply to the emotional letter I had sent her, and she had given me no word about where she might now be residing. I knew that she would not stay in London during the Blitz—not because she might die, but because of the general upheaval to her routines and the social order,
because of her fear of change. I imagined she was in a house similar to this one, except smaller, I thought spitefully, and less grand.
“This man,” Lucy declared, reading out a letter, “says that he has discovered a new amphibious mammal and he humbly puts forward his own name for consideration for its nomenclature.”
I put my elbow on the desk and rested my cheek on my hand, listening to her read the animal description aloud—larger than a pine marten and yet smaller than a dog, slimy, with a distinct tang of iron in the air once it had vanished, a white patch of fur between its eyes—her mouth curled in sardonic appreciation, her eyes bright and large. I let myself picture some halcyon future; let myself ignore the horde of beetles gnawing their way through the long gallery; the planes across the channel being fueled, bombs loaded in their bellies; the great crowd of stuffed animals who waited for the wars of men to be over, hoping that there would still be a museum left in London for them to return to; and the ghost, the intruder, that continued to haunt both my dreams and the house itself.
* * *
Autumn had returned by the time the evacuated children came to visit the animals, and when they clattered inside the front door they brought with them a swirl of leaves scorched yellow and a blustering wind that made the chandelier above them sway and groan.
I had never been in charge of child visitors to the museum in London, but in our correspondence, their teacher, a Miss Forbes, said that I should treat them as I would the adult visitors and that they would be too overawed by the house to get into mischief.
Seeing them walk past the animals openmouthed, almost reverent, grabbing silently at each other in excitement, reminded me of my secret thrill of watching visitors to the museum in London, and I felt a pang that we had shut the mammal collection away here at Lockwood, just as so many other museums and art galleries had fled the capital, leaving its remaining occupants bereft of their culture just when they might need it most to get through the barbarous bombardment of the Luftwaffe.
