by Jane Healey
“You shall of course be on hand to supervise their being moved there, the creatures from the main house,” he said. “We can’t have the nose of the polar bear being bashed against the wall on its journey before people get to see it, now, can we?”
“Quite,” I said and, leaving half my meal uneaten, made my excuses and left the room.
* * *
The next Sunday, I came back from a short blustery walk in the bare gardens, looking to read a book and warm my chilled toes in the parlor, thinking that I might pretend I was simply on holiday in a grand house and that I was not in charge of a collection crumbling at the seams from my own incompetence. But when I reached the door of the parlor, Lucy looked up from her seat by the electric fire.
I felt my heart lift at the sight of her, like a trained animal, and then fall when I remembered we were not sweethearts anymore.
“Good afternoon, Hetty. Do you need the room?” she asked, fiddling with the buttons of her cardigan.
I cataloged her, drinking her in. Curly black hair teased into waves, perfect red lipstick, bruises under her eyes, a hand fluttering at her side that I longed to catch in my own.
“No, I was just wandering about. You stay there, keep warm by the fire.”
She smiled but it had a pleading note, as if my presence was painful for her. Yours is painful for me too, I wanted to say. “Good afternoon, Lucy,” I said instead, and left, my tongue aching with words unspoken.
I took the stairs two at a time back up to the first floor and then paused, hearing the clang of something dropping all the way down a different flight of stairs, followed by a groaned damn it. I went in search of the sound and found Paul at the foot of the stairs at the other end of the corridor, bending over a silver candlestick.
“Can I help you, Paul?” I asked.
“I’m fine,” he said, standing back up. “Just retrieving some things from the attic for his lordship, for the dinner.” He held the candlestick in his hand. “They’re slippery buggers,” he said, “and I’m all fingers and thumbs today. One week, miss, one week until I’m suited and booted and off for training.”
“You’ve enlisted?”
He nodded enthusiastically. “I turned seventeen and three months recently, finally, and the army have taken me. I can’t wait to actually do something, instead of sitting here like . . .” He trailed off—was he going to say like a woman, or like a duck?
I took pity on him. “Well, I wish you the best luck in the world, Paul. They’ll be lucky to have you. Let me help you carry some things down; I’m at a loose end today.”
“Much obliged,” he said, and then motioned up the stairs. “There’s a whole pile of things we’re fetching down by the door of the storeroom; you can’t miss them.”
I climbed the stairs to the second floor—the floor I thought of as Lucy’s—and then continued on to the storeroom, almost tripping over the cluster of candlesticks that were, as Paul said, just by the door.
But I did not pick them up straightaway; instead I crossed the length of the storeroom and opened the door to the attic itself, turning on the light to diffuse the fusty darkness. I felt the cold from outside creeping in through a crack somewhere, and brushed a hanging cobweb out of my face as I ventured further in, toward Lucy’s secret room; separated by only a bricked-up door from the bathroom where I had bathed with her, and laughed with her, and been loved by her.
It was the same as it had been when we opened it up, blue and empty—except that was not quite true, because there was something there, lying on the dusty floorboards in the corner. A pigeon; a larger, more prosaic version of the dove that Lucy had stepped on all those years ago.
How could a dead pigeon, and one which had probably been roosting in the attic and looked to have died of natural causes, frighten me, make my teeth clench together as I crouched closer and touched its dry corpse with the top of one shaking finger, jerking quickly back at the feel of it? If I did not pull myself together, I told myself, I would be unable to work for the museum at all. How could I be frightened of dead animals when I had spent the last decade of my life surrounded by them?
My clothes were now coated in dust, so after I had brought down the candlesticks and other things for Paul, I took them to the laundry room straightaway. I had given up asking the servants for help with any additional task, for fear of being looked at askance by them, judged and gossiped about, and also because I did not want to give them more work.
In the laundry room, as my fingers chafed at the cold water in the tub, I heard someone at the back door, and then the clink of a cup being set down on stone, and laughter that I did not recognize.
When I took my damp load out to pin on the clothesline, whoever had been there had scurried off, leaving no trace beyond the stub of a cigarette on the doorstep, winding a thin trail of smoke into the air.
* * *
That night, and the following night, and the night after that, I had the worst nightmares yet. I dreamed that I had woken up to find a bloodied rabbit in my bed, too late to save it, that the bed itself was made entirely of freshly skinned rabbits, cold and wet with blood. That the museum’s animals had moved to my room while I slept and when I woke they were crowding around me and I could not escape as they pressed toward me with their claws and paws and teeth. That there was a ghoulish woman leaning over my bed, her breath ruffling my hair, her icy fingers reaching for my face.
Ten days before Christmas, and three days before the dinner, I woke from one of these dreams, on a calm night so bitter I was convinced that it had snowed as I shivered in my bed. I twitched open my blackout curtains and peered out into the night, condensation clouding the glass before me.
There was no snow, but there was something else, there on the lawn by the kitchen vegetable plot.
The museum’s Indian bison, its shape unmistakable.
I unlocked the window with a sleep-weak hand and leaned out, teeth chattering. Was it skinned too? It was too dark to see. I blinked as if the scene might vanish, like the afterimage of a dream, but it was still there.
I fumbled into my clothes, tugging a jumper over my pajama shirt, pulling on socks and boots, and then I locked up my room and ran, clattering, down the stairs.
The night guard was on his feet when I reached the bottom, alarmed by the noise.
“What’s happened?” he asked, holding up his torch. The policemen had told the Major that the guards should not wear rifles, in case they accidentally shot someone, in case the intruders were only truant children.
I ran to the front door. “The museum’s bison, it’s on the front lawn,” I said, my voice a frightened warble.
“My god,” the guard said, “are you sure?”
I swung the heavy door open and pointed to the lawn.
“The entrance light, the blackout!” he urged, and I scrabbled for the light switch.
“There, do you see, it?” I said, pushing the door further open now that we were in the dark, realizing that I did not trust my own eyes, that I needed him to say he saw it and that it was not just a figment of my imagination.
“I see it,” he said. “Stay here,” he called to the other guard, who had appeared in the entrance hall. He jammed on his cap and followed me as I ran down the steps, over the driveway, and set out across the lawn wet with mist, my heart roaring in my ears.
You see, I imagined myself telling Lucy, I’m not mad, and I sprinted toward the figure that grew clearer in silhouette, its large rectangular side like a slab carved from the night, head down toward the ground.
It would be too heavy to carry between the two of us; we would need to ask the other guard for help and another man besides. How many had dragged it here in the first place? Was the skin still there? I could not tell.
We had just reached the beginning of the vegetable garden, a row of stakes ready for the spring’s green beans, when the bison lifted its head.
I screamed and the guard jolted to a stop behind me. The beast huffed and put its head bac
k down.
“It’s a cow,” I said. I coughed and then repeated it louder, in an ordinary voice to brush away the terror of dead beasts that could come back to life. But my teeth were still chattering.
The cow looked up at us again, its jaw working slowly on its pilfered dinner.
“I should have checked the museum room first,” I said, heart juddering. “Indian bison have horns and a ridge, a hump, through the shoulders. Our bison isn’t even posed with its head down, like the cow was. What on earth was I thinking?” The two bovines looked nothing alike; Indian bison of both sexes had horns, for god’s sake.
The guard let out a breath. “Well, I’m relieved,” he said. “I couldn’t imagine how it had gotten out on my watch, the dead one, I mean,” he qualified. “We’d better get this fugitive back to the farm.” I let him circle the cow, crooning softly, and grab its rope: I was too scared to get close to it, as if the night might transform it into some other beast again. “Hefty buggers up close, aren’t they?” he said. “I can take it from here; no need for the both of us to traipse through the mud.”
I glanced down at my boots, at the dark splatters on my linen trousers. “If you’re sure,” I said, my voice thick.
“I’m sure,” he said, kindly, as if he was trying to treat me carefully, as if he knew all the wild thoughts that whirled in my mind. He clucked his tongue and led the cow away, its footsteps oddly stumbling in the way of bovines, its bulk swaying from side to side.
I tipped my head up and stared at the stars in the sky as a sob caught in my throat, and then I trudged back toward the pitch-black house.
* * *
There was no more sleep that night for me, and the next day, after another morning of roaming up and down the long gallery hunting down infestation, jumping at the shapes of mounted animals and cabinets even though they were in the same positions as they had been for over a year now, biting my lip on tears that threatened to fall, I decided that I had had enough.
The museum would not, could not, remain here for the rest of the war: the infestation alone—never mind the intruders who were likely plotting out more mischief—had made our position here untenable. More to the point, though, I would not, could not, remain here; the experience would turn me utterly mad, would destroy the last shreds of my professional dignity and the last threads of my sanity too.
I did not want to leave Lucy, I felt heartsick at the thought—and only now that I had loved did I know what heartsick felt like. A life without her in it, even if all we shared currently were silent breakfasts and awkward passings-by in the corridors of the house, was a life devoid of joy. Now that I knew what it felt to love and be loved in return, even if only for a few months, I knew that my loneliness would be more acute, might very well swallow me whole. And yet we were not together anymore, I had ruined all that, and thus all I had was the museum and my employment. I would lose my position as assistant keeper for calling for another evacuation, for confessing the full extent of the damage and the loss to the specimens under my watch at Lockwood, but I would fight to be kept on in a lesser role, would give it everything I had.
As I was called out of my office to help supervise the movement of the mounted animals from the main house to the long gallery (members of the new local Home Guard had been conscripted to help with the heavier items for the dinner), I drafted in my head the letter I would write to London; the evidence that I would lay out, in black and white, on the page; the culpability I would admit to for not requesting a second evacuation sooner.
The morning of the Major’s damned Christmas party, after a night with no sleep at all, and as the humans in the house scurried to and fro, industrious as I had never seen them, I posted the letter.
And as I dusted and cleaned my animals in their temporary home in the long gallery—the Sumatran tiger, the polar bear, the spotted hyena, the black panther, the giant pangolin, the juvenile elephant, the gray wolf, the wallaby, the wolverine, the southern muriqui, the white-tailed mongoose, the blesbok, the large-spotted genet, the lar gibbon, the southern African lion, the capybara, the giant golden-crowned flying fox, the jaguar, and others—ready for their audience, I imagined the postman carrying my letter to the railway station; it being hoisted in a large sack onto the night train and sorted by men in a lurching carriage. I pictured the postman in London picking up his sack in the morning and heading out early to deliver his load; my letter being put in the pile on the director’s secretary’s desk as she yawned from a night spent in an air-raid shelter. I pictured it being passed to the director himself to read, as he puffed on his pipe, and the choice words he would have to say about my behavior. He would agree that another evacuation was needed, I was sure of it, and would have the secretary start drafting letters, and organize a meeting with the Ministry of Works and Buildings, and then the mammal collection would move.
The animals would be safe again, and I would be gone from here, the both of us rescued—from the tyranny of Lord Lockwood, from the hungry beetles and moths, from covetous thieves, from the elements, from the house and all the strange things that seemed to stalk its rooms nightly.
Thirty-Seven
The tableau for the dinner party that the housekeeper and other servants had created, under orders from Sylvia and the Major, was like something from a play, decadent and astonishing and, to my eye, more than a little grotesque. When I expressed my amazement at the spectacle to Dorothy, as she took a break from polishing the parquet floor in the main entrance hall that afternoon, she said that this was small fare compared to some of the parties she had seen back when Lord Lockwood’s wife and mother were alive, let alone the kind of thing the Victorian inhabitants of Lockwood were said to have got up to—masquerades where the jeweled masks and costumes worn by each guest would have been enough to purchase a small house each; Indian-themed summer balls complete with wild animals who were paraded through the house on silver leads; extravagant party games that lasted the whole weekend with specially made rulebooks printed on paper embossed with gold; nightingale-listening parties, where the birds were drowned out by the chorus of champagne corks from a regiment’s worth of butlers. Even a regular Christmas during the time when the manor had housed thirty-five servants or more, and half as many guests, was a sight to behold, she said.
The main house itself—the entrance hall, the library where pre-dinner drinks would be held, the billiards room for coffee and cigars—was decked out in exotic flowers that spread their rich scents throughout the rooms, and every surface had been buffed to a gleaming, almost disorienting, sheen, but the true pageant began at the door next to the Major’s office that led toward the long gallery. The door had been propped open and a blood-red velvet curtain hung in its place. Beyond the curtain was the short corridor, where dark, glittering cloth was suspended in oily folds from the ceiling, and the Major’s collection of snarling mounted heads had been placed on the walls to either side, with men’s and ladies’ hats balanced on their horns and muzzles. The long gallery itself was lit by candles, in chandeliers far apart enough to create dips of thick darkness, and in candlesticks on the dinner table and on the occasional tables surrounding it. But before one reached the table, the parade of the museum’s animals began, as if they too were making their way to dinner. First came the spotted hyena, with its mouth open in a growl and the hair on its neck raised in warning; and a few steps after that, a table draped in black cloth on which stood the juvenile Brazilian tapir, with a drooping snout and its reddish-brown coat patterned with dizzying white stripes and dashes; and then, to the left, the blesbok, a type of antelope with a white forehead and great ringed horns that tapered to a sharp point; followed by an orangutan to the right, looking half human in the gloom; then the spotted cuscus on another platform; the giant pangolin, armored with scales and balanced by a long tail; and finally the hefty bulk of the Indian bison—the real one this time, not a beast I had conjured in my mind.
As one neared the table, the decorations started to include flora as well
as fauna, with potted plants from the greenhouse bringing with them the scent of close, loamy days; vases of hothouse flowers that perfumed the air; houseplants purloined from other rooms, their waxy green leaves dark and tropical in the dim light; holly wreaths with beady ruby-red berries; and sheaves of cane and twigs potted and painted gold, gleaming in the candlelight. The vegetation continued around the table, wherever a spare space could be found in between the congregation of animals that would surround our feast—the Sumatran tiger at one end, the juvenile elephant at another, and in between them: the polar bear; the gray wolf; the jaguar; the black panther; the southern African lion; the zebra; the wallaby; and the wolverine, southern muriqui, the white-tailed mongoose, the large-spotted genet, the lar gibbon, the capybara, and the giant golden-crowned flying fox, all on occasional tables.
The freshly polished teak walls, where they could be seen behind such a crowd, held some of Lockwood’s collection of portraits—great men and women, plump with wealth and indolence, peering lazily out from between beeswax candles in gilded brackets. (I had assumed that the Major would put his own portrait up, but apparently even he was not so gauche as that.)
The heavy antique table and matching chairs were standing on a carpet of animal skins borrowed from the floor of the Major’s private library—and I had studied them carefully to check that he had not pilfered skins from a locked cabinet belonging to the museum, that we would not be resting our feet on type specimens and rare species. I was immensely uncomfortable with his choice of carpet—heads and tails and claws positioned carefully so that they could be seen—but not wishing to start any argument with the Major when I was so close to finally leaving this hellhole behind, I refrained from expressing my opinion.
