by Jane Healey
Just a few more days, I told myself, trying to picture his face turning red with outrage when he learned that the museum was to be moved, imagining what it would be like to be safe and far from here, to be myself again.
* * *
As the veal was taken away, its richness weighing sickly in my stomach, the officer sitting in front of the southern African lion was passed a message from one of the servants; apparently there had been a telephone call for him and, making his apologies, he went to return it. Mary, who had been sitting next to him, immediately stood up and made a beeline for the Major. We watched as she draped her arms around his shoulders, her red nails like talons on his black suit.
“I miss you,” she said, ignoring Sylvia sitting next to him, who was doing her best not to look furious.
The Major patted her forearms much as one might pat a small dog, but when she kissed him on the neck, he gripped them tightly. “You said you were going to behave tonight, darling.”
“You like it when I don’t behave,” she said, as a woman near me sucked in a breath between her teeth and another man coughed. I had a sudden vision of how parties must have been when Lucy’s mother was alive: the extravagant festivities that could turn from harmless enjoyment to uncomfortable spectacle in the blink of an eye.
“Go and powder your nose, Mary,” the Major said tightly, twisting in his seat. He released her arms and instead held her chin, his knuckles white with the force of his grip, before pushing her away. She stumbled and righted herself with a hand on the table where the spotted cuscus crouched. “A little too much champagne tonight,” he declared and the table tittered, pleased to break the tension. Mary walked away toward the west wing of the house, her white furs like a gleaming banner in the dark.
“Poor form of Malcolm to bring another man’s ex-girlfriend to dinner at his own house,” the Major drawled, gesturing toward the two empty spaces at the table, making the officer closest to me snort and an older woman frown daintily. “You wouldn’t go crazy like that if we broke up, would you, darling?” he asked Sylvia.
“I think having to say goodbye to you would turn anyone crazy, darling,” she gasped theatrically, and the Major kissed her on the cheek.
“Women’s hearts are such sensitive things,” he said, and she hit him lightly on the arm, “like little fluttering birds.” He stroked her neck and she giggled.
I hid my distaste with a sip of water. I felt for Lucy. Having to sit at dinner and see your father fawn over a girl younger than you, with an audience watching, must be terrible. Let alone having his last girlfriend make a scene too.
The salad arrived next, ferried by the servants in their immaculate uniforms, bringing with them the cold, fresh smell of the outdoors as if the walls at the darkened end of the corridor were melting away and the night was creeping in. Josephine served me and I thanked her awkwardly.
The artist opposite me was looking over his shoulder at the polar bear behind him, or perhaps the painting of one of the lords of Lockwood behind the bear.
“Such an interesting setting,” the woman sitting in front of the zebra said.
I glanced at Mary’s still-empty seat and the dark eyes of the large-spotted genet that peered back at me from behind it, its bushy tail curled around the table it sat upon.
“Well, at least that ghastly Priestley is off the BBC,” the officer with the southern muriqui peeking over his shoulder was saying. “They did the right thing there, booting him off, he would have stirred the country to revolution if he got his way—”
“I have it on good authority that the order came from the very top,” another man said, leaning forward conspiratorially, but the officer was not done yet.
“All this talk about after the war,” he said, “about housing and social justice and fairness—we have to win the bloody war first. All these factory workers dreaming about their new prefabricated homes should be putting their minds to the task at hand.”
“Hear! Hear! Don’t get Lord Lockwood started on unions,” said one of the two politicians, his cheeks flushed from the strong red wine that had been served with the veal course.
The Major shook his finger and clicked his tongue.
“Here, you’re not a bolshie, are you, Lillian?” one man asked the redheaded singer next to him, the one who had offered to perform for us later.
“God, no,” she said, with a little flick of the tail of her fur over one shoulder, but her eyes met mine and I was not sure she was telling the truth.
After the plates were all taken away, and as thoughts turned to the sticky delights of dessert, the Major stood up and rang his knife against his glass.
“Now, I did have an ulterior motive for inviting you here tonight, I’m afraid, an announcement I want to make.” He paused. “I am delighted to announce that the museum, whose fine animals you see around us now, has asked me to host some of their collection permanently at Lockwood once the war is over.”
My heart kicked and blood drained from my face, as the table congratulated him and told him what a marvelous idea that was.
“I’m sorry, Major Lockwood, but that simply cannot be true,” I said, my voice shaking with fury now, not fear. What the hell was going on? He could not be serious, surely?
“I beg your pardon, Miss Cartwright; are you calling me a liar?” he asked with a smile.
“The remit of our museum is education. Your hosting a separate collection here will prevent researchers, and the public, from accessing it,” I said, rather than yes. My mind was whirling and the blank accusing faces of the mounted animals around the table seemed to press in toward me.
“Oh, I’m not going to put them away under lock and key, Miss Cartwright,” he said with a little laugh. “Naturally, we shall be open for visitors.”
This was why he was looking for funds then; not for our museum but for his.
“What a fine setting for them,” the man to his left said.
“I’m sorry, but this is unfathomable, the museum’s mammal collection cannot be split between two locations,” I said, standing up, unable to sit placidly, listening to this rubbish.
“It can, it will,” he said, as people shifted in their seats and looked at me disapprovingly.
I grasped for any argument that he might understand, beyond the fact that he could not do this, that he was lying, and that the museum would never have agreed to this. “The cost of hosting the specimens here in an environment appropriate to their conservation—”
“Cost, you say,” he said, and rubbed his finger across his mouth. “If you are so concerned about cost, Miss Cartwright, then perhaps you as a museum attendant”—attendant, as though I were nothing more than a caretaker!—“should not have caused so much damage to my property. Damage caused by changing original antique locks and hammering nails through original window frames to board up windows in some fit of paranoia. The museum actually owes me funds, Miss Cartwright—”
“Father,” Lucy cut in, “perhaps we could wait until after dinner—”
“It’s all right, my dove, just some healthy tussling over particulars. Miss Cartwright is embarrassed that the museum directors saw fit to keep her out of the loop.”
“Lord Lockwood—” I exclaimed, but the wail of the air-raid siren interrupted me.
“Ah, saved by the bell,” he said, smiling lazily. He clapped his hands together. “Now, I have a very comfortable basement should any of you like to lurk there, but if not, feel free to remain in your seats. Our ARP warden is a bit keen, I’m afraid.”
I stood there, the siren an echo of my own rage, my toes curled tightly in my shoes, my chin shaking, as the Major started pontificating proudly about his new collection. I was confident he had fabricated the museum’s agreement; that he thought if he presented it to me, and them, as a fait accompli, then they would be too embarrassed to correct him. But the museum had experience dealing with rich collectors, with wealthy visitors who demanded to buy our specimens, and we would not be cowed by one ridiculous man. Pe
rhaps I could throw one of his silver knives at him, I thought, staring at the knife handle, my fingers aching to reach for it.
In the end, of course, I did nothing of the sort; I simply turned away to join the handful of guests, mostly women, who were heading for the basement, my hands clenched into fists and an angry sweat prickling underneath my dress. As I left, I glanced back at the crowd of stuffed animals who could not choose whether to shelter in the basement, as ever worried that while I might survive, they might not.
Well, perhaps if a bomb fell on the long gallery the Major might get knocked out by a piece of flying shrapnel, I thought darkly, and then tapped my fingers on the side of my head as if I could remove that thought. I was not someone who believed in jinxes, but equally it did not seem like a good time to start tempting fate. That was what the house had done to me, ripping away my rationality, leaving me using terms like fate.
Lucy was walking ahead of me again, chattering brightly to the lord next to her, the same man to whom the Major had called across the table—while the diners close by looked knowing, and Lucy’s face froze in a polite grin—doesn’t my daughter look a jewel tonight?
The Major could not force her to marry someone, I thought wildly, as we squeezed our way past the mounted heads, one of our number stealing a hat from a snarling tiger and placing it on their own head to much laughter. We were not in the eighteenth century; he could not make her walk down the aisle and say yes. If he did, I’d fight him, I decided. I could not protect my animals with brute force, but I could and would for her.
Because Lucy did not want a boyfriend or a husband, I knew that. It was more likely that when Lockwood was requisitioned for some other war task once the museum was gone, she might fall in love with a nurse, or a brave spy, a schoolmistress charmingly frazzled by her charges. I could find another woman, of course, back in London where there was sure to be at least some of my ilk hiding somewhere, but, I thought, as I took my seat on the sofa in the basement, and Lucy took the space next to me, as her perfume and the warm smell of her skin enveloped me, as my hand trembled in its attempt not to reach for hers, I knew that I would love no other woman but her.
The servants had taken one side of the basement, and the guests the other. In the big hotels in London, one woman said, there were fully stocked underground bars and dance floors, singers for entertainment, and then, realizing that the daughter of Lord Lockwood was sitting near her, nervously added that she was not complaining, not at all, only gossiping. And so began a spirited sharing of air-raid stories, even the servants chipping in with gruesome tales they had heard from relatives working in factories in northern towns.
“I can’t believe your father lying like that,” I said softly, looking at Lucy’s hands clasping her clutch with the heavy torch inside.
“I’ve heard nothing about it, nothing at all,” she said, shaking her head so that her hair brushed against my shoulder, “and it was terrible of him to bring it up at dinner like that without warning you. He’s done this before with other things, ridden roughshod over people to get things done the way he wants. It’s how he does business.”
“Are you all right?” I murmured, as her body quivered. I had been so wrapped up in my outrage that I had not thought about Lucy’s nerves, her fear of the enclosed space of the basement. “I can find you some wine, or something. I’m sure the all-clear will sound at any moment.”
“I’m fine, Hetty,” she said, and pressed a hot hand to my thigh, and now I was the one to shiver. “Thank you for asking, though.”
“Of course,” I said.
I should apologize to her now, hang my pride. I should tell her about the letter I sent this morning too, but I was a coward who feared my news would hurt her further, who did not want to hear her say that she did not accept my apology.
The all-clear sounded faintly and the guests stood up, shaking the dust from their clothes, glad to be heading back up to the warmth and light of the house, back to a dinner setting that seemed to be of another time, back when the waters between Britain and the rest of the world did their job, and war was fought elsewhere, and did not batter its cities and towns and villages, its defenseless people.
We made our way through the corridor into the long gallery and I paused by the blesbok, the candlelight making the table ahead of me seem like some painted backdrop.
“Are you not coming back to the table for dessert?” Lucy asked, touching my elbow.
“In a moment. I shall have a walk through the museum rooms first, burn off my anger so I don’t throw my petit fours at your father,” I said, trying to make light of my vicious hatred, of the blaring sense of alarm that the siren had engendered inside of me. I should go to bed now, I thought. I should retreat, knowing that I had the upper hand, that the letter was already making its way on the train to London. But I was not someone who backed down, who ran away, I told myself—all the while knowing that, in a sense, I was doing precisely that in requesting that the museum be evacuated a second time.
I opened the door to the first room to the left of the corridor and shut it behind me, switching on the floor lamp in the corner. I touched the edges of cabinets and crates and jars, cataloging them under my shaking breath as I passed by: skins of manakin birds from the Amazon basin, marsupial skeletons, the double-headed lamb fetus floating grotesquely in its spirit jar, gazelle skins from the country that had been British Somaliland before it was conquered by the Italians a few months ago, rodent skulls from South America, walrus ivory, Asian black bear skulls. I moved into the connecting room with the ambient light of the first room to guide me, and circled its collection, and then made my way to the third room, which was even darker than the last.
My eyes were still adjusting to the gloom when I noticed a small shape lying in the middle of the floor. I moved closer and reached out a hand that dwarfed the object. I felt dry feathers against my palm.
A hummingbird.
There was another one a few steps away, and then another after that. A trail of them, leading onward into the blackness of the night.
Forty
I didn’t want my father to marry Sylvia, to have my mother replaced, for Sylvia to be mistress of Lockwood and my mother’s presence here, all the years she had spent in these rooms, forgotten. But could I begrudge my father happiness, when it was hardly right that he should be as lonely as I now was?
Would another woman, another wife, do better here than my mother did, I wondered, watching Sylvia check her makeup with a hand mirror, frowning at her reflection as my father turned away to talk to another guest; or would she be haunted just the same, would Lockwood work its witchery on her too?
* * *
Six months before my mother died, I found her wandering in the gardens soaked to her skin and hurried her inside. I placed her by the fire in the morning room and patted her hair dry with a towel, peeled off her sodden sweater and wrapped her in two blankets, as if I were the mother and she my wayward child.
“What were you doing out there?” I asked.
“Walking my gardens,” she said, her voice tired, but a petulant set to her chin.
“You should take an umbrella next time, you’ll catch your death of cold.”
“I wouldn’t if he hadn’t lied to me,” she said, plucking a thread from one blanket and staring into the fire.
“Who?” I asked, knowing that the only “he” she ever talked about was my father.
“My husband,” she said primly. “He promised me he’d build me an orangery, a palm house, a proper hothouse for my flowers. He lied. Look,” she said, hand reaching out for a photo frame on the mantelpiece that I retrieved for her. “Here I am. Do you see me?” she asked, fumbling the frame into my hand.
I stared at the faded photograph, at a pale girl in a froth of white petticoats from neck to ankle, shod in shining black boots and with her ringlets in ribbons, a faint scowl on her blurred face. She was standing on a tightly groomed lawn next to a soaring white house with the forest some way behind
her, dark and overgrown. “I see you,” I said, seeing myself too in that little girl.
“That girl wanted everything, she wanted the world. A palace, a palm house, a prince to sweep her off her feet and take her away from the heat and the noise and the backwater of her home.” My mother gave a short, mirthless laugh, resettling the blankets around her shoulders. “That girl knew nothing.”
My knees were aching from crouching beside her but I didn’t want to move yet, for I sensed a rare glimmer of sanity in her that I wanted to savor.
“I, she”—she poked the glass of the photograph—“used to dream, terrible dreams about la diablesse.”
“Who was she?” I asked, even though I had been told many times before.
“The woman in white, my nurse called her. She was human once but became a demon. She put spells on men; she used to wait for them in the forest and then run away and let her beasts eat them. She wore a large white dress with many petticoats that hid her single cloven foot, and a hat or a veil to cover her monstrous face.” My mother’s hand touched her cheek. “I used to dream of her, waiting for me in the forest, hunting me. I thought that if I left my home, I might leave her too, but I got it wrong, don’t you see?”
“How did you get it wrong?” I asked, suddenly desperate to hear what she might say.
“She was trying to warn me; the dreams were her gift,” she said. “That day when I arrived at Lockwood, my wedding day, my husband took me on a tour of my new home, room after room, all his, all mine, until we came to one room, a bedroom with purple wallpaper, with a sloping floor and a window that rattled in the wind, and I turned around and there she was, waiting for me. Don’t you see?” my mother said again, turning to clutch my hands. “It was the mirror, I saw my reflection, I saw her inside the mirror, the woman in white, it was me all along.”
