The Museum at the End of the World Read online

  He heard a faint noise somewhere distant that might have been a lavatory flushing.

  Loud footsteps. Keys. Commanding voices. Straining, he thought he heard the word “Buster.” Cell door clanging. Keys.

  “Helena?” he whispered.

  After what seemed minutes, her voice said,

  “Take your trousers off!”

  He stared at the back of the settee.

  “Pardon?”

  Further fraught silence.

  Into that silence he said, sibilant, “What did you say?”

  He lay feeling his heart’s turmoil, every now and then its rogue pumping performing finales in his throat.

  “Helena?”

  He decided that he would take off his socks. There was something about doing, well, it, in socks, something essentially plebeian. Non-évolué, Jimbo would have said. He’d got one off and with contorted squirming, drawing up the other knee, was working on the other, fearful he might bring down the heavy curtains onto himself, when a beagle stuck its head round the end of the settee. It clambered over his ankles, tail thunk-thunking against the taut fabric of the settee’s back. It gave a peculiar impression of smiling.

  “Shoo!” he whispered. “Go! Bad dog!”

  It squirmed its way up onto his chest and sat there, tilted, its behind half-on. He pushed it away. Risking his hand being seen on the top edge of the settee, he gave the dog a powerful shove. At the other end, it started to lick his bared foot. Then it backed further out, dropped into a play-fight posture, front legs flat on the carpet, bum in the air, and got hold of the other, drooping-off-his-foot sock, and, against his frantic kicking, worried it free, and disappeared, sock in mouth.

  He heard the small sound of a door closing.

  He waited for what felt like hammering minutes.

  “Helena?”

  She suddenly appeared at the far end of the settee. She had taken down her ponytail. She placed her bare feet carefully, straddling his legs, moving up him until she stood astride his chest. Then she caught up the hem of her blue skirt and began slowly to bunch it upwards.

  He gazed.

  A thatch of hair.

  Holding the bunched skirt against herself with an elbow, she spread with her thumbs what Rob, from the study of diagrams, supposed must be the labia majora.

  The pile of the carpet was forcing its way under his fingernails.

  She pulled the bunched material of her skirt closer to her stomach and held it clamped flat with her fist and, with the thumb and forefinger of her other hand still holding the labia open, bent forward regarding herself.

  sinking closer

  breathy whisper

  Rosebud

  He made a sound, an involuntary sound, a râle, a sound he heard as if it had been made by someone else.

  tat-tat-tat

  metallic

  Behind the curtain, on the window, sounding inches from his head.

  A panic seized him.

  “What is it?”

  She straightened and let her skirt fall.

  “It’s Joshua,” she said.

  “Who’s Joshua?”

  “He’s unpredictable when he’s drunk so I’ll try to draw him off but you stay hidden.”

  She backed down his length and disappeared and then the TV went silent.

  Then she was back kneeling on the settee and looking down at him.

  “If it’s on,” she said, “he’ll come in here and sit in front of it and stare through his drunken knees at this shoes. Handmade,” she added, “Italian. It could take minutes, could take hours.”

  “Who is it?”

  “My brother. He’s a houseman at Guy’s. Very distingué. If I were you,” she said, “I’d draw my knees up and move tight in against the back here. Just to make sure you’re out of his sightline.”

  As he shuffled himself tighter in, she sighed and said, “Quel dommage!”

  The knocking, now duller, sounded to be on wood.

  “Won’t he wake them?”

  She placed an actressy back of her hand against her brow and said, “Je suis désolé.”

  “Won’t the noise—”

  “To think,” she said, hanging over the back of the settee, “You were nearly, on the very brink,—sur le bord of being diddled.”

  She gave a theatrical sigh.

  “Quel dommage!”

  He rolled his head and shoulder out to watch as she crossed the hall and knelt at the front door, raising the large brass flap of the letter box.

  “Who is it?”

  “Becca, let me in.”

  “Please identify yourself.”

  “Becca, it’s raining.”

  “You’ll have to do better than that,” she said. “State your name and the purpose of your visit.”

  An outbreak of hammering on the door and indistinct imprecations.

  “If this is Joshua, then you’re drunk again, drunk like a goy, a shiker who brings tzures upon our father.”

  “Open the fucking door, Rebecca. I’m warning you.”

  His voice through the letter box sounded distorted, sounded like the voice of a character in a cartoon.

  “How rude!” she said.

  The outer brass flap clanged and there was silence.

  Rob lay clenched, sure that the raised voices would bring down her parents.

  The whinge of the outer brass flap being raised.

  Helena raised hers.

  A bush burst through, a branch, a thrash of leaves.

  Helena reared back.

  The bush withdrew.

  “I’m afraid,” said Helena, “it’s the garden shed.”

  “Let me in, Rebecca, you vicious little cunt.”

  “I’m afraid it’s the garden shed for Joshua,” she said, “on those greasy grass clippings with earwigs on him.”

  There was silence.

  He started kicking the door.

  She flipped the catch and ran. He saw a flash of her blue skirt near the staircase. Then the door began to open and he hugged himself tight in, pushing his body and face into the settee’s fabric.

  He heard nothing and then the far doors opening.

  Then nothing.

  Then a stumbling noise.

  “…fucking dog…”

  Further obscure noise. Bottles rattling. A door closing.

  Then no sound. Was he crossing the white carpet? Then—was that shoes in the hall? He lay there for long minutes in the silence then rolled over onto his back. He looked at his watch, deciding to wait for fifteen minutes. After fifteen long minutes, he emerged on hands and knees and peered around the end of the settee. The chandelier still blazed in the hall. The far doors stood open into the deepening darkness of a passageway. He got up and stood wondering what to do.

  He edged into the passage. An open door, the shape of a long table, chair backs, a dining room. Beyond that, another door. He stood in front of it breathing through his mouth, straining for sounds. He put his fingertip to the door. It opened a crack onto darkness. What he had heard earlier, the stumbling noise, footsteps in the hall, must have been the brother on his way upstairs. He felt about on the wall for a switch and the kitchen lights stuttered on and swelled and settled into a humming. Faucet, stainless-steel bowls, copper pans, blue tiled backsplash, cupboard doors matte-plastic inset with strips of steel, it was a glossy kitchen, magazine and Mondrian.

  The wicker dog basket the brother had stumbled over sat in the middle of the floor where he’d kicked it. Rob looked all around it and in it for his sock, lifting a bunched-up old quilt panelled in roses. Looked underneath the basket. Underneath the table. Allowed light to wash along the passage. The dog, too, must have gone upstairs. He looked about at the ends of the settee, looked at the bottom few steps of both staircases, scanned
the black squares in the hall. Then, resigned, sat on the settee to put his shoes on.

  He stood in the silent hall under the blaze of the chandelier. He felt fearful the parents would appear. Hopeful that Helena would. Nervous that the unpredictable brother might. He felt like a guest, rudely abandoned. He felt like a burglar. There seemed to be no understandable shape to the evening’s events, no dénouement. There was nothing but this brightly lit silence. He looked at the twigs and stripped leaves scattered near the door.

  He began to suspect that the hanging rectangles of the chandelier were made of some sort of plastic, there was… he wondered what he meant… a thickness about them as though each piece had a skin, not alive like glass, a rind, a nearly invisible rind.

  He eased the door ajar. Miserable drizzle.

  To one side of the door stood a tall vase-thing they used as an umbrella stand. Perhaps made to be an umbrella stand. Porcelain, he thought. Decorated with a profusion of flowers and foliage. Japanese export-ware, Jimbo had instructed him. Imari, was that the word? Garish he thought, but fetching a pretty penny, Jimbo said, in the sales rooms.

  He drew from it a slight green umbrella.

  He wondered if he ought to turn off the lights.

  Eased open the front door, eased it inch by inch closed behind him. He crunched down the drive and began to walk the long miles home under the ridiculous parasol, under the persistent rain, his sockless shoe rubbing, blisters rising, rubbing. His mind kept repeating, against the rain, against the weariness of walking, an incantation, a rune, a couple of lines from an early Mississippi blues he’d caught late one night on a Hamburg radio station, no idea of the song’s title, or the singer, just a fretwork of notes leading into the two lines he’d heard before the FM signal wandered. He was ridden by this fragment, a blues of loss and longing, the singer searching…

  Lord, I’ve been to the Nation

  An’ roun’ the Territo…

  He did not know what the words meant.

  In his right hand, the frail parasol, and clamped to his body by his left arm, under his sheltering jacket, the red and magic record.

  *

  Jimbo won a scholarship to St. Edmund Hall in Oxford. Rob, awarded a State Scholarship, but much smitten by a girl from Beckenham called Cecilia, trailed after her to Bristol University, which held the additional lure of a critic with a fabled reputation in Shakespearian studies. Disappointment awaited him on both fronts.

  The tedium of Anglo-Saxon was mandatory but Cecilia compounded this mindless affront to his free time by electing to also embrace Old Norse, a move on her part that Rob felt was—while at the same time feeling himself ridiculous for feeling it—was, somehow, a betrayal.

  She had been named, she had once told him, after a Christian martyr who in the second century had taken a vow of celibacy, a baptism and naming by which, he was coming to believe, she had been unduly influenced. During their amatory grapplings, rather lukewarm engagements on her part, Rob increasingly thought, she trotted out that they must not get carried away when being carried away was Rob’s precise desire.

  She was soon lost in a prickly thicket of thorns and wens, lost letters representing the voiced and voiceless dental fricatives ð and þ and the runic letter later replaced by w; she thought the kennings of skaldic recitation were the essence of poetry whereas Rob thought that ‘whale road’ and ‘oar-steed’ meaning ‘sea’ and ‘ship’ were but heroic boilerplate.

  Upon graduation, Cecilia was awarded the University’s Walter William Skeat Medal in Etymology.

  The famed Shakespearian scholar was also a disappointment. He was both lank and stoop-shouldered. His leg-crossed suit trousers revealed shins of riveting whiteness. For some unfathomable reason, he put Rob in mind of a potted hyacinth, the flowers grown so heavy that the fleshy stem bowed to meet the peat and potting soil. A dry, pretend-cough, guarded by the back of his hand and dangling fingers raised to his lips, heralded each practiced witticism. What could be seen of his tie above the grey pullover sported tiny devices or emblems, a club, college, or regimental tie, Rob thought, until he put himself near enough one day to make out they were horseshoes. During the seminars, while seeming to listen to their comments and discussions, And what has Miss Mayberry to contribute to this… ah…? he nibbled mixed nuts from a crinkly cellophane packet and sometimes celery.

  Rob soon abandoned the university, going in only for the tutorials in Anglo-Saxon as he knew he needed external discipline to learn the language and vocabulary and read such scraps of verse as survived. He found Middle English—Chaucer aside—to be equally arid; he felt that life was too valuable to expend deserts of time upon the much-admired alliterative masterpiece Awntyrs of Arthure at the Tern Wathelyn.

  His life fell into a pattern that pleased him. He read most of the night, getting up at noon or thereabouts for breakfast, usually some variety of Madras curry and a pint of George’s Glucose Stout. He spent the afternoons pottering in the zoo, the dreary city museum and art gallery, used bookstores, and in nearby Bath at the Baynton bindery and the art school where William Scott taught. On some afternoons, he took the bus out to Berkeley Castle and walked in the water meadows or to Chipping Sodbury to browse the antique shops. Post-Cecilia, though, more and more of his afternoons were filled with dalliance. Post-Cecilia, his world, surprisingly, seemed filled with girls.

  He and Jimbo had been drifting apart before they entered university simply because the demands of their sixth form years had left them little spare time; both had realised that scholarships were the passports to lives they were beginning to imagine. Both made light to each other of their deepening interest in what they were studying. Cecilia, too, had come between them. Jimbo at first dismissed her as a passing coup de foudre but as the liason continued—twin sets—did not bother—a charm bracelet—to disguise his hostility—for Christ’s sake, Rob, she plays a recorder—nor his physical aversion.

  He wrote three letters to Jimbo at St. Edmund Hall but received no reply.

  Weeks later a telegram arrived.

  Rob associated telegrams with glad tidings or news of a death.

  He opened it to read:

  Imperative read Robert Byron.

  He usually went to The Green Bush at opening time, drank with old local men and flashy, secretive Jamaicans and played darts seriously. Usually, before Time was called, he walked back to his room in a house of students in Redland and settled to reading; it added little to his life, he felt, to know that Redland had nothing to do with redness but derived from “thrid,” land that had been cleared, rid of trees.

  His squalid room, his bed with its increasingly unappetizing sheets, the purple eiderdown, the huge sentinel wardrobe with the silvering of its mirror decaying into black patches and freckles, all formed a haven. Books were piled on his table and stood about the bed in stacks. A gas fire with a meter had been installed inside the Victorian cast-iron fireplace, the floral motifs of its surround blurred by successive layers of black paint but on cold nights, lacking shillings, he wrapped himself, in lieu of pyjamas, in his undergraduate gown.

  In his first weeks he had filled in gaps in early novels reading Defoe: Captain Singleton, Colonel Jack, Moll Flanders; Smollet The Adventures of Roderick Random, The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker; Fielding: An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews, Amelia; Richardson’s Clarissa; then on to the Gothic: Melmouth the Wanderer, The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Monk, Vathek; then on to the tedious attractions of Thomas Love Peacock: Gryll Grange, Crotchet Castle, Headlong Hall; then to the book to which he kept returning: Don Quixote, in the 1620 translation by Thomas Shelton. Its language filled him with a purring pleasure as he spoke aloud its rhythms in his silent room under the unshaded bulb.

  At the same time as loading in this necessary ballast he had discovered Joyce Cary’s first trilogy: Herself Surprised, The Horse’s Mouth, and To Be a
Pilgrim. He was also reading, with large surprise, Samuel Beckett’s Murphy, Watt, Molloy, and Malone Dies.

  Certain strange books he acquired on sight. It felt as if he recognized them. He scoffed them off the shelves of used-book stores as greedily as a lover of caramel picked out the square shapes in a box of Black Magic.

  Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, Newman’s Apologia pro Vita Sua and The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated, John Speke’s Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile, Bernard Berenson’s Italian Painters of the Renaissance, Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, the 1587 version of Holinshed’s Chronicles, Sir Richard Burton’s Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to El-Medinah and Meccah.

  And there were, of course, poems, not the bulk oeuvre, not Selecteds and Collecteds, but individual poems and fragments he held in something like reverence. Lines that chimed. He copied them out into a ledger, leather backstrip and marbled endpapers. Hopkins, Edward Thomas, John Crowe Ransome, Louis MacNeice, Auden, Dylan Thomas… He read through the ledger daily attempting to commit another to memory.

  John Crowe Ransome

  “Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter”

  He closed the ledger and tried; tried to visualize the page.

  Shut his eyes.

  …The lazy geese, like a snow cloud

  Dripping their snow on the green grass,

  Tricking and stopping, sleepy and proud,

  Who cried in goose, alas…

  Sometimes, starting at the other end of the ledger, he worked sentences and paragraphs, descriptions of things seen, purple willow herb waving tall in the roofline gutters of Redland’s once-proud houses; carved on the front panel of a Jacobean chest he’d seen in an antiques shop in Chipping Sodbury, two facing whales spouting from their blowholes, the ginger-and-white cat sat on the pavement outside the butcher’s, so fat its tongue stuck out.

  He turned a page in the ledger.

  Dylan Thomas

  “Fern Hill”

  He recited “sky blue” for “blue sky,” his mind mechanically transposing.