A Glove Shop In Vienna (22 page)

In the director’s office I began to search for a list of employees. My brief when I got the job had been to streamline the place, reduce expenses, modernise — or else. It looked as though some pretty heavy staff cuts would be first on the list. But in installing roe deer rutting noises, Mr Henry seemed to have shot his bolt. I could find nothing relevant.

In the end I went to see my second-in-command, Mr Biggers, the taxidermist. I had met him at my interview and knew him to be a level-headed and sensible sort of bloke.

‘Mr Biggers, I’m a bit puzzled about the number of people working here,’ I said. ‘I thought we only employed four full-time members of staff.’

Mr Biggers pushed aside a dodo-head cast, dropped a pickled skin back into its barrel and drew out a stool for me.

‘Ah, yes,’ he said. ‘Well, a lot of people
do
work here, but they’re not exactly members of staff. They’re voluntary, as you might say.’ There was a pause, then he added, ‘They’re by way of being friends of Flossie’s.’

‘Who’s Flossie?’ I asked. But I was only playing for time; I knew of course. In this situation, the imprint of the football supporter was writ large and clear.

‘Miss French. The assistant curator. Her name,’ said Mr Biggers, ‘is Florence.’ He sighed and I loved him for it. ‘Flossie has this odd sixth sense. If someone comes into the museum who is sad or in trouble in some way, she always seems to know. Then she charges out front and shows them round.’

I scowled. This was a bit close to the bone.

‘She’s very fond of this place. You might say her enthusiasm is contagious. People start regarding it as home.’

‘But this is impossible! These people are handling highly valuable articles. Look, would you ask Miss French to come to my room straight away.’

She came, saw me and flinched. ‘Oh! You should have told me you were the new director. Letting me
show
you things…’

‘It was my first naked sea slug,’ I said briskly. ‘Please sit down, Miss French. I want to ask you about these friends of yours who’ve taken to working here. The Asian lady for example?’

‘Oh, that’s Mrs Rahman,’ she said, her face glowing with pride in her protegee. ‘She’s expecting a baby and she’s very lonely because her husband is doing a degree or something; they were very scientific with her in the hospital, so she came here to have a cry. She wants to have her baby by the Leboyer method, you see and they wouldn’t—’

‘By the
what
?’ Vivian didn’t want children and the whole scene was one I had blotted out.

‘Oh, it’s lovely! You have the baby in the dark with beautiful music and you don’t thump it and it smiles when it’s born. There’s a lot about massage too and warm oil and putting it on the mother’s stomach when—’

Too late I regretted my question. ‘So she came in here to cry. And what then?’

‘Well, I took her to my room for a cup of tea and now she’s sorting out the Hartington Egg collection. It’s been lying around since 1890 all in boxes, because no one’s had time to do it and she’s found some amazing—’

‘But is she
qualified
? Does she know what she’s doing?’

Flossie frowned. ‘I suppose she isn’t qualified on paper, but she has the gentlest hands I’ve ever seen – like the antennae of butterflies, they are. I can’t imagine her ever breaking anything and she’s so patient. Also she’s terribly generous. She buys all the coffee and sugar and biscuits for break – she insists – and the petty cash is absolutely
flourishing*
.’

I was liking this less and less. ‘And the little old man?’

‘Uncle Laszlo, do you mean? Well, I found him in the back one day, sort of rootling among the ichthyosaurus bones; he’d got lost, I think. It’s sad because he’s retired and lives in this awful hotel with no one to care for him – all his people stayed behind in Hungary in 1956. He must have been some sort of professor, I reckon. His hands are a bit shaky now, but he’s absolutely brilliant with bones.’

‘Oh, my God!’ I could see it all: medical disasters, insurance scandals, enquiries… ‘And that guy in jeans doing the carpentry?’ Obscurely, he had annoyed me most. ‘Your boy friend?’

She flushed. ‘No,’ she said shortly. ‘Matt’s American. He went through the drug scene when he was still in nappies and he’s been through some bad times. As a matter of fact, I found him kind of passed-out behind the stuffed bison in that alcove where Brian sleeps.’

‘Brian?’

‘Only in the winter.’ She was on the defensive at last. ‘He’s a pavement artist and in the summer he likes to sleep in the park. He’s very careful — it was because of him that we found the leak in the dark-room roof.’

I picked up one of Mr Henry’s treasures – a specimen tube simply and coyly labelled ‘cyst’ and turned it over in my hands.

They’ll have to go, Miss French. Every one of them.’

She stood there, knock-kneed as ever, taking it.

‘Look,’ I said. ‘I don’t know if Mr Henry told you, but this museum is financially on the rocks. Our endowment’s been reduced to nothing by the inflation and unless we can get a grant from the Natural History Commission we’re finished.’

‘We’ll have to
close
, do you mean?’

I nodded. ‘Just so. And the first thing Sir Godfrey Peters and his Commission are going to ask me is why this museum is full of geriatrics and pregnant women and tramps.’

A pause. Then she said gently, ‘Could… they just finish what they’re doing? They’ve all worked so hard.’

I frowned, calculating. ‘The Commission’s due in mid-February. That’s three months from now. All right, they can finish the jobs in hand but that’s
all
. Do you understand?’

‘Yes, Mr Bellingham. I understand.’

There followed some of the most exhausting weeks of my life. Three months was not nearly long enough for what needed to be done. Havelock had had connections all over the world and hardly a week passed but some ancient general or intrepid lady entomologist died and left us their collection of Peruvian rhinoceros beetles or a tin trunk of mysterious shards. It seemed to me that unless we could make some kind of order out of the muddle and get some of the stuff on display, the Commission would make short work of us.

So we set to work. And I have to say here and now that rancour was not one of the football supporter’s vices. She kept her lame dogs out of my way in her room and turned herself into a kind of sloe-eyed helpmeet out of the Old Testament, constantly at my side. We staggered about with drawers and specimen boxes, we sorted, we classified. We turned out rusty tins labelled ‘Henderson’s Breast Developer’ or ‘Colman’s Original Mustard’ and found now a valuable effigy, now a collection of mouldering pupae which crumbled at our touch. And always, even at the end of the most gruelling day, covered in dust and tottering with exhaustion, her demented enthusiasm remained undimmed.

Three weeks after my arrival she knocked at the door of my office as I sat in solitary state, drinking my coffee with the cyst.

‘Uncle Laszlo’s finished the ichthyosaurus. He was wondering if you’d like to see it?’

I followed her into her room. The old man had on his hat and coat; scrupulously he was getting ready to leave now that his task was done. I thought how tired he looked, how old.

The ichthyosaurus took up two trestle tables and so far as I could see he had made a flawless job of it.

‘Thank you. That will make a most valuable exhibit.’

Uncle Laszlo took up his briefcase. ‘There are some pterosaur bones in the cupboard in Mr Bigger’s room,’ he said. ‘I think they are complete. If they could be assembled, they would make an interesting comparison.’

‘Are you sure?’ I asked sharply.

‘That it is a pterosaur, I am sure. That it is complete, I cannot say.’

‘Well, you’d better find out,’ I said.

Uncle Laszlo looked at me and then quietly he took off his hat and coat. After all, he did not look so very old. It was only when a sort of sigh spread around the room and Flossie lurched radiantly towards me with the second cup of coffee that I realised what I had done.

After that things went downhill rapidly. Flossie appeared next day carrying a swathe of wild silk, priceless stuff the colour of the sea. ‘Mrs Rahman’s father-in-law sent it from Quittah. Would you mind terribly if we used it to display the Abyssinian pottery on?’

I said no, I didn’t mind. Gradually it turned out that I didn’t mind Brian, on leave from his pavement, wiring the display cases for concealed lighting, or Matt repainting the frieze in the main hall. Mrs Rahman moving on from the Hartington Egg Collection to the Kashmiri dried ferns was another thing I

didn’t apparently mind too much. As for Flossie putting in a fourteen-hour day, that had always been all right with me.

Soon I abandoned not only my principles but the cyst, taking coffee with the rest of them in Flossie’s room and giving them the benefit of my views on Leboyer, the political situation in Afghanistan and the efficiency of Yoga in licking drugs. It got so that when Flossie vanished one morning, obeying her sixth sense, and came back with a tragically widowed Brigadier, it was I who gave him the Madagascan ivories to sort.

I began to be hopeful. The Havelock, like a woman who is loved, began to glow, to shine.

‘They can’t close us, Paul, we’re so
beautiful,’’
said Flossie, gazing entranced at her newly mounted shrunken head. And removing a mother-of-pearl coconut scraper from her tangled hair, I was inclined to agree.

My happiness was the greater because Vivian, for the first time since our marriage, was taking an interest in my work. ‘I was thinking, Paul, if the Havelock is in trouble financially we ought to get going on the social side a bit. Have some fund-raising parties and things? I’d need some new clothes, of course…’

Gratefully I made over my salary cheque and Vivian, looking unbelievably stunning, sallied forth in search of American philanthropists, captains of industry and eminent scientists who might interest themselves in the Havelock and its fate.

I had it all sorted out in my mind, of course. Sir Godfrey and his Commission were due on February the twelfth. A week before that I was going to clear out the volunteers, give Flossie a holiday (I saw no way of making that girl into anything that remotely resembled the curator of a natural history museum) and only Mr Biggers, myself and the staid secretary would be there to present accounts and conduct them on a formal tour.

But there I had reckoned without my wife. She had managed – heaven knows how – to get hold of Sir Godfrey socially and to interest him in the Havelock and me.

We were having our coffee break when we heard the sound of purposeful footsteps approaching the director’s office, halting and then returning. Then came a knock on the door and a jovial, booming voice – ‘Ah, Bellingham, there you are! We’ve come to look in a bit early, as you see. Thought we might get your case through quicker that way.’

I don’t know what I had expected from the chairman of the Natural History Commission. Hardly the Flash Gordon profile, the craggy jaw, the Bermuda tan. Flanked by three steely-eyed, grey-suited experts, Sir Godfrey advanced into the room. As he did so his jovial expression became more fixed, his craggy jaw tightened a little.

On a camp-bed by the window Mrs Rahman was doing her ante-natal breathing, something we insisted upon. Matt, who was deeply into Yoga, was demonstrating the ‘Cobra’ to Uncle Laszlo. Brian, in the manner of tramps since time immemorial, was stuffing his boots with newspaper…

Sir Godfrey came to a halt. He had to since Flossie, who had been on her hands and knees labelling specimens, now reared up in his path. I moved forward to remove a Rhodesian leg ornament which had got caught behind her ear, thought better of it and shook hands with Sir Godfrey.

‘Your staff, I take it?’ said Sir Godfrey, surveying the room. ‘Perhaps you’ll introduce me.’

I introduced him. What else could I do?

I must say he was straight with me. Biggers and I showed him round and he asked intelligent questions while his posse took notes. Then we went to my office.

‘Look, Bellingham, before we go any further there’s one thing I want to make quite clear. Every one of these peculiar volunteers must go and go for good. It’s absolutely out of the question that we could award a grant to a place run like… a jumble sale. You must know quite well that your exhibits are not insured for handling by unauthorised persons. And what about the medical question? Suppose that extraordinarily pregnant lady should be taken ill and her husband sue you? Or the old man have a fit? You must be as aware as I am of these considerations?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I am.’

‘Good. Then I have your word that all these people will be removed immediately?’

‘No,’ I said.

A flush spread over Sir Godfrey’s handsome face.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I know exactly how you feel because I felt the same when I first came here. But I find I no longer care to go along with the way things are run nowadays. Friendly old people’s homes closed and the residents turned adrift because the fire escape’s two inches too narrow. People losing their jobs because they’re too old or too young or haven’t passed some arbitrary exam. All the goodwill of ordinary people going to waste. Havelock was a tea merchant. Everything he collected, he brought in during his spare time. This museum was built by amateurs and it’s only because I’ve had the help of other amateurs that I’ve been able to run it. If they go, I go.’

‘In that case,’ said Sir Godfrey, ‘there’s nothing more to be said.’

They all knew at once of course. Biggers must have told them and when I came back from lunch they were waiting for me. Mrs Rahman, her doe-eyes wide with concern; Uncle Laszlo, shaking his head; Matt telling me I was silly, that they had always known they wouldn’t be allowed to stay.

And Flossie, blaming herself. Flossie putting a hand on my arm and remembering, and turning away with a little gulp… Flossie who had lost both her parents in a car crash and to whom the Havelock was home.

The letter refusing the grant came the following week. Vivian was furious with me and I couldn’t blame her. After all, Sir Godfrey was her protege.