Music at Long Verney (16 page)

WHEN MRS OTTER
came into the Abbey Antique Galleries that morning, Mr Edom, the proprietor, saw with concern that her hat was straight, her hair tidy, her handbag clasped. Something must be very wrong.

“Oh, Mr Edom, I am so thankful to get you to myself.” She broke off, trying to recover her breath. “You know, it's my positive belief that St John Street gets steeper every day. I should not be in the least surprised to find myself picking edelweiss there. Not that I like edelweiss; it's such a cold-hearted flower, though it meant a great deal to our great-grandparents, plunging into crevasses to snatch it for their Louisas. I'm sure it can't be only my increasing years which make me so out of breath by the time I get here – though at the moment I am feeling dreadfully old.”

She sat down, holding her bag upright on her knee like a person applying for a situation. Her glance strayed over the Dresden shepherd playing the flute to his dog, the pewter tankards on the mule chest, the Nailsea birds poised on their crystal branch, the wig stand, the three Portuguese reliquaries, the satinwood
bonheur-du-jour
as though in one or other of these she might find reassurance. But nothing supplied it, and the glance returned to Mr Edom and rested on him so disconsolately that he began to feel that he too must fail her.

“The trouble is, all your things are so beautiful, so tip-top. I've got nothing you could conceivably want.”

Remembrance of past transactions with Mrs Otter told him that this might well be true. At the far end of the room, the reflection of Mr Collins' face, encompassed by the blue plaster bows of a rococo mirror, repeated the same tale, and in sterner accents. He had bought a great deal of rubbish from the dear lady. On the other hand, she had sometimes brought off a winner.

“Don't say that, Mrs Otter. Have you forgotten those duelling pistols you found in the attic which Mrs Vibart carried off for her collection? George sold her two of his kittens at the same time.” This should settle George Collins.

“Yes, wasn't it glorious? But I have no more duelling pistols. Nothing but assegais and baby clothes.”

And he'll buy them, thought Mr Collins. Undoubtedly there must be something about Mrs Otter, since Mr Edom felt whatever it was so strongly. For himself, Mr Collins felt nothing except a loyal resignation. He went on looking in a bible of china marks for TBZ, with “Patmos” in a crowned lozenge.

Mrs Otter enlarged. “All the same, I think I'm going to ask you to come and look, just in case you should find something I've missed. You see, the pistol money went to my idiot boy to help buy an enormous Edwardian car because he wanted to drive to Brighton. Well, that was all right, and he was towed back, and when it was repaired he took it out to show to a friend who rather thought of buying it, which would have paid for the repairs, which had come to more than he expected, because apparently when you have an Edwardian car its inside bits are period pieces too. So he was on his way to the friend, who shares a flat in Chelsea, when he saw another friend who was marching in a peaceful demonstration or perhaps it was a counter-demonstration – anyway, it was peaceful – and the
friend said join in, so Toby joined in, going as slow as he could and then waiting for them to catch up, and it gave new life to the demonstration, and whole busloads cheered, and everything was perfectly all right till they got to the Embassy; but by then the car had overheated from going so slow, and it skidded and rushed halfway up the Embassy steps. No-one was hurt, but the Embassy people were very prim about it, and Toby was arrested; and as his license is endorsed up to the hilt he'll either have to pay a fine or go to prison. Personally, I would welcome a term in prison, prison sounds so calm. But the young don't want calm.”

“It will be a pleasure,” said Mr Edom, putting his foot firmly on the further end of Mrs Otter's statement. “I'll come at once, if that would be convenient.”

“Perhaps not quite at once. I ought to do a little tidying first.”

“Shall we say, this afternoon, at three?”

“At quarter to four. Then I can give you tea.” She was already looking more like herself. Her hat had drifted to the back of her head and a ringlet had escaped and hung engagingly over her nose.

It is the doom of man to love what he is not constructed for. Mrs Otter was too often tipsy. She dressed like a tinker, and if by chance she was driven into respectable new clothes she instantly got them into bad ways. Her reactions were incalculable. She combined being vague with being arbitrary. In terms of cabinet-making, silverware, ceramics, Mr Edom would never have admitted her into his Galleries. But from the hour he first set eyes on her (a horse had fallen down in St John Street and she was sitting on its head), he had loved her against all his principles, and fatalistically, as fathers love. So – but without impediment of principles – did every errand boy, every street hawker, and all the town's crusted bad characters. He wasn't much among so many, and probably at their various
times they had all had tea with her. But today it was his turn.

Her Lapsang Souchong was exquisite, but he felt a traitor as he drank it. There was treachery in allowing her to foist such rubbish on him: alphabet mugs without handles, souvenirs from Jerusalem, that hatbox with associations (he had avoided it till now, but it had got him at last); worst of all, ruins of what had once been splendours. He was packing the sorry assortment in the hatbox when she remembered what it was she had been meaning to say ever since he arrived: Would he like a scrap screen?

The scrap screen was in her bedroom. Its eight-fold span glorified half a wall with the colours of a hothouse, the richness of a plum pudding, the glow and multiplicity of the Last Judgment window in the Minster. And even to his trained and anxious eye it seemed in quite remarkably good condition. Mistaking his silence, she said propitiatingly, “It's done on the other side too. But it's not so lively, as by then they had to fall back on engravings.”

“Who were ‘they', Mrs Otter?”

“My first husband's great-aunts. Eight of them, and each did a leaf. They lived in a rectory in north Norfolk and were always in quarantine for something or other. Would you like to see the other side?”

He answered that he would take the other side on trust and send packers and a van in the morning. Meanwhile, he would put a cheque in the post – a provisional cheque – for he hoped to do considerably better.

He was so elated by the prospect of enriching Mrs Otter that not till he was on the threshold of the Galleries and saw Mr Collins at the telephone did he remember that he did not go in for large Victoriana.

“That was Mr Grimshaw,” said Mr Collins, putting back the receiver.

“Domes, I suppose?” Mr Grimshaw was the curator of the stuffed birds in the town museum.

“I told him you had no unoccupied domes, but he saw the dome of the Nailsea birds through the window, and he's coming tomorrow to measure it and make an offer.”

“He can offer,” said Mr Edom.

“And Mrs Harington may be coming too. She wants to try if the harp stool is comfortable.”

“Quite a party.”

“Why, who else?”

“Mrs Otter's scrap screen. We must think about placing it. It's six foot high, and to be seen to advantage it will need twelve-foot-by-four-foot floor space.”

Forty minutes later Mr Collins, putting on his coat again, remarked that Mr Edom ought to have been a general.

The van came punctually next morning. Mrs Otter came too, sitting beside the driver and holding the hatbox. The screen was carried in. Freed from its wrappings and expanded in its resting place, it looked imposingly spectacular and totally out of keeping with its surroundings. But Mr Grimshaw, single-hearted in his devotion to British birds and their post-mortem preservation, walked in without paying it the slightest attention.

“I've come about that dome. But I don't see it, though it was here yesterday. You seem to have moved everything. What's the object – Oh, there it is.” He produced his pocket rule and made careful, censorious measurements. “It's a bit cramped, but it will have to do. I'll take it. I must say, I wonder what in God's name these flimflam objects were meant for? How could any bird fly with wings like ballet girls' skirts, I'd like to know.”

“You will take the group?”

“The group? Good God, no! It's the dome I want.”

Mrs Harington had now come in, carrying an opossum muff. Leaving Mr Collins to explain to Mr Grimshaw that the dome could not be sold without its denizens (a routine matter but wrong-headedness sprang eternal in Mr Grimshaw), Mr Edom went to greet her. He was too late. She had gone straight to the screen and had eyes for nothing else. She was always lovely, but never before had he seen her look like this: enfranchised by pleasure at the brilliant paper mosaic.

“And there's so much of it!” she exclaimed.

Her intent gaze travelled from seedsman's-catalogue carrots to giraffes, copper kettles, smirking blonde children in pinafores, Grace Darling, marrow-fat peas, Indian braves, Goody Two-shoes, the Taj Mahal, dahlias, chest expanders, guardian angels, trophies of grapes, peaches and nectarines, foxhunters, cauliflowers, steam engines, illuminated texts, gorillas, Persian kittens, hip baths, crocodiles, robins, General Gordon, Eno's Fruit Salts, camellias, pineapples, sewing machines – their irrefutable fortuity firmly pasted on and guarded by the splendid varnish of the period. The travelling gaze reached the edge of the screen, flicked inattentively over the shabby human figure standing by it, went back to the solemn raptures of discovery. Mr Edom stole a congratulatory glance at Mrs Otter – and realised that in another moment she would be giving the screen away.

“Mrs Harington, do you know Mrs Otter? We are selling the screen for her.”

“How do you do? I'm afraid I've been rude, thinking of nothing but your screen. Please forgive me and tell me about it. What's this queer thing, next to the lobster?”

“A mangle, for squeezing wet washing in before you hang it on the line.”

“What a good idea! And this?”

“A bonnet.”

Their voices mingled. Of the two voices, Mrs Otter's sounded
the younger. Presently, they were down on their knees, studying the base of the screen.

“The bull, Mrs Otter! Look at the bull!”

Below the bull a hand in the Norfolk rectory had stuck an illuminated text:
He shall be called Wonderful
.

“Do you think it was his real name? It's the sort of name people give bulls. Or was it a coincidence?”

“I wish I knew. I've often wondered about it.” Mrs Otter was stroking the opossum muff.

Meanwhile Mr Grimshaw, who had paused before a small ivory Annunciation to comment injuriously on the angel's deficiency in pectoral muscles – how did Mr Collins suppose it would ever get off the ground again? – was slowly making his way out from behind the screen. An engraving caught his eye. As if the bull called Wonderful had materialised, a strangled yell rang through the Galleries.

“Furnivall's hoopoe! Furnivall's hoopoe! I say, Edom, do you know you've got a Furnivall's hoopoe here?”

“And begonias!” murmured Mrs Harington.

“Jammed in among all these tomfool foreign cathedrals. It's a marvel I saw it. Furnivall's hoopoe, by Wilkins. What a find – and I daresay you hadn't even noticed it. Do you know, the last Furnivall's hoopoe in this country was shot in 1852? By a clergyman, needless to say. Pity nobody shoots clergymen.”

Mr Edom made a deprecatory noise.

“I tell you, the Church of England has wiped out ninety per cent of the rare birds in this country. All those country parsons, they all had guns, they all fancied themselves as naturalists, they all had six days of the week to do nothing in. So whenever they saw a rare bird, they shot it. Go into any ornithological museum and read the tickets. Shot by the Reverend Mr So-and-So. Shot by the Reverend Mr So-and-So. What a pack!”

Mrs Otter from her side of the screen took up the challenge.
“Fiddlesticks, Mr Grimshaw. Both my husbands were Church of England clergymen and neither of them shot as much as a canary.”

“Why should they? Canaries are as common as sparrows. They left canaries to their wives and went out to extirpate siskins and choughs and avocets and rare migrants like Furnivall's hoopoe. It makes my blood boil.”

“And the stuffed birds in the museum,” retorted Mrs Otter, “those which weren't shot by clergymen. Do you suppose they all died a natural death?”

“Madam, you stray from the point. The purpose of an ornithological museum –”

“Ornithological shrike's larder,” interposed Mrs Otter.

“If you are referring to
Lanius collurio,
I will admit that I hold no brief for the bird, but –”

“
I
do. At least shrikes have the decency to eat what they've killed, which is more than ornithologists do.”

While the contest raged from either side of the screen and a customer came in only to say she would be calling later and hurry out, Mrs Harington went on enumerating toads, volcanoes, turkeys, etc. Maddened by this incessant cooing, harassed by Mrs Otter's agility in straying from the point, Mr Grimshaw broke off and went back to his first purpose. “Edom. I will take the engraving of Furnivall's hoopoe. How much do you want for it?”

Mrs Harington sprang to her feet. “If you think you are going to have my screen –”

“There, there, don't get excited. Of course he shan't” and “I understand the screen is already under offer,” said Mrs Otter and Mr Edom, speaking simultaneously.

“Nothing would induce me to buy it,” said Mr Grimshaw. “All I need is the engraving of Furnivall's hoopoe. I presume it can be peeled off.”

“I doubt it. I very much doubt it,” said Mr Edom. “Mid-nineteenth-century paste is very tenacious.”