The World Before Us (8 page)

Norvill took the beetle from Edmund. “That one was brought back by Nicholson last month,” Edmund added. “He has about twenty of them.”

“I’ve seen one of his already,” Norvill replied, turning back to the table. “He brought it to lunch in a snuff box.” Norvill angled the cut of paper toward the lamplight to better gauge the beetle’s luminescence. “This one’s antennae are quite distinct—”

The door at the back of the parlour swung open and Norvill paused as Mrs. Chester strode toward the gathering in a bustled blue dress. She was carrying her hat in a gloved hand as if she’d just returned home, and her dark hair glossed in the candlelight. Edmund kissed his young wife’s cheek, and then responded to Norvill’s comment about the antennae. “They’re allegedly for fighting over the females.”

Charlotte nodded at the assembled men, taking in each of their faces quickly; she knew all but one of them. “Gentlemen,” she said as she curtseyed. She squeezed Edmund’s arm. “I’ve come to say good night.” Norvill stepped back to let her by and she glanced down at the beetle in his hand, said, “It’s a pity it’s so delicate; it would make a very interesting piece of jewellery.”

In the end it was Norvill who remembered Charlotte’s comment about the beetle and who, three years later when the collections were first opened to the public, suggested that Edmund commemorate the
event by presenting his wife with a bracelet featuring the glass-encased scarab. Charlotte mentioned this in her diary—her surprise that Norvill would have paid such attention to a trifling comment on the night they first met.

It is just past one o’clock when Jane comes back from lunch. She is thinking about Charlotte’s bracelet as she crosses the marble floor of the natural history hall, and we traipse behind her through the crowds who’ve come for the last day of public exhibition: a woman in a beaded shirt shaking her son’s arm for rapping the shell of the giant tortoise, a young couple peering into a cabinet of sea stars. When Jane reaches the wrought-iron stairwell that curves up to the first-floor gallery she takes the steps two at a time, then follows the narrow spiral up again to the galleries on the second floor, thinking about Gareth’s earlier words. Sitting on the bench outside the Chester, they had come back to her—his comment about the feliform hare, the cat–rabbit hybrid that was part of a collection of early Victorian hoaxes, an anatomical impossibility stitched together by a taxidermist and passed off for almost a year as a new species. She saw Gareth holding it in its spirit jar and saying, “I might keep this chap” as the cat spun slowly around. It hadn’t occurred to Jane when he said it, or in the stress of the weeks before, that certain things might not go to auction, those bits and pieces of a collection with less determinable value. Packing the containers of her lunch bag back up it had come to her with a jolt: the Chester family archives and the dozen or so personal objects associated with Edmund and Charlotte would be exactly the type to fall through the cracks. If Edmund Chester’s museum—his life’s work—was no longer supportable, who would care about his walking stick and ivory letter opener, Charlotte’s pearl hair combs or her scarab bracelet?

Charlotte’s bracelet is on display in a small room that was once their
maid’s quarters. There are five galleries on the second floor: the zoological specimens are in the centre gallery, with the scientific, botanical, ceramic and print galleries in satellite rooms. The Chester cabinet is in an alcove off the print gallery. When Jane walks through the main archway she finds a half-dozen people looking at the wall of early Victorian photographs and a man studying the explorer Fitzgerald’s hand-drawn map of the Kalahari Basin but no one at the Chester cabinet, so she takes out her key and unlocks its glass door.

The Chester family collection wasn’t properly archived when Jane was hired, even though Gareth had been wanting a display for years and had been setting aside any relevant documents or artifacts he’d come across since he was brought on as the museum’s director. The cabinet now contains some five shelves of the family’s belongings including a handwritten copy of one of Edmund’s Society speeches, his open ledger, an invitation to the museum’s first public exhibit, yellowed newspaper clippings and old photographs of early displays. On the middle shelf are two facsimile pages of Charlotte’s diary in which she describes the delivery of a pair of mammoth tusks, as well as a sketch she made of the natural history hall in the 1880s and a caricature of Edmund carrying a whale on his back. Her hand-held mirror and pearl hair combs are nestled on the lowest shelf next to a square of needlework, two smelling-salts bottles, a jet brooch and the scarab bracelet—the beetle mounted in an overlarge bauble of glass and braced like a cameo on a wide velvet band.

There is no official history of the Chester Museum, but Jane, as the compiler of the Chester family’s archives, has sifted through a number of descriptions of the museum’s early years. Most of the details come from Edmund’s letters, although Charlotte’s diaries and various Society announcements have added to his account, and objects in the collection—like
the presentation notes Edmund wrote up on cards for that first night’s exhibit—have added to Jane’s sense of how those early evenings unfolded, the men usually staying late for a round of drinks and cigars that Edmund gamely provided.

In the eight months it took Jane to catalogue Edmund’s letters and ledgers she came to imagine him clearly, and often it was the ephemera that revealed him to her the most: the arrangement of objects for his first exhibit hastily drawn on the back of his wife’s note to the maid about cleaning the wainscotting; the names of those he’d invited in his daybook, each attendee ticked off diligently in a firm hand or crossed off in bold strokes. This is one of the marvels of existence, Jane thinks, as she takes the bracelet off its support and lays it gently over her own wrist: that so much can be recreated; that all the bits and snippets—the receipts for roses, inventories tucked into books, even sherry glasses or cigar boxes or the worn clasp on a velvet band—are enough to conjure whole lives.

Three years after Edmund Chester’s first exhibition in the parlour of his home, his “museum”—a roped-off arrangement of three rooms on the lower floor of the house—was opened to the public. Visitors could come weekdays from noon until two and all day Saturday with tickets at a half-shilling. Thursday evenings the house was open from six until eight for gentlemen members of the various societies, and once a month, on the last Friday, it was open to those gentlemen and their wives—though the florid regrets tucked into Edmund’s daybook indicate that the wives rarely visited a second time. The lower rooms of the house had, by then, started to take on a distinctive fetor from exhibits that were not always properly preserved, and from the constant traipsing in and out of what Charlotte called “the rabble”—men on their half-day off, reeking of the
pubs, or women carting their children and market purchases. Even the padded chairs in the breakfast room adjacent to the display suites had started to emit a fusty smell, despite Charlotte’s weekly airing of the house and her attempts to beat the cushions into scentless submission. By the end of the museum’s first year Charlotte gave up, and she, Edmund and their young children removed themselves to the upper floors, resettling the “step girl” in the almost uninhabitable attic.

Charlotte was interested in details. She wrote eloquently in her diary about the minutiae of the collections, about arguments and making up, about Edmund’s ridiculousness and his quiet, attentive virtue. If Jane ever needs to know how to remove grease stains from hardwood or how to pin the femur of a
Loris
skeleton onto its pelvic bone, Charlotte’s diaries can tell her. It is, Jane knows, one of the reasons she is drawn to the bracelet: Charlotte’s ability to tell a story; the woman’s side of a man’s world, glimpsed in an age of exclusion. Charlotte’s caricature of Edmund carrying the whale on his back was drawn on the bottom of a letter to her sister, a letter in which Charlotte recounted an overture made by Edmund one evening after a glass of brandy with a professor of zoology from Brest. He’d pulled up a chair beside their bed after the professor had left and broached the possibility of purchasing a bowhead skeleton. Charlotte sat up against the pillows and stared at him blankly. “A bowhead skeleton?”

“Hilaire has one,” Edmund said. “It won’t cost much.”

Jane has always liked to imagine this scene and so we see it in the same way she does: Edmund would take Charlotte’s hand in his and kiss her palm, revelling in the lilt of lavender or lilac on her wrist after the fug of the cigars downstairs. Buoyed by expectations, he would glance up at her smart, pretty face only to be surprised at the tightening of her jaw. In circumstances such as these it was his strategy to bide his time, to drop
the matter and ask again after the next success: a write-up in the paper, a visit from someone notable. He would demur, say, “We can talk about it later. I shouldn’t have woken you.” Then he would set her hand down on the quilt and drop his own over it.

“Recklessness doesn’t suit you, Neddy.” We can see Charlotte saying this firmly while extracting her hand. Can imagine her yanking the sheets made in Edmund’s textile factory up around her neck as she turns to the wall and demands a proper house in which children can be raised without being subject to fantastical sea creatures and pickaxes. Charlotte informing Edmund, finally, that she refuses to speak to him again until he puts in an offer on the terraced house next door—an offer that, we know, would have demanded considerably more than he could afford.

Edmund Chester did well in manufacturing. His company’s linens, at the end of the nineteenth century, could be found in one out of every eight respectable English houses. At the end of his life he wrote that he had only one real regret—that he would’ve liked to travel more, to have been a man of adventure himself. In the Chester’s early years he’d confessed to Charlotte that he sensed it wasn’t the museum, but his engagement with, and support of, a particular breed of gentlemen that would be his legacy. He believed things ought to be remembered as attached to the people who held them in their hands. “What we pay attention to defines us,” he wrote in a letter to his son, when Thomas was twenty and preparing to enter law school. Edmund Chester paid attention to what the men and women of his time thought mattered, to what they carried back with them from their forays into Africa, Asia, the Arctic, Europe and the Middle East. What they brought back in sacks, caught in traps, nets, cut with chisels, fashioned with their own hands.

He wanted, in those years, to do more than make sheets on looms; he wanted to capture the fantastic and strange, to live a life in the zealous pursuit of knowledge.
I did not collect to own
, he wrote in one of his last letters.
I collected to create a discourse between the men of my day, and the
larger world
. “For it is not only
people
that constitute a society,” he’d said in one of his early Thursday evening lectures, “but also places and
things
, and this museum will explore the relationship between them.”

Edmund did eventually purchase the house next door so that the original site could be renovated and used wholly for displays. Walking through the front doors of the museum today one first enters the high-ceilinged natural history hall, the room’s outer walls rimmed by display cabinets, its centre bare save for the shadow cast by the long sought-after bowhead skeleton, which hangs on near-invisible wires from the second-storey ceiling. The first floor was opened up at the turn of the century to form a gallery around the whale, and today a dozen curiosity-style cabinets dot its walkways. The whale’s phalanges swim so close to the east and west railings that people sometimes lean out and try to touch the nub of the bones with their fingers, a small stitch of space that cannot be bridged.

The sound of a little girl’s shoes clapping across the hardwood floor of the print gallery rouses us. This is the nature of the dream: one minute we are in the world and the next we are Elsewhere trying to understand who and what we see.
It is Friday
, we remind ourselves,
it is Friday, and today the museum is closing
. Jane takes a last look at the bracelet, placing it hesitantly back on its stand, and then she locks the cabinet and turns to go downstairs. Our attention is divided, and so some of us start to wander off on our own, to move toward the longcase clock, the Victorian photographs, the Bedford cabinet.