A Glove Shop In Vienna

With Love and Swamp Noises

It was the kind of place you go to to get out of the rain or to amuse an ancient relative with a passion for stuffed ptarmigans, assegais and the less important kinds of mummy. A tiny, old-fashioned museum — The Havelock, they called it — tucked away in one of those quiet grey squares between the London Library and St James’s.

A place in which one might have expected to meet anything — except one’s fate.

It was November — somehow it always seems to be in that part of London — with the bobbles on the plane trees swirling out of the mist and splayed leaves on the pavement. My wife wouldn’t come — she had an ‘engagement’ and because I suspected what that engagement was, it was with the familiar ache gnawing at my stomach that I paid my entrance fee, walked past the bust of William Havelock in his pith helmet and found myself gazing into the placid eyes of an aardvark standing solidly astride his piece of painted veld. A family of white-tailed gnus stared from a glass case, a sea-lion reared its majestic chest from a mahogany plinth. It was very quiet.

I wandered past a case of exotic butterflies, models of outrigger canoes in bark, dice made out of knuckle-bones… Havelock clearly had collected everything. Then suddenly out of a door marked ‘Private — Staff Only’ there erupted a girl… A knock-kneed, tangle-haired girl carrying a hippopotamus harpoon, a bell-jar of stuffed willow grouse and a cardboard box.

It was all too much. The cardboard box slipped, fell and a dark and unpleasantly mottled object rolled across the floor. A shrunken head, not in the best state of preservation. I retrieved it. She thanked me, apologised, smiled. Then she put down her load again and said, ‘Are you enjoying yourself? Would you like me to show you round?’

I must, I suppose, have said yes. At any rate she showed me round. No, what am I saying? She gave me that museum, she laid it at my feet. I felt she would have torn the exhibits from the walls and put them in my cupped hands, so demented was she to share, to give.

‘It’s such a lovely place — no one ever comes, but they should. Look, that’s a naked sea slug — they’re very rare in Britain — don’t you like those purple tentacles? And those silk moths are descended directly from the ones belonging to the Emperor Wu-Ti — the one who bred the Heavenly Horses, you know — and we have the best collection of East Indian sea-shells in the world; a dear little professor sent them from Kuala Lumpur. Did you know that some shells are whorled sinistrally and some dextrally? I didn’t until I came to work here.’

Her hand hovered above my sleeve; her heart too no doubt-on mine, on anybody’s… A cornucopia of a girl who went on talking even on an inward breath. And suddenly I imagined her making love like a football supporter, lurching out into the night afterwards to assault total strangers with her happiness.

‘Listen!’ she said. We had come to a case of stuffed roe deer: a stag and a hind prancing over some rather wilted heather. She pressed a button and suddenly the museum was filled with an extraordinary mournful, honking sound.

‘They’re roe deer rutting noises,’ she said, her plum-coloured eyes glistening with pride. ‘Mr Henry had them put in. He was our last director, he’s just retired. We’ve got some swamp noises too, in the other room, to go with the dinosaur bones. Would you like to hear them?’

But at swamp noises I stalled and excused myself. It wasn’t until I let myself into the flat and my stomach-ache returned that I realised it had disappeared during the last few hours. And yet who could I blame? I had wanted to get married, not Vivian. She had warned me all along that she couldn’t bear to be tied. ‘If you start being jealous, Paul, it’s the end,’ she had said. So I wasn’t jealous. There was just this incessant pain in my guts. I suppose that’s all jealousy is. Just pain.

The next day I went back to the Havelock with my new bunch of master keys and let myself in at the back, walking down corridors cluttered with specimen cabinets, old wall charts and piles of skins towards the director’s office. Though it was early, I was surprised to see a number of people already at work, A gorgeously dressed and rather pregnant Arabian lady was sorting osprey eggs, an ancient, bald little man assembling ichythosaurus bones, a boy in tattered jeans hammering at a display case…

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.

‘If you would climb down,’ she said, ‘I’m sure I could get him to change his mind.’

But this I wouldn’t do. ‘Sometimes you have to stand up and be counted,’ I said wearily — and saw her recoil from my priggishness.

Ten days later I came home to find a note on the mantelpiece. Always look for the obvious, they say, in matters of the human heart. But could I have foreseen anything as trite, as banal, as soul-destroying as Vivian and Sir Godfrey? Or that my disgust and bitterness would be so little help in blotting out the pain?

At the Havelock we went on working like lunatics, all of us. You could have eaten your dinner off the floor on the day before we were due to close. That day we had a party. Matt and Brian fixed up a bar between the aardvark and the gnus, Mr Biggers made a speech, Uncle Laszlo and the Brigadier downed the champagne like mother’s milk, and to the sound of roe deer rutting noises Flossie and I solemnly waltzed.

Parties poised over an abyss of leave-taking and calamity are generally the best. None of us noticed how late it was, or that Mrs Rahman had long since slipped away. When we did, Flossie went at once to find her.

She returned as pale as death. ‘Oh, come quickly, please, please! And ring for an ambulance, someone — only I’m afraid it’s much too late!’

Flossie was right. Mrs Rahman, that gentle soul, had not cared to spoil our fun. Now she lay on the trestle bed, glistening with sweat and trying between contractions to apologise.

Heaven knows how we did it, but we did. And when it was over and we gave the radiant, exhausted woman her lusty son to hold, I had to hand it to Leboyer. Because I swear to you, the messy, beat-up little thing quite definitely smiled!

It was November again. Bobbles on the plane trees; mist, wet leaves splayed on the pavement. A year had passed since I had first seen the naked sea slug and the football supporter had tottered out of her door, dropping her shrunken head. My decree had just come through and the sense of failure was bad.

I went in past the bust of Sir William in his pith helmet… past the aardvark, the gnus… Everything was as it had been but a little better, a little more highly polished. A couple of Arab ladies were whispering reverently by the silk moths of the Emperor Wu-Ti. A lot of people came from the Middle East these days: the place was a kind of pilgrimage spot for them. The birth-place of Yusuf Mahomet Abu Rahman, the first healthy male child born to the son of a reigning sheik in the state of Quittah for forty years. Our endowment from the old man, running at one three-hundredth of his annual oil revenue, made the Havelock one of the wealthiest museums in the land.

The door marked ‘Staff Only’ burst open. Her sixth sense unfailing, out she came.

‘Oh, Paul, why did you come in by the front, we’ve been waiting and waiting for you! Uncle Laszlo’s found some new bones which he thinks are—’ She broke off, tilted her tangled head. ‘Are you sad?’

‘Not now.’

She lurched tentatively towards me. I opened my arms and she moved into them. My own personal football supporter. Mine. …