‘Joseph Hooker.’
‘Just so. We’ve talked about him, haven’t we? Now follow me.’
They went up another staircase and along a corridor and then another and after a very long time arrived on a balcony. Chrissie looked over the railing and saw another balcony below. Unlike the balcony in the house with no rooms these were connected at each end by two spiral staircases.
‘Is this a church?’
Mr Watson tsked. ‘No, Christina. This is Joseph Hooker’s sanctum. We are in his herbarium!’ He began to go down the nearest staircase. Chrissie gingerly took hold of the rail, her hand, damp with fear, slipping on the swooping metal.
There were cupboards everywhere. Chrissie considered hiding in one until Mr Watson got bored of looking and left. But the last time she had hidden in a cupboard she had got Addled Brain and seen the Cat in the Hat and the lady with the white gobstopper eyes. She blotted out this memory.
‘See this?’ She found Mr Watson by one of the cupboards. Inside there were drawers, too small for toys or even knickers and socks. Certainly no room to hide. Mr Watson took out a folder, identical to the one Chrissie had used at her old school for her project on the moon expeditions. Inside were not pictures of astronauts, as she half expected, but a sheet of paper with brown dead plants like the ones that Mr Watson drew in his studio. Her heart sank.
‘Read that to me.’ Mr Watson pointed at the inside of the cupboard door. A faded notice, dirty and curling at one corner, was pasted to the wood. Chrissie knew it was wrong to stick things on furniture: Michelle had got in trouble for gluing a photo of David Essex to the headboard of her bed. She tried to read the faint type.
‘The words are funny.’
‘They’re not funny, they’re French. The left column is in English.’
Christina read in halting speech.
‘“Visitors studying in the Herbarium are requested to observe that the removal of specimens, or any portions of them, from the sheets—”’
‘Enough!’ Mr Watson interrupted. ‘What’s the date?’
‘June the ninth. One eight eight two.’ Chrissie found it hard to say numbers over a hundred. But she guessed why he was showing her: ‘That’s today!’ She guessed wildly, immediately seeing her mistake.
‘This is 1976 and it’s not June the ninth.’ Mr Watson heaved a sigh. ‘This was composed by Joseph Hooker.’ He pointed at the name at the bottom of the notice. ‘It’s nearly a hundred years old and it’s still true. You must put back anything you use and you can’t detach any “fruit, flower, or leaf” without first getting the approval of the Keeper of the Herbarium. What is wrong with this instruction?’
‘It’s old?’ Christina was frightened that a dead man could leave instructions. Was he brown and shrivelled like the specimens?
He raised his eyebrows and Chrissie thought of the stone caterpillars above Hooker’s eyes. ‘This last line is contradictory. The wording could specify that no portions of the specimen be removed without permission. By listing those three parts, he implies that other parts can be removed.’
‘But he says it’s “absolutely...”’ Chrissie took a deep breath and tackled the next word, syllable by syllable, ‘“Pro. Hid. It. A. Bit. Ed.”’
‘Prohibited. Your dad boasted that you came top at reading!’ Mr Watson was querulous. Chrissie wondered why her dad had said that because it wasn’t true.
‘Hello, George.’
Chrissie couldn’t see anyone. Nor, it seemed, could Mr Watson. He slammed shut the cupboard; the sound reverberated around the vast space.
‘Who’s the little friend, George?’ A man was leaning over the rail of the spiral staircase above them.
‘A friend’s daughter.’ Mr Watson gave a cough.
‘You have friends!’ The man grinned broadly and then became serious. ‘There was a man here asking for you. Could that have been the father perhaps?’
‘My daddy’s working,’ Chrissie asserted. Then she remembered she must not say that he drove a taxi and felt herself go red.
‘Is he now? So George is minding you, is he? Or are you minding George?’ Another grin.
‘Wait outside,’ Mr Watson hissed at Chrissie.
‘I don’t—’ Christina began to say that she didn’t know how to get outside, but Mr Watson jerked his thumb towards a door beyond more cupboards.
‘Through there. Wait for me in the hall.’
As Chrissie walked away she heard the man say, ‘You’ve cocked up this plate, George. I wonder if it would be better to start afresh...’
‘I did what you wanted,’ Mr Watson said and Chrissie paused. He sounded really cross.
‘Clearly you did not do as...’
The little girl heard footsteps and hurried along a passageway. She came to a green baize door and burst through it. She was in the hall. In the gloom above she could see William Hooker gazing sightlessly at her with his crawling caterpillar eyebrows. She flung herself at the main door and rushed down the steps and out into the street.
‘Chrissie, what are you doing here?’ The door of a telephone box opened and someone came out.
Chrissie was so pleased to see a familiar face that she nearly hugged Emily. ‘Why weren’t you at school today?’ She had meant to be casual as if she didn’t care that Emily had been absent. But she had cared. She was her only friend even if Emily wasn’t allowed to speak to her. ‘The teacher said you were ill.’ She shielded her eyes from the glare bouncing off the hot pavement.
‘My mum tells them that when she wants me to stay with her,’ Emily explained.
‘Why does she want you at home?’ Chrissie’s own mum said that she was ‘only too glad to get you kids out from under my feet’.
‘She doesn’t like being on her own when my dad’s away. She’s asleep now so I sneaked out. I thought I might catch Bella. She would have tried to call me after school.’ Emily stirred up a cloud of dust in the gutter with the toe of her sandal. ‘Why don’t you make it up with Bella? It would be much simpler if you did. Then we could all have fun again.’
‘There’s nothing to make up.’
‘It would be good if Bella said sorry for saying you lied, but she won’t. I think if you said you were sorry for running away, she would let you go round with us again. I mean I know you’re not sorry, but even so...’ Emily wasn’t in her uniform; she wore her denim hat crammed down, bending her ears. Chrissie couldn’t see her eyes. ‘That was her on the phone.’ She tipped her head at the bright red box. It appeared to waver in the heat as if it too were imaginary.
Chrissie blinked. ‘How could she ring you from in there?’
‘She’s got the number. We both have it.’
‘But how could she know you’d answer? What if someone else was in there?’ Chrissie had never heard of getting called while you were in a public phone box.
‘We plan the time and I am ready and waiting by the phone. I live near your house by the pond actually, in the next road.’ She whipped off her hat and then put it back on, jamming it even further over her face. ‘I hold the receiver so as to make people think I’m talking. But you have to keep the metal things down or it won’t ring.’ Emily flapped her arms about, which reminded Chrissie of Mr Watson explaining about dead plants. ‘Bella must have tried to ring me and then gone home. I was thinking of ringing her at home instead. But I just tried and there’s no answer.’ She blinked rapidly in the bright sunlight.
Chrissie imagined being friends with Bella and Emily again and waiting for the telephone in a call box to ring or ringing either of them from it. If they were friends she wouldn’t have to pretend to her dad that she had friends when she didn’t. She was sick of pretending – it was all she ever did. Then the reality of what Emily had said sank in. She meant she lived close to Chrissie in Kew, not in Westcroft Square in Hammersmith. She could easily find out that Chrissie didn’t truly live there. She batted off the fear. ‘She should say she’s sorry for making me prove I live in that house.’ Taken up with the inj
ustice, Chrissie had forgotten that Bella was right to doubt her honesty.
Emily was scrutinizing the Herbarium. ‘I’ve always wondered who lives here.’
‘Joseph Hooker. He’s a friend of my dad’s.’ Too late she saw how stupid the lie was. And pointless since Emily wouldn’t care either way. She felt herself go beetroot red and tottered back against the railings as heat engulfed her.
‘Isn’t Joseph Hooker dead?’ Emily was puzzled. ‘Do you mean the man who ruled Kew Gardens in the Victorian times?’
‘No. Another one. My dad’s there now, talking to him about one of his pictures.’
Emily snatched off her hat again, gave it a bash inside and this time screwed it up in her hands. ‘Chrissie, can I tell you a secret?’
Chrissie nodded. Then, seeing that Emily wasn’t looking at her, said, ‘Yes, OK.’ She weighed up the pros and cons of keeping someone else’s secrets. Would it get her into trouble? Would it make her important if she had a person’s secret to keep?
‘My mum drinks.’
‘Right.’ Chrissie didn’t think this much of a secret. ‘Everyone drinks. We’d be dead if we didn’t. That’s why all the plants are dead. There’s been no rain for ages—’
‘I don’t mean water. Cinzano. She drinks a bottle every day. When she drinks Cinzano she cries about my dad. I have to stay at home with her to make up for him being abroad.’
‘You’re not at home now.’ Chrissie latched on to a certainty.
‘I sneaked out to talk to Bella. She rings to see if I’m OK. Dad’s reporting on the Lebanese civil war.’ She twisted her hat in her hands. ‘I thought of running away from home. What do you think?’
‘Where to?’ Chrissie was amazed. The idea had never occurred to her. Now that it had, it seemed a good thing to do. No more drawing lessons; no more school where she had to pretend things.
‘Anywhere. I’m not sure where. Actually I can’t, it’s too hot to go anywhere.’ Emily flapped the hat in front of her face. ‘The North Pole!’ She laughed and then made a funny sobbing sound.
‘Best wait until it’s colder,’ Chrissie advised. ‘And you need to take food with you.’
‘Don’t tell Bella I said that,’ Emily said.
‘I don’t think she’d want to come, she isn’t brave like you.’ Chrissie hadn’t thought this until now. Emily was the bravest of all of them.
‘About my mum.’
‘Doesn’t she know?’
‘She said my mum was an alcoholic. I said she wasn’t. I lied. That was wrong. I tell her that Mum gets tummy bugs because of the heat. You can, you know.’ She had her wise face on.
‘Yes, it was wrong to lie, but—’ Chrissie was about to tell Emily about her own lies when a voice made her jump.
‘There you are!’ Mr Watson was coming down the Herbarium steps. ‘You should have waited in the shade. You could get sunstroke.’
‘This is Emily.’ But there was no one there, just scuff marks in the dust. The sun pressed down on her head.
The high temperatures were set to continue. People – young and old – were dying. In the blasting heat, nothing was real. Nothing was true.
Mr Watson led Chrissie back across Kew Green to his house by the pond. In the hall he called, ‘We’re home, darling.’ Mrs Watson’s coat was draped over the banister. Shaking his head, he hung it on a peg.
Mrs Watson’s reply was drowned out by the chugging of a diesel engine. Chrissie looked down the path and saw her dad’s taxi at the gate.
Chapter Nineteen
October 2014
Stella had forgotten that at 6 a.m., when she came to clean the Marianne North Gallery and the Shirley Sherwood Gallery next door, it would be dark. When she and Jackie had ‘walked’ the cleaning zones, it was daytime and Kew Gardens was busy with visitors. Trevor, the Facilities Manager, had brought them to the galleries in a buggy. The galleries were half a mile from the Estates Office. For the first weeks, until she handed it to another operative, Stella would do the job, reaching the cleaning zone on a bike with a cart attached. The bicycle lamp, powered by a dynamo, dimmed whenever she slowed. The wind was against her and when she pushed on the pedals the cart swayed, further hampering her progress.
A grey band of mist hung over the lawns. The gardens were unlit and the boundary wall was too high for street lights to penetrate. Stella had memorized the location of the gallery on the map, but at the Palm House, she took a wrong turning. She peered into the darkness; the mist made shapes like figures queuing in silence before the glasshouse. Stella was furious with herself for thinking this.
The galleries must be to the left, but if she cut across the grass the wheels would damage the lawn. Clumsily she led the whole contraption around, aware all the time of the silence. She was metres from the South Circular, but it seemed to Stella that the quiet was absolute.
Cycling had warmed her, but the creeping fog chilled her again. Jackie had suggested Jack come with her, but apart from the fact that Stella had allocated one operative to the galleries, she knew he wanted to clean the Herbarium. If Jack was here, he would have got them straight to the gallery.
Starting again from the Elizabeth Gate she wiped moisture from her eyes. Now she could hear blood pounding in her ears and her rapid breathing. She was fit but, rattled by the darkness and the odd quiet, was already exhausted.
It wasn’t silent any more. She heard a swish of leaves and rustles in the undergrowth either side of the path. Bushes thickened to form a tunnel. The figures in the mist were crossing and recrossing in front of her. She pedalled faster. The lamp brightened and the external sounds increased. Ridiculous. Jack believed in ghosts and insisted that ‘we are never alone’. She was alone.
At last, at a bend in the path, she came upon the Shirley Sherwood Gallery, a modern single-storey building that she had looked forward to cleaning. Beyond was the Marianne North Gallery. She was starting there first.
In the daylight the generously proportioned house, with its closed-in porch and canopied veranda, had appeared attractive. Stella had seen a photo of it on the Kew Gardens website. In the photo, the terracotta bricks and the green lawns in the foreground were steeped in sunshine and Stella had likened it to houses that she cleaned in Chiswick and Richmond. Now, outlined against the orange-mauve sky, clouds racing past the chimney pots, it belonged in Psycho.
Behind her was yawning darkness. Again Stella told herself that she wasn’t in the middle of nowhere, but close to a busy road.
A crunch on gravel. Footsteps. Stella jumped off the bike and kicked the stand down. She fumbled in her anorak for her phone. Staff were given an emergency code to call. Her finger hovered over the keys. It wasn’t a footstep, it was beating wings. Geese rose out of the darkness and flew upwards. Terry had explained about their ‘v’ formation, but she couldn’t remember what he had said. It wouldn’t help her now.
Birds featured in another of Hitchcock’s films. She forced herself to breathe long and deep. Two in, two out. Two in, two out. The gravel sound happened again. It wasn’t the geese. Nor could it be gravel: there was no gravel. Trevor had said that Kew Gardens was hard to break into, that was the point of the wall. Security was tight.
She was definitely alone.
She unhitched the trolley from the bike and lugged it up the two flights of steps to the veranda. Twenty-five minutes already, way over the allocated ten to get there. When she got to know the route, ten minutes should do it.
Inside the tiled vestibule, following instructions on the sheet, Stella deactivated the alarm. Wheeling in the cart, she yelped and then controlled herself. It was the bust of Marianne North. Thinking statues were real was Jack’s thing.
MISS MARIANNE NORTH.
THE ACCOMPLISHED ARTIST AND TRAVELLER IN
MANY LANDS WHO PAINTED ALL THE PICTURES
IN THIS UNIQUE COLLECTION AND PRESENTED
THEM TO THE NATION.
BORN 1830. DIED 1890.
Dipping into the cart, Stella found the dus
ter and flapped it around the stony features. The task wasn’t on her sheet, but it grounded her.
The air inside the gallery was like a tomb, not that she cleaned any tombs. Dead leaves, rotting vegetation, stale smoke. Stale smoke? The detectors would pick up a smoker. In the glow of the ‘night light’, it was, as Jack had said, like a church. He had talked about a votive silence. Stella, who deplored playing music while she cleaned, wanted a radio on now. ‘Rebel Rebel’ would break the silence, votive or otherwise.
In the sickly green of the security lighting, the black-framed paintings, hung so close together, resembled a giant grid. When she had first seen them, she had decided that this arrangement – it covered the walls entirely – would discourage dust from accumulating. However, a devotee of deep cleaning, she relished jobs that required her to get behind the visible – bath panels and skirting boards – and would love to give this place a proper going-over. She had been disappointed that ‘Kew experts’ would clean the paintings. Now, on this dark and misty morning, Stella was grateful that her task was only to mop the floor with cold water. It was challenge enough.
She turned on the gallery lights and was dismayed to find that the two globes slung from the high ceiling made little difference to the vast space. Jack would like it: he was happier in the dark.
Used to negotiating furniture, filing cabinets, sofas, a plethora of occasional tables and knick-knacks, Stella had looked forward to mopping the stretch of tiled floor with only two high-backed double-sided benches on it. She hurried through to an antechamber lined with more paintings, furnished only with a cupboard, and out to the yard where she filled the bucket. Here she could hear traffic. She was relieved to hear the familiar sound of a diesel engine pulling away, a delivery van or a taxi.
In the antechamber, she squeezed the mop out on the bucket ringer. No water must be left on the tiles when the public arrived. Methodically, she swished her way across the floor and then out into the main gallery. It was satisfying to see the tiles and iron-fretted grilles along the base of the walls glisten in her wake. Picking up speed, she’d soon covered the entire area.
The House With No Rooms Page 12