Dead as a Dodo

by Jane Langton

  There were few left of the army of servants who had once roosted in North Oxford attics and labored in its kitchens and pantries. After her mother’s death, Freddy had been cared for by a succession of nannies, but in her own opinion she had brought herself up.

  Her father wasn’t so sure about that. William had done his best to be both mother and father to Freddy, but he knew how far he had fallen short. If his wife had lived, she would have provided an example, a pattern to follow. Without her, Freddy had been an adorable but headstrong little girl. Had he kept her at home too long? Perhaps she should have been sent away to the sort of public school where privileged young women were prepared for Oxford and Cambridge.

  But Freddy had seemed too young to be sent away. William had enrolled her instead in the expensive high school around the corner. During all those years she had been a gawky young thing, skinny and childish long after her classmates had blossomed into hips and breasts.

  Now Freddy was an Oxford student, an undergraduate at Christ Church, and to William’s alarm her hormones were making up for lost time. She was suddenly far too pretty, a small delectable girl with deft hands and bitten fingernails.

  William didn’t know which was the stronger, his amused admiration of his daughter or his parental doubts and cautions. She was so eager and receptive, so dizzy with excitement, but at the same time so lacking in any protective coating of irony. Her mind was burgeoning, but it was only a ragbag of bright scraps—ends and swatches ripped from the things her tutors and fellow undergraduates knew. Freddy was a wild jumble. Lately she hadn’t been able to finish anything. She would begin a project, then zigzag in another direction. There were no calm guidelines stretching before her, attached to sensible goals. Instead she was strapped to a pair of galloping horses, plunging blindly forward in no particular direction. Or perhaps the reins were only loose filaments dissolving in air like threads of spun sugar.

  Now here she was, walking beside him, a quivering bundle of excitement, as though those jerking strings were tugging her forward from now to now, so that she strode forward too quickly along Bradmore Road.

  William quickened his pace as Bradmore turned into Norham. Should he now, too late, begin acting like a father? “Tell me about that young man,” he said, trying to sound friendly and diffident. “Some sort of clergyman, is he?”

  “Oh, yes! He was ordained last year. He’s got his own church. He’s the rector of his very own church.”

  “What church is it?”

  “St. Mary’s.”

  “St. Mary’s?” In spite of himself William was impressed. “Do you mean the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin?”

  But Freddy’s little dog was barking, yipping behind the door as she ran up the walk. Freddy rushed up the steps, unlocked the door, snatched up the dog and hugged him, plucked his leash from the wall and raced after him down the path, while her father blundered into the darkness of the front hall. His glasses were askew. One of the temple pieces had lost its paper clip.

  As a zoologist and a devout student of the work of Charles Darwin, William knew precisely what was afflicting his daughter. It was the basic animal urge to reproductive success, the pressure for sexual selection. She was responding to the urgent biological summons to reproduce the species Homo sapiens, to enrich the genus Homo, the family Hominoidea, the order Primates, the class Mammalia, the subphylum Vertebrata, the phylum Chordata, the kingdom Animalia. Like every barnacle in the sea and every creature on the land, like every other living thing, Freddy was responding to nature’s call.

  But it was too soon. There was plenty of time. Wait, Freddy dear, slow down!

  William leaned out the door and called after her, “Freddy, I forgot to ask you. Tomorrow I’m driving down to Cornwall to close up the house for the winter. Do you want to come along?”

  Freddy turned and walked backward, while the little dog barked and tugged at the leash. “Oh, no, Father, I’ve got a date. Two, in fact. No, three.”

  DIARY OF FREDERICKA DUBCHICK

  This is my new diary. I’ve thrown out the one from school because reading it makes me sick. There isn’t a word of truth in it.

  This time I’m going to be absolutely honest. I want to find out what I think, what I want, and what I don’t want.

  Resolution number one—no underlining.

  Resolution number two—no exclamation marks.

  I’ll begin with how nice it feels to be looked at. How I love being looked at! This afternoon after Father’s lecture in the museum, while everyone was applauding, I glanced around and that American was staring at me. I looked away again and went on clapping, but I knew his eyes were on the back of my head, and I could feel my hair because he was looking at it. I could feel my cells jiggling and all the spirals of my DNA molecules whirling dizzily around because his eyes were activating them, getting them all excited.

  Important! This diary is not concerned with guilt for disloyalty to anybody else. It’s just the truth. That’s all, it is, the naked truth.

  CHAPTER 7

  “What am I to do?” exclaimed Alice, looking about in great perplexity.

  Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

  The visitor was at home in the house. He had explored every corner as a child. Even the rooms once occupied by servants were familiar territory.

  But only once had he climbed up on the counter in the housekeeper’s private kitchen. Only once had he opened all the doors of the cupboards that rose to the ceiling. The single occasion had left him with a frightening memory of standing on tiptoe on the counter and reaching up and opening the door of the highest cupboard and looking inside, and then slamming the door and jumping to the floor.

  Now he dragged over a chair, climbed on it, and opened the selfsame door.

  Yes, the shelf was still full. The same dusty jars of desiccated black stuff were still there, crowded together in untidy rows. Reaching up, he grasped one of them, stepped down carefully from the chair, and set the ugly jar on the counter. The label said Chutney.

  But when he turned the jar and saw the dark spiny contents, it was hard to believe they could ever have been edible.

  He climbed back up and extracted another jar. This time the label said Jugged Hare. But it couldn’t possibly ever have been jugged hare, whatever that was. Once again the contents were slumped at the bottom of the jar, broken objects with hooked projections on the corners.

  He brought his gaze close to the glass, and saw a tinny-looking piece of punched metal, an identifying label.

  Before the afternoon was out, he had brought down all the jars and lined them up in rows on the counter. They were Griskin of Pork, Pressed Tongue, Haunch of Venison, Forcemeat, Peach Preserves, Calves Foot Jelly, and a lot of other antique survivors from Mrs. Beeton’s nineteenth-century cookbook.

  Except that they were not. Every one of them contained something thoroughly inedible. Very carefully, he picked at one of the labels. It was dark and speckled with age. The spidery writing was nearly illegible. It refused to come loose easily. Someone had used good glue.

  His heart quickened as he saw a second label under the first. He tore and scratched and scraped with his thumbnail, picking off the upper label at last.

  The second was half destroyed but still readable. It showed only a handwritten number, 1347. When he climbed back up to fumble over his head for more jars—was there another, just out of reach?—he found something else, a book, an old journal. He blew the dust off the cover and opened it.

  There were many closely written pages. The handwriting was difficult, and some of the passages had been written in code. For a moment he puzzled over the code, then smiled to himself. There was nothing to it.

  Sitting down on the counter, he began to read.

  CHAPTER 8

  “The question is, “said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all”

  Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass

  It was two days since Johnny Farfrae had force
d Helen to leave the reception. Afterward she had refused to speak to him, and yesterday she had awakened early and fled to her job as to a haven of peace.

  But coming home, she made up her mind to bring the warfare to an end. “Johnny dear,” she said, hurrying into the house, “let’s begin again. I can’t bear going on like this.”

  It was no good. He started up out of his chair, glaring at her. “What do you mean, begin again? By God, if you want to begin again, you can get down on your knees and apologize.”

  So the battle went on all evening, sometimes in silence, sometimes in rage. Helen detested it, although she suspected that Johnny didn’t. It was as though they were acting out the proper marriage roles for a husband and wife. Helen remembered Johnny’s father, that domineering old bastard. She remembered too his timid mother, how cowed and stooped she had been, as though marriage had bent her back.

  There was to be no submission for Helen. Once again this morning she had dodged out early, although Johnny hated to cook his own breakfast. He would have to cook his own dinner too. She couldn’t face another night of confrontation. At six o’clock she called him. “I’ll be late, Johnny. It’s this grant application. The final draft is due tomorrow morning.”

  Johnny’s response was a vicious explosion, but Helen endured it and stuck to her story, and then put the phone down gently. When it rang a moment later, she didn’t answer. Would he come to the museum and drag her out? This time she would fight like a cat, because there would be no one there to see.

  Helen’s story about the grant application was a lie. The deadline was months away. Nevertheless, she turned on the computer and watched the code words race up the screen, then tapped a few keys to summon up her notes.

  It was no use. The notes were meaningless. Helen was too miserable to focus her attention. She turned off the computer, then switched off the light over her desk so that no one on the upper levels of the Inorganic Chemistry building next door would see a middle-aged woman weeping in the Oxford University Museum. For a while she sat in the dark, sobbing. Then she stood up shakily and wandered out into the corridor.

  There was scaffolding outside the office door. Bricklayers had been working all over the building for a month, pointing the walls. Other craftsmen were repairing the plaster. The dim lamps over the courtyard glowed softly. Helen walked slowly down the south staircase—the other set of stairs in the north tower was blocked with still more scaffolding. Downstairs she wandered aimlessly among the exhibits, her tears drying on her cheeks.

  It calmed her to remember where she was. Her job as William Dubchick’s assistant was new, but she was an old friend of the museum. She had been coming here all her life. Her childish collection of tadpoles in jars of murky pond water, her tank of swimming terrapins, her fossil ammonites from Lyme Regis—young Helen had collected them after pressing her nose against the glass cases in the Oxford University Museum, after beholding the dodo and gaping at the leg bones of Cetiosaurus oxoniensis. The tadpoles and the terrapins had led directly to the study of developmental biology, and eventually to a fellowship at her old Oxford college, St. Hilda’s.

  After twenty-seven years of teaching, Helen had retired gladly, but it had been a mistake. She should have foreseen it, that retirement wouldn’t suit her. She should have guessed that from now on she would have no life outside her own unhappy home, and no self but as Mrs. Johnny Farfrae. One day she had heard of the job opportunity with Professor William Dubchick, the great authority on primates, on crustaceans, and in fact on the nature of all life on earth. She had applied for it eagerly, and to her joy she had been hired. And now here she was, a member of the museum staff. Helen told herself that her domestic troubles shouldn’t matter anymore, not now, not here in this cherished place.

  The corridors were dark. She walked along the north side, where the primate display cases stood against the wall. The illumination within the cases had been turned off, but the glass eyes of the tarsier shone with reflected light, and the skeletons of the bigger primates were white shapes in the gloom. Walking softly along the corridor, she caught up with Homo sapiens, who was marching jauntily away from the rest, heading east.

  Then, turning back, she walked out into the courtyard. It was a great high volume of air, vanishing into darkness above the hanging lamps. The arcaded galleries rose above her like palaces in Venice, arch after pointed arch, announcing with their striped voussoirs, John Ruskin was here.

  Helen was alone in the courtyard, but as usual she didn’t feel alone. She was accompanied by the circle of stone scientists. In life, each one of them had grasped some new principle, each had forwarded human understanding of the workings of the world. In their solemn isolation and frozen gravity, they gave the courtyard an aura of distinction. The dim air was thick with history, knobbed with these pillars of earnest intellect. How many reasonable men did it take to ornament a public room? In one corner, Hippocrates lifted a stone finger, warning against the superstitious healing of the priests; in another, Leibnitz gazed upward at the admirable laws of the City of God; in a third, Joseph Priestley stepped nobly forward, displaying his apparatus for dephlogisticated air. Helen patted the bust of Dr. Acland, Regius Professor of Medicine, founder of the museum and friend of Ruskin’s. She stroked the bony scapula of Bison bison. Then, wandering eastward, she edged around another set of display cases and found herself in a corner with Linnaeus, who was mildly consulting his notebook, recording a stand of Swedish sea holly or the habits of the ant lion.

  Cornered with Linnaeus, she only faindy heard the opening of the main door of the museum and the sound of heavy footsteps on the south stairs. She knew who it was, Bobby Fenwick, making one of his random nighttime inspections of the museum. Bobby was the night watchman for all the science buildings in the neighborhood of Parks Road. Working late, Helen often exchanged a friendly word as Bobby moved along the gallery with his flashlight.

  Tonight he wasn’t making much of an inspection. He was clattering downstairs again in a hurry. Well, it didn’t matter. She could have told him that the building was safe and sound. Helen stroked the stone cloak of Darwin and put her hand fondly on Newton’s apple, then turned her head in surprise. The door was opening again, feet were climbing the stairs again. Bobby must have come back to do a more thoroughgoing job.

  Again there was only a short pause before she heard him hurrying back along the upstairs gallery in the direction of the south stairs. Then suddenly he called out, “Hello, who’s there?” Helen recognized Bobby’s reverberating baritone, but it wasn’t coming from upstairs. He was shouting from the direction of the main entrance. He had just come in. The footsteps were someone else’s, not Bobby’s.

  Listening, Helen heard the intruder stop, then start pounding along the south gallery and around the corner to the west. He was avoiding the south stairs because Bobby was climbing them, shouting, “Come on, now, who’s there?” Did the stranger know the north staircase was blocked with scaffolding? She heard the footsteps stop, then start back the other way. But he was cut off. The gallery was like a game board with a single exit. Helen listened as the two playing pieces dodged around it, one fleeing, the other in pursuit. Bobby was shouting again. “Hey, stop. I said stop.”

  Anxiously Helen walked across the courtyard and hurried up the stairs. What if the stranger discovered the open door of the Zoology Office? The office was vulnerable. But when she stopped to listen, the footsteps faded. Bobby’s voice was fainter too. The thumping of footsteps on stairs had started again, but it was dimmer, farther away.

  Then Helen remembered another staircase, the stone spiral leading to the upper reaches of the tower. The two of them must be mounting the tower steps.

  Helen found the door. It was standing open. There were shouts and halloos from above, the noise of running feet. Doubtfully, telling herself she was being foolish, Helen followed, feeling her way up the triangular steps in the dark. At the top of the stone spiral, breathing hard, she emerged into the archaeology storeroom. It
was a high space with two magnificent windows, from which she had often stared out over Keble College and the church of St. Giles and the Radcliffe Observatory. Now the room was dark and empty, illuminated only by a soft glare from the lights of the city, spoiling the view of the stars.

  Bobby was shouting again. Where was he?

  From the archaeology storeroom two exits opened out. One was a blank, the iron staircase leading to the ventilators where the swifts nested. The other was a door looking out on the glass roof.

  The door was open, showing a rectangle of night sky. Below the door a metal ladder ran down to the wooden walkway surrounding the glass peaks of the roof. Timidly, Helen stood in the doorway and looked out. At once she saw something amazing. Someone or something was bounding up the glassy slope. But the roof was too steep! No one could do that. Nothing human could do that. It wasn’t Bobby. Where was Bobby?

  Fear overcame her. Helen was afraid in the same way she had been afraid in the dark as a child, wondering if the blur in the corner of her bedroom was a lost soul trying to creep into her skin and push her out, so that Helen would no longer be Helen.

  She fled, running carelessly down the winding stone steps and bursting out onto the floor of the west gallery.

  Panting, she hurried into the office on the south side and felt around in the dark for her coat and bag. Then she stood for a moment, staring at the pale blob that was the telephone on her desk. Should she call the police? Of course she should call the police. But she didn’t. What she had seen was too unearthly. She couldn’t have seen what she thought she had seen. She was out of her mind. She was still too much afraid.

  There were only two cars left in the parking spaces in front of the museum. Helen unlocked hers and drove to Kidlington, steeling herself for the tirade she would encounter at home.