by Jane Langton
Oliver looked at her in surprise. “But that wasn’t in the paper.”
Helen shrugged her shoulders, and he drifted out of the office, wrapped in melancholy.
So far, Helen and Mary had seen the manuscript poems of Shelley in the Bodleian Library and the Alfred Jewel in the Ashmolean Museum. They had walked to a famous inn at Godstow, the Trout. From now on, Helen said, she would use her university status to show Mary the scholarly privacies of the most beautiful of the colleges. This morning they started with the fabulous beasts in the Great Quad at Magdalen.
Mary gasped. There they were, crowning the buttresses between the arched windows of the cloister, monsters with heads sprouting from their bellies, strange mixtures of man and reptile, beast and bird.
“I think of them as weird predecessors,” said Helen, “failed organisms that didn’t make it in the struggle for life. Nature tried creatures with two heads, but it didn’t work. The heads were always arguing with each other, so in a crisis they couldn’t make up their minds.”
Mary laughed. “So they became extinct.” She pointed to the molding below the crenellated edge of the roof. “There’s an angel. What about angels? Are they extinct too?”
“No.” Helen looked at the angel and figured it out. “They must be a future stage of improved adaptation, one we haven’t reached yet.”
“I see,” said Mary. “Maybe the human race will start growing wings. You know, a little bit at a time. There’ll be a child with extra-large shoulder blades, and it will jump higher than the other kids, and then some of its children will jump still higher, and eventually—”
“But will they take a kindly interest in the rest of us, the way angels do?” said Helen. “I doubt it.”
They left Magdalen and took Rose Lane to the Broad Walk and the wide path to the Thames. There were shaggy long-horned cattle in Christ Church Meadow. From the riverbank they watched crews of girls in racing shells. A coach was teaching them to execute turns. “Slow—slow! Now then, five, make sure your blade is square.”
Mary turned to Helen. “But you must be tired of all this. You’ve seen it so often.”
“Not at all. It’s like reading a favorite book to children. You’re eager to introduce them to something you love, and so pleased when they like it.”
“Do you have children?” said Mary inquisitively, wondering if this was a violation of British reserve.
“No, I don’t,” said Helen shortly.
There was an awkward silence, until Mary suggested going back to Keble for lunch.
The truth was that Helen was on the verge of telling Mary a thousand things. She wanted to tell her, she was dying to tell her. Only a kind of perverse loyalty kept her silent. Loyalty to what? The institution of marriage? Hardly. But whatever it was, it was the very thing that had kept her attached to Johnny Farfrae all these years, in spite of the absurdity of their differences. She told herself that it was not altogether his fault she was so unhappy. It was class snobbery on her part, and she refused to give in to it.
She knew what her friends were saying, She should never have married him in the first place. How can she endure it?
But it was easy to understand why she had married him. What a blithe boy he had been! They had met on a Saturday night in a village pub in West Yorkshire, where Johnny was the performing folksinger, the best for miles around. Helen had been captivated by his light tenor voice and his merry air of authority. Like any young fool, she had been swept off her feet.
The singing was over now, along with the merriment. How does she stand it? Helen stood it because Johnny aroused her pity as well as her contempt. Oh, it didn’t matter that he was only a postal clerk, while she had a couple of university degrees. That didn’t matter a bit. All of those class barriers were gone now, weren’t they? That kind of ranking by speech, by accident of birth? Well, good riddance to it.
What Helen failed to consider was that Johnny couldn’t get rid of it. He punished her for being different, for her poshness, as he called it. Oh, aren’t we la-di-da today. If she brought home a woman friend and the afternoon sparkled with laughter and talk, he would glower and rattle his paper and turn his back.
And, oh, God, the drunken brawls on the street, and the fights at home—
Sometimes Helen imagined herself giving in and giving up. One day she would curl up in bed and pull the covers over her head. They would take her away and put her in a narrow room in an institution, and she would crouch in the corner, her hair long and straggling, her mouth hanging open. She would lose the power of speech.
This pathetic woman accompanied Helen every day. She was a cautionary presence, and yet in some way, when things were really bad, Helen almost welcomed her. She could imagine being drawn in by that skinny arm. It could happen, it could happen to anyone. Any healthy person on the street might give up and say, it’s too hard, oh, it’s too hard.
Well, so far she had fought back. She had turned away from pathos. She had tried passionately to reject class warfare. Helen’s idealism was inherited from her socialist parents and her Fabian grandparents, but so was her poshness, and it continued to burst out. She couldn’t control it. She admitted to herself that she hated the people on Cornmarket Street, the young kids in their burly jackets, the crude giggling girls. I hate the babies, too, she thought ruefully. I hate the very babies in their pushchairs. And that was wrong, surely it was wrong. As for her husband, she never formed the words in her head, but the unshaped meaning was there, racking her body with self-knowledge— I hate him, too. I hate Johnny Farfrae, too.
Unformed words fester in the throat, they lie coiled in some wet, red compartment of the body, they are fed by the events of every day and grow fat.
Stuart Grebe found the door to the Zoology Office ajar. It was Wednesday afternoon. The museum was open, families and students were milling around the exhibits, but the office was empty.
He was disappointed to find nobody there. He had come in a spirit of sociability, his gregarious nature having made him a disciple of William Dubchick’s, an admirer of Helen Farfrae’s, an enthusiastic pupil of Hal Shaw’s, and the friend of everyone else in the department.
But the office itself was interesting. Stuart brought his nearsighted eyes close to the jars on the table and peered inside. He admired the photograph of Charles Darwin over the fireplace. He inspected the egg of the great auk and ran his finger over the carved leaves and insects along the mantel.
Then he caught sight of the computer. It drew him across the room. Stuart had been a computer freak from infancy, and he longed to test this one out. It was British, but surely not very different from the one he used at home.
He stood in front of it and struck a key. And of course the differences soon vanished. Before long he had called up the list of directories.
One was entided Dubchick. Could it be the long-awaited book?
It was. Stuart punched up Chapl, ran down the pages and read them at a glance. Then he called up Chap2.
No one interrupted him. No one entered the office. Stuart Grebe helped himself to a blank floppy disk, sat down at Helen Farfrae’s computer, and had his way with it for the next quarter of an hour.
CHAPTER 28
She never finished the sentence, for at this moment a heavy crash shook the forest from end to end.
Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass
There was a new security officer roaming among the science buildings at night, dropping into the museum, shining his flashlight along halls and corridors. No one but Helen Farfrae missed the old night watchman, Bobby Fenwick. She was still deeply troubled about his death. Detective Inspector Mukerji had scolded her for her delay in calling 999, but he had assured her that she could not have saved young Bobby by calling earlier. His fall had killed him instantly, Mukerji said. Then he had looked at her with his shining dark eyes and asked why had she waited so long, and she had been unable to answer.
It was one of his weirder, more convoluted problems. In his office
at St. Aldate’s, Gopal Mukerji kept running its strange facets over in his mind—Dr. Farfrae’s insistence that she had heard an intruder, her visionary account of an impossible ascent up the side of the glass roof, Fenwick’s fatal fall, the ridiculous burglary of the dodo and the equally absurd reverse burglary, the return of the antique crabs. Well, perhaps it was a return. Professor Dubchick was not at all sure about the provenance of the battered fragments in the jars.
At the inquest, the whole thing had sounded ridiculous. Mukerji felt like a fool. Usually his eccentric cases were more intriguing than the ordinary violent crimes that came his way, but not this time. It wasn’t the solemn nagging of his superiors that bothered him, it was the phone calls from Mrs. Fenwick, asking tearfully if he had made any progress in his investigation of her husband’s death. Inspector Mukerji could not refuse to talk to the poor widow, but it was always painful, and he had little to say to her. Oh, he could quote from Tagore, The frail flowers the for nothing, and the wise man warns me that life is but a dewdrop on the lotus leaf, but what good would that do?
By the time of Homer’s third lecture, his panic was over. In a crowd of Keble undergraduates he walked serenely across Parks Road. Some of them were his students, and they grinned at him and said hello.
But Homer was anxious enough to be an hour early. There was time to kill. He dawdled on the lawn in front of the museum, and looked up at its long flat front.
Even from the outside it had an aura of metaphysical authority. Its history had become the stuff of legend, because the University Museum was coeval with The Origin of Species. They had emerged into the world at the same time: the mountain of brick and stone, glass and iron, the building that was meant to be a glorification of life on earth, a celebration of the Creator’s power—and the book promoting a monumental idea that was about to shake that mountain to its foundations. No sooner was the last glass slate attached to the roof than the glorification of the Creator’s power and the defiance of that glory were embattled in the museum, in a famous debate between the Bishop of Oxford and the supporters of Charles Darwin.
Local history had long since awarded the prize to Hooker and Huxley rather than to Bishop Wilberforce, and since then the Oxford University Museum had been a temple to death as well as to life, the ceaseless murder of one creature by another, the multitude of clawings, rippings, gobblings and swallowings that had gone on every day in every jungle, forest, and field and in all the oceans of the world from the beginning of time. And all the polite gentleman scholars—Ruskin, the Slade Professor of Fine Arts, Acland with his gendemanly sideburns, and Dodgson with his clever stories, as well as the current crop of researchers with their learned papers—they were all accessories after the fact, whether they wanted to be or not.
Homer walked into the museum and stopped in front of the glass case displaying the skull of the dodo. Extinction was omnipresent among the exhibits. Oh, it wasn’t just the dodo, it was Iguanodon bernissartensis and Megalosaurus bucklandi and Cetiosaurus oxoniensis and all the rest. “Pax vobiscum, you guys,” said Homer, turning around and wandering dreamily in the direction of the south staircase.
“No, sir, better go the other way.”
Homer stopped short. “What?”
A workman was dragging a sawhorse to the foot of the staircase, setting it squarely in Homer’s way. “The other stairway’s open,” he said. “You’ll have to go up that way.”
“Oh, sorry, I forgot.” Homer stood in the ground-floor corridor and looked up at the fabric of metal pipes and wooden planks blocking the way to the gallery floor. But instead of turning and making for the stairway at the other end, he continued to stand there, looking up.
The workman, whose name was Ben Cobble, found him dense. He pointed down the hall. “The other staircase, you see, sir.”
“Of course. I just wondered, you’re revamping the whole museum, is that it?”
“Oh, no, just bits and pieces here and there.” Ben’s mind was on the work he was about to do, but this bloke was still standing there, staring at him. “Well, we made some repairs to the vaulting in the gallery.”
“Oh, right, I remember. You finished that last week.”
“And now there’s this, and then there’s the public toilets downstairs.”
“Oh, I see. And that’s all you’re doing, I mean, in the whole museum?”
Ben looked at him, trying to keep his temper. “Well, before I come along, they was doing some kind of work on the glass. I dunno. Me, I’m a bricklayer.”
“The glass? You mean the glass roof over the courtyard?”
Ben picked up his mortaring tool and waved it toward the heavens. “Right, that’s right.”
“Well, what were they doing up there?”
The bricklayer started back up the stairs, squeezing past the scaffolding. Homer guessed he was sick of answering the questions of an inquisitive American. But Ben was yelling Homer’s question to someone in the upper gallery. “Hey, Tuck, what was that bloke doing up there on the roof last month?”
The answer came floating down. Tuck had a ringing tenor voice. Homer could imagine him singing in church, the darling of the choir director. “The slates flew off the tower in a high wind. There was that storm last summer, remember? They were replacing the slates.”
Homer yelled another question to the invisible Tuck. “Oh, so it was just the tower, is that all?”
“No, worse luck,” caroled the celestial Tuck. “The slates hit the glass roof, cracked the glass tiles, hell of a job repairing the tiles. They’re laminated and pinned and stuck on with mastic, and I don’t know what else.” Tuck leaned over the stair railing and looked down kindly at Homer. “Chewing gum? Library paste?”
Homer was surprised to see that the choirboy looked like a chimpanzee, or perhaps an amiable baboon—but then Homer had primates on his mind. “How did they climb the roof? What did they have, scaffolding like this?”
“No, no, nothing like this. It was all ropes and pulleys, you know, like window cleaners use.”
“Ropes and pulleys? No kidding!” Homer leaned over the sawhorse barrier and beamed up at Tuck. “Tell me, when did he finish up there? When did he call it quits and take away all his equipment?”
“Oh, Christ, I dunno.” Tuck screwed up his chimpanzee face and tried to remember. “Do you know, Ben?”
Ben shook his head. He didn’t know.
Tuck began counting off days under his breath. “I remember the day Charley come down, he was draped all over with ropes, and he said, ‘Thank God, that bloody job’s done.’ It must’ve been—Wait, I know.” Tuck laughed, and it was like the ringing of heavenly bells. “It was the day there was this big party in the museum. They told us we had to get the hell out, leave everything all neat and nice. So I put down me bucket of mortar, and then along comes Charley with his blasted rope and drags it over the bucket and tips it over. So I says, Clean it up, you fool, and he says—Well, never mind what he says. It was October second. The day of the party, October second.”
Homer was disappointed. October second was two days before the dark night when Helen Farfrae had seen something on the roof of the museum, someone or something bounding up the glass. The repairman’s rope had been taken away too soon. Homer’s precious fool’s experiment, the visit to the zoo, his delight in the way the orangutans had swung back and forth so easily on their ropes, had been a waste of time.
That afternoon Johnny Farfrae had a fight with his district supervisor. The supervisor dropped in without warning and found him opening mail. Not sorting it, opening it. There was a hell of a row.
“Inadequate addresses,” claimed Johnny. “Christ, I was just trying to find information inside, so we could—”
“Hand them over.”
The addresses were clear and complete. The envelopes contained benefit checks.
There had been episodes like this before. “Get out,” said the supervisor. “You’re lucky I don’t turn you in. Rifling the Royal Mail is a criminal offe
nse.”
“Well, fuck you,” said Johnny. He went for the supervisor’s throat, and there was a wild scramble. Johnny’s fellow clerks came running.
Within the hour he was out on the street. Seething with rage and despair, he took the bus back to Kidlington, but he didn’t go home. He spent the rest of the day in his favorite pub. By the time he stumbled out at last, he was roaring drunk. The inside of his brain was hot and red and his clenched fists trembled, as though they remembered long-ago Saturday nights when his father had come home sloshed and knocked his mother around just to clear the air. And then from his own room Johnny would hear them going to bed, his father purged of his anger and his mother weeping. From behind their bedroom door her sobs would go on, changed and muffled but still audible.
Now Johnny knew what had been going on behind that bedroom door, and his blood rose with anger at the way Helen had been shutting him out. He stormed up to the house to find it dark. Her car was not in the garage.
He knew where she was, all right, and his rage increased. With boozy extravagance he called a cab.
William Dubchick and Helen Farfrae were totally absorbed in the mysterious jars of crabs. Helen had begun staying late, just to do one more, or two or three. Steadily she moved from jar to jar, dumping the contents into the porcelain dishes, looking at them with the high-tech microscope. The crabs were plumper now, less wretched-looking after their rehydration.
William often joined her in the evening, coming in after eating a hasty supper and walking Freddy’s dog. Tonight he came in early. At ten o’clock they were still hard at work.
“You know,” said William, looking up from a shriveled carapace and a mess of jointed legs, “it’s true that we’ve matched a lot of these with crabs in the Down House catalogue, but there’s still a problem.”
“The matching is so rough,” said Helen.