The Museum of Things Left Behind

by Seni Glaister

  Copyright

  Fourth Estate

  An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF

  www.4thestate.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate 2015

  Copyright © Seni Glaister 2015

  Seni Glaister asserts the moral right to

  be identified as the author of this work.

  A catalogue record of this book is

  available from the British Library.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Source ISBN: 9780008118952

  Ebook Edition © May 2015 ISBN: 9780008118969

  Version: 2015-04-02

  Dedication

  For my brave and brilliant father

  Prof. David Glaister

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  The Characters

  Epigraph

  1 In Which a Letter Stands Out

  2 In Which Treason Is Narrowly Avoided

  3 In Which a Formal Communication From a Foreign Entity Is Delivered

  4 In Which News Travels Fast

  5 In Which a President Addresses His Nation

  6 In Which Enough Tea Is Grown

  7 In Which the President Has Doubt

  8 In Which a Protestation Is Made

  9 In Which PEGASUS Has Her Wings Clipped

  10 In Which a Royal Visitor Arrives

  11 In Which Plan B Might Work

  12 In Which the British Visitor Is Made to Feel at Home

  13 In Which the Visitor Goes Exploring

  14 In Which Tourism and Recreation Go into Battle

  15 In Which the President Loses His Cool

  16 In Which the Dancing Begins

  17 In Which the Visitor Gets a Lesson in Timekeeping

  18 In Which Lizzie Makes a Bedside Visit

  19 In Which the Curiosities Are Examined

  20 In Which Lizzie Exerts Some Power

  21 In Which the Americans Play Ball

  22 In Which the Visitor Gets Down to Business

  23 In Which the Purpose of Education Is Questioned

  24 In Which Lizzie Beats the System

  25 In Which Love Is the Answer

  26 In Which a Deal Is Done

  27 In Which the Piece Fits

  28 In Which There’s Education in Moderation

  29 In Which the Chief of Staff Plots

  30 In Which the Troubles Escalate

  31 In Which Lizzie Shares a Secret

  32 In Which the Ministers Measure Up

  33 In Which Tourism Is Boosted

  34 In Which Laughter Spells Trouble

  35 In Which Lizzie Supposes

  36 In Which Lizzie Dines Out

  37 In Which Tea Is Taken

  38 In Which Dancing Spells Doom

  39 In Which a Walk Is Planned

  40 In Which Lizzie Begins to Understand

  41 In Which a Meeting Is Tabled

  42 In Which Sergio Faces the Music

  43 In Which Lizzie Explains the Birds and the Bees

  44 In Which the Bell Tolls

  About the Author

  Acknowledgements

  About the Publisher

  The Characters

  The Cabinet

  The President – Sergio Scorpioni

  Minister for Defence – Alixandria Heliopolis Visparelli

  Minister for the Exterior – Mario Lucaccia

  Minister for the Interior – Rolando Posti

  Minister of Finance – Roberto Feraguzzi

  Minister for Health – Dottore Decio Rossini

  Minister for Agricultural Development – Enzo Civicchioni

  Minister for Education – Professore Giuseppe Scota

  Minister for Recreation – Marcello Pompili

  Minister for Leisure – Tersilio Cellini

  Minister for Tourism – Settimio Mosconi

  Minister for Employment – Vlad Lubicic

  Chief of Staff to the President – Angelo Bianconi

  The Proletariat

  The Postman – Remi

  The Stationmaster – Vinsent Gabboni

  Patron of Il Gallo Giallo – Dario Mariani

  Patron of Il Toro Rosso – Piper

  The Clockmaker – Pavel

  The Potter – Elio

  The Visitors

  British VIP – Lizzie Holmesworth

  American Consultant 1 – Chuck Whylie

  American Consultant 2 – Paul Fields

  Epigraph

  Alieni theam faciunt optimam.

  (Strangers make the best tea.)

  CHAPTER 1

  In Which a Letter Stands Out

  High above the city, in the dustiest, windiest, sparsest corner of the north-west quadrant, Remi was sorting the mail. He had arrived out of breath at the sorting office. He glanced at his stopwatch and noted, with a flicker of irritation, that he was at the upper end of the time he allowed himself for this short journey. The early-morning rain had added an element of risk to some of the sharper corners, and on several occasions he’d had to slow almost to a stop to avoid injury to himself or damage to his bicycle. Happily, though, he lived on the same level as his workplace, and his commute was generally a straightforward three-kilometre cycle ride on the slippery paths that snaked through the tea plantations from the small home he shared with his mother. In a month or two, with the onset of the harsh summer sun, these paths would quickly mould into dusty, deeply grooved channels. In turn the channels would soon evolve into narrow ruts, which would hug his bicycle tyres so snugly that he could ride much of the way with his eyes closed – a feat he had often attempted with considerable, albeit unrecorded, success. Even in the wet spring months his journey to work was not strenuous; his bicycle could probably still find its own way through sheer habit, and this was certainly the easiest section of his day’s circuit. That morning, however, his journey had been interrupted not once but twice, on the first occasion by a neighbour, who needed help with a stuck pig, then shortly afterwards by a second neighbour, who held the firm belief that a problem shared was a problem halved. Remi had wondered, as he pedalled furiously to make up for the lost seconds, whether the sharing of a problem exactly doubled it, providing it with two minds instead of one in which to fester, and he further worried that the problem, like the simplest of organisms, was simultaneously dividing and subdividing in his brain and that of his neighbour.

  As always, however, Remi’s most pressing concern had been his prompt arrival at the office for, despite the absence of a supervisor’s watchful eye or any sort of mechanism to monitor his comings and goings, Remi’s deep commitment to the state had engendered within him a work ethic unlikely to be rivalled within the whole of Vallerosa. In his decade of postal duties he had never been late for work, notching up instead some two hundred hours of unpaid overtime through his systematic early arrival. This un
interrupted record of excellence counted for little, however, and the banked hours bore no currency other than within his own conscience. Had he been pushed to verbalize the seriousness with which he approached timekeeping, he would probably admit that if he were to stray from his self-governed schedule on more than one or two occasions, he would not hesitate to sack himself.

  The sorting office – a basic construction with lofty eaves and a trill of natural light that flitted down from windows too high to provide a view in or out – served multitudinous roles and could, just by a change of the swinging sign outside, transform itself from postal hub to the country’s only ticketing office to the bureau of the registrar and back again. With the ticket sign hoisted, citizens would come here from far and wide to receive their allocated quota for state-organized events, including the busy annual season of festa, dances and sporting competitions. Not long ago these duties would have been fulfilled far below in the official city buildings surrounding Piazza Rosa but the president (who had pledged his life to the rigorous execution of his responsibilities but occasionally had difficulty separating valid solutions from denial) had taken exception to opening his curtains in the morning and looking down upon slowly shuffling queues of people. Queues, the president was quite sure, were a symbol of need, the physical manifestation of demand outweighing supply and, most worryingly, a queue might suggest, to any rational man peering from his balcony above, a failure on the part of the president accurately to judge and cater for the requirements of his people. So the issue of tickets had been moved as far from the palace windows as possible. Now occasions such as the Annual Blindfolded Hog Chasing Finals or the Spousal Waltz would cause an unobtrusive and unobserved queue to snake as far as the eye could see.

  On the first Monday of each month the sorting office sign would be lowered and replaced with the Owl and Viper insignia representing the city’s official registrar. On those mornings the office was commandeered by Benito, the notaio, who issued, in painstaking brown-inked calligraphy, the hand-drafted certificates of birth, death and marriage. The queues for these services were inoffensively short, but the same president who had been insulted by queues forming in Piazza Rosa had been equally upset by the notion of grieving widows and widowers sharing a small reception room with eager soon-to-be-weds or, even worse, the smug and self-satisfied contentment of new parents. As it had been impossible to allocate a separate reception area to each distinct need, he had relocated the office in its entirety to the new postal sorting office at the top of the hill. While this did not negate the possibility of a newly bereft widow sitting beside a recently endowed mother, it successfully removed the possibility of the incumbent president being troubled by this notion. As it happened, there appeared to be less and less likelihood of such offence being caused as, in recent years, it had come to the attention of several officials, whose role did not specify a requirement to notice such things, that the registration of deaths was using considerably more ink than the issue of marriage certificates, and the issue of marriage certificates seemed to be using considerably more ink than the registration of births. But it would be a little while yet before anyone felt concerned enough to raise the matter through the ranks of government and bring it to the notice of somebody with enough seniority to act upon it.

  On ticketing days, and on the Mondays that fell to the service of the notaio, there was no mail service. Furthermore, much longer-lasting interruptions to the important job of postal delivery took place every five years. In the summer of years ending with 0 or 5, red and black bunting would be nailed to the front of the sorting office, and for a whole two-week period, the building would become the balloting headquarters from which the city’s volunteers mounted and executed their political campaign. This period was fast approaching and Remi’s underarms were already tingling with anxiety at the thought of the disruption his beloved postal service would suffer if – as had been rumoured recently – the campaign were to become one of above average complexity.

  But on most mornings, such as this, the office was Remi’s domain, a sanctuary in which correspondence could be allowed to negotiate the most delicate part of its journey, the transition from letter sent to letter received. The brass name plates were Remi’s to polish; the visiting cats were his to spoil with saucers of milk and scratches behind the ears; the single teacup, saucer, plate, fork and knife were his to wash up; the kettle was his to – meticulously, according to a detailed list of tasks – descale every other month. Remi’s routine had varied very little since he had perfected it nearly a decade ago but the diligence with which he approached every last detail suggested that the job was as exciting and agreeable as if he were performing it for the very first time.

  The mail awaiting him was about average for the time of year, a smallish bundle at the bottom of a large grain sack. Having prepared his morning cup of tea, Remi set about the preliminary stage of his role. Removing his shoes, he set them neatly by the door. After clicking each of his knuckles, he took the sack and spilled the contents onto the polished linoleum floor, spreading the mail out as he went and occasionally separating small clusters with the aid of a socked toe. Then, with the deftness of a croupier, he began to shuffle each of the assorted envelopes into one of the eight quadrants.

  Armed with the basic topography represented by the eight meagre piles of mail on the floor of the sorting office, any transient traveller would find himself very quickly able to navigate the dark and otherwise confusing labyrinth of alleys, moss-covered steps and steep gullies that interlinked each proud district. The four principal quadrants, north-west, south-west, north-east and south-east, further subdivided into a top and a bottom region, belonging either to the altos or to the bassos. Vallerosa’s landmass, as any number of bleary-eyed and disoriented travellers can confirm, is made up in its entirety of a steep and craggy gorge, to which the medieval city has tenuously and surprisingly adhered since its founding fathers built their first hovels on a small plateau halfway up the side of the ravine; they had made their dangerous escape across Europe pursued by fervent Catholics who, luckily for the escapees, had had no fortitude when it came to mountain climbing, despite their very close relationship to God. Here, legend will tell you, on the far side of the mountains – mountains considered insurmountable by the weaker-spirited – the nimble pioneers believed they had at last found sanctuary. Settling in this heaven on earth at the centre-most point of the world, they gave thanks for this safe haven. Finally harboured from the wrath of an all-powerful regime, they collapsed in exhaustion, hidden from view in all directions by the mountains that cut them off completely from the rest of the world for more than half of the year, yet blessed them with a plentiful supply of clean water from below and verdant pasture above.

  Through the middle of this unlikely outpost, half a mile below the shed in which Remi now toiled, the beautiful river Florin rages from west to east, thundering its pale blues, greys and greens through the centre of the country, carving an ever-deepening crease through the nation’s belly. The river’s source, the bright winter snows and cool spring rains from the slopes of Italy’s high mountains to the west contribute generously to both velocity and volume; within the last hundred years, three generations of formidable engineers have built a trio of impressive dams to harness the energy of this plentiful resource. First Hydras, then Gorgons and, most recently, Chimeras have been built, each more ingenious than the dam before; between them these masterful behemoths turn the great turbines that feed the country’s modest electrical needs. With its excess energy stripped and redirected to boil kettles, to flicker and hum in light bulbs and refrigerators, the Florin continues its journey more sedately, though always with the capacity to surprise, towards a series of inhospitable bends between sheer granite cliffs, that mark the end of its journey through Vallerosa, where it passes quietly into Austria.

  The four lower quadrants, each nudging the river’s craggy banks, combine to form the bassos. From here, where the lowest homes dip their toes into the s
pring floodwaters, the city, carved from a solid seam of red granite, rises chaotically upwards towards the magnificent Piazza Rosa to the north and the slighter, quieter, humbler Piazza Verde in the south. Despite their difference in grandeur, each has claimed the largest, flattest areas on either side of the river to house the country’s municipal buildings. From these piazzas the city continues to clamber upwards, on either side of the river, meandering through the altos, the higher houses scrabbling and clawing their way ever more precariously; the foundations of many appear to rest on the roofs of the tier beneath them. At the highest point of the gorge the anxiety of the buildings to take a foothold lessens and the dwellings dwindle in density, petering out as the steep gorge softens to join the plateau above. Despite the distance from the river beneath them, even the uppermost homes have chosen to turn their backs on the green expanse of the mesa and instead crane their necks to look down upon layer after layer of houses beneath them, and these houses scrabble for a view of the river below. On a still day the rush of water as it crashes from Hydras, then again from Gorgons and Chimeras, can be heard from every corner of the country: the natural acoustics provided by the land’s topography, the giant loudhailer that forms its mouth at the lowest point, will allow a man snoozing in his chair after lunch high in the altos to set his watch to the bells chiming in Piazza Rosa way beneath him. That is, if the bells were allowed to chime.

  These geographic distinctions – the bassos, the altos, from the north and west to the south and east – entirely satisfy the needs of all the country’s citizens, even though from time to time the government has attempted to issue new labels to describe the eight regions more accurately. Indeed, on one occasion a bill that introduced a complex postal code system that could pinpoint an address to its very street had been drafted but it had subsequently been mislaid and no replacement scheme had – so far – been adopted. Without the impetus and intervention of Remi it is doubtful that one ever will and so, for the time being, the eight quadrants remain.