The Museum of Broken Promises

by Elizabeth Buchan

  ‘A bear?’

  She faltered. ‘I believe so.’

  ‘We like our stories to be filled with witches, woods and wild animals.’ Petr gestured to the plaster figures on the wall and smiled. That simple movement of his mouth turned him from the serious employer into a teasing, charming person.

  ‘It was wonderful,’ she said with a rush of feeling. ‘Magic.’

  He got up and laid a hand very briefly and lightly on her shoulder. ‘I can’t tell you how refreshing your response is.’

  ‘Petr, the children are fine,’ Eva interrupted from the doorway. The electric light from the corridor cast an unflattering light on her, making her even more sallow and washed out.

  Petr glanced at his wife. ‘Laure, we have something to discuss with you.’

  Eva cut him off and an exchange in Czech ensued. Petr answered, and then, switched back into French. ‘My company wishes me to remain here for the next year before returning to Paris. Jan and Maria…’ his voice gentled as it always did when referring to his children… ‘like you very much. You told us that you were taking a year off from your studies and we would like it if you stayed here with us for that time.’ He seemed aware that he had caught her off guard. ‘Please, think it over. Give us your answer in a few days.’

  Later, Laure looked out from her bedroom window over the roofscape of the Malá Strana. Brympton was becoming a memory: the red-brick house that was home, the bus queue (the place to harvest the best gossip), the wind that whipped down from the fells.

  Wasn’t it snakes who sloughed off skins? Laure had sloughed off that early part of her life and here she was: exposed, exhilarated, ready to grow a new one.

  She spread her fingers over the window pane. Below, the hidden pulse of a grey, subdued city was beating, subterranean and unknown.

  CHAPTER 11

  Paris, today

  BACK HOME IN TIME TO GET READY FOR A LONG-ARRANGED dinner with Simon in the Marais, Laure tossed her keys into the bowl by the door. They landed with the habitual clatter that threatened to crack the china one day.

  It was unusually cool and fresh inside the flat and, for once, silence issued from the courtyard. Tugging at her dress zip, she headed for the bathroom, only to come to a halt. A stillness had been caught in the rooms. An element had changed. Or else something was missing.

  Where was Kočka?

  Her bag dropped to the floor. Laure launched herself into the sitting area and spotted at once that the window, which she had left on the half-latch, was now wide open. Kočka’s towel was spread over the sofa, ruffled and indented, indicating that, at some point, she had been there.

  Turning in a quarter circle, she ran her eye in a systematic fashion up and down each quadrant before checking the next until she completed the circle.

  Laure called ‘Kočka’, which was absurd as the cat had no idea of her name. Dropping to her knees, she peered under the sofa and chairs hoping to see the curved torso and a pair of world-weary, unblinking eyes. Next, she searched under the bed and through the kitchen. Finally, she hung out of the open window before running down to the courtyard.

  Kočka had vanished.

  She returned upstairs and stood in the centre of the room.

  Her nails dug into her palms. She had made a mistake in imagining that she wouldn’t get involved on a deep-down level instead of a manageable one. It was the difference between a helpless, visceral response to a frail little cat whose claws had dug into her pulpy heart and the sensible, practical course where Laure did her best to ensure a stray was comfortable and fed – and nothing more than that.

  ‘Where are you?’ Again, she searched the apartment. Kitchen, bedroom, sitting area. ‘Where are you?’

  At the back of her mind was the absurd demand: you can’t leave me.

  Please.

  But the realization hardened that Kočka had probably abandoned Laure and was back battling her way through the Parisian streets. The familiar, bitter grief crept over her.

  Reluctantly, drearily, she went over to shut the window.

  Then thought better of it and left it half open.

  An hour later, in the Marais restaurant, Simon put down the implement with which he had been extracting snails from the shell. ‘Something’s wrong.’

  Normally, the scents of garlic and melted butter would have been ambrosial but, at this moment, they sickened her.

  She explained.

  Simon said, ‘But you weren’t going to keep her.’

  ‘No, I wasn’t, was I.’ She was hoping she wouldn’t let herself down but her eyes filled up. ‘But I can’t bear to think of her back on the streets, suffering and hungry. At the mercy of God knows what.’

  He leant over and smudged an escaped tear with his thumb. ‘I haven’t seen this side of you very often.’

  She dashed her hand across her eyes. ‘That’s because it isn’t a side. Just a blip.’

  Simon finished the snails. ‘I know you work very hard at being contained and I have two things to say about it. One, it doesn’t fool everyone. Or, rather, it doesn’t fool me. Two, it’s a waste of energy. We all have feelings, some of them run very deep indeed. It’s a negation to hide them.’

  She managed a half laugh. ‘Have you been on a mindfulness course or something?’

  ‘Actually, yes. And you should have been with me.’

  This was unexpected. ‘Do you and Valerie talk about those sorts of things?’

  ‘We do now.’ He leant over and refilled her glass.

  ‘Lucky Valerie.’ She thought for a moment. ‘Since we are talking this way, you do love Valerie? More than anything. And have done so for a long time?’ She swallowed. ‘It can last?’

  Simon looked at her with a great deal of compassion. ‘Yes. Why do you ask?

  The salient memories about Tomas were still reliable but, as time passed, she struggled to remember the smaller details, or the precise texture, of their time together. Could she recall, truthfully, the fervour and fever of emotion, the aching lust, her delight in the rightness of it? No, but also yes. Yes. Could she pinpoint the moment when she understood that her feelings for him and, by extension, the cause were so intense that she felt liberated from herself, the Laure Carlyle from Brympton?

  If she was truthful, and truthful she should be, the memories of the political resistance hidden in Anatomie’s lyrics tended to be sharper. So, too, were the performances at the marionette theatre.

  But, never forgotten were the subversion, the secrecy. The hilarity. Tomas warned her to be careful and never to repeat what she knew to anyone. Yeah right, she remembered thinking at the time. How discreet was discreet? Most of Tomas’s circle made their political affiliations known and were careless with their talk. Anatomie had only to strike up a chord and everyone knew what they were on about.

  She wondered if they ever understood how innocent she had been. Certainly, she had failed to understand the layers of complicity existing between the watchers and the population on which they spied which ensured tiny sprouts of rebellion were ignored. Until they weren’t.

  Simon was waiting for her answer. She lifted her glass and said lightly, ‘Because in this wicked world it’s good to know.’

  She made the taxi driver drop her at the canal and walked back home through the violet night, the kind that normally made her feel glad to be alive. Tonight, it was different as she was dragged down by a feeling that she could only describe as misery.

  For God’s sake, what was one small, feral cat?

  Answer: it could have been her one small, feral cat.

  The dispirited shrub in a corner of the courtyard had somehow managed to produce a few white blossoms. Oddly, she found it a comforting sight and Laure stopped to admire their glimmer in the dusk. This was a mistake. Madame Poirier rose from her chair outside her flat where she kept vigil.

  ‘Madame, you should be aware that you left your window open today.’

  Laure stared at her. For a hopeful second, she thought Madam
e Poirier was about to tell her that a cat was on the loose. ‘It’s very warm for this time of year, madame.’ She barely managed her customary politesse and, turning around, fled for the refuge of her front door.

  Upstairs, she stood for a long time at the window of the sitting area, straining to see if a cat shape was padding across the roofs. After a while, she turned back to the room and her gaze rested on the black-and-white photograph of a beach with the spumy sea running up it.

  She poured herself a glass of wine and sat down to catch up on potential donations.

  Working was like wading through mud. Again, she checked outside the window.

  ‘I will not be broken,’ Tomas told her. ‘Never.’

  All these years Laure had been schooling herself to accept that, almost certainly, one way or another, Tomas had been broken. He had wanted to keep his ideals, his purpose, his music, and it devastated Laure to think that he might have bludgeoned into other ways of thinking.

  If he was alive.

  In the bedroom, Laure got undressed and cleansed and moisturized her face with the most expensive creams she could afford. (Why not?) Having stepped out of her underclothes, she reached for the oversized T-shirt she favoured for sleeping in. Air played over her back and breasts. It was almost a caress and longing caught her cruelly.

  Could he be alive? She had failed to find him when she tried but it was possible. Just.

  If so, did he ever turn his face to the west and think of her? That girl?

  Perhaps he did.

  Not knowing was a hydra-headed, tormenting adversary. It never admitted defeat, it almost never retreated. It bided its time in the rock pools and under the stones of the mind and spirit, waiting on the turn of the tide to race back in.

  If he was alive, Tomas might well have loved others. Women? Men?

  Every seven to fifteen years, the cells in the body were replaced. Bone, skin, stomach, liver. The lot. Having read about it in a scientific journal, Laure was cheered because it suggested renaissance and renewal were possible. But it also meant she was walking around with every cell in her body replenished and he would be too. They would have learnt new ways of thinking – or she had – developed unfamiliar physical responses, new knowledge and desires. They would move differently, eat differently, their views on sex, love and politics almost certainly would diverge.

  ‘I wish I could touch you,’ she said aloud. She almost added, just once, but that was to be stupid. Just once would not be enough.

  Later, she lay in bed and sobbed for one fragile little cat.

  For the question that had never been answered.

  And all the other things, too.

  The daily post arrived with a larger than usual haul and the subsequent discussion of its contents took up much of the working day. The cigarette packet on the inside of which were columns of numbers written down with the word ‘divorce settlement’ was shocking and amusing. The shoebox filled with sea shells with no return address was an enigma. Laure gave in to temptation and plunged a hand down into them, enjoying the feel of their whorls and curves and the faintest of salty tangs. The note that came with them read: ‘Sadly, the tide went out and never turned.’

  After closing time, Laure made her rounds, satisfying herself that the lights were out and the alarms set.

  She was on the bottom rung of the stairs and overheard Nic and May talking in the lobby.

  ‘Can I ask you out to dinner?’ May asked. She was teasing and laughing.

  ‘Yes, you can but whether you may is another matter,’ said Nic.

  Laure found herself frozen to the stair. That exchange was an echo – eerie and dislocating – one from long ago.

  ‘OK. May I take you out to dinner? In fact, I insist.’

  ‘I thought you’d never ask.’ Nic’s footsteps sounded on the wooden floor. ‘Are you always so bossy? You know what they say about domineering women?’

  May laughed, a sound filled with excitement and anticipation. ‘The same as they say about domineering men.’

  ‘Let’s go and discuss it.’

  The door opened.

  Laure waited until she heard the door shut behind them. The madness and ache of that time, her time, were old companions and they were with her now.

  Outside the museum, Laure gave herself a pause. A street-cleaning vehicle was grinding up the street. Two cyclists with sit-up-and-beg vehicles lumbered past. Madame Becque waved from the grocery.

  Irritatingly, her sixth sense swung into play. Was she being followed?

  Occasionally, this happened. It was a conditioned reflex from the past, a fallout, usually re-triggered by sleeplessness and emotion.

  Every sense on high alert, she picked her way down the street towards the triangle of earth where she had first seen Kočka and rattled a packet of cat biscuits. She did not hold out much hope and there was no rustle of undergrowth, no answering sound and no glimpse of an emaciated brindled body.

  She thought of the weary golden eyes, the tiny puft of the feline heartbeat under her fingers, the bony, fragile skull. If life had been kind and equable, Kočka would be slinking through the violet night, in a garden where poppies burned in the sun, roses rustled and ripening fruit scented the evening air. She would be lying on warmed stone, replete and dreaming.

  The phone in her bag rang. Reluctantly, she fished it out. ‘Hallo.’

  ‘Laure, it’s May. I wanted to ask you a couple more things.’ ‘Can’t they wait? Anyway, thought you were with Nic.’

  May was the dog with the bone. ‘I am, but I’ll be working on the article before I go to bed. It would help me a lot if we had a discussion. I know … I know the copybook is still blotted but I hope we are past it?’ She was warm. She was cajoling. She was contrite. ‘Can we get over it?’

  The words clustered in Laure’s ear. Animals could shake water off their coats and she longed to shake off May in similar fashion.

  ‘You’re right to bear a grudge,’ persisted May.

  Grudges consumed the spirit. Laure knew that only too well and swallowed her irritation. ‘I’m on my way home. You can talk to me as I go.’

  ‘First off, have you found the cat?’

  Laure softened. ‘I haven’t but I’ll keep looking.’ She avoided stepping into a pile of dog faeces. ‘What did you want to know?’

  ‘You lived in Prague before the communist regime fell and in Berlin just after the Wall came down. I wondered if you wanted to talk about your experiences there and how they affected your decision to set up the museum?’

  The questions were like gnats. To be swatted? She pulled herself into line. ‘I’ll think about the answer.’

  After a moment, May said: ‘You haven’t forgiven me. But I don’t expect it.’ She added, ‘It’s odd, isn’t it? For the time it takes, interviewer and interviewee are spliced together. While it’s going, it’s a marriage.’ Laure heard her intake of breath. ‘After it’s over we can divorce.’

  This was almost childlike in its analysis, but correct, as Laure well knew. Keeping a sharp lookout for more dog messes, she silently acknowledged May’s cheek and candour. Possibly, she had no morals but they now understood each other better. ‘Ask away,’ she said, feeling the release of not fighting it any more.

  ‘Your sponsor? Did you ever get to the bottom of why they suddenly gave you so much money?’

  ‘I’ll answer that too tomorrow.’

  ‘You know,’ said May, ‘I think I understand why you chose the Canal Saint-Martin for the museum.’

  ‘Why did I?’

  ‘Because… because it’s a place where people go who have nowhere. Who think, perhaps, they don’t belong. It’s a place to put out a hand and feel that there is something to be gained from nothing.’ There was a short pause. ‘Of all people, you must understand how that feels.’

  Laure looked towards the canal where the autumnal trees dipped towards the water and couples were making their way across the ironwork bridge. To where the tents of the homeless clustered
on the banks.

  Put out a hand.

  May was right.

  The phone call ended.

  In a change of plan, she walked down to the canal and, instead of turning for home, crossed the nearest bridge to Chez Prune. Having managed to nab an outside table which had a view of the water, she ordered red wine, then a second glass. It was to dice with getting drunk but she was going to enjoy it in a Paris that tonight was in languorous mood.

  ‘Learn after me.’

  Tomas’s voice was in her ear.

  ‘From me. It’s learn from me,’ she pointed out.

  He never liked being corrected on his English. ‘Are you listening?’

  She nodded. ‘Of course.’

  ‘This is who we are. In 1948, there was a coup d’état and the communists took over. By 1968, we were supposed to be used to the idea that “socialist consumerism” was the way to the good life. It wasn’t the good life. It wasn’t free. Dubček tried to make the country better and to barter with Moscow. It was called the Prague Spring. He failed and the Russians sent in the tanks. We got Husák and what they called “normalization”. What that meant was persistent surveillance. It was the mud which covered everyone. I wrote a song about it. “The Discovery of Fear”.’

  Disguised as a love song because of the risk, it hadn’t been Tomas’s best. It didn’t matter because it went down a storm.

  It was quite a story, her time in Prague. Full of love and fear and grief. But those three things were proof that she had been alive. Electrically so. Even the consequence, the on-going inner debate with conscience and recrimination, was a kind of proof.

  She rang May back. ‘If we are to continue, I think I should know more about you.’

  ‘Really?’ responded a startled-sounding May. ‘If I told you that my bedroom was decorated with pink rosebuds, the bed was hung with white net and had satin bows and the wooden floor was waxed weekly by the maid on her hands and knees would that help? Oh, and my full name is May Eugenie Marcia Williams and my mother is known as Miss Melia.’