The Mystery of the Venus Island Fetish

by Dido Butterworth

  That left only Dithers, his curator of mammals. Patrician, with impeccable manners, a Cambridge man. He never failed to charm with his tales of derring-do among the African big game. He was seated next to the evening’s principal target, Mrs Gladys Gordon-Smythe. Wrapped in a fox-fur stole, the widow was on the wrong side of sixty. Griffon watched as Dithers fixed her with his soulful black eyes, his kind mouth forming the most sympathetic of shapes. The widow’s titterings and fast-emptying champagne flute indicated that she was enjoying the attention. Then something broke the spell.

  She raised her lorgnette and pointed her powdered face directly at Griffon. ‘Director. Director! Have you any news of that young curator of yours, Mr Archibald Meek? I am most anxious to learn what he has done in the Venus Isles. Perhaps his collections of artefacts will complement those made by my dear, late husband. He was martyred bringing the gospel to the savages, you know.

  ‘Perhaps,’ she added coyly, ‘if Mr Meek’s collections are good enough, one might be motivated to fund a gallery of Pacific cultures to exhibit them.’

  Griffon sat in silence, all eyes upon him. Blast Meek! The man had simply vanished. A year and a half overdue, and his director had no idea where he was. Off digging gold in New Guinea, no doubt, or in the thrall of some dusky maiden. Would the fellow never return and live up to his responsibilities?

  ‘Nothing but early reports, Mrs Gordon-Smythe,’ he replied at last. ‘But they are quite encouraging. As you know, the Venus Isles are pretty much the most remote and uncivilised spot in the entire Pacific. Communications are slow. But I’m sure Meek will return soon, and in triumph.’

  At that moment, Griffon would have loved to kill Archibald Meek. Along with the rest of his useless curators. Then he could start over, and build the finest museum in the Empire. One worthy to have him at its head.

  As he watched Meek, Griffon let none of this show. He lay inclined, plank-like on his chair, his hands folded behind his head. Until he began stroking his hair, he’d been as still as a mannequin. ‘Ah, the prodigal curator returns!’ he murmured. ‘Alas, after the stock-market crash, the museum budget no longer extends to a fatted calf. Welcome back, Meek.’

  Archie wrenched his gaze from the mask. He had heard about the crash aboard the Mokambo, but none of it had made any sense. Not that he’d ever taken an interest in such matters anyway. But, at that moment, not even news that the plague had returned to the city would have made an impression. Only one thing mattered to him: the Great Venus Island Fetish. It unnerved him to see it removed from the locked and darkened storage chamber where he had left it on the eve of his departure. It seemed to him that the evil thing had been set free.

  ‘The fetish,’ he stammered. ‘It really should be in the collection area, where it will be safe. There’s a great danger. I mean of borer and dermestid beetle, not to mention fading.’

  ‘Meek, have you forgotten your place? You come here two years late, dressed like an imbecile, and all you can talk about is the decor?’ barked Griffon.

  ‘No, sir. Sorry, sir,’ replied Archie, automatically losing five carefree years.

  ‘The board and I felt sure we’d never see you again. Thought you’d gone native. You were given three years’ study leave in the Venus Islands, not a day longer. Your reports were laconic, to say the least, and we’ve had none at all for the last two years. You’re damn lucky, Meek, that you’ve got a position to return to. Good Lord! What’s that?’

  Archie’s suit revealed far too much shin and wrist, and the director’s gaze was fixed on his employee’s left forearm.

  Archie squirmed. How could he explain his initiation and tattooing, and the absolute necessity of undergoing it? ‘Er, a tattoo, sir,’ he mumbled, pulling his sleeve over the image of a frigate bird.

  ‘A tattoo!’ thundered the director. ‘A tattoo? God damn it, man. Have you gone completely mad? A curator, in my museum, gone bloody native! My God, how will you explain that to our donors? What will Mrs Gordon-Smythe make of that? She’s been asking after you, you know, and is keen to fund a new Pacific gallery. But, my word, man, if she sees that damn thing on your arm she’ll take her money straight to the art gallery!’

  In all his years Archie had never heard Vere Griffon raise his voice. The director was a martinet, no doubt, but his style ran more to intimidation with tones indicating the slenderest restraint upon a cauldron of emotion. The young man felt crushed. Maybe he had gone native. But he had done great things as well. His only hope of mollifying his director lay in enumerating them.

  ‘I’ve made a wonderful collection, sir, and I’ve already drafted a very comprehensive report.’

  ‘A collection?’ said Vere Griffon, his voice betraying a flicker of interest.

  ‘A collection, sir. Of everything found on the Venus Isles, from the plants, worms, fish and insects to the artefacts made by the islanders. I’ve even got a set of spirit masks and a headhunting canoe, though the Venus Islanders were most reluctant to part with them.’

  ‘Perhaps the prodigal has redeemed himself,’ Vere Griffon murmured under his breath. His expression softened to the extent that Archie felt he could return to the most urgent issue.

  ‘Sir, the Venus Island Fetish is a most delicate artefact.’ Moving closer, he could see now that several of the skulls were tinted orange rather than their original smoked-brown colour. They were, he decided, beginning to lose their patina, perhaps because of exposure to sunlight. Then he spied a small object lying on the floor beneath the mask. He bent down and picked it up. It was a human incisor. Archie slotted it carefully into an empty socket on one of the discoloured skulls. The fit was perfect.

  The skull that had lost the incisor had terrible buck teeth—the worst he’d seen since Cecil Polkinghorne had waved him off at the docks five years earlier. Despite the fit, Archie couldn’t reattach the tooth in its socket. Without adhesive it would simply fall out again. So he placed it in his pocket, intent on returning with some glue.

  ‘Would you allow me to care for the fetish while it’s here, sir? Otherwise its pigments will fade, and bits will drop off—’

  ‘Balderdash!’ Vere Griffon shot back. ‘Bumstocks inspects it weekly. He may be only a taxidermist, but he’s more than capable of basic maintentance.’ The director composed himself and continued. ‘We must do all we can to engage the board of directors, and surrounding them with treasures from the collection keeps their minds on what’s at stake. Their personal donations are all that’s keeping us above water at present.’

  Vere Griffon sat up and cleared his throat. ‘My dear Archie, you’ve been away a long time. And you do seem quite lost. But you need to get a grip, man.’ Griffon smiled. ‘I’ve put together the best collection of curators in the colonies in this institution, and it’s vital that we all pull together. We cannot have dissent, or disloyalty. Not now. Go to your office and take up your work. I’m afraid that we’ve had to move you into a rather smaller one. But I think it will do for the time being.’

  Dryandra Stritchley ushered Archie out the door.

  ‘Phew,’ said Archie. He slumped against the doorjamb. The worst was over. He composed himself and walked back into the great hall. It was just after nine and the first visitors of the day were trickling in. As he approached the stuffed orangutans he slowed to eavesdrop on a pair
of elderly women who stood looking at the creatures.

  ‘Ain’t he the spitting image of my Clarrie?’ one quipped.

  ‘Yairs,’ the other replied. ‘I can see the ’semblance—’specially round ’is eyes. But Clarrie’s teeth are dirtier. And there’s less of ’em.’

  Archie left the cackling women, and walked towards the unmarked wooden door that led to the curatorial offices. Amid the clutter of the exhibition it was easy to overlook. He inserted his antique key in the lock, and as it turned he heard that satisfying ‘thunk’ which heralded his admission into the bowels of the institution.

  The walls of the narrow corridor were crowded with books and journals. Archie was on his own turf now, and his heart began to soar. How long had he waited for this day? In a few moments he would see his Beatrice. Surely she had accepted his proposal of marriage.

  Chapter 3

  If circumstances had ever conspired to keep a girl from knowledge of the world, they had done so in the case of Miss Beatrice Goodenough. The second child of a straight-laced father who sired only daughters, she grew up in an isolated if rather grand homestead on the western plains of New South Wales. It was the kind of place where masters and servants never mixed, where father came to dinner in a high starched collar, and where even the ebony legs of the piano were decorously hidden behind voluminous rolls of cloth.

  Her childhood memories consisted of time passing slowly: she and her younger sisters dressing dolls; the parlour with its heavy drapes and ticking grandfather clock, its chimes marking what seemed an unvarying eternity. Just once, something extraordinary happened. She had gone to the kitchen, a realm forbidden to her, when a knock sounded at the back door. Cookie, as the children called her—a rotund woman in her fifties—rose and opened it.

  And there stood a near-naked Aborigine, a nulla-nulla in his hand.

  ‘Mi laikim tukka, missus. Cuttim plenty piaiwood.’

  Cookie slammed the door shut. She noticed Beatrice and shooed her away. But not before that momentary glimpse of the wider world had both terrified and thrilled the young girl.

  Beatrice was schooled by her mother until she was twelve, and then packed off to stay with an aunt and uncle at Mosman on Sydney’s north shore. She would be ‘finished’ at the Methodist Ladies College. Her custodians, she was dismayed to discover, were even more Victorian in their attitudes than her parents. Beatrice felt that the only reason they accepted her was the generous stipend paid them by her father. With few diversions, she devoted herself single-mindedly to her schoolwork. Unsurprisingly, she matriculated with the highest encomia.

  Despite her obvious intelligence, her teachers worried about young Miss Goodenough. Miss Sodworthy, the Latin mistress, summed matters up when, on the eve of Beatrice’s matriculation, she warned the girl that her combination of naiveté and rather rapturous temperament would get her into trouble.

  ‘You’re an intelligent and diligent student, Beatrice, but you’re hopelessly romantic—and flighty to boot. To avoid, er, let us say, distractions, I suggest a job in a quiet environment. A museum, for example. There are always lots of labels to be written in such a place, and your calligraphy is excellent. There’s a new director at the natural history museum. From Cambridge, I hear. And so handsome.’ A dreamy quality crept into her voice. ‘Perhaps Headmistress can make inquiries on your behalf.’

  And so it was that in 1926, at the age of seventeen, Beatrice’s glorious copperplate secured her the position of registrar in the museum’s anthropology department. Archie, a year older, was in the final year of his museum cadetship. Gangly, pimply, pale and small for his age, he was awkward in the way only teenage boys can be. A careful observer, however, might have noticed in his hazel eyes, fine nose and well-defined mouth the makings of a handsome young man.

  The anthropology department occupied the entire basement of the museum. At one end, tall double doors opened into a capacious room used to unpack collections and curate oversized objects such as canoes and carved trees. This space opened onto the registration area. At its centre was an imposing oak table, upon which sat, on an angled bookstand, a great, leather-bound register. Beside it was an inkwell, a fountain pen and blotting paper. A stool, and a tall wooden cabinet against the adjacent wall, in which were stored specimens upon which the registrar was working, completed Beatrice’s realm.

  A few chairs, scattered about a bench set below a high window, occupied most of the remaining space, which acted as a sort of anthropology common area. Four doors opened from this room. Three led to offices of varying size, while the fourth opened onto a dank corridor which led deep under the building. Light switches along its length lit up only three bulbs, while simultaneously turning off the three behind, so as to leave darkness before and behind the visitor. Heavy wooden doors, resembling those of prison cells, opened off it. Behind each lay a storeroom crammed with objects for which there was no space in the exhibition, or which were considered unsuitable for public display. Painted wooden plaques indicated the category of the objects therein: Egyptology, Oceania, Osteology and so on, into the far darkness.

  In his early days at the museum Archie wandered the storerooms, familiarising himself with the contents. The walls of the osteology room, he discovered, were fitted with wooden racks, while coffin-sized crates, stacked almost to the ceiling, occupied the centre of the room. The boxes held skeletons, the racks, skulls. Hundreds of them. Each shelf was labelled: ‘Solomon Islands’, ‘British New Guinea’, ‘New Hebrides’, ‘New Zealand’, ‘Tasmania’, ‘Victoria’ and so on. The largest area was ‘New South Wales’, every shelf of which was crammed with skulls. Some had jaws, but many did not. Some were stained brown with soil, indicating a long time buried, but others were fresh and white from the dissection table. One day Archie took a skull in his hands. It looked like it had been burned, and he noticed that there was a neat hole in its side, just large enough to accommodate the tip of his little finger. ‘Myall Creek, Female’ had been inked across the brow. He put the skull back in its place, wondering how the perforation had been made.

  By the time he entered the next room the minor mystery had been forgotten. ‘Oceania’ was long and rectangular, much larger than ‘Osteology’. The walls were festooned with shields, spears and clubs, while dozens of canoes, fish-traps and doors to spirit houses were slung from the ceiling. On the far wall, lying like a funnelweb spider in its lair, was a terrifying mask, surrounded by skulls—the Great Venus Island Fetish. Archie backed out, shut the door and vowed never again to enter the room alone.

  On the rare occasion that Archie emerged into the registration area, Beatrice hardly noticed him. As a cadet he was a general dogsbody, and, except when she needed a heavy object moved or something brought up from the storeroom, Beatrice ignored the painfully shy young man. But from the moment Archie laid eyes on Beatrice, he’d been ensorcelled. As she sat, straight-backed on her stool, with the great register open before her, her blue eyes fierce with concentration, her blonde locks cascading around her face, she became his goddess.

  Beatrice would never admit it, but despite her romantic flights of fancy she was probably the one person on earth more shy and awkward with the opposite sex than Archie. The merest intimation of anything to do with real boys had her melting in an agony of embarrassment, which perhaps explained why her taste extended only to pale, skinny, academic types—and then only in her dreams
.

  It was some time before Archie plucked up the courage to speak to his idol. It happened at the museum Christmas party, after they had each drunk two glasses of punch.

  ‘Miss Goodenough, are you musical, at all?’ he blurted. ‘I mean, do you like music—that sort of thing?’

  Somehow, Archie’s mirroring of her own internal anguish put Beatrice at ease. Or perhaps it was the punch. In any case she responded in a rather breathless way about the glories of Brahms and Schubert, and the virtues of Elgar, then blushed violently.

  Desperate to sound cultured, Archie had drawn his question from thin air. He knew nothing at all about music, and was trapped by a rising sense of panic. He was about to slink away, a self-confirmed failure, when he remembered the posters advertising a recital at the town hall.

  ‘Would you come to a concert with me?’ he stammered.

  ‘I’d love to,’ said Beatrice, somewhat surprising herself.

  Archie made a feeble excuse that he was needed at home, then rushed into the street to find out exactly what the poster advertised. To his horror, he saw that it was not Brahms or Schubert, but a Salvation Army hymn night. But he was committed now. Just have to make the best of it, he said to himself. It was, after all, the season for such things.