The Museum at the End of the World

by John Metcalf

  She shrugged again.

  “It was something they had and I didn’t. I wasn’t in the play like they were. Their timing, it was like a language I couldn’t speak. When the ball was coming my way and they were swarming it towards me, I couldn’t do anything, just stupidly watched.”

  The waiter padded towards them again.

  “Oh, I don’t know! A steak, I guess.”

  “The chef recommends his onglet de boeuf.”

  They both nodded.

  “Gigondas, that’s OK?”

  “So,” she said.

  “In Fredericton!” said Forde. “Onglet!”

  “So we now come,” she said, “in this gripping narrative to Captain Anthony Tresillian, my very own ‘stage door Johnny.’ Flowers and his card left at Mr. Anstruther’s cubbyhole. He was smitten by my beauty. Me! He thought I was a wonderful actress. That should have warned me. He took me to dinner. To dinners. With wine. Wine! When Mary and I—if there wasn’t a technical rehearsal or a press call we could only afford a quart bottle of cider between us on a Sunday afternoon.”

  She sipped the Gigondas, hmmm, looked up, and nodded her approval.

  “Truth be told,” she said, “some part of me was tired of being cold and poor, tired of packets of crisps and ginger-coloured fishcakes from MacFisheries and baked beans and tea turned orange from Carnation condensed milk.”

  She set the glass down, ran her fingertip and thumb up and down its stem.

  “Marrying Tony,” she said, “was the one really unforgiveable thing I’ve ever done.”

  Forde did not know what to say.

  “You were young.”

  She nodded.

  After a moment or two, she said, “That cider. It had a bird on the label, one of those birds with red heads.”

  Forde looked blank.

  “They attack trees.”

  “Woodpeckers?”

  “Exactly! Woodpecker Cider. Bulmer’s, that was what it was called. It made one shudder even as one drank it. Warm cider! They didn’t have fridges.”

  “Yes,” said Forde, nodding. “It all seems so long ago.”

  “You’re making me suddenly remember all sorts of odd things,” said Anna. “I remember how much pleasure it gave me—you’re going to think I’m really silly—but going to an off-licence to buy a bottle of wine and there was always a thick wad of pink or mauve tissue paper on the counter, and the man put the bottle on the wad and rolled it up in the top sheet so tightly and beautifully and a twist at the neck.”

  “With me,” said Forde, “it was ice cream. Watching them make wafers. Sculpt wafers.”

  She reached across the table and squeezed his hand.

  “Lovely man,” she said

  “Not the sort of memory,” he said, “to share with one’s colleagues of the professorial variety.”

  “Thinking back,” said Anna, “the things that Mary and I put up with. We roomed together in Nottingham and we usually shared when we were on tour. She looked out for me right from the beginning. She was kindness itself. Some meals we were reduced to sugar sandwiches. And those ‘boarding houses for theatricals’—one place always gave us curried mince with bloated sultanas in it. The curry powder tasted chemical and turned the stuff bright mustardy-ochre, the exact colour, Mary said, of a newborn’s shit.”

  She smiled at a memory.

  “Have you ever eaten a meat,” she said, “called ‘scrag-end’?”

  “Christ, no!” said Forde. “What is it?”

  She shrugged.

  “Don’t know. They served that too.”

  “What an adventurous life!’

  “Those curses of Mary’s. We knew what they meant but how she got there…? Always effing and blinding, Mary was. If she was searching for something or if she’d broken something, ‘Gilbert and fucking Sullivan!’ she’d say, or if she was in a rage and threatening to quit she’d say, ‘If he gives me one more note like that in front of the company it’s Goodnight Vienna!’ So long ago now.”

  She paused, shaking her head.

  “What’s that you’re writing?”

  “A nugget,” said Forde, “for future use.”

  What?”

  “’Scrag-end.’”

  “And those ‘boarding houses for theatricals’ are etched in the memory. Etched. Rooms half-filled with ancient wardrobes the size of double coffins. Ovaltine and a motor bike under tarpaulin in the front garden. And cold, cold. Sometimes, in the north, there’d be no washbasin in the room, just a washstand with a jug of cold water standing in the matching bowl. You’ll find them in antique stores now. No such thing as showers, of course. You had to book a bath. Appointments for baths in one place we used to stay, they recorded them in a big black ledger held closed by a huge rubber strap like the ones they cinch around your arm for a blood test.

  “One place, I remember, Mary and I were having breakfast in ‘The Breakfast Room’—red plastic salt-and-pepper shakers, shaped like tomatoes and greasy to the touch—in what would have been the parlour, though sometimes it was in the basement, the breakfast room, I mean, anyway we both felt somehow uneasy as though, I don’t know, as though there was another presence there, and then under a side table that was covered with a green sort of cloth hanging down, baize, bobbles along the edges, very Victorian, the things one remembers! So vivid. We saw a tartan slipper and eyes and there was a small child under there entirely naked—‘feral’ Mary said—except for these adult-sized tartan slippers like slithery boats on his feet.”

  “Very unnerving,” said Forde.

  “And it was that house,” she said, “that had a shared toilet for two floors. I used to read a great deal in those days, and I remember a line in a novel about someone finding in a communal toilet ‘a turd like a conger eel’…well…”

  “And Mary?” said Forde. “What happened to her? Are you still in touch?”

  “No,” she said. “after I married Tony I let things drift. Then cut myself off entirely.”

  Forde cocked his head in enquiry.

  “Don’t you understand?” she said, “Norman’s Conquest. Everything, everything I did was on the rebound from Torquay. I’m sorry,” she said, “Do stop me if I’m becoming garrulous. It’s the wine.”

  “Not at all!” said Forde. “It’s so interesting, so, I mean, all I do is sit at a desk and turn sentences around.”

  “So, then,” she said, “Tony.”

  She set down her knife and fork.

  “Does the word ‘Dubbin’ mean anything to you?”

  “For waterproofing—”

  She nodded.

  “A sponge bag?”

  “Yes?”

  “Does the name ‘Cash’ ring a bell? Labels?”

  “Yes, of course. With your name on them. They were printed on cloth, sort of—what? Tabs? You sent away for them. My mother sewed them into shirt collars and waistbands, football shorts and such—why are you asking?”

  “Just to see if you knew what I’d got myself into.”

  “With Tony, you mean?”

  “How old were you?”

  “Cash, you mean, labels? Ten? Eleven?”

  “Yes, well he was thirty-two.”

  She fell silent.

  “I never loved him. Tolerated him, I suppose. That was what was unforgivable.”

  “We all made young mistakes, Anna.”

  “I think he saw me as a ‘free spirit,’ an ‘actress,’ an ‘artiste,’ something outside his experience entirely. Sort of ethereal—if you can imagine. He had a lick of floppy hair at the front, like a boy. He was used to girls in jodhpurs, girls who wore pyjamas they kept under their pillows in zip-up pyjama bags that were shaped like horses. The kind of girls who called ‘Coming!’ to a ringing telephone.

  “Turned out he was quite wealthy. His colla
r stays were made of ivory. From the family elephant I wouldn’t have been surprised. His parents lived in a sort of manor-house-y place in the Cotswolds, near Little Rollwright. There was an enormous brass naval shell case from World War I in the hall for umbrellas and walking sticks. He had lovely manners, really, but he was overbearing. Not nastily or anything, but overpoweringly there, if you know what I mean. And loud. ‘Bluff,’ they’d have called him in earlier days. The men he led, by report, worshipped him.

  When he wanted to exercise his conjugal—”

  “Quite,” said Forde.

  “And ‘exercise,’” she said, “is le mot juste, he’d always say, ‘Fancy a spot of rumpy-pumpy?’ Though he smelled nice, I have to say that. Sweat a little bit, Wright’s Coal-Tar Soap and a bit lemony from his shaving stick. It’s funny, isn’t it, about smells. There was a general aroma around him, Kiwi-Shoe-Polish smell and a vegetable, flowery sort of tweed smell from his jackets.

  “And manly sports! God! Fell running. Rugby. Spelunking. Rock climbing. Off-piste skiing in the French Alps—Val Claret. Mirabelle. He coached rugby, shivering little boys in bright jerseys. Bellowing round the house ‘Have you seen my creel?’ And hare coursing. They wore little green outfits and caps like jockeys and there was a Master and beagles foaming about and pouring over each other, and those skeletal grey dogs looking terrified and quivering and they made toot noises on little copper bugle-things and it was always soaking wet.

  “And his damned car I was supposed to admire. British Racing Green—”

  “An MG?” said Forde.

  “‘A 1930 M-Type,’ I was told to say. The hood was held down by a leather strap—”

  “Bonnet,” said Forde.

  She stuck out her tongue.

  “And the roof fastened on with studs. ‘Poppers,’ he called them.”

  “And ‘boot,’ said Forde.

  She shook her head.

  “Yes.” she said, “conversation was often a minefield. And the weird class, is it sillobeths? No. Never could remember that word.”

  “Shibboleths,” said Forde.

  We use Colman’s Mustard, never Keen’s.

  Cane sugar is always to be preferred.

  Other than a signet ring, gentlemen do not wear jewellery.

  “And loud. He boomed. Took up most of any space. Boom. Boom. He was affable enough but boomy, always the first to tap knife on glass to give boomy speeches. He wasn’t SAS—I don’t know if they had that then—but something in that line. Officially he was in the Worcestershire Regiment, but he was always being seconded to ‘training exercises,’ desert places, Oman, Arabs, the Trucial States. I believe they call them now the United Arab Emirates.”

  She waved a dismissive hand.

  “When he was off on these jaunts it was the only time the house was restful. Then it was back to boom, boom, boom, and Mess Nights. Though he was very proud of the Worcestershires. They used to be called the Twenty-Ninth Foot, and in 1770 they shot four rioters in Boston. And because of this the Americans called the regiment The Vein Openers—not very catchy, is it?—more like apothecary’s assistants—and that’s still the official nickname or whatever the word is.”

  She frowned.

  “Nickname doesn’t sound dignified enough, does it? ‘Sobriquet’?”

  “I can’t think,” said Forde, shrugging.

  “‘The Boston Massacre,’” she said. “That’s what the Americans called this scuffle. Much referred to,” she said, “in Mess speeches and toasts and so forth. So,” she said—holding out both palms—”there I was”—she made a clicking noise, tongue pulled from palate,

  “—an army wife.”

  “What about his parents?” said Forde.”How did they take to you?”

  “Oh, his mother was warily welcoming. A young girl from the colonies, the colonies!, a girl of what antecendents? an actress, a doubtful hmmm to that one, the bass line there being no better than she should be, taking her darling boy away by wicked wiles.”

  She grinned at him.

  “Me!” she said. “Wiles! Polite smiles at the beginning. But little doubt left as to who was Matron. A household,” said Anna, pausing, “a household, you might say, folded and bound into hospital corners. She soon had me marked down as a malingerer, a shirker. A distant politeness,” she said, “descended.”

  “Oh dear, oh dear,” said Forde. “I could imagine.”

  “If she was making coffee in the morning—she actually did have an Aga cooking range—she always served it in astonishingly horrible mugs.

  ‘They’re thrown locally and one does feel a responsibility to one’s local craftspeople.’ Thick, squat, but the coffee was stirred with silver apostle spoons. And the sugar! I always remember that. The weight of it. Demerara sugar, not cubes, but sticky in a bowl, sort of a glistening, brown sludge.

  “She was a Divisional Commander of Girl Guides, always supervising whatyoucall’ems—in a big field with tents and odourous portables—jamborees—making speeches and dragging Girl Guides out of hedgerows from the clutches of ‘village oiks.’”

  Silently, white, black, the waiter materialized.

  “The dessert menu, Madam? Sir?”

  “Mmmm?” said Forde to Anna.

  “A few more minutes?” Anna said to the waiter.

  Forde opened the menu.

  “When I went over there—” said Anna.

  “Good God!” said Forde. “Sorry. A chapeau! A chapeau! Listen to this. ‘Baba au rhum served with syrup of rum, vanilla seeds, lemon zest and topped with a chapeau of whipped cream.’ Sorry.”

  “It was when the verse drama revival was starting. I was reading poetry all the time, how to speak it, that was what I wanted to learn. Christopher Fry had just, just written The Lady’s Not for Burning. Do you remember it?”

  “Years and years ago,” said Forde. “To be honest, I don’t remember much about it at all.”

  “It once seemed so alive, so sophisticated,” her out-thrust fingers theatrical in their tension. “It seemed so, you know, so beaded bubbles winking at the brim.”

  Forde shook his head in slow sympathy.

  “It was only Richard Burton’s second role. That was in 1948. He was twenty-three then and beautiful. So beautiful. And in 1950 Gielgud took it to New York and played the lead. Do you remember Thomas Mendip’s speeches?”

  “No, I’m afraid not.”

  “Or Jennet Jourdemayne’s?”

  “She was…”

  “The Lady,” said Anna.

  She set down her glass.

  Why do they call me a witch?

  Forde, recognizing quotation and remembering the plastic orchid in the bar, moved the everlasting flowers to the safety of his side of the table.

  Why do they call me a witch?

  Remember my father was an alchemist

  I live alone, preferring loneliness

  To the companionable suffocation of an aunt.

  I still amuse myself with simple experiments

  In my father’s laboratory. Also I speak

  French to my poodle. Then you must know

  I have a peacock which on Sundays

  Dines with me indoors. Not long ago

  A new little serving-maid carrying the food

  Heard its cry, dropped everything and ran,

  Never to come back, and told all she met

  That the Devil was dining with me.

  Forde stared at her

  “That was my audition,” she said, “at Nottingham. Well, part of it.”

  “How do you remember…”

  “And now,” she said, “it’s all so faded.”

  She paused.

  “So faded.”

  With a sigh she fell silent, head down, her finger tips tracing up and down the tablecloth’s starched fold.
<
br />   The silence extended.

  To break what he felt to be deepening emotional awkwardness in the silence, Forde reached across the table and took her hand.

  “Anna.”

  Cradled her hand in both of his.

  “Anna.”

  “I know,” she said—

  “We’re here,” said Forde, giving her hand a little squeeze.

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “Before,” said Forde, “tell me. You were telling me about Tony’s mother.”

  “Well,” she said, “in a roundabout way I suppose I still am.”

  She made a grimace.

  “This,” she said, “might have been written just for her.”

  Struck a pose, declaimed:

  Stern daughter of the voice of God!

  O Duty!

  She gave him a brave grin.

  “I suppose she must have worn other things but I always picture her in oatmeal-coloured cardigans, she was a bit dumpy, and oatmeal lisle stockings and a sort of cut-down Robin Hood hat with the eye of a pheasant feather in the band. And a shortie duffle coat that did up with toggles made from the points of deer horns. You know what I mean, eye?”

  Forde flick-flicked his fingers.

  “But what you couldn’t take your eye off was the brooch she wore on the cardigans. Always the same one. It was a silver-and-cairngorm mounted grouse claw. Grisly thing. The nails gone yellow.”

  “A vision! said Forde. “A vision! And his father?”

  “I was never entirely sure,” said Anna, “that he’d quite mastered who I was. He always addressed me as ‘little lady.’ The Brigadier was, shall we say, vague. He usually held out until 11 a.m., but then he’d wander into the kitchen and point at the window and say something-something-yardarm and get a gin bottle from the pantry. Then he’d retire to his dovecote.”

  “His—?”

  “Yes. It was a round, tower-thing like a silo, original and untouched, I was told, since the sixteenth century, with a sign over the entrance KEEP OUT. DANGER. FALLING MASONRY, and apparently he sat in there most of the day in a deckchair drinking gin-and-bitters while studying the Daily Telegraph. Or ‘whilst,’ as he would have said, ‘whilst studying.’”