The Museum at the End of the World

by John Metcalf

“Christ!” said Forde. “You really did stumble into the mother lode, didn’t you?”

  “What light there was,” she said, “came from the nesting slots, they were like a wedge of cheese with the thin end going to the outside, two layers of them round the top of the walls, not layers, tiers, I should say, and the light seemed greenish for some reason, sort of thick, almost as if you were underwater, subaqueous, that’s the word.”

  “So,” said Forde, “there—”

  “How strange,” she said, “that light. As though you were deep under water and looking up towards the surface and the light from the slots was the sky.”

  She stared at him for a few seconds from some far distance and then seemed almost to shake herself.

  “Pardon?”

  “So,” he said, “there you were, married…”

  “Roast beef,” she said, “roast beef with Bisto gravy and roast potatoes, roast pork with apple sauce and roast potatoes, roast lamb with mint sauce and roast potatoes, married life,” she said, “progressed.”

  “Mmmm,” said Forde.

  “I read a lot, returned the library books on time, went for walks with dog and without dog, shopped, rummage sales at the church marking the seasons, bought the Observer Book of Trees and Shrubs, little holidays were pleasant if only to ski places, then there were courses on English pottery in which I was fairly interested but—I don’t know if you’ll understand this—but bored by at the same time. Because it was there, historically, if you see what I mean, but it wasn’t beautiful. Unlike studio pottery, but studio pottery wouldn’t have done at all. Tongues would have wagged. If they’d seen Lucie Rie in my house or Hans Coper. Leach and Shoji Hamada were just getting started up then in St. Ives. Don’t you love Bernard Leach, those chargers, that mushroomy-coloured glaze?”

  “I’m afraid I’m not up on Leach,” said Forde. “heard of, but—”

  “You see,” said Anna, “dinnerware, tea cups and saucers, there was a practicality there, a function they understood, a dinner plate was a dinner plate, and the more hideous the more they liked it. They loved the Worcester stuff, floral, florid, gilt, views of Castles and Stately Homes—vulgar beyond description—but Hans Coper would have puzzled them, aroused hostility.

  Army wives…”

  She paused.

  “Raku,” she said, “and army wives would have been like—save me from some awful cliché, Forde. Like, oh hell, like oil and water. What? No, no, Mess Nights were obligatory, of course, but beyond that one couldn’t escape socializing to a degree. Tony’s rank demanded it.

  “Anyway, I enjoyed getting out and about, the day trips up to Hanley in Stoke-on-Trent to the Ceramics Museum and the Wedgewood Memorial Institute, you know, the Etruria stuff and the pseud Jasperware, and a decent lunch all on my own sitting in state with a real tablecloth being gracious and pretending not to be me.

  “But the real treat was poking about in antique shops and junk shops. I’d started to buy lustreware, the pink or silver mainly. It was all made with a compound called ‘Purple of Cassius’—though even as I say that, and it’s perfectly clear in my mind, I have no idea—no idea at all why. Which has never occurred to me before. Why ‘Cassius,’ I mean, which is what I mean by being interested but bored at the same time.”

  “Because,” said Forde, frowning in concentration, “if you’d really been interested, you’d have found out.”

  “Exactly!” she said.

  “Coffee,” said Forde.

  “Am I beginning to sound ridiculous?”

  “Shall we have coffee in the lounge? It would make a change from this rather,” waved his hand about, “caveronorous… caver... cave-like.”

  Passing through the foyer, Anna gave the bell on the unmanned front desk a bling.

  “That’ll teach him to sssh me,” she said.

  A young woman wearing a tie appeared; Forde wondered, not for the first time, why he found women in ties sexually attractive.

  Shrilling pipe or fluting whistle

  declaimed Anna

  In the valleys come again;

  Fife of frog and call of tree-toad—

  “Shssh,” said Forde, hurrying her elbow, “shssh.”

  In the lounge, sole occupants, they sank into armchairs.

  The waitress fussed with things.

  “What are you smiling about?” said Forde.

  “Junk shops,” she said. “Just remembering. One lovely day. I bought a badger.”

  “In a glass case?”

  “No, he was just standing there. On a plinth. A really handsome fellow! I’ll never forget his coat. The hair, when you stroked it, it felt very thick and coarse, brittle, bristly almost, rather like…”

  She cast about.

  “… rather like a cheap crowd-scene wig.”

  “Hmmm,” said Forde.

  She glanced down at her palm.

  “It was so, so unexpected.”

  “And how was the advent of the badger received?”

  “It caused for some days a certain...” she did one of her actressy little gestures, “... a certain froideur.”

  She shook her head and firmed her lips.

  “When I was out one day Tony disposed of it.”

  She undid the paper wrapping of a sugar cube.

  “It did not smell!”she said

  “Cane sugar,” said Forde, “is always to be preferred.”

  Holding the cube out as if it were a disdained specimen, she said, “Quite. Irredeemably infra dig.”

  She flashed a grin.

  Then her expression settled again and she said, “But you know, my badger was just like everything else. Indulged just so far and no further. Setting limits for the child. It was all pretending. Pretending to be something, more inventing an interest than feeling it, all those years pretending, playing a part. That’s what being the wife of an army officer was like for me, like being on an unending invalid’s diet, unending blandness and accord, a life-sentence of, oh, blanquette de veau, say, and raspberry jello.”

  Forde nodded in what he thought might look like a judicious manner and poured more coffee.

  “So when Tony died, I was sad. Of course I was sad. All those years. But I wasn’t grief-stricken.”

  She held Forde’s gaze.

  “But I’ll tell you something.”

  An ‘ummm?’ was forced from Forde.

  “That fetching white stripe, the feel of him, that stuffed badger, he was real.”

  Forde resorted again to measured nodding.

  Anna sipped her coffee.

  She stared at him across the table.

  “I want very much,” she said, “ to make you understand.”

  “Oh,” said Forde, “I think I—”

  “Take,” she said, “say, Mess Nights. Black tie, maroon cummerbunds. The chic drink in those early days was gin with Rose’s Lime Cordial. The noise rising fast. Chit. Chat. Chump. The other half, old chap? Tilt the wrist, pray, on the Tanqueray, hmmm? Women’s plump shoulders. A heated pong seeping up, Johnson’s Baby Powder, foul Lily-of-the-Valley Bath Salts on some of the matrons, Chanel, Givenchy, a miasma. Dreadful noise, guffaws, teeth, it was nearly impossible to hear what people were saying, so you were reduced to smiles and nodding. Then the drift to the dining table. Chairs drawn out with ostentatious gallantry. Everyone stood, of course, for the Colonel’s entrance. He in the full—what’s that lovely word?—the full panoply of dress uniform, in full fig, ‘gongs,’ as they used to say, not black tie, because, you see, he had to wear the Dettingen Sword.”

  “The what?”

  “It’s one of the Commandments of military life,” she said, “that no one can take a weapon into the Mess. And very wise, too, given that they’re piss-artists to a man. But for the Colonel of the Worcestershires—or were they the 29th Foot then?—never could
keep these damn things straight. But the colonels of the Worcestershires were granted the honour of wearing into the Mess the Dettingen Sword—an honour bestowed—I can’t remember if it was given to a particular colonel or to the regiment—but anyway given by George the—can’t remember—but one of the three—for valour on the field of battle at the Battle of Dettingen. The French,” she said with a dismissive wave. “1740-ish, I think. So it would be, I guess, the Second.

  “Anyway, the Colonel stands at the head of the table and is approached by the youngest Subaltern, who is doing the Slow March. Then when the Subaltern reaches him, the Colonel raises his arms out at his sides and the Subaltern—is there such a word as ‘ungirds’?

  “The sword’s in a silver-gilt frog with tassels and braided cords tied into decorative knots hanging from the hilt, the whole mess of it the size of a small bird’s nest. So then—do you know the word ‘frog’?”

  Ford patted his hip.

  “Or ‘chape’?”

  Ford shook his head.

  “Gotcha!” she said. “It’s the half-moon metal bit at the bottom of a scabbard. Stops the point. Whenever I’m feeling blue or—I don’t know, inadequate or something, I think of words like ‘chape,’ that my enemies don’t know, and it cheers me up.”

  “So what happened then? In the Mess?”

  “I often visit a lovely red leather one in Boston.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Frog. In the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Harold likes it there. When we go in, he always puts his finger to his lips, ssh. Anyway, the second-youngest Subaltern Slow Marches up to them bearing a silver tray—pardon me—a salver, with a pair of white kid gauntlets on it and they’re each embroidered on the backs with the Crown. Then—oh, God!—after much rigid backwards-and-forwarding and glove-donning and foot-stamping and about-turning and general palaver, the sword is borne by the youngest Subaltern at Slow March round the table.”

  With a wriggle forward, she heaved herself out of the armchair, pulled down her dress, squared shoulders, and proceeded, in stately slow march, in and out of the furniture, arms stretched in front of her, palms up, bearing the sword. The waitress passing through with a bus-pan of crockery for the dishwasher stopped, staring.

  Sinking back into her armchair, she said, “Then the Subaltern set the sword in the centre of the table and stood back at attention, set the sword on two gunmetal things—stands? No, what’s the word? Two… like the things in a Chinese restaurant—but bigger, of course, the doohickeys you rest chopsticks on.

  “And the stewards are filling the glasses and then the Colonel proposes the toast:

  The Dettingen Sword.

  “The older officers are already bright red and when the service starts they pour—well, you see, they’d have a big sherry when they came into the mess and several Rose’s Lime Cordials or whatever their poison, but they’d hold onto their sherry glasses and get a refill and take it in to dinner and tip it into their beef consommé to tide them over until the service of the mess Chambertin or Muscadet, which were imported by the Education Officer whose main job it was—whose sole job it was—except for delivering occasional lectures on the regimental history of the Vein Openers and organizing the lottery tickets and showing pox films. It was always beef consommé.

  “Dozens of candles in the candelabra spaced down the length of the table, you can feel the heat of it rising. The tide of conversation, the oppression of it, cars, perennials, the plots of films, the cure of bald patches in lawns, the exploits of someone or other at Bisley. The perfume miasma…” She flapped both hands, dispelling it, “and the boom, boom like an iron torture device screwed tighter and tighter round your head.”

  She made some small, elegiac sound within a sigh.

  “I just used to sit there and stare at the mess silver. At the candlelight playing on it. The most amazing thing—it was always at centre-table next to the Dettingen Sword—was a huge model of a Juggernaut. Must have been the gift of an officer who’d served at some time in India, I don’t think the regiment did. You’ve heard about this mess silver business?”

  “From retiring officers?” said Forde.

  She nodded.

  “When Tony died…” she said, and broke off. After a pause, she said, “It’s a tradition I have some feeling for. I went down to London to the Silver Vaults and scouted out an eighteenth-century tureen, gadrooned… Chancery Lane? Sorry. Boring you… I don’t suppose the mess could tell the difference if it had come from Debenham’s third-floor Kitchen Wares, but I’ve always believed in acting as if. If we don’t, I’ve always felt, what’s left?”

  “Anyway,” she said, “anyway. Inebriated maundering. But this Juggernaut. It was so bizarre I looked it all up. The actual car, chariot, wagon—whatever you call it, was supposed to have been fifty feet high and have sixteen huge wheels. And sitting in it the mammoth statue of Jagganath. The car lived all the year in one particular temple, but on the feast day it was dragged to a neighbouring temple in a procession. Flowers strewn in the streets, flowers in garlands, drummers, thronged bodies and faces masked with coloured dyes. Pilgrims were supposed to have thrown themselves under the wheels in religious ecstasy, and bystanders to have been crushed to death as it rolled on. Couldn’t stop the bloody thing, I suppose.

  “Well, this silver monstrosity—dozens upon dozens of devotees heaving on the silver ropes and squished bodies, arms flung upwards as the wheels crushed them, chaps at the back in a great collapsing mound pushing, and a mass of chaps clinging to the sides—like those photos of people in India on trains or Africans clinging to the roofs and window frames of Mama buses. It was so big and busy and so ugly, it should have been in a Ripley’s Believe It or Not museum.

  “One of mess servants told me the silver wasn’t sterling. It was low-grade Indian stuff that tarnished faster.

  “Native silver, always polishing the piece, ma’m, a soft tooth brush for the crevices and not Goddard’s or Silvo, the only thing to get the job done, Duraglit wadding. With Duraglit there’s none of that white stuff left behind.’

  “Such a pleasant man.

  “Talking of India,” she went on, “do you remember those Kipling lines?

  For the Colonel’s Lady an’ Judy O’Grady

  Are sisters under their skin.

  “They really didn’t like me chatting to the mess servants. Any ‘same under the skin’ business didn’t go down at all well, wasn’t ‘on,’ do you see? Simply wasn’t how one behaved, do you see? Made the servants uncomfortable, m’dear.

  “Anyway, they’d all be well-pissed by dessert, and Tony would have told off one of the subalterns to drive me home before the games started.”

  “Games?”

  “A feature,” she said.

  “Cards, do you mean?”

  She laughed.

  “Games like what?”

  “Oh,” she shrugged, “like one chap lying down on the floor and seeing how many chaps at the same time could make a pyramid on him before he passed out.”

  *

  They stood in the foyer of the Lord Beaverbrook waiting for the taxi and looking out into the night.

  “The man who wrote the menus,” said Forde, gesturing towards the doors and beyond, “would describe that as the porte cochère.”

  She pushed her elbow into his side.

  “I’m not convinced,” he said, “that this is a good idea, but I simply can’t think of anywhere else in Fredericton.”

  Snow was blowing.

  “Anyway,” Anna went on, “I just didn’t seem at ease in England after Tony died. There was nowhere I really fitted in. And Harold was here, of course, and the housekeeper was getting a bit tottery… So I sold the house and there was money in the bank account and some stocks, my solicitor did all that, and then there was Tony’s pension. I was rather touched by that. He’d been on a training exercise in the Tru
cial States, the, um, you know…”

  She waved them away.

  “He’d only been doing inspections, administrative things for years, the derring-do days were long behind.”

  “Comes to us all,” said Forde.

  “He became quite morose,” she said, “when he couldn’t gallivant about with a Bergen blowing things up.”

  “Boom. Boom,” said Forde.

  She slapped his arm.

  “Comes to us all,” he said.

  “What was I talking about?” she said.

  “Pension?”

  “Right! His death,” she said, “was a bit, well, iffy.”

  “Iffy? What do you mean ‘iffy’?”

  “A couple of the boys, including his long-time driver, told me it was an accident, that the lorry they were digging out just toppled onto him. Which is what I think did happen. The four men who’d been with Tony, you see, no one was wounded. But other lads who expressed condolences said Tony’d been killed when the lorry was attacked by marauders out of the desert raiding for guns and equipment. They’d seen the bullet holes in the truck a couple of days later when it was towed back into camp.

  “So what I think happened was that Colonel Raven, he was fond of Tony and a real old sweetie-pie, I think he organized the shooting of the truck so that Tony’s death would be ‘in the line of duty,’ or is it ‘on active service’? It’s TV confuses you, one’s British, one’s American. Which meant his pension would be bigger, which I did receive—the ‘active service’ one. Sounds James Bondish, doesn’t it?”

  She shrugged the matter away.

  “Anyway, Viyella shirts, cavalry twill trousers, his pairs of brogues, his fishing rods and reels—‘centre-something,’ I think he’d said they were, old ones and valuable, and the rods were split-cane, which is something special he told me, but it all went to a charity shop. Even the ivory shirt stays. It was all—stuff. I just wanted to be done with it.

  “The only thing I kept from that life was a small painting I’d bought, of a plate and a knife and a fork by William Scott. It’s always been an icon for me, literally, an icon. I love it. Do you know him? Tony used to refer to it as ‘What’s for Dinner?’”