The Museum at the End of the World

by John Metcalf

  “Dangerously steep!” he said.

  The make-up was so elaborate, so excessive, that the word “make-up” seemed inadequate to convey …

  Maquillage, perhaps.

  “What a lovely—would one call it a choker?”

  She smiled.

  “Victorian, isn’t it?”

  “Clever boy,” she said.

  “And not jet,” said Forde. “Rather too matte for that.”

  She was watching his face.

  “It wouldn’t possibly be … coal, would it?”

  “Very clever boy,” she said. “How did you know that?”

  “I’ve seen pieces in museums and at auctions.”

  “I love auctions,” she said. “My name’s Bronwyn.”

  “They still do it, you know,” he said. “I’ve seen modern pieces for sale from a barrow on the seafront at Whitby in Yorkshire. Not with that refinement, of course. Robert Forde,” he added, “though people usually just call me Forde. I don’t really know why.”

  She took his arm.

  “Nice sleepy auctions in country towns—such a pleasure,” she said. “Like boxes of chocolates. Magical boxes, always full and waiting to be opened. I lead a lovely, selfish life going to antique shops and auctions, buying little things of beauty for myself. I adore Jermyn Street, don’t you? Perfume from Floris. The Burlington Arcade for antique jewellery. Paxton and Whitfield for those special water biscuits. And then the bliss of afternoon tea at Fortnum. Of course,” she went on, “I wasn’t brought up here entirely…”

  “Here?”

  “England, I mean. Which rather explains it all. No. I spent my early years in Sarawak. My parents were missionaries, you see.”

  “Anglican?”

  She batted her ancient lashes.

  “Do I have a Baptist look?”

  Forde smiled.

  “And then I was shipped off to boarding school in England. Nine at the time. Plenty of love for the dusky indigenes but precious little for me. Anyway, that was the way I felt as a girl. Poor Bronwyn, less loved than a Dyak. So I’ve always comforted myself ever since with objets d’art and positively ruinous delectabilia and …”

  “Wait for us!” called Sheila.

  “… and remain,” continued Bronwyn, “with lingering hostility towards Dyaks.”

  They paused outside the listing wooden swayback shed, which served as a lavatory. Sheila joined the line. Seconds after entering she shot out again.

  “Christ!” she said.

  “It’s easy to see,” said Bronwyn, “you’ve never been to China.”

  The four of them made their way along the uneven path through the woods towards the shed where the lecture and tea-drinking and folkloric entertainment were to take place.

  “No,” said Forde at the door, after glancing inside, “I’ll go for a stroll in the woods. At least they’re not wearing clogs.”

  “Clogs?”

  “Mmm.”

  “Why should they be? They’re not Dutch.”

  “No, but the hulking bulk of them, and the jolliness and headscarves, and accordions. I don’t know. Perhaps I was thinking of Lancashire.”

  It was warm, cloudless, the slow-wheeling shapes of hawks sliding down the sky. The rows of tea bushes were planted on hillsides that looked as though the trees had been bulldozed into wreckage. The soil was black and acidic. Rank bracken had grown back in between the rows.

  A flicker of movement on the fringe of dappling oak leaves caught Forde’s eye. Familiar brown wings laced by demarcating black lines and dots. Two fritillaries. He was excited and intensely pleased.

  When he had first seen Monarch butterflies on coming to Canada he had been reminded of fritillaries, the colouration, the black lines of demarcation like niello jewellery, but Monarchs had seemed burly and muscle-bound in comparison, NCOs of the butterfly world, while fritillaries were officers and aristocrats, the browns and ochres, umbers, burnt siennas of their wings like exquisite marquetry.

  He used to wander in the New Forest when he was a child catching butterflies and hunting for grass snakes and adders. The boy he wandered with was four years older, and Forde had existed in a haze of love and hero-worship. The butterflies had been shaken from the net into a killing jar, glass and wide-mouthed with a large cork bung. Onto a pad of folded cotton at the bottom of the jar, a rag of an old shirt perhaps—not cotton wool as insect legs snagged in its wisps—he’d pour a few drops from a bottle of Thawpit, a commercial solvent used in dry cleaning and then freely available. It was only years later that he’d learned that Thawpit was actually carbon tetrachloride and considered to have near-fatal effects on the liver. He and David used to like the sweetness of its smell.

  He could see them now, nosing the air for the faint smell of grass snakes, an unmistakable smell, musk and marsh. He could see the two of them now standing beside the silver glint of small streams, breathing open-mouthed so that their hearts would not pound in their ears and mask the faint slither of sound they were straining for, the pause as the head lifted and the black tongue flicked the air, then again the long whisper of sound resumed.

  And into an old pillow case went adders, which they handled with dangerous familiarity. They carried an old tobacco tin containing a razor blade and purple crystals of potassium permanganate as first aid. They had sworn to each other that they’d cut a cross over the two fang marks and suck and spit and let blood flow and then force in the purple crystals. He’d had terrible dreams about the thought of cutting. Doing the cutting. He’d been—what? Twelve?

  They’d sold the grass snakes and adders to the Ferndown Zoo for a shilling a foot, money that kept them in cigarettes. They’d smoked a brand called Park Drive.

  Even then, nearly sixty years ago, fritillaries were seldom seen, very local in their distribution. He’d known only three rides in the New Forest near Ringwood, where they might reliably have been found. On St. Catherine’s Hill outside Christchurch he remembered catching a Smooth snake, a species considered locally extinct. Remembered the wonder of it, David’s jealousy.

  He’d read just a couple of years ago a doom-laden list in the Daily Telegraph of creatures now extinct or nearing extinction, creatures common in his childhood, adders themselves, slow worms, cinnabar moths, Smooth snakes, green-throated sand lizards, palmated newts, fritillaries …

  But here in the sunlight, in all their remembered grace and beauty …

  There welled into his mind, along with that special Anglican smell of damp and dust and stone, a line from the psalms.

  We bring our years to an end, as it were a tale that is told.

  He stood staring, transported.

  *

  “Sir Charles,” said Bronwyn, taking his arm again, “was a nasty old man. Very fierce and rude.”

  “But to think,” said Forde, “that you … I mean The White Rajah of Sarawak! It seems somehow …”

  “He didn’t die until quite recently, you know—well, the sixties I think it was. In Cheltenham. Or Cirencester.” She waved a dismissive hand. “He had a horrible glass eye he got from a taxidermist to cover a socket. Hunting fall. Eye on a twig. He got an assortment of eyes—rabbits, sheep, deer, and so forth and he used to wear different ones everyday. But yes, he was there—in Sarawak, I mean—well, until the Japanese soldiers came.”

  “And when you were a child, you remember…”

  “Oh, but it was the Ranee all the stories were about! Sylvia, her name was. Oh, she was a baggage! Of course, I never saw any of the goings-on but all the children heard the stories from the servants and the agency men and their servants… Not that she was in Sarawak all that often. She much preferred Paris and London. ‘Frivolous’ was the word my father used—such a weight of disapproval. She was Lord Esher’s daughter, you know. Sylvia Brett, she used to be. And a merry dance she led him, by all accounts. Do
people use the word ‘trollop’ nowadays?”

  Through the trees the buses in the parking lot came into sight.

  “It was the drink,” said Bronwyn. “Gin for breakfast rarely ends well. She was a living scandal. She even made the Dyaks nervous, and some of those johnnies weren’t exactly straitlaced.”

  “Shrunken heads and such?”

  She waved her free hand dismissively again.

  “Nasty, smelly things,” she said.

  She paused to pat his arm.

  “She refused, just refused to leave the table, and stayed on after dinner for port or brandy. Smoked the cigars and drank the brandy. Utterly foxed. And by then she’d be quite raucous. Not, apparently, that the esteemed Sir Charles Vyner Brooke appeared to care! He’d be as fuddled as she was and fumbling in some creature’s placket.”

  Forde tutted.

  “Too sordid, my dear,” said Bronwyn.

  She shook her head.

  “It is said,” said Bronwyn, “it is said, that after dinner the men repaired to the billiard room and she used to hoist up her skirt and clamber up onto the table … I’m not embarrassing you am I, dear?”

  “No, no. Fascinating.”

  “And work herself against a corner pocket and open her legs wide … and shout … you’re sure I’m not …”

  “Please.”

  “By this time, of course, she’d be hectic with drink.”

  “And shout what?” he said.

  “And she used to shout …”

  Bronwyn paused and drew herself up.

  “Come on, boys!” she cried. “Pot the red!”

  *

  The pork medallions, please.

  Sir?

  Blanquette de veau.

  “Well, as I was saying, the pottery finds from any given site will be divided into groups, do you see, on the basis of different fabrics. Now what does fabrics mean? Well, pottery fabrics depend on the degree to which the clay was worked before the vessel was formed and the kind of temper that was used.

  Certainly, Madam. Gazeuse or still?

  Oh, um, fizzy.

  Temper? The material used to reinforce and strengthen the clay. Clay is tempered—mixed with, do you see, shell, sand, straw, and ground-up, previously fired pottery—shards—which substance is referred to as grog. Haven’t the faintest idea why.

  Anyway, the archaeologists would define the groups, do you see, as handmade or wheel-made wares. As fine, medium, or coarse wares. As wares poorly fired or well-fired. And as wares tempered with …”

  “Dear frantic God! DO SHUT UP, ROGER, and have another drink.”

  *

  The Alupka Palace was designed, read Sheila, by the Scottish architects Edward Blore and Henry Hunt and was built for Prince Michael Vorontsov between 1828 and 1846… “Are you listening?”

  “No,” said Forde, “I’m watching this snail.”

  He thought the Palace vulgar and ridiculous, a pot-pourri of clashing styles, less a house than a folly. Sheila went into the Palace to see the bedroom where Sir Winston Churchill slept during the 1945 Yalta Conference; he wandered further into the gardens. They funnelled out to the drive, which led down to what was now a parking lot at the entrance to the estate. The Palace had been set into a ledge cut in the mountainside. The drive up to it was walled on both sides. On the mountain side of the drive was a retaining wall well above head height. The other wall was lower, providing a waist-high barrier against the mountain’s fall to the sea, where the sun sparked on water and Raoul Dufy sails stood white on blue.

  The mountain was thinly wooded and he noticed an ochre scar carving down through the trees, a shallow gully of erosion. He probably wouldn’t have seen them if not for the movement. They seemed to blend into the tumbled stone. A file of dogs.

  The leading dog was tall and wiry-haired, greyish with something about it of an Irish wolfhound. The dogs following were mongrels, brown mostly, here and there a flash of white. Where the gully widened into grass and weeds, the dogs stopped and looked about. Then they sank almost out of sight as they worked forward to the coping on the top of the wall. Then nothing.

  They gave a strong impression of tenseness, wariness. Forde waited until no one was near and gave a sharp whistle. A greyish ear flicked above the grass.

  “What are you doing?” said Sheila. “Watching snails?”

  He sensed covert movement along the coping and out of the corner of his eye caught the grey dog appearing at the foot of a flight of steps some twenty yards away. The dog sat. It waited until the drive was clear then led the pack across the drive into deep shadow on the seawall side. They trotted down towards the car park seeming almost to flow.

  As Forde and Sheila approached the buses, they saw the last two dogs, back legs splayed, squirming and scrunching themselves under the edge of their bus.

  “Why are they getting under there?”

  He shrugged.

  “What if they get run over?”

  “I expect they’ve done it before.”

  Sheila bent and banged the side of the bus with her umbrella handle.

  A ferocious snarl ripped back.

  “Perhaps,” said Forde, “he’s taken up a querencia.”

  “A what?”

  “It’s when a bull decides…”

  “I’m not having Hemingway,” she said, “before lunch.”

  She reversed her umbrella again.

  “If something of that size has taken a fancy to the underneath of the bus, I personally would be somewhat circumspect about challenging it.”

  “I’m not challenging him. I just don’t want him to…”

  “It’s not important whether you’re challenging him or not,” said Forde. “It’s what he thinks you’re doing.”

  “This is a ridiculous conversation,” said Sheila.

  “And especially,” added Forde, “if you are armed only with a collapsible umbrella.”

  “WHY,” said Woolly Bear, “IS THAT WOMAN HITTING THE BUS?”

  “Snails!” said Sheila.

  On the bus once again and driving along the coast road, Forde started reading the daily bulletin. “We’re promised ‘unique Crimean wines,’” he said. “Followed by lunch on the Naberezhnaya Lenina featuring ‘wholesome Ukrainian cuisine.’ Want to take bets?”

  In the yard surrounding the winery building stood rusting, industrial-looking container tanks. The building itself was surrounded by straggling lilac bushes, under one of which lay two unconscious drunks.

  Each visitor was given a tray holding twelve numbered glasses of wine, glasses about twice the size of a shot glass, the glass itself thick. A man in a suit expatiated at great volume through a sort of loud-hailer contraption on the qualities peculiar to each wine. They were all utterly undrinkable, each vilely sweeter than the last.

  Forde pushed his tray away and shook his head at Sheila.

  Tilting his head back, Father Keogh swilled each glass. Then his head came down again, his tongue searching into the glass, filling it, magnified, raw.

  With a small movement of his head and a glance, Forde directed Sheila’s attention to the sight of the fat tongue pushing in.

  *

  “You know,” said Forde when they were yet again on the bus and waiting for lavatory-stragglers and wine-purchasers,” I think the only wine I can remember being as foul as those came from Bulgaria. It was called Boyar’s Domain. Unforgettable.”

  …thirteen, fourteen, fifteen… counted the guide.

  “Poor man,” said Sheila. “He’s so anxious.”

  Lunch was leisurely and awful.

  Everyone was given an entire fish. Grey mullet, said the guide.

  They seemed to be deep-fried.

  Father Keogh spent the entire lunchtime drinking a brown liquid and gazing with obsessive intensity into
Mrs. Cleary’s cleavage.

  *

  The Romanov Apartments in Livadia Palace left them both feeling sad. The walls were hung with framed snapshots of Nicholas II, Tsar of All the Russias, the Tsarina Alexandra, the Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia and Tsarevich Alexei.

  The girls in summer white and wide, flowered hats.

  On country walks.

  Picking wild flowers.

  Sitting at elaborate picnics in the woods, white linen tablecloths.

  Paddling at the seaside.

  Alexei on his tricycle.

  Lessons on the terrace with their tutor.

  Anastasia, feet swinging under the piano bench, doggedly working on her baggy knitting.

  All murdered on the night of July 16, 1918 in Ekaterinburg in “The House of Special Purpose.” And, over the years, to be followed by millions more.

  Forde felt both moved and oppressed by the family snapshots, and leaving Sheila reading plaques and notices, wandered out into the gardens hoping the sunshine would lift his spirits.

  “Schwibzik,” they’d all called Anastasia—“Little One.”

  *

  The guide was approaching along the bus’ aisle.

  … sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen…

  Forde drew breath sharply as Father Keogh’s knees, one after the other, slammed into the back of his seat.

  “I could definitely use what Baden Powell would call a chota peg,” said Forde. “No, no, I mean a BURRA peg.”

  “Well,” said Sheila, “you’ve been looking forward to Chekhov’s house all week.”

  “What’s so special about this Chekhov fellah?”

  Forde turned towards the voice and saw an eye and nose and part of the mouth of Father Keogh, who seemed to be bent double as he peered up through the armrest gap between the seats.

  “I said what’s so special.”

  “Well a lot of people consider him the world’s greatest short-story writer.”

  “And you’re one of those, are you?”

  “Mmm-mmm, yes.”

  “I’ve not encountered him,” said Father Keogh.

  “Not had the pleasure of his acquaintance,” said The Minder’s voice.