Lucy and I were now estranged from one another, with neither of us making the first move to apologize, and the both of us knowing how much our words had wounded the other; and my heart was broken.
Sometimes, during the aching loneliness of all those years I had spent a spinster, the years spent living alone in one room at boarding houses and tired lodgings, I would have moments where I would realize how long it had been since anyone had touched me—even a handshake, or a hand placed on my forearm, a simple hug—and my body would ache, my soul would feel so heavy I would have to go out with shaking legs for a walk no matter what the weather was, because I feared that if I curled up on my bed like I so dearly wished to, I might remain there and never get up again. If humans are animals, I would think, then do we not require touch as well as food and water and air and a roof over our heads in order to live, to survive? It was a histrionic state of mind, these sudden funks, I knew that, but I could not escape them. And now, now that I knew what it was like to share my bed with another, to have a lover there to touch and hold and be held in return, now that I knew the true pleasures of sex, or how it felt for your jaw to ache from too much kissing, the rub of skin against skin that left a burn, the tight clasp of a hand in your hand, this estrangement felt even worse. I was marooned, adrift with no sight of land, for where or how would I ever meet someone like Lucy again, someone that could love me?
Although I had prepared to face the Major’s wrath for boarding up his home, when he returned from his trip he did not mention the windows at all, not even in a veiled aside. Paul said that he had narrowly escaped a direct bomb hit while in the north, so perhaps he had had a change of heart where matters of security were concerned, and yet he still did not join us in our nights in the basement during air raids, preferring to stay tucked up in bed with Sylvia, the heiress, who Dorothy had said he might ask to marry him soon. Her throaty laugh had become a common sound in the hall outside the Major’s office, but unfortunately for the rest of us they did not confine themselves to his office and private library—where I pictured her reclining on the skins on the floor, her pale skin a pleasing contrast—nor his suite of rooms upstairs, but made good use of the museum rooms to dawdle in and do heavens knows what else. He had his own set of keys to open up the rooms and then to lock them when they were finished, and he was irritatingly catholic about doing so, so I had no excuse for confronting him about putting the animals at risk.
“I’m being careful with the locks, Miss Cartwright,” he called out one day, when I left my office at the same time as he left the long gallery, as he bent to turn the key in the door, with lipstick on his cheek, and Sylvia leaned languidly against the wall, a loop of loose hair falling down her neck like a tail.
He patted the lock once he was done, tilted his head to me with a sardonic smile, and walked off, Sylvia following in his wake.
I grimaced as I stared at the long gallery door, trying not to imagine what he had been up to in there with only my animals for an audience, trying not to think of him tainting my workspaces with his lusts, his seedy trysts.
The museum rooms had once felt like a safe haven for Lucy and me, our own little hideaway from the rest of the house, and the fact that he was now intruding on them made me feel even more wretched.
My work was the only thing I had to keep me company those winter months, but there was little consolation to be found. I lost a striped owl to a moth infestation and nothing I could do would save it at its advanced stage of decay, so I sealed it up in its cabinet where it would die a slow second death as I watched through the glass. A sacrifice so that the moths that feasted on its viscera would not jump ship to a new host once they were finished. My fingers stunk of glue and poison, my arms burned from sweeping and vacuuming, and my eyes were strained from peering into corners, searching for tiny, wriggling things that I could never see.
Meanwhile, the animals stood and waited and watched me, with their silent eyes and fading fur, with feathers so dry and stiff they would not flutter in the strongest of winter winds, with the floor creaking and shifting in the cold beneath them. And whenever I finally slept—on those occasions when exhaustion or loneliness claimed me—I would toss and turn, my dreams monstrous and terrible, and then startle awake, my ears pricked ready for sounds: the engines of bombers muscling their way through the sky; the first dampened note of the siren before the wailing crescendo; Lucy’s whimpering cries as she woke from another nightmare—and should I hear that, would I go to comfort her, I wondered, or would I be the last person she wished to see?—the shrieks of foxes in the gardens come to join their brethren already hiding inside; the muted smash of another window being broken and the silence afterward when the interloper realized they had been boarded; or the sound that I seemed to fear the most, an everyday sound that would be transmogrified by the darkness, by the quiet of the east wing which was empty of all living souls but for myself: the sound of footsteps padding along the hall toward me. For I was more convinced than ever that whoever had been attacking the museum was not an intruder at all but came from inside the house itself, and that they had fixed their sights on me.
In late November, the Major announced he would be having a grand Christmas dinner party at Lockwood on 18 December, and that he had chosen for his setting not the dining room, nor the ballroom, but the long gallery itself.
“I want to showcase the specimens at their best. A couple of my guests have expressed interest in donating quite large sums to the museum,” the Major told me over breakfast. It was just the two of us, for Lucy hardly ever came down for it now.
“What room were you thinking of putting the table in?” I asked.
“Oh, the corridor itself. I am going to have some of the larger, more impressive mounted animals from the museum collection brought out there, and surround the table with them, put the paintings back on the walls, and generally return the place to its former glory.”
He was, was he? Nice of him to tell me what he was planning on doing with my animals.
He set down his knife and wiped his mouth with one of the fine linen napkins that came as standard here at Lockwood. “No thoughts?” he said sarcastically, and I pursed my mouth. “You can’t object to my plan, surely, Miss Cartwright? For we will be watching the animals beadily; there can be no theft from right under our noses.” He tapped his nose mockingly as he said this. “Or are you nervous about my guests being rowdy with them?”
I was, after seeing the behavior of the officers who had come to the one and only ball I had attended here. “How many guests will you be having?” I asked.
“Oh, about twenty or so. We shall just about fit on the two dining tables pushed together. It’s a select group coming; old friends, army officials, a couple of politicians, a sprinkling of artist types for color, you know. I suppose you’ll be invited too, as a representative of the museum,” he said, glancing at me over the rim of his coffee cup.
As a director of the museum, I thought, and wiped my own mouth with a napkin, using it to hide my scowl.
“Sylvia thinks that candlelight will add marvelously to the atmosphere; she’s got all sorts of ideas,” he said, twiddling his hand in the air in lieu of a more detailed description.
“The notion of having candles so close to the specimens does give me pause, Lord Lockwood.”
“Oh, come now, we’re not using them as candlesticks. They’ll be a good few yards from the table. We need to have room to sit at it, after all. I’m not going to all this trouble just to feed the animals.” He gave a short laugh. “I tell you, it’ll be quite the coup, Miss Cartwright, for Lockwood and the museum,” he said, cutting into his sausage.
What could I do? I had no useful argument except that I did not want them damaged. I felt too tired to argue with him, my hands shaking around my cup of coffee, my thoughts treacle-slow.
“You shall of course be on hand to supervise their being moved there, the creatures from the main house,” he said. “We can’t have the nose of the polar bear being bashed against the wall on its journey before people get to see it, now, can we?”
“Quite,” I said and, leaving half my meal uneaten, made my excuses and left the room.
The next Sunday, I came back from a short blustery walk in the bare gardens, looking to read a book and warm my chilled toes in the parlor, thinking that I might pretend I was simply on holiday in a grand house and that I was not in charge of a collection crumbling at the seams from my own incompetence. But when I reached the door of the parlor, Lucy looked up from her seat by the electric fire.
I felt my heart lift at the sight of her, like a trained animal, and then fall when I remembered we were not sweethearts anymore.
“Good afternoon, Hetty. Do you need the room?” she asked, fiddling with the buttons of her cardigan.
I cataloged her, drinking her in. Curly black hair teased into waves, perfect red lipstick, bruises under her eyes, a hand fluttering at her side that I longed to catch in my own.
“No, I was just wandering about. You stay there, keep warm by the fire.”
She smiled but it had a pleading note, as if my presence was painful for her. Yours is painful for me too, I wanted to say. “Good afternoon, Lucy,” I said instead, and left, my tongue aching with words unspoken.
I took the stairs two at a time back up to the first floor and then paused, hearing the clang of something dropping all the way down a different flight of stairs, followed by a groaned damn it. I went in search of the sound and found Paul at the foot of the stairs at the other end of the corridor, bending over a silver candlestick.
“Can I help you, Paul?” I asked.
“I’m fine,” he said, standing back up. “Just retrieving some things from the attic for his lordship, for the dinner.” He held the candlestick in his hand. “They’re slippery buggers,” he said, “and I’m all fingers and thumbs today. One week, miss, one week until I’m suited and booted and off for training.”
“You’ve enlisted?”
He nodded enthusiastically. “I turned seventeen and three months recently, finally, and the army have taken me. I can’t wait to actually do something, instead of sitting here like . . .” He trailed off—was he going to say like a woman, or like a duck?
I took pity on him. “Well, I wish you the best luck in the world, Paul. They’ll be lucky to have you. Let me help you carry some things down; I’m at a loose end today.”
“Much obliged,” he said, and then motioned up the stairs. “There’s a whole pile of things we’re fetching down by the door of the storeroom; you can’t miss them.”
I climbed the stairs to the second floor—the floor I thought of as Lucy’s—and then continued on to the storeroom, almost tripping over the cluster of candlesticks that were, as Paul said, just by the door.
But I did not pick them up straightaway; instead I crossed the length of the storeroom and opened the door to the attic itself, turning on the light to diffuse the fusty darkness. I felt the cold from outside creeping in through a crack somewhere, and brushed a hanging cobweb out of my face as I ventured further in, toward Lucy’s secret room; separated by only a bricked-up door from the bathroom where I had bathed with her, and laughed with her, and been loved by her.
It was the same as it had been when we opened it up, blue and empty—except that was not quite true, because there was something there, lying on the dusty floorboards in the corner. A pigeon; a larger, more prosaic version of the dove that Lucy had stepped on all those years ago.
How could a dead pigeon, and one which had probably been roosting in the attic and looked to have died of natural causes, frighten me, make my teeth clench together as I crouched closer and touched its dry corpse with the top of one shaking finger, jerking quickly back at the feel of it? If I did not pull myself together, I told myself, I would be unable to work for the museum at all. How could I be frightened of dead animals when I had spent the last decade of my life surrounded by them?
My clothes were now coated in dust, so after I had brought down the candlesticks and other things for Paul, I took them to the laundry room straightaway. I had given up asking the servants for help with any additional task, for fear of being looked at askance by them, judged and gossiped about, and also because I did not want to give them more work.
In the laundry room, as my fingers chafed at the cold water in the tub, I heard someone at the back door, and then the clink of a cup being set down on stone, and laughter that I did not recognize.
When I took my damp load out to pin on the clothesline, whoever had been there had scurried off, leaving no trace beyond the stub of a cigarette on the doorstep, winding a thin trail of smoke into the air.
That night, and the following night, and the night after that, I had the worst nightmares yet. I dreamed that I had woken up to find a bloodied rabbit in my bed, too late to save it, that the bed itself was made entirely of freshly skinned rabbits, cold and wet with blood. That the museum’s animals had moved to my room while I slept and when I woke they were crowding around me and I could not escape as they pressed toward me with their claws and paws and teeth. That there was a ghoulish woman leaning over my bed, her breath ruffling my hair, her icy fingers reaching for my face.
Ten days before Christmas, and three days before the dinner, I woke from one of these dreams, on a calm night so bitter I was convinced that it had snowed as I shivered in my bed. I twitched open my blackout curtains and peered out into the night, condensation clouding the glass before me.
There was no snow, but there was something else, there on the lawn by the kitchen vegetable plot.
The museum’s Indian bison, its shape unmistakable.
I unlocked the window with a sleep-weak hand and leaned out, teeth chattering. Was it skinned too? It was too dark to see. I blinked as if the scene might vanish, like the afterimage of a dream, but it was still there.
I fumbled into my clothes, tugging a jumper over my pajama shirt, pulling on socks and boots, and then I locked up my room and ran, clattering, down the stairs.
The night guard was on his feet when I reached the bottom, alarmed by the noise.
“What’s happened?” he asked, holding up his torch. The policemen had told the Major that the guards should not wear rifles, in case they accidentally shot someone, in case the intruders were only truant children.
I ran to the front door. “The museum’s bison, it’s on the front lawn,” I said, my voice a frightened warble.
“My god,” the guard said, “are you sure?”
I swung the heavy door open and pointed to the lawn.
“The entrance light, the blackout!” he urged, and I scrabbled for the light switch.
“There, do you see, it?” I said, pushing the door further open now that we were in the dark, realizing that I did not trust my own eyes, that I needed him to say he saw it and that it was not just a figment of my imagination.
“I see it,” he said. “Stay here,” he called to the other guard, who had appeared in the entrance hall. He jammed on his cap and followed me as I ran down the steps, over the driveway, and set out across the lawn wet with mist, my heart roaring in my ears.
You see, I imagined myself telling Lucy, I’m not mad, and I sprinted toward the figure that grew clearer in silhouette, its large rectangular side like a slab carved from the night, head down toward the ground.
It would be too heavy to carry between the two of us; we would need to ask the other guard for help and another man besides. How many had dragged it here in the first place? Was the skin still there? I could not tell.
We had just reached the beginning of the vegetable garden, a row of stakes ready for the spring’s green beans, when the bison lifted its head.
I screamed and the guard jolted to a stop behind me. The beast huffed and put its head back down.
“It’s a cow,” I said. I coughed and then repeated it louder, in an ordinary voice to brush away the terror of dead beasts that could come back to life. But my teeth were still chattering.
The cow looked up at us again, its jaw working slowly on its pilfered dinner.
“I should have checked the museum room first,” I said, heart juddering. “Indian bison have horns and a ridge, a hump, through the shoulders. Our bison isn’t even posed with its head down, like the cow was. What on earth was I thinking?” The two bovines looked nothing alike; Indian bison of both sexes had horns, for god’s sake.
The guard let out a breath. “Well, I’m relieved,” he said. “I couldn’t imagine how it had gotten out on my watch, the dead one, I mean,” he qualified. “We’d better get this fugitive back to the farm.” I let him circle the cow, crooning softly, and grab its rope: I was too scared to get close to it, as if the night might transform it into some other beast again. “Hefty buggers up close, aren’t they?” he said. “I can take it from here; no need for the both of us to traipse through the mud.”
I glanced down at my boots, at the dark splatters on my linen trousers. “If you’re sure,” I said, my voice thick.
“I’m sure,” he said, kindly, as if he was trying to treat me carefully, as if he knew all the wild thoughts that whirled in my mind. He clucked his tongue and led the cow away, its footsteps oddly stumbling in the way of bovines, its bulk swaying from side to side.
I tipped my head up and stared at the stars in the sky as a sob caught in my throat, and then I trudged back toward the pitch-black house.
There was no more sleep that night for me, and the next day, after another morning of roaming up and down the long gallery hunting down infestation, jumping at the shapes of mounted animals and cabinets even though they were in the same positions as they had been for over a year now, biting my lip on tears that threatened to fall, I decided that I had had enough.
The museum would not, could not, remain here for the rest of the war: the infestation alone—never mind the intruders who were likely plotting out more mischief—had made our position here untenable. More to the point, though, I would not, could not, remain here; the experience would turn me utterly mad, would destroy the last shreds of my professional dignity and the last threads of my sanity too.
I did not want to leave Lucy, I felt heartsick at the thought—and only now that I had loved did I know what heartsick felt like. A life without her in it, even if all we shared currently were silent breakfasts and awkward passings-by in the corridors of the house, was a life devoid of joy. Now that I knew what it felt to love and be loved in return, even if only for a few months, I knew that my loneliness would be more acute, might very well swallow me whole. And yet we were not together anymore, I had ruined all that, and thus all I had was the museum and my employment. I would lose my position as assistant keeper for calling for another evacuation, for confessing the full extent of the damage and the loss to the specimens under my watch at Lockwood, but I would fight to be kept on in a lesser role, would give it everything I had.
As I was called out of my office to help supervise the movement of the mounted animals from the main house to the long gallery (members of the new local Home Guard had been conscripted to help with the heavier items for the dinner), I drafted in my head the letter I would write to London; the evidence that I would lay out, in black and white, on the page; the culpability I would admit to for not requesting a second evacuation sooner.
The morning of the Major’s damned Christmas party, after a night with no sleep at all, and as the humans in the house scurried to and fro, industrious as I had never seen them, I posted the letter.
And as I dusted and cleaned my animals in their temporary home in the long gallery—the Sumatran tiger, the polar bear, the spotted hyena, the black panther, the giant pangolin, the juvenile elephant, the gray wolf, the wallaby, the wolverine, the southern muriqui, the white-tailed mongoose, the blesbok, the large-spotted genet, the lar gibbon, the southern African lion, the capybara, the giant golden-crowned flying fox, the jaguar, and others—ready for their audience, I imagined the postman carrying my letter to the railway station; it being hoisted in a large sack onto the night train and sorted by men in a lurching carriage. I pictured the postman in London picking up his sack in the morning and heading out early to deliver his load; my letter being put in the pile on the director’s secretary’s desk as she yawned from a night spent in an air-raid shelter. I pictured it being passed to the director himself to read, as he puffed on his pipe, and the choice words he would have to say about my behavior. He would agree that another evacuation was needed, I was sure of it, and would have the secretary start drafting letters, and organize a meeting with the Ministry of Works and Buildings, and then the mammal collection would move.
The animals would be safe again, and I would be gone from here, the both of us rescued—from the tyranny of Lord Lockwood, from the hungry beetles and moths, from covetous thieves, from the elements, from the house and all the strange things that seemed to stalk its rooms nightly.