This was one of Richard’s party tricks, every time we visited a zoo or a country house. He would take a broad piece of grass, hold his hands together – palms facing and fingers knitted – and stretch the grass between the tops and bottoms of his thumbs, pressing them tight against each other. Then he would put his mouth against the heel of his hands and blow. The rude squeak it made would almost always, after a few dud goes, result in the peacock looking indignantly at him and fanning its spectacular tail in annoyance.
Leo finds the right piece of grass. ‘This one. Come on, Mummy, before he walks off. Hurry.’
This isn’t going to go well. It’s another of those moments, ones I’m used to, where Leo remembers that I’m not Richard and that those wonderful things that went with Richard are gone forever. It breaks his heart every time.
I stretch the piece of grass taut between my thumbs and blow.
The sound is hideous: loud, rude and perfectly peacock. His tail goes first time and he shakes his bottom as he circles, the eyes on the end of each feather quiver and sparkle in the sun.
I could cry.
Leo cannot contain his excitement and chases after the peacock with a fresh piece of grass. He is the image of Richard when he’s laughing. I imagine a younger Richard, with other peacocks, perfecting the trick. Why did I never ask him where he learnt to do it? Was it here? It’s an unusual skill to have, but Richard was an unusual person.
We keep going, anti-clockwise, round the building and there – on the front side of the house but at the other end to where we went in last night, is the ticket office. It’s a real museum. You can’t see the dome from here and, for a second, I wonder what else hides behind the grey-painted turnstile, the misty window of the kiosk.
I pat my jeans’ pockets, I’ve got money. I wouldn’t put it past Araminta to make us pay. And maybe we should pay. That wasn’t in any of the discussions about gas bills or broadband: there wasn’t a set number of museum passes for the year. Would Richard have paid? That’s a simple answer – Richard wouldn’t have come here. I cajoled and encouraged him: after we had Leo I’d go as far as to say I begged him. But the answer was always a flat – immovable – no.
‘Well, we’re here now,’ I say to the stubborn ghost of Richard, ‘Come what may.’
There’s an old man behind the desk at the entrance. He sits in what could loosely be called a ‘gift shop’, a collection of dusty toys and 1950s postcards and a brightly coloured ice cream freezer. I grimace at the idea of Leo living so close to an ice cream shop, and anticipate months of push-me-pull-you rows.
‘Two please.’ I smile at the man. ‘One concession?’ he asks.
‘Yes, one student please. And one adult.’
He tears pink paper tickets from a roll, more slowly than I would have thought was possible. ‘Have you been before?’
I want to tell him that we were here all night, that we’ve seen the ancient kitchen and had our first disagreement with Araminta, but that’s not going to help. ‘We haven’t,’ I say and play nice.
‘Down this corridor is Gallery One, start in there – most people do – and then go on to Gallery Two after that. Then Three and Four. They’re numbered, you see.’
It’s not the most sparkling museum tour I’ve ever had.
‘Do you have a map?’ Ghost Richard laughs beside me: he thinks I’m funny.
‘We don’t. But they’re all numbered, you see.’
Leo and I set off down the corridor. There are a few boards explaining the nature of the collection, but I can’t really stop and read too much of them without losing Leo’s attention. And then, right in front of us, is a picture of Leo’s great-grandfather.
The genes are strong. The photograph is monochrome but Richard’s dark hooded eyes – and Leo’s – are there. The thick hair, almost black and poker straight, is the same. His face is narrower than Leo’s and his cheeks more chiselled than Richard’s but the likeness is unmistakable. ‘This is a picture of Daddy’s grandfather.’
‘Why is he wearing that hat?’
‘He was an explorer. This is his camp. See his tent behind him?’
‘Is that a real gun? I would be great with a gun.’ Leo starts to spin round, his imaginary gun held up to his shoulder but, for the sake of the painting, I touch him lightly on the arm and he stops.
In the painting, Colonel Hugo is sitting in a fold-up chair outside a canvas tent. He wears a pith helmet and desert fatigues. His legs are stretched out in front of him, gaitered up to his knees, and a rifle lies along the length of his legs, down to his crossed ankles.
‘It is definitely a real gun,’ I say.
‘What did he do with it?’
And this bit I do know. I know that Richard’s grandfather was a Victorian conservationist, and that meant that he shot, stuffed, and brought to England thousands of animals from all over the world. He believed he was preserving them for posterity and education and, in that, Richard supported him 100 per cent. The one beef that Richard could have had with this museum – Richard the committed vegetarian who couldn’t bear the death of so much as an insect, Richard the lifelong green campaigner – he didn’t have at all. Whatever kept Richard from this place, it wasn’t the stuffed animals: I always felt that it was something far more human.
Leo is bored with waiting and has answered his, pretty fatuous, question for himself. He is walking off down the corridor.
There is an archway on the left-hand side. The sign the man in the booth promised looms up in front of us: Gallery One. Leo, fractionally ahead of me, slips round the corner into the room and gasps.
I stifle a scream.
*
The animals are stuffed, just as Richard told me. And they’re mainly displayed in twos, exactly as he said: an ‘ark of death’ he called it. What is so incredible, what made Leo gasp and me scream, is the scale of it. The humans stand in a relatively small spot in the middle and the animals take up the rest of the space: virtual reality designers of the present day would have trouble making anything so amazing. The gallery is huge, a lantern of glass in the ceiling lets in enough light to cast eerie shadows around the room.
Every animal is posed, mostly with another of its species, as if it is mid-breath, so lifelike it feels that they are about to place one hoof or claw or foot in front of the other and walk right towards us. Their glass eyes twinkle with the reflected sunlight and I prepare for the inevitability of seeing one blink.
Okapi bend to drink from a pond as a hippo roars up at them, its peg teeth snarling. Giraffes splay their elegant legs to reach leaves from the small trees growing – although they can’t be real – here and there through the scene. At the back, walking between the scene on our left and the scene in front of us, no bars to contain the animals except for the glass that keeps them from the centre of the room, the biggest elephant I’ve ever imagined strolls – benign – above the other animals. The sheer height of him throws my gaze to the floor of the display and I’m amazed to see snakes, mid-slither, and tiny rodents – frozen in terror – looking up at the snakes’ pointed tongues. I’ve never seen anything more real in all my life and yet, at the same time, it is the stuff of nightmares.