‘Are they alive, Mummy?’ Leo’s voice is unsteady. His hands flutter on his thighs.
I reach out and take his hand, stilling the nervous movement. His fingers weave between mine and I squeeze hard. ‘They’re dead. Stuffed.’
‘They’re not stuffed,’ says a cold voice behind me and I remember that, as this house gives, it instantly takes away: a seesaw of expectation and emotion. ‘They’re mounted. The skins are stretched over frames of wood, and then posed in lifelike positions. It’s infinitely superior to stuffing.’ Behind her, a zebra looks at me with contempt. I move my head slightly to one side and, as I suspected, every pair of black glass eyes follows me.
‘Mrs Minta,’ says Leo, turning to face her. ‘Are these your animals?’
‘They’re not my animals.’ She is softer when she speaks directly to Leo. ‘They are your great-grandfather’s animals.’
‘Why did he put them in here?’
‘He was a collector. He loved animals and travelling, and he wanted all the people who lived here – who didn’t have television or the internet – to see them too.’ She sounds almost human.
‘It’s . . . I can’t . . .’ I’m almost lost for words. ‘It’s barbaric.’
‘Really?’ Her question is rhetorical, a way of letting her breath freeze the room, of spreading ice across the parquet floors and up through my feet. ‘I’m sorry that you think so.’ A mouse looks up at me in support of her: I swear its whiskers are jiggling in disgust, its little brown nose twitching towards the bad smell.
‘What’s “barbaric” mean?’ Leo walks up to the glass. It runs from the floor to the ceiling and he bumps his face against it when he leans forward to look in. ‘Ow.’
‘Watch out, Leo,’ Araminta chips in before I can. ‘The glass has to stay very clean so you can see in.’
It’s making me feel light-headed, my palms are sweating. ‘All those poor dead animals.’
Leo turns round to look at me. Behind him a tiger lies on its side, bathing in the shafts of sunlight, its orange stripes as vivid as when muscle rippled beneath them. ‘But they’re dead, Mum. Like the fox.’ He looks thoughtful, sad.
The animals stare at me: judge and jury. They wait, in silence, for me to speak. Araminta stands in front of them, as if she is about to command the vast army to attack. I imagine the teeth and claws and wings and hoofs: the noise they would make, the squawking, the bellowing, the accusing.
‘The fox?’ Araminta’s head swivels: for a moment I think it will rotate a full 360 but her owl eyes settle on me, burn into my conscience.
‘Mummy killed a fox. Poor fox.’
‘It ran in front of my car. I didn’t see it till it was too late. I’m so sorry.’
She does not blink. ‘But you decided not to say, not to tell me. Even when I was looking for her.’
‘Her?’
‘She had cubs. She has been teaching them to hunt out on the lawn in the evenings.’
‘I . . . I didn’t know it, she, was your fox.’ I am burning with guilt, with embarrassment. I inhale deeply to keep myself from crying. It is bad enough to be responsible for that little death, without this inquisition.
‘We have a tradition of foxes being safe here.’ She speaks to Leo but, simultaneously, glares at me. ‘Colonel Hugo refused to let the local Hunt onto the land. He thought hunting with hounds was inhumane, barbarous.’
I resist the urge to gesture around me, at these hundreds of animals, dead as door nails. A vulture hovers, wings outstretched to the width of my arms, behind Araminta, literally backing her up.
‘We could get the fox and put him in here.’ Leo is trying to be helpful.
Araminta shakes her head. ‘We can’t get into these cases – we would accidentally take little bugs in, mites, and they would eat the animals.’
‘How did the animals get in?’ Leo asks. It’s a good question.
My mind sees the animals, two-by-two, coming down a wide plank in the drive, descending from the mouth of a huge wooden ship and walking, trotting, flapping, their way into this room. I can hear the noise they made as they settled into position, the snorting, growling, trumpeting.
Araminta points at the back of the case in front of us. ‘There, do you see?’ she asks Leo. ‘There are two big doors hidden in the landscape.’
We lean forward and I can just make out the top edges of the doors in the painted background behind the animals.
‘But you mustn’t ever open them.’ Araminta says and looks at us very seriously. ‘It would be catastrophic.’
‘The animals are very beautiful,’ says Leo. He strokes the glass.
‘They were beautiful. Before someone shot them.’ I mutter it, mostly to myself. Araminta is angry enough already: I don’t want to get into a debate with her but I can’t keep my mouth shut either.
Araminta stands beside Leo. She peers into the case. Doleful fawns gaze back at her, their dead brown eyes convincingly wet. ‘The Victorians didn’t know that some animals would become extinct one day,’ she says. ‘Do you know what extinct means?’
Leo nods his head.
‘This is a West African Black Rhino. There aren’t any left alive. Not one.’ She points at the rhino, at his wide shoulders, his thick wrinkled skin. ‘Should we put him in a cupboard where no one can see him?’ She looks at me when she says this, the set of her shoulders challenging me to respond. She’s made this argument before.
‘Or should he be in here so people can learn? So we can talk about the fact that the rhino’s family are all dead and that we need to take care of the planet, even species we don’t see or know about?’ She exhales loudly, showing that she’s done, the lecture is over.
Leo presses his face too close to the case. His lips leave a moist kiss on the glass.
‘Yuck, Leo,’ I say. ‘Wipe that off.’
He stands up straight, running the glass with the edge of his shirt sleeve. ‘I think the animals are very beautiful. I like them.’ Team Araminta.
She looks at me for a moment, victory held tight behind her thin lips, then leaves as quietly as she came in.
To: Simon Henderson
From: Cate Morris
Subject: Not Even About Food
Mail: We looked around the museum – not in any detail but as much as Leo could take in/enjoy – I can’t say I felt the same way – and then we had to give up and go to the supermarket. I needed to know that there was still a real world out there, still normal people who do dull shit like shopping or spitting.
I bought pizza and bottles of water and washing powder. I bought wine.
I was coping, I was, until I saw the emperor penguin. Have you seen it? It’s not much shorter than me and it’s in a wooden case – still in its original packaging. Next to it, in a glass display panel, is a letter from Ernest Shackleton offering the penguin as a gift to Colonel Hugo. And that’s not the weird bit. The weird bit is the second letter, the answer from Colonel H, from Richard’s very own grandfather – that never got sent. He explains, in terribly polite terms – not wanting to cause offence – why he can’t possibly accept the gift of an emperor penguin. AND IT’S BECAUSE IT DOESN’T MATCH. Because Hugo’s exhibits are from non-Antarctic environments and it DOESN’T MATCH. A penguin. Not wallpaper, not kitchen chairs, a penguin – a penguin almost as tall as me. Is that what I’m here to learn, Simon? That it wasn’t only Richard who was bonkers? That it was his grandfather, and his grandfather’s father: the whole bloody lot of them. That they were all utterly utterly mad. For generations and generations.