The Archivist Read online

  She had never spoken about this encounter to anyone, but now she knew God knew, and however hard she tried to suppress it, He probably knew she had been hoping to repeat the sensation. It thrilled and disgusted her in equal measure, but she wanted different things for her life now: she wanted to walk with Jesus, she wanted to find salvation, she wanted to help others and, to her shame, she wanted Michael.

  Michael was a lay preacher who came to their church on alternate Sundays. Their courtship had been serious but simple, their wedding night an intensely embarrassing experience and nothing like riding a bike down a hill. She sensed Michael’s unease, but gradually they developed a deep fondness for one another which brought her through her shame and disappointment, and in her mind she gave thanks to her God for this good man. They produced two sons, and their lives settled down to a routine packed with responsibility. For the first two decades, her decision to educate the children at home overwhelmed her waking hours; then she had the responsibility of trying to police their daily lives once they had left home, which both boys desperately wanted to do the moment they reached eighteen; and just when she should have had some time to do what she wanted to do, the needs of Michael’s elderly parents slipped into the vacuum and stole away her freedom and happiness.

  Now the menopause had struck and she remembered how she and Monika had laughed that the German word for a nipple was a chest wart, the German for pubic hair was shame hair. All these years later, she inadvertently caught sight of herself in the bathroom mirror, and that was what she saw – two warts on her chest and a thin straggle of shame hair. She hated her body even more than she had done as a young adult. Her life had passed and she had wasted it waiting for something better. Some days she felt strong and belligerent: life wasn’t fair – she had worked hard, she had prayed, she had sacrificed her youth and her freedom. Other days she faced the sickening truth that she had never deserved anything better – she was plain and she was lumpy. Even her grown children did not seem to want her company and her parents-in-law criticised and complained no matter how hard she worked for their comfort.

  The only person is this sorry mess who seemed to be on her side was Michael, and Michael never touched her, and she didn’t blame him because she was sweaty and wrinkled. She was sickened when she saw couples embracing in television dramas, she looked away as they munched at each other’s lips.

  She had taken the job at the Hall to get out of the house, and she was a good guide. She admired BS Moreton. When she saw him taking a group of visitors around, she would position herself carefully so that she could hear what he was saying. She admired his knowledge and his gravitas, and wished she could emulate his manner, passing on history as if he was chatting over a dinner table. She always felt she was lecturing to visitors. He had been so kind to her when she had her accident, even though he hardly knew of her existence before. It was horrible at the time, but good things can come out of bad, and that winter, when she was fully recovered, BS asked if she fancied doing some extra hours when the Hall was closed, to help him in his office with some tasks. She knew he needed her help – he was hopeless at organisation.

  BS’s office was tucked away in one of the maids’ rooms above the music room at the end of the indigo library above, the mighty Wurlitzer organ which had been rescued from the Odeon cinema in Cardigan Bay days before it was demolished. It was a low-ceilinged room with two circular windows, one looking out across the courtyard, the other under the main portico into the great hall. Along one wall stood a heavy table piled high with towers of papers, between which the scratched and worn leather top was visible. Behind the table was a large and equally worn nineteenth-century leather chair, a few tufts of horsehair peeping out from the front of the armrests. This was BS Moreton’s desk. Beside the table stood a magnificent mahogany filing cabinet with tarnished brass name plaques on each drawer, empty of any annotation. Every surface was piled high with papers and ancient leather books in various stages of dilapidation. Along the adjacent wall was a smart computer, black and silent and covered with a thick film of dust. BS hadn’t had the help of an assistant for some time. He had his ‘hot file’, a pile of unanswered memos and letters and notes scrawled on the backs of envelopes, and Maureen knew she could sort all that out for him, set up a proper filing system and protect him from making a fool of himself.

  ‘Rosemary tells me you’re a whizz with computers,’ BS said.

  She felt flattered. ‘I can use most office programmes, word processing, emailing, that sort of thing.’

  BS brightened and said, ‘Management keep sending me emails, and I get Rosemary to print them up for me so that I can read them.’

  ‘I can sort that out for you. What’s that computer over there used for?’

  ‘I haven’t dared turn it on in case I banjax the whole thing,’ he had replied. So Maureen connected the computer and the printer, and the IT man came in to get them on to the internet, and BS was full of wonder and admiration for her skills, and Maureen felt good about herself.

  She had never set foot in the Hall during the closed season, and being one of the skeleton staff that winter made her feel special. She wasn’t just one of a crowd of guides any more – she was recognised by the managers and they said ‘good morning’ to her, and how are you? BS started lending her the pass key ‘to save my legs,’ he told her, and when she ran an errand for him she had access to parts of the Hall that no other guides visited. She found a suite of locked cloakrooms which was only opened for functions – three spotlessly clean loos, a pile of hand towels next to the sinks, Molton Brown soaps and hand creams and a bank of mirrors. Maureen began to visit these cloakrooms regularly, washing her hands with the expensive soap and rubbing on the hand cream afterwards.

  BS loved to waste time and he particularly loved to waste time chatting. Maureen thought it wasn’t a bad way to earn seven pounds an hour, sitting with her hands nursing a cup of coffee and listening to his stories. He was indiscreet and passed on far more about the earl and his wayward children than he should have. When the earl was away BS took her over to the private apartments on the pretext that he wanted to update his information files on the prints and paintings over on the private side. She felt like a naughty schoolgirl under the protection of the head boy as they peered into the rooms where the earl’s guests stayed. BS swayed over to the window of one of the rooms and beckoned to her. His height and stature made her feel small, almost petite, when she stood beside him. ‘Imagine waking up to that view,’ he said, and he leaned over towards her and they laughed.

  He showed her the rooms where the Victorian maids had slept, let her climb up the ladder to the roof while he waited down below gazing up as she ascended. From there she looked out across four acres of tiled roofs. The countryside was brown with winter, the margin of the lake edged with ice muting the colour of the water which glowed red from the clay soil, the River Lugg shining like mercury between the trees.

  They went for drives around the estate and he showed her where the third earl had been buried, the one who was killed at the Battle of Preston in 1648 and brought home by his warring sons. He showed her the plaque on the huge oak at the end of the river walk which was dedicated to the twelfth earl who died during the Second World War when the Backslider’s Club in Pall Mall took a direct hit. She came with him when he gave his talk ‘The Ladies of Duntisbourne Hall’ to the Women’s Institute and although she thought some of his stories verged on the salacious, when the ladies gathered around him afterwards she was awed by his easy, urbane charm with them and she felt special because she had the privilege of enjoying his company every working day. He asked her to look up his lottery numbers each week on the internet; she showed him how he could browse the catalogue of the British Library online; he sat close to her and watched over her shoulder, so close she could smell shaving soap on his neck; she caught him looking at her knee which peeked out from the wrap-around panel of her skirt.

  Then she told him about her idea for the library p
roject and he embraced it with enthusiasm. She began to work more than the few days a week that had been originally suggested. BS explained that there wasn’t enough money in his budget to pay her for extra days and she said she didn’t mind. She knew he needed her, she was on fire with this new project, and he said she was wonderful. When she prayed at night, she thanked God for letting her have this opportunity, and she asked God to bless BS Moreton because he was a good man. Looking back on that winter, she had an image of BS which looked completely different from the man she saw now. During that winter she was drawn to him, she had grown an attachment to him. He didn’t seem as old to her as when she had first started working for him. She looked forward to coming in to work. She loved the atmosphere of the little office above the library – the fresh coffee and the ozone smell of outdoors that came in with him, on him, as he swung through the tiny room and dropped into his chair and said, ‘Make mine a belter, Mo.’

  Two weeks before the Hall opened for that season, Michael took her up to their holiday lodge in Scotland, leaving the ancient parents in the care of his sister. She took long walks around the bay when Michael was in town doing the shopping, and she thought about BS. She missed him. She sent him a postcard, a picture of a pale-coloured Highland with a jaunty note that the bull’s hairstyle reminded her of him, but without the horns (exclamation mark). She wondered how many days he would need her when the season started, how the CEO had reacted to her library scheme. She even imagined not going back to guiding but writing more material for handbooks on other collections in the Hall – the watercolours, for example. The skin on the outsides of her index fingers was now white patches of shining scar tissue. She couldn’t remember the last time she had left them alone long enough for them to heal.

  For the first week of that following season she thought BS was away. She had heard his radio broadcast over the weekend, Radio Shropshire’s version of Desert Island Discs, and she was looking forward to telling him how well he had come across, how glad she was that he had included one of her favourite pieces of music in his list, ‘E lucevan le stelle’, the aria from Tosca, but he didn’t appear down in the Hall.

  The following Monday she saw him in the distance across the courtyard, heading for the staff car park and he was with the buxom northern guide, Donna Falkender and Maureen felt such a jolt at seeing them walking out into the crisp spring sunshine that she turned away from the front door, feeling nauseous. She made her way back to the state dining room where she sat and chewed at the outer edge of her index finger. When the left-hand one became too painful she began to work her teeth along the edge of the right-hand finger, nibbling and tearing at it like a piranha. It soothed her, but then she felt ashamed and pulled her hands up inside the sleeves of her jumper to hide them.

  BS came to speak to her at the end of the week when he saw her sitting on security at the end of the indigo library. When she sensed him approaching she began to tremble. It was late in the afternoon and the library was empty of visitors. He started by asking her if she had had an enjoyable break in Scotland, thanking her for all her excellent work over the winter. He then went on to explain that he wouldn’t need to take up any more of her valuable time because Donna Falkender was going to be helping him over the next few months. She spoke French and German and could translate some of the documents he was working on at the present time. Maureen listened and nodded, but knew he was lying. She wanted to say ‘I know why you want that woman up there in the office with you,’ but instead she tried a light dig at him and said, ‘So you’ve got a new handmaiden now, have you? I suppose it was time to move on to a younger model?’

  BS glanced away and removed his reading glasses, studied the lenses for a moment and looked down at Maureen with such contempt it pressed her back into the chair.

  He drew himself up to his full height, towering over her because she had left it too late to get to her feet. ‘How dare you speak to me in that manner,’ he said quietly, but she could hear his breathing quicken. ‘What makes you think you have the right to make such an insinuation? The appointments I make are based purely on ability, and you are completely out of order to suggest that I would appoint someone for anything other than the most honourable motives. The work you have done for me over the winter does not qualify you in any way whatsoever to speak to me with such familiarity. If you ever speak to me like that again, I will see to it personally that you leave Duntisbourne Hall immediately, and let me tell you, my influence is such that no other stately home in England will employ you,’ and he turned his back on her and walked away down the library, the ferrule of his stick smiting the oak boards.

  She stared up the state rooms, watching Laurence with his tour moving along the rooms towards her. She was not allowed to leave until he reached the library. When he arrived she handed him the radio without a word and made her way towards the staff cloakroom. It was untidy because there was no paper towel dispenser on the wall and opened packets spilled their contents over the shelf beneath the mirror, not like the cloakroom she had used in the winter. Maureen stared at the image in front of her. She hated it – the sallow skin, the hint of a jowl along her jawline, the lumpy outline of her upper arms underneath her navy cardigan. She turned away and went through the inner door where she could lock herself in. She put the mahogany cover down to make a seat before sitting, then she rolled up the sleeve of her left arm.

  The skin underneath was marked with brown lines, old scars from her fingernails. She bent her arm and dug her nails deliberately into the skin just below the elbow which was paler and had fewer scars on it. It hardly hurt at all and as she pulled her nails through the skin and saw the livid red lines oozing, she began to feel a little calmer again.

  She heard the outer door open and someone turned the handle on the other side of her locked door. ‘Sorry!’ a voice and Bunty left the cloakroom. But it was too late – Maureen knew Bunty would be waiting somewhere in the corridor outside for her to finish, and she was going to have to leave. She pulled her sleeve down, stood up and flushed the toilet. The wounds on her arm were beginning to smart, and the agitation and distress that had begun to abate rose again in her chest even more powerfully, fuelled this time by a crushing sense of guilt and shame.

  - 7 -

  Over the next few days Max turned up at the Hall for a few hours and tacked himself on to the small groups of visitors shivering their way through the state rooms. He began to get to know the other guides: Claude Hipkiss he had met on his first day, but he wasn’t confident Claude had any idea who he was; he also recognised Laurence Cooke, a beautifully dressed resting actor, the man Bunty had bellowed at across the Hall. Maureen Hindle seemed a little more senior to the rest of the guides, which may have explained her aloofness; then there was Noel Canterbury, a beady-eyed man with a good sense of humour and an enthusiastic admirer of the opposite sex even though Max doubted he would ever see sixty again, and Major Frodsham, splendid in tweed plus-twos with a matching jacket and waistcoat taut over his enormous stomach. The Major’s eyebrows intrigued Max. They were the same squirrel-red hue as his magnificent moustache, but the left eyebrow curled like a horned beast up towards his temples while the right eyebrow brushed down towards his cheek giving his face a mischievous asymmetry. Max noticed that the Major never quite managed to do a tour, preferring to slumber quietly at the end of the indigo library, his almost completed Times crossword slipping from his lap. There was one guide to whom Max took an instant dislike, not because of her appearance as would be expected (she had the body of an ancient anorexic, her large lollipop head accentuated by a solid mane of peroxide yellow hair) but because the first time she spoke to him it was to dress him down loudly for standing in the statue corridor instead of going up to the guides’ room and having a cup of tea. Her name was Edwina Lemon, although she preferred to be called by her nickname, Weenie. She also insisted that for centuries her surname had been pronounced Limon because she was descended from an ancient family of French landed gentry. Despite the s
olid mask of make-up that she wore over her parchment-thin skin, and her vulgar dress sense, she was under the illusion that visitors mistook her for the countess, a sophisticated and elegant woman who oozed money and breeding in as full a measure as Weenie spilled gaucheness. She seemed to have some sort of understanding with Roger Hogg-Smythe, a guide about the same age as Max who made a great fuss about the rota whenever he was called ‘to the bench’. At first Max wondered why a High Court judge would take a job as a guide, but he soon realised that Roger was nothing more than a JP.

  Max found the diary system bewildering. On his application form he had agreed to work three days a week, Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. During his second week he turned up to work on Friday to a rather frosty reception from Bunty.