The Glass Ocean(6)
Not one to be deterred, my father is poking among these objects, ferreting, sorting, examining things in the very dim light provided by the room’s single window, narrow, dirty, and distant.
Bit of a collector himself, my da. Crumpling something soft into his pocket, left pocket, something that doesn’t belong to him. I can’t quite see what it is. But the sly, shamefaced expression, that I can see. Even in this lousy light.
He starts then, gives a sudden, sharp little quiver, surreptitious creature that he is, all alert, scenting the air, listening, ears and whiskers turning like pinwheels because he’s heard, from somewhere within the softly swaddled chambers of the burrow, a reedy distant susurrus that might or might not have been a Hallo—
• • •
Yes. There it is again. Hallo from the next room, rattle of hand on doorknob, minor rupture followed by inward collapse, a geometry of light and dust containing a figure, unfamiliar. Round glint of glasses, sharp spade of beard, tweedy sleeve, inserted. And a voice. Hallo! Is somebody there?
This will be Harry Owen. He’s been waiting, too, in another part of the burrow. Drawn by my father’s scrabbling. Something else alive in here! It’s not just me! Or so it seems.
My father comes toward him eagerly, emerges from the shadows, hastily checking his pockets, gasping slightly, as if rising in a very great hurry from a very great depth.
Yes, yes, it’s me, he says, I’m here. Leo Dell’oro—ship’s artist.
Harry Owen is startled by this. It shows. Slight retraction of the beard. We aren’t on a ship, we’re in a burrow. But being impeccable in manners, introduces himself nonetheless.
Yes, says my father. I’ve heard all about you. And unhelpfully adds, Felix Girard is out. Would you like to see my pictures?
Oh my dear my father I miss him so. Such a child, scampering off into the warren in search of a sketch pad with which to impress the tweedy stranger. Where has he gone? I don’t know; I can’t see that part of my grandfather’s kingdom. And anyway, he’s back now, already, panting, sketch pad in paw. The stranger, encompassing this, draws book and boy both out into the passage, where the light, such as it is (an aqueous matter no matter where, in this house), is somewhat better for looking.
The sketch pad is a ragged, well-thumbed thing, thickened by interpolation into it of other matter—pages torn out of books and periodicals, letters heavily annotated in the margins, daguerreotypes, restaurant menus, old postcards, tickets, pieces of carpet, a swatch of wallpaper—no wonder my father feels at home in Felix Girard’s house, and will soon possess an impulse to make the collecting a family matter. Nasty, unhygienic stuff. But in among it—the drawings. These are very good, precociously good. Pencil sketches mainly, flora and fauna, North Yorkshire coast, moors. And bones. These are his drawings of the Whitby ichthyosaur, which was excised from the cliff called Black Cap by my grandfather, Felix Girard, several years ago.
The ichthyosaur was and is my grandfather’s most famous find, crowning achievement of his career as a bone monger, the career for which he left his other, previous, more respectable career, that of surgeon, in Paris, at l’Hôtel-Dieu.
• • •
Charnel house on the Seine. All those infected linens hanging out on metal clotheslines on terraces above the river. Bloated monster, breathing sickness on the city of light.
• • •
He had to leave it. So much death, that’s what he said. Ah, the stink, Marie! Without irony. And so my grandmother left him.
I can’t blame her. There’s an issue here of contracts, as well as of expectations.
• • •