‘But then it did.’
‘Months later.’ He meets my eyes, blue on brown. A family passes us with a little boy and girl wearing dinosaur tails from the museum shop. I want to shove them out of the way, shield them from the unfurling carnage, keep them safe from the scene of this car crash. My voice is an awful half sound. ‘I was fourteen. You were thirty.’
‘I’m aware of the maths.’
‘Maths?’ A terrible laugh escapes from me. ‘It’s called something else now.’
‘Don’t.’ He puts a hand out to stop the word but it’s too late, though neither of us says it, it flaps manically around us, a caged bird finding sudden, stuttered flight.
That’s what it was, I almost say, but the words fade on my lips, it seems implausible that this man – who still has the most beautiful shoulders I’ve ever seen – could bethat.
He steps towards me. He is so close, his scent is almost overpowering. ‘I loved you.’
Old words. Overused, meaningless, if they were a currency, their value has long depreciated, but these warnings play in my head like a podcast, background noise, incapable of reaching me here under these museum arches, powerless to prevent my dismantling. My heart beats so hard, I’m afraid he’ll see my pulse through my skin.
‘Stop,’ I say, more to myself than him but I can’t help it. Despite everything I’ve schooled myself in these past eighteenyears – grooming, power dynamics,#MeToo – he has turned something in me to honey, dark and sweet and liquid. My tailbone slams against the railing, the one solid thing in my astonishing loss of control. ‘I have to go.’
He calls after me from the balcony, shouts that name he’s always loved, but I am at the top of the stone staircase, under the skeleton of the blue whale, out of the museum, away.
14
Gift
Then
Iam in the museum a week after I touched him. I’ve said nothing to him, not a word, I told Mama I didn’t want to go anymore but she insisted, she said it was important, this week more than any other, unless something was wrong, unless something has happened. What could I say?
He watches me from the other side of the lab, he has brought me a Wardian case, a type of early terrarium used to protect foreign plants on their journeys to England. A few months ago, I’d have pored over it, the glazed glass, the iron swirls, worked hard to capture it in my sketchbook. But his offerings hold no interest to me anymore. I am dropping beads of paint into water. Turning them to rolling clouds, stormed skies, thunderstorms.
‘I have something else for you,’ he says.
I don’t look up. I am tired of museums, of discoveries, the endless stream of the living and the extinct, what is the point of dissecting a thing to its constituent parts, of understanding theinside of things when I can’t understand myself? Knowledge is a futile project. Everything is closed and secret.
But he insists. He pushes something within my line of sight. The knots in the mahogany make me catch my breath. ‘It can’t be,’ I whisper but it is. Those pitch-black markings, the striking ochre of the hindwings. Until I hold the display case again, I didn’t realise how much I missed it. ‘I thought you sold it?’
‘I did.’
‘The museum bought it?’
‘They were one of the bidders, along with Harvard and two private collectors.’
‘You said there were only three bidders.’
‘I didn’t realise you listened so closely.’
‘I listen to everything you say.’ I stare at him. He looks away.
‘There was another bidder,’ he says. ‘Last minute.’
‘You?’
He nods.
‘But Mama said they sold for eleven thousand pounds.’
‘Yes.’
‘Why would you pay that? That’s an insane amount of money.’