Then he realized it wasn’t a rubber mask. It was his mother’s head.
August 1991
Summer had finally come to London a week ago after two months of almost continuous rain, and already the grass in the parks was parched. Seven days of heat seemed to have drawn every last drop of moisture from the soil – from the pavements, from the cement in the eternal building works – and dust that was loose and weightless hung like a permanent haze in the air. Frannie Monsanto had breathed it in, washed it out of her hair at night. She felt it now, clinging like pollen to her skin, which was already sticky with perspiration.
Normally Frannie’s Mediterranean genes reacted automatically to sunshine, flooding her with a deep sense of well-being. But at work today she had been glad of the coolness of the basement vault of the Museum, and she was thankful to be heading away from the claustrophobic oven of the city and
en route
to catch a train up to the Yorkshire countryside.
The rush-hour tube was crowded and she felt faintly ridiculous holding the double bass, her overnight suitcase wedged between her legs. Air blasted her face through the open windows: hot, rank draughts that smelled of soot and something more unpleasant, reminiscent of unwashed feet, as the carriage rocked and screamed through a long stretch of darkness.
Frannie was twenty-five, with attractive Latin looks and a slender figure that she kept well toned by twice-weekly aerobics, and by swimming fifty lengths on Sunday mornings at her local pool. Like many Latins,
her family had a tendency towards fatness in middle age, and Frannie was determined never to let that happen to her, the way she was determined about many things in life.
Capriciousness sometimes broke through her barrier of reserve and, on rarer occasions, a fiery temper; but mostly Frannie applied herself with single-minded quietness and dedication to her work. She did not consider herself academic, or intellectual, and had to compensate by sheer slog. That was how she had got into university in the first place, and how she had got her degree in Archaeology and Anthropology. Frannie would have been pleased just to have scraped a third and had surprised herself by getting an upper second. She had scarcely been able to believe her good fortune when she had been offered a post as a research assistant at the British Museum within weeks of leaving university, where she had remained since.
She had wispy chestnut-brown hair that was clipped to each side of her head and rested on her shoulders, a straight nose, intelligent olive eyes and an expressive, sensual mouth prone to smiling, although at heart she was a serious girl. At five feet four inches, she wished she was a little taller, but by and large she was happy about her appearance.
She was wearing Nike trainers, blue jeans, an orange T-shirt and a black cotton jacket. Slung over her arm was a large untreated leather handbag she had bought in Naples four years previously on a family visit, and which was now comfortably hammered from its daily use. Frannie was not particularly interested in clothes and loathed shopping for them. In any event, archaeology did not pay well and she was saving as hard as she could to buy a small flat of her own and get out of the crummy place she rented. Jeans were fine for her work
and she lived in them most of the time, except when she had a smart date.
She had had no such date for a while. It had been over six months since her relationship with her last boyfriend had ended and, to her surprise, she was really enjoying her freedom. She was reading a lot, catching up on movies, going to exhibitions.
It would not last, she knew. Something intrinsically excited her about men, and sex was something she enjoyed deeply.
‘Dreaming of nothing in particular?’ said an advertisement on a panel in front of her.
A lanky youth with goofy front teeth stood opposite her. He looked at her face, down at the double bass, then back at her again. She caught his eye, stared back, and he looked away hastily. The train swayed and she nearly lost her balance, bumped into a large man in a singlet, with tattoos on his arms, and the double bass rocked precariously. She was already regretting having so readily agreed to bring it.
It belonged to Meredith Minns, a fellow Archaeology student at the University of London, with whom she had shared a room for their last year there. Meredith had wavered all that year between becoming a professional archaeologist or musician, then had fallen in love with a farmer and was now living in North Yorkshire, had produced two children, one of whom Frannie was a godmother to, and seemed content being a farmer’s wife.
When she had invited Frannie up to stay, she had asked if she would mind collecting the instrument from a man who was repairing it in Covent Garden. Meredith had told her to take a taxi and she would pay, but Frannie did not like squandering money, neither her own nor anyone else’s, and she had decided
when she collected it that although it was bulky it was not heavy, and she could manage it on the tube. Now she was beginning to realize she had been a bit optimistic.
The train was slowing and she gripped the grab-handle harder, lurching towards the goofy-toothed youth. Bright lights slid past the window as they came into a station. She saw the sign
KING’S CROSS
, and the train halted. She lugged her case and the double bass out, along the platform and on to the escalator.
On the station concourse, long lines stretched back from the ticket offices and the platform gates. Commuters hurried, some trying impossibly to sprint through the crowds.
People clambered over suitcases; a toothless old lady halted her luggage trolley, lips chomping impatiently, waiting for Frannie to move out of her path. But Frannie had not noticed her; she was standing, trying to fathom out the departures board.
YORK
, she saw, 17.34.
PLATFORM
3. She looked around for a luggage trolley but could not see one, and hefted her double bass and suitcase over to a queue at the ticket offices. An announcement rang out. Beads of perspiration trickled down her neck. She bought her ticket, then queued again at the platform gate. The train was coming in now, and the Tannoy announced: ‘Arrival of the 14.52 from York. British Rail apologizes for the late arrival of this train.’
She saw carriage doors opening in line before the train had stopped moving, and the empty platform erupted in seconds into a surging wall of people. Frannie heard a shout and a small boy ran past the ticket inspector and headlong into the mêlée, followed by a harassed-looking man. Frannie gripped her ticket in her teeth, picked up her case and slid the double bass
forward, stopped, repeated the procedure until she had reached the gate, then handed the ticket to the inspector.
He clipped it without looking at it, distracted by a colleague, and handed it back. She struggled forwards, the double bass getting heavier by the moment, got a few yards down the platform then stopped for a rest. Somewhere in front of her she heard a child shouting.
‘No! I don’t want to! I don’t want to!’
The sound rang out above the clattering of feet. Several people glanced around.
‘I hate you!’
The crowd was thinning and she could now see a boy of about eight – the boy who had run through the barrier a few minutes before – fighting to free himself from the grip of the man who had been chasing him and who was pulling him down the platform towards the gate.
‘Let me go, let me –’ As they reached Frannie, the boy suddenly stopped shouting and stared at her intently. Frannie felt a strange sense of recognition, as if she had seen him before somewhere. The man looked familiar also. In his mid-thirties, she estimated. Tall, a handsome, distinctive face; brown hair parted high up; he reminded her a little of the movie actor Harrison Ford and she wondered fleetingly where she had seen him before; perhaps he was an actor, or maybe a politician.
He stopped, sensing the boy’s change of mood and interest, and smiled apologetically at Frannie; he seemed a little embarrassed by the child’s behaviour. The boy was looking curiously at her double bass.
‘Can I – er – give you a hand?’ the man said in a quiet, assertive voice that carried both a hint of humour and the plummy confidence of the English upper
classes. He was wearing an old-fashioned but rather stylish linen suit, a faded denim shirt and a pink-and-green tie, and he had an endearing air that made Frannie instantly attracted to him.
‘It’s OK,’ she said. ‘Thanks – I can –’
‘It’s – er – no problem. Which carriage do you want? Have you got a reservation?’
‘Any carriage – I didn’t reserve.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘To York.’
‘Oh right – we’ll – umm – take you down to the front – it’ll be easier for you the other end.’ He picked up the double bass and the suitcase.
‘Really, it’s –’
‘What’s in there?’ the boy asked, touching the case. He was serious-looking, with an open, freckled face and curly ginger hair.
‘It’s a double bass,’ she said as she walked behind the man, the boy walking beside her.
‘Why’s it in the box?’
‘Because it’s easier to carry.’ She smiled, feeling a curious affinity for him.
‘We’ve just been to an air museum and the zoo,’ the boy said.
‘Have you?’ Frannie said politely.
‘Whipsnade Zoo, in Bedfordshire. I had a ride on an elephant and on a camel. The camel sat down first so I could get on. They always do that. Did you know?’
‘I didn’t realize they were so polite. Which did you like best – the camel or the elephant?’
The boy thought for a moment. ‘I think the camel – because if you have one you don’t have to remember to give it water every day. But they can kill you.’
‘Can they?’ she said, amused by the boy’s reasoning.
‘Oh yes,’ he said solemnly.
‘How about here?’ said the man.
‘Perfect. That’s very kind – just leave them here.’
The man lugged the double bass on to the train and wedged it into the luggage space at the end of the compartment. Frannie picked up her bag, but he took it insistently from her, carried that on to the train too and put it beside the double bass. ‘Beautiful city, York,’ he said.
‘Eboracum,’ Frannie replied, then immediately wondered why she had said that.
He gave her an intense look, as if he was examining an exhibit in a glass case. His eyes were a brilliant, cornflower blue, beneath thick eyebrows that were well apart. ‘Ah,’ he said with a warm grin. ‘A Latin scholar.’
Frannie smiled back. ‘No, I’m not a scholar, I’m afraid.’
‘I’m having piano lessons,’ the boy said.
‘Are you?’
‘Yes. My teacher’s not very nice, though. I’d like to learn the guitar when I’m older.’
Frannie caught his father’s eye. Caught the
frisson
of interest that flickered in it. He hesitated, as if about to say something, then he blushed and glanced at the boy.
‘Well – er –’ the man patted his pockets. His jacket was crumpled and his shoes were old brown brogues, well polished but battered. The boy was by far the neater of the two, in a white open-necked, button-down shirt, grey shorts with turn-ups, white socks and laced rubber-soled shoes. ‘Better not – er – get stranded on the train,’ he smiled at Frannie, hesitating again, as if trying to summon the courage to say something else.
‘Thank you,’ Frannie said as they parted. ‘Thank
you very much.’ She wished she could have kept the conversation going, but found herself watching him walk towards the exit, the boy at his side.
She went into the compartment, which was beginning to fill, and managed to claim a seat by the window. The image of the man’s face stayed in her mind. Excitement burned inside her. The fleeting look of recognition of something in his eyes; of the mutual attraction. She wanted suddenly to get up and run down the platform after him. To prevent the parting that had just taken place.
Except, she might just have been imagining his interest. And at least she hadn’t made a fool of herself. She smiled, feeling good suddenly. Good to have found herself attracted again to a man after so many months. She sat back, opened her bag and took out two magazines,
Antiquity
and the
Antiquaries Journal
. And she also took out the novel she was reading,
Take No Farewell
by Robert Goddard, which seemed oddly appropriate, she thought.
As the train jolted, then jolted again and began, silently, to roll forward, she flipped open one of the magazines at the last page, where she always started. But it was an hour before she was able to settle down and concentrate on her reading.
The traffic was snarled. Engines blattered and rattled and horns blared. The air above the bonnets of cars was corrugated by the heat and the gold spikes of the railings across the road bent and shimmered like reflections in a disturbed pond. Beyond them the British Museum sat, serious and graceful in the block it occupied in Bloomsbury, bounded by four roads like an island to which time was anchored.
In the rooms and galleries beyond the graceful portals, fragments of the past were laid out and neatly labelled, tens of thousands of years of chaos put into semblances of order:
Ancient Iran
;
Coptic Art
; Italy
Before the Roman Empire
. Visitors could stare through polished glass at the corpse of a man preserved in a peatbog; at jewelled crowns from the heads of dead emperors; at clay tablets and carved gods and Ming vases and fragments of neolithic artisan soup mugs; at pages of manuscripts left open as though waiting for their long-dead authors to return for final amendments.
Few people left the building unimpressed, untouched by something, by a memory or a thought, by a sense both of man’s insignificance and of his resources, by an awe of being in a place the sum of whose parts was greater than any single human being could ever be.
Behind the quiet order of the galleries lay a labyrinth of corridors, book-lined offices and basements where many of the thousand-strong staff worked, and where some of the priceless exhibits had been stored during
the war. Frannie’s office was cramped and one of the few without a window, but she did not mind. She loved this museum and still, some mornings, after nearly three years, got a kick just out of walking in through its majestic front, unable to believe that this was really where she worked. And sometimes, when the monotony of her current assignment got her down, she reminded herself that it was early days in her career and there were more exciting landmarks ahead.