The Golden Child by Penelope Fitzgerald

Author:Penelope Fitzgerald [Penelope Fitzgerald]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2014-04-24T04:00:00+00:00

5

WHEN Waring Smith reached home he felt so battered, so much more knowledgeable and so much less confident that he scarcely knew what he was supposed to do next. His good sense told him that he had better go back to work at the usual time next morning, and make as acceptable a report as he could on his expedition.

As soon as he picked up the newspapers, lying in reproachful disorder on the front door-mat, he learned the details of Sir William’s death. Then, in the Sundays, came a long paragraph on the death of Jones. In stunned disbelief, Waring could only remember Sir William asking why the blazes the public shouldn’t believe there was a Curse on the Treasure if they wanted to.

He rose early to go to the launderette before starting out to work; there, sitting between a sleeping tramp and a West Indian mother of six, with his shirt and socks whirling round before his eyes, he allowed himself to think, or to feel, rather. All the springs of emotion, frozen up in him, first by the exactions of the Whitstable and Protective Building Society, then by the bewilderment of his Russian trip, were now set free. Even the enormity of the truth about the Exhibition receded, and he was totally absorbed by his longing for Haggie and his grief for the loss of Sir William. Yes, Sir William had been eighty-five, and his life depended on a hairsbreadth from day to day. But he had filled a place which now had to stand forever empty. How kind, and how unkind he had been at exactly the right moments, and how impressive, distinct and apart, with the patina of fine old age on him, like the Museum’s choicest objects, detached and yet affectionate towards the queer century into which he had survived. He had cared about the patient public outside the Museum, not out of sentimentality, not even because he had been born in the backroom of a two-up-two-down in Poplar, but as a plain matter of justice. He could not imagine the Museum without the chance of going up to Sir William’s room, dense with smoke from morning till evening, for a few words about heaven knows what.

The papers also spoke about an inquest, and that was a hard blow. Waring would very much have liked the old man to have been buried in peace. In any case, it was all nonsense. How could Sir William have collapsed and died in the Library? He never went there.

Even in the few days he had been away, the aspect of the queues had changed. The courtyard, an hour before admission time, had more the appearance of a great fair painted by Breughel; the weather was almost as cold as in Moscow, tiny children in bright woollen hats were chasing each other in and out of the legs of the crowd, and enterprising vendors of hot dogs and meat pies had been allowed to set up their pitch under the colonnades.

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