The Allport Museum is an era pressed in the pages of a book like an old flower. Each room cordoned off from touching, our time, frozen, kept still forever, silent but for the backing of the ticking grandfather clock. When I paused before the room containing Mary Allport’s harp I stopped and frowned.
“Who plays her harp?” I whispered.
“What do you mean?” My guide asked. “Oh, now, today? I really don’t know. I don’t think anyone is allowed to play it.”
“Instruments are meant to be played.” I couldn’t have explained to her my strong identification with the unplayed instrument preserved as a relic of a bygone time, for seemingly no purpose but that of preservation itself.
“It’s for it’s own protection. It’s very old now.”
I nodded my understanding yet my words argued the point. “Better, if one were a harp, whose sole purpose is to make music, to fall apart playing when your time has come than to sit unplayed for centuries.”
The cabinet I had to find is stored in a room you can only enter with a librarian escort, and generally speaking only writers and researchers are allowed. The Crowther Collection is separated on opposites sides of this vault of hidden, lost things are stored, because during life the man the world knew as Cecil had a long-standing grudge against Crowther.
“So why do you want to look at the cabinet of curiosities?” the librarian asked.
“I’m writing a novel in which Cecil is one of the characters.” On the spot I decided to do it so it wouldn’t be a lie.
“Why Cecil though? I think Moreton was a far more interesting sort of man. Cecil just appears to have been very good at making money. Nothing much personal shows through with him at all.”
I exhaled air through my nostrils in quiet humour. When you look at your own life and you remember how much you’ve already edited. The things you’ve burned, the edited photograph albums with old boyfriends removed, should we not see the dead in ourselves? The traces left of a life one hundred and fifty years later are but the ashes of a story fire that’s most pungent truths sometimes don’t make the cut when it’s time to decide what is preserved. What of a father’s life do we preserve to show to grandchildren? What of a grandfather’s?
“How do people know that yet, if no one’s written a proper biography?” I asked gently, not wanting to appear defensive of a dead man. “Surely no one with such a fine eye for beautiful things could have been so straightforward?”
“True. Who knows what he was up to in his spare time, I guess?”
We rode the elevator up to ‘11’ (which you can’t see on the visitor maps and is only reachable by staff that have a particular level card to swipe) we met two other librarians. They spotted where we were heading.
“Are you going up to 11? I’ve been here five years and I’ve never got to see 11! Are you a writer or something?”
“Yes.”
“Oh you’re here for the grisly medical equipment!”
Clearly I have come to look like someone who is here for the grisly medical equipment. “No,” I muttered. “Just… shells…”
“Here it is, the whole thing’s Huon Pine,” The lady explained. As she opened the drawers the smell of my century poured out and I tried to breathe it in like it was snuff. The cabinet contained a great deal more than shells. Small packets of powders in red and white, little viols of dirt… “What is anyone going to do with little bits of dirt like that?” she asked. Fortunately I’d tucked away the very similar glass vial of dirt from his grave hanging around my own neck at that very moment.“Nobody’s really catalogued this properly,” the librarian remarked. “They were basically 19.th century hoarders. Moreton started keeping things even before Cecil carried it on. Moreton was the interesting one, with his photography and everything. Or Mary and her painting! What got you interesting in old Cecil out of all the Allports?” she queried again. “He just seemed to me like the rock who held the family together and lived only to perform his duties to his family, if he had a fun side there’s no record of it. Other than that he eccentrically pottered away collecting books and memorabilia in his spare time. What does a novelist do with that?”
“It’s hard to explain,” I murmured, running my fingers reverentially over the tiny vials and boxes.
Beyond all the tiny containers full of my century, and the mummified bat and toad, my eye was immediately drawn to the small spiral shaped white shell which is identical to the one I found on his grave. When I lay my fingertips on it and felt something jolt through my body. I picked up one of the cowries and held it to my ear.
“Do you hear the ocean from the nineteenth century in there?” the librarian joked.
“One has to check.”
As I left the library I found myself walking behind two young men close to my age. They were walking arm in arm, one of them wearing a suit and the other dressed more casually. The coincidence made the hairs on the back of my arms stand to. I thought it lovely, taking it for a friendly gesture as it once would have been in my time, but I smiled when I saw them shift to holding hands and realized they were in fact lovers. They were going the same way as me and I couldn’t help observing them as a slightly uncanny manifestation.
As I had not yet once seen two men go hand-in-hand up Liverpool Street with the blithe happiness of these two. They were gawked at by every second or third passerby, I’m sorry to report, even today. One old lady visibly jumped a little when she noticed they were both male. But something inside me flared up in rebellion and defiant elation even at this. I felt such an aching sorrow-softened species of happiness to see how unaffected by it they were, as though they neither noticed nor cared. And why should they? Despite what we've all heard in the news the law of this land allows them this basic right these days. See how that better world you promised me has partially arrived, my dear? I thought, feeling the gentle tap-tap of his grave dirt vial against my chest as I walked.
For many of us the ear to hear us and the heart to understand haven't been born yet. So we leave traces. A letter still unopened. A journal with subtle encoded meaning. A story unhoused at last. The echoes of their voice are still reverberating. Whenever someone catches the signal they come alive again for a moment. Nothing is ever truly over, just deferred. Ours is a story yet to be told, and always to be told.