relationship with Tucker, even as it stood, even excluding the school-girl dreams about Tucker coming to London and maybe even to Gooleness and maybe even staying with her and maybe even not staying on the couch, was exciting. How could it not be? She had something that nobody else in the world had, as far as she knew: e-mail conversation with the sort-of-famous Tucker Crowe, an enigmatic, talented, intelligent man who’d disappeared a long time ago. That would brighten anybody’s day, surely?
But then there were the darker, Duncan-related pleasures she was discovering in the situation. It had taken her about a minute and a half to work out that, if Duncan ever looked at the fridge, he would have no idea who he was staring at, and the ironies of that were good enough and large enough to eat with a knife and fork, on their own, with no accompanying bitterness. She could tell him anything. And he’d believe her, because he knew for a fact that Tucker Crowe now looked like Rasputin, or maybe Merlin—Annie had checked Duncan’s website when Tucker told her about Fucker’s unscheduled appearance in the bar, and his picture was there, as Tucker had told her it would be. (And she noticed, with great delight, that Fucker had described
First, though, she needed Duncan to visit, and she needed him to take notice of something that he would never normally spot in a hundred years: a very small change to a domestic environment. Maybe if she blew the picture up so that it covered the entirety of a wall, he might ask her whether she’d done something to the kitchen; but presuming this was beyond her, both financially and technically, she’d have to point it out in some other unsubtle way. She was going to make him look, though, whatever it took. There was no doubt about that.
She left a message for him on his cell when she knew he’d be teaching.
“Hello, it’s me. Listen, I’m sorry about the other night. I know you were trying to be friendly, and I can see how you might have needed someone to share the news with. Anyway. If you want to try again, I promise I’ll be more receptive.”
He called her at work, on his lunch break.
“That was very sweet of you.”
“Oh, that’s okay.”
“Pretty amazing, though, no?”
“Incredible.”
“There’s a picture up on the website.”
“I might have a look, later.”
There was a silence. He was so transparent, and she felt an unfamiliar tug of affection. He wanted to keep the conversation going, and he was also looking for an elegant way to turn this tiny spark of interest into something warmer and cozier. It wasn’t that he wanted her back, necessarily, she understood that, but she was sure he’d have been hurt and bewildered by her anger. And he’d be homesick, too. He hated not having his things around him, even on holiday.
“Can I come round for a cup of tea sometime?”
Elegance had proved beyond him. He’d settled for desperation, in the hope that she’d respond to his neediness.
“Well…”
“At a time convenient to you, of course.” As if the inconvenience, rather than the infidelity and the mess it had caused, might be responsible for the hesitation.
“Maybe later in the week? Let the dust settle a bit?”
“Oh. Really? Is there still, you know… dust?”
“There is round here. I don’t know what it’s like at your place.”
“I suppose if I say it’s not dusty, you’ll think, I don’t know… that everything’s all okay for me.”
“I’d just think you hadn’t noticed, to be honest, Duncan. You never used to notice when you were living here.”
“Ah. I thought we were talking about metaphorical dust.”
“We were. But there’s always room for a joke, surely?”
“Ha, ha. Yes, of course. Whenever you want. I’m sure I deserve a bit of teasing.”
She was suddenly overwhelmed by the sheer hopeless-ness of her relationship with Duncan. It wasn’t just hopeless in its current form; it had always been hopeless. It was an unsuitable Internet date with an inadequate, unexciting man that had lasted for years and years and years. And yet something was making her flirt with him, if flirting could ever include bitterness, and exclude fun, joy and the promise of sex. It was the rejection, she decided. And rejection in Gooleness was a special kind of rejection.
“What about Thursday?”
The truth was, she didn’t want to wait that long—she wanted him to see the picture as soon as possible. She could see, however, that desperately wanting someone not to recognize a photo of someone else was unattractive, and possibly even indicative of a spiritual crisis.
Terry Jackson, the town councillor, was unhappy at the lack of progress with the 1964 exhibition and had come to the museum to tell Annie as much.
“So, at the moment, the centerpiece of the exhibition would be what? The pickled shark’s eye? Because it’s hard to imagine anyone wanting to look at that for long.”
“We don’t really believe in centerpieces.”
“Don’t we?”
“No, we…”
“Let me put it another way, then. Is the shark’s eye the best thing we’ve got?”
“The idea is that we collect so many great things that we don’t talk about the best thing we’ve got.”
Every time Annie met Terry Jackson, she was distracted by his hair, which was gray, but thick and lovingly shaped by Brylcreem. How old had he been in 1964? Twenty? Twenty-one? Ever since he’d outlined his dream exhibition, which she had been naive enough, and arrogant enough, to believe she could turn into a reality, she’d had the feeling that he had left something behind in that year, and that she could help him get it back. The shark’s eye clearly wasn’t going to do it for him.
“But you haven’t got any great things.”
“We haven’t got enough, certainly.”
“I can’t say I’m not disappointed, Annie. Because I am.”
“I’m sorry. It’s a very hard thing to pull off. I think that even if we’d decided to widen it out and try for a ‘Gooleness in the 1960s’ exhibition, we’d have had difficulties.”
“I can’t believe that,” he said. “This place was bonkers in the 1960s. Loads of stuff going on.”
“I can believe it.”
“No you can’t,” he said sharply. “You’re just pretending you can believe it to humor me. The truth is, you think this place is a dump and you always have done. You’d love to put a shark’s eye in an empty room and tell everybody it summed up Gooleness. You’d think it was funny. I knew we should have got a local girl in to run this place. Someone with a feel for it.”
“I know I wasn’t brought up here, Terry. But I’d like to think I’ve developed an affinity with the town.”
“Codswallop. You can’t wait to leave. Well, now your boyfriend’s run off, you can, can’t you? Nothing keeping you here.”
She studied the wall behind his head hard, in an attempt to retract the one tear that seemed to be forming in her right eye. Why the right? Was it one of those things where the right tear duct was connected to the left side of the brain, and it was the left side of the brain that processed emotional trauma? She had no idea, but trying to work it out helped.
“I’m sorry,” said Terry. “I had no right to bring up your personal life. It’s a great town, Gooleness, but it is a small town, I’ll give you that. My nephew’s at the college, and they all seem to know up there.”
“Don’t worry. And, of course, you’re right. There’s less to tie me to the town than there was. But I would like to try and get this exhibition on before I leave. If I leave.”
