So Many Ways to Begin

50 DHSS Booklet, Guide to Services for the Newly Unemployed, 1986

This was what it took, in the end, to break him. A five-minute meeting in a basement office. A man in a suit, ten years younger than him, talking about the need for efficiencies. Talking about the importance of restructuring, the generous size of the package being offered. Economic conditions are putting the whole sector at the back of the queue, Daniel, the younger man said. It's a tragedy for heritage in the county but we have to do our best with it.

It's David, he said tautly, leaning forward, placing his forearms on the desk. It was the same desk that had been there since the museum opened, a heavy modernist piece which had seen four directors sit where the young man was sitting now, and slide important pieces of paper across its polished surface. David had even taken his place there for a week once, standing in for a director who'd gone to the British Museum for a conference. How long have I got? he asked, cutting across the young man's continued explanations. The man looked up, meeting his eye for the first time since he'd started talking. He seemed confused by the interruption, frowning slightly.

I'm sorry? he said. David rubbed his forehead, holding his hand over his eyes for a moment.

Please, he said, gesturing vaguely at the papers on the desk, don't bother with all this. Just tell me how long I've got. A month? Three months? The man looked down at the papers in front of him, as if to check, tugging at his earlobe and sweeping his hand across the top of his head.

Well, he said. If you'll let me finish.

There was a filing cabinet behind the desk that contained the records of every exhibition held since the museum opened, the loans, acquisitions, searches and sales which had been necessary to facilitate them, the planning which had gone into them, the interpretative text which had been used in the displays, the visitor responses, the press coverage, the layout diagrams, everything. And with the exception of the years 1965-1968, between the museum opening and David starting work, there wasn't a single exhibition that he hadn't been involved with in some way. He wondered if the young man knew that. He wondered if the young man knew how often he'd sat in his bedroom as a child, sketching out exhibition spaces for the air-raid finds his father brought home for him from the building sites; or how many times he'd been to London to study the exhibitions there, the correlation of displays and texts, the skill needed to draw a visitor through a collection of objects and bring them out with a lived sense of one particular moment in time. He remembered the excitement he'd felt when he first took the job, and how he'd managed to hold on to something of that excitement even as the collections were being reduced, the staffing levels cut, even as he lost faith in his ambition of one day opening a museum of his own, or saw how easily the documents and objects in the archives would rot and crumble no matter how carefully they were kept. He wondered, looking at the locked filing cabinet, if he would ever be able to do anything else.

The young man was still talking, reading through a sheaf of papers spread out in front of him, the words chattering past unheard until David caught the phrase with immediate effect. He looked at the man and sat further forward in his chair.

Immediate effect? he said. The man nodded.

I'm so sorry, he said, tilting his head to one side and trying to make a sympathetic expression.

Right now? David said stupidly. The man nodded again. Bloody hell, David said. After twenty-three years? The man lifted his hands off the desk, holding his palms up towards him.

David, he said, I know. Your length of s

ervice is reflected more than adequately in the package we're offering to—

Twenty-three years, David said again, interrupting. I'm forty-one years old. This is all I've ever done. What am I going to do now? What the hell am I going to do now?

He might have signed something. He might have been handed a bundle of papers which he rammed furiously into a briefcase. Possibly the man stood and tried to shake his hand, and he either didn't notice or refused. Anna might have appeared on his way out of the building, to offer her apologies or her condolences or just to hold up her hands and say there was nothing she could have done. He couldn't remember. He wasn't sure how he got from the office to the house, whether he said goodbye to anyone on the way out, or said anything at all, shouted anything, kicked or slammed any doors. He wasn't in the mood, for once, to keep a record of the event.

51 Video cassette: World's Greatest Boxing Heroes, c.1987

He was watching one of his new videos, with his feet up on the coffee table and the curtains closed, when he heard Kate letting herself in through the front door, dropping her school bag on the stairs and walking straight past him into the kitchen. He sat up a little straighter, rubbing at the skin around his eyes and wondering what time it was. He heard her take a glass out of the cupboard and help herself to some orange squash, and he noticed for the first time that she no longer had to stand on a stool to reach it.

She came back into the room without saying anything, sitting at the far end of the sofa and slowly swinging her legs. She was eleven years old, and he realised that she was on the verge of no longer being a child. He watched her for a moment, her face lit up by the television screen, a biscuit in one hand and the glass of squash in the other, apparently unaware that he was looking at her. Her blonde hair was tied back into a neat ponytail, the arms of her small silver-framed glasses tucked into the hair around her ears. As she bit into the biscuit, she kept bringing a finger or a thumb up to her lips to poke stray crumbs back into her mouth, pinching up any that fell further down on to the front of her school uniform, her eyes staying fixed on the screen, the two men in black and white circling each other with their gloved fists raised, her face almost expressionless. He found something compulsive about watching her; something about her neat smallness, the delicate shapes of her hands, her ears, the soft roundness of her nose; something about the way each time he looked at her he saw some faint echo of Eleanor, or himself, or even of Ivy; something about the way each time he looked closely some part of her seemed to have changed, stretched and grown while he wasn't looking, the colour of her hair darkening slightly, the burnish of the skin on her face coarsening a little, the shape of her eyebrows shifting and settling, her feet stretching a little further towards the floor each time she sat at the far end of the sofa with a biscuit and a glass of orange squash. She would never again be the same as this one moment he was watching her now. Before she'd been born, he'd never understood what a privilege this would be. He watched her carefully, not quite turning towards her, trying not to let her see. She picked the last few crumbs from her sweater and gulped down the rest of her drink.

Dad, she said, turning to him suddenly, what do you do? He looked at her. She turned back to the screen.

What do you mean? he asked, taking his feet down from the table and sitting up, leaning towards her.

I mean, what do you do, she said again, emphasising the do, as if her question was obvious.

Well, he said, and then he didn't know what to say, and almost as suddenly as she'd started the conversation she seemed to lose interest.

Can I watch my programmes? she asked.

In a minute, he said. Do you mean what do I do for a job? he asked. She nodded.

Mrs Smithson went round the class and everyone had to say what their dad did, and I didn't know what to say and everyone laughed, she said, matter-of-factly.

Did everyone else have something to say? he asked her. She nodded again. Even Carl? he asked. And Robin?

Carl said his dad was an RAF pilot and Robin said his dad worked in America, she said. He smiled gently.

Oh, he said, I see. Well, you know that I used to work at the museum, don't you? You know I was a curator? Why didn't you say that? She sighed loudly, as if what he'd just said was too boring to even respond to. Kate? he said. She turned to him, resting her chin on her hand and lifting her eyebrows in an impression of her mother. Why didn't you say that? he asked again.

But you don't do that now, she said, her voice rising indignantly. I had to say what you do now not what you used to do. What do you do now, Dad? she said again. They looked at each other for a moment.

I don't know, he said quietly. I've been having a rest for a while, he said. Like when you have a summer holiday. She looked at him, small flickers of disbelief wrinkling across her face.