The Mystery of the Venus Island Fetish (5 page)

‘Phew,' said Archie. He slumped against the doorjamb. The worst was over. He composed
himself and walked back into the great hall. It was just after nine and the first
visitors of the day were trickling in. As he approached the stuffed orangutans he
slowed to eavesdrop on a pair of elderly women who stood looking at the creatures.

‘Ain't he the spitting image of my Clarrie?' one quipped.

‘Yairs,' the other replied. ‘I can see the 'semblance—'specially round 'is eyes.
But Clarrie's teeth are dirtier. And there's less of 'em.'

Archie left the cackling women, and walked towards the unmarked wooden door that
led to the curatorial offices. Amid the clutter of the exhibition it was easy to
overlook. He inserted his antique key in the lock, and as it turned he heard that
satisfying ‘thunk' which heralded his admission into the bowels of the institution.

The walls of the narrow corridor were crowded with books and journals. Archie was
on his own turf now, and his heart began to soar. How long had he waited for this
day? In a few moments he would see his Beatrice. Surely she had accepted his proposal
of marriage.

Chapter 3

If circumstances had ever conspired to keep a girl from knowledge of the world,
they had done so in the case of Miss Beatrice Goodenough. The second child of a straight-laced
father who sired only daughters, she grew up in an isolated if rather grand homestead
on the western plains of New South Wales. It was the kind of place where masters
and servants never mixed, where father came to dinner in a high starched collar,
and where even the ebony legs of the piano were decorously hidden behind voluminous
rolls of cloth.

Her childhood memories consisted of time passing slowly: she and her younger sisters
dressing dolls; the parlour with its heavy drapes and ticking grandfather clock,
its chimes marking what seemed an unvarying eternity. Just once, something
extraordinary
happened. She had gone to the kitchen, a realm forbidden to her, when a knock sounded
at the back door. Cookie, as the children called her—a rotund woman in her fifties—rose
and opened it.

And there stood a near-naked Aborigine, a nulla-nulla in his hand.

‘Mi laikim tukka, missus. Cuttim plenty piaiwood.'

Cookie slammed the door shut. She noticed Beatrice and shooed her away. But not before
that momentary glimpse of the wider world had both terrified and thrilled the young
girl.

Beatrice was schooled by her mother until she was twelve, and then packed off to
stay with an aunt and uncle at Mosman on Sydney's north shore. She would be ‘finished'
at the Methodist Ladies College. Her custodians, she was dismayed to discover, were
even more Victorian in their attitudes than her parents. Beatrice felt that the only
reason they accepted her was the generous stipend paid them by her father. With few
diversions, she devoted herself single-mindedly to her schoolwork. Unsurprisingly,
she matriculated with the highest encomia.

Despite her obvious intelligence, her teachers worried about young Miss Goodenough.
Miss Sodworthy, the Latin mistress, summed matters up when, on the eve of Beatrice's
matriculation, she warned the girl that her combination of naiveté and rather rapturous
temperament would get her into trouble.

‘You're an intelligent and diligent student, Beatrice, but you're hopelessly romantic—and
flighty to boot. To avoid, er, let us say, distractions, I suggest a job in a quiet
environment. A museum, for example. There are always lots of labels to be written
in such a place, and your calligraphy is excellent. There's a new director
at the
natural history museum. From Cambridge, I hear. And so handsome.' A dreamy quality
crept into her voice. ‘Perhaps Headmistress can make inquiries on your behalf.'

And so it was that in 1926, at the age of seventeen, Beatrice's glorious copperplate
secured her the position of registrar in the museum's anthropology department. Archie,
a year older, was in the final year of his museum cadetship. Gangly, pimply, pale
and small for his age, he was awkward in the way only teenage boys can be. A careful
observer, however, might have noticed in his hazel eyes, fine nose and well-defined
mouth the makings of a handsome young man.

The anthropology department occupied the entire basement of the museum. At one end,
tall double doors opened into a capacious room used to unpack collections and curate
oversized objects such as canoes and carved trees. This space opened onto the registration
area. At its centre was an imposing oak table, upon which sat, on an angled bookstand,
a great, leather-bound register. Beside it was an inkwell, a fountain pen and blotting
paper. A stool, and a tall wooden cabinet against the adjacent wall, in which were
stored specimens upon which the registrar was working, completed Beatrice's realm.

A few chairs, scattered about a bench set below a high window, occupied most of the
remaining space, which acted as a sort of anthropology common area. Four doors opened
from this room. Three led to offices of varying size, while the fourth opened onto
a dank corridor which led deep under the building. Light switches along its length
lit up only three bulbs, while simultaneously turning off the three behind, so as
to leave darkness before and behind the visitor. Heavy wooden doors,
resembling those
of prison cells, opened off it. Behind each lay a storeroom crammed with objects
for which there was no space in the exhibition, or which were considered unsuitable
for public display. Painted wooden plaques indicated the category of the objects
therein: Egyptology, Oceania, Osteology and so on, into the far darkness.

In his early days at the museum Archie wandered the storerooms, familiarising himself
with the contents. The walls of the osteology room, he discovered, were fitted with
wooden racks, while coffin-sized crates, stacked almost to the ceiling, occupied
the centre of the room. The boxes held skeletons, the racks, skulls. Hundreds of
them. Each shelf was labelled: ‘Solomon Islands', ‘British New Guinea', ‘New Hebrides',
‘New Zealand', ‘Tasmania', ‘Victoria' and so on. The largest area was ‘New South
Wales', every shelf of which was crammed with skulls. Some had jaws, but many did
not. Some were stained brown with soil, indicating a long time buried, but others
were fresh and white from the dissection table. One day Archie took a skull in his
hands. It looked like it had been burned, and he noticed that there was a neat hole
in its side, just large enough to accommodate the tip of his little finger. ‘Myall
Creek, Female' had been inked across the brow. He put the skull back in its place,
wondering how the perforation had been made.

By the time he entered the next room the minor mystery had been forgotten. ‘Oceania'
was long and rectangular, much larger than ‘Osteology'. The walls were festooned
with shields, spears and clubs, while dozens of canoes, fish-traps and doors to spirit
houses were slung from the ceiling. On the far wall, lying like a funnelweb spider
in its lair, was a terrifying mask, surrounded by
skulls—the Great Venus Island Fetish.
Archie backed out, shut the door and vowed never again to enter the room alone.

On the rare occasion that Archie emerged into the registration area, Beatrice hardly
noticed him. As a cadet he was a general dogsbody, and, except when she needed a
heavy object moved or something brought up from the storeroom, Beatrice ignored the
painfully shy young man. But from the moment Archie laid eyes on Beatrice, he'd been
ensorcelled. As she sat, straight-backed on her stool, with the great register open
before her, her blue eyes fierce with concentration, her blonde locks cascading around
her face, she became his goddess.

Beatrice would never admit it, but despite her romantic flights of fancy she was
probably the one person on earth more shy and awkward with the opposite sex than
Archie. The merest intimation of anything to do with real boys had her melting in
an agony of embarrassment, which perhaps explained why her taste extended only to
pale, skinny, academic types—and then only in her dreams.

It was some time before Archie plucked up the courage to speak to his idol. It happened
at the museum Christmas party, after they had each drunk two glasses of punch.

‘Miss Goodenough, are you musical, at all?' he blurted. ‘I mean, do you like music—that
sort of thing?'

Somehow, Archie's mirroring of her own internal anguish put Beatrice at ease. Or
perhaps it was the punch. In any case she responded in a rather breathless way about
the glories of Brahms and Schubert, and the virtues of Elgar, then blushed violently.

Desperate to sound cultured, Archie had drawn his question
from thin air. He knew
nothing at all about music, and was trapped by a rising sense of panic. He was about
to slink away, a self-confirmed failure, when he remembered the posters advertising
a recital at the town hall.

‘Would you come to a concert with me?' he stammered.

‘I'd love to,' said Beatrice, somewhat surprising herself.

Archie made a feeble excuse that he was needed at home, then rushed into the street
to find out exactly what the poster advertised. To his horror, he saw that it was
not Brahms or Schubert, but a Salvation Army hymn night. But he was committed now.
Just have to make the best of it, he said to himself. It was, after all, the season
for such things.

The more Archie thought about the concert, the more daunting the whole thing became.
What does one do with a young lady on a first date? Was it even a date? And what
to wear? He confessed his worries to his best friend, the mammalogist Courtenay Dithers.

‘Just kiss her,' Dithers replied airily. ‘Politely, on the cheek. Or the lips if
you must. That's all that's required on a
first
date, Archie. But you must pass muster,
clothes-wise, old man. Do you have a suit?'

‘Maybe I could borrow my brother's,' Archie replied doubtfully.

‘Don't be ridiculous. You'd be swimming in the thing. Better ask for Nev at the Maori's
Head. He'll sort you out.'

That lunchtime Archie detoured via the Maori's Head Hotel. It was the museum's local.
Nellie, the barmaid, pointed out Nev, a slight, furtive-looking man who was smoking
in a darkened corner of the public bar. He was, Archie felt, the kind of bloke who'd
vanish at the first sign of trouble. And, judging by the look
on his face, trouble
was never far off.

‘Suit, is it?' Nev said, as he mentally measured Archie up. ‘Formal? S'right? See
me out the back at four, and bring a tenner. Nine bob as surety you'll return it
on time.'

At the appointed hour Archie presented himself in the dank laneway at the rear of
the Maori's Head. Nev materialised out of nowhere. The fug of smoke around him thickened,
courtesy of the durry hanging at a corner of his mouth. He was carrying a large parcel
wrapped in newspaper.

‘It'll fit yer like a glove,' Nev said. A smile revealed gappy, nicotine-stained
fangs. ‘Just get it back on time. Tomorrer, 7 a.m. Don't be bloody late or yer'll
do yer dough!'

Archie untied the package to reveal a pair of black and grey striped stovepipe trousers
and a splendid tails coat that hung halfway down his calves.

He cornered Dithers. ‘Nev gave me a mourning suit! I'm going to a bloody Salvo's
concert,' Archie wailed, ‘not a state funeral.'

‘It will all be all right, Archie. Never hurts to dress up. Just don't be too public
in it.'

‘Why not?'

‘Well, Nev runs a little sideline. He works for a dry cleaner up the Cross, and rents
out clothes overnight. Then he cleans them before the shop opens in the morning.
As long as nobody knows, no harm is done. Wouldn't do for the suit's owner to see
you, though.'