The Museum of Broken Promises Read online

  ‘I don’t know why I’m here.’ He corrected himself. ‘Yes, I do.’

  The struggle for disclosure was also familiar to Laure. ‘Beginning at the beginning helps both of us,’ she said gently. ‘Take your time. I’m here to listen.’

  Joseph Broad drew out an expensive-looking wallet and extracted a railway ticket from it. The manner in which he held it suggested that the ticket burnt him and he dropped it onto the table. ‘As you know, my name is Joseph Broad but it should be Joseph Murry.’

  Out of the corner of her eye, Laure saw May settle further into the chair, her hair colour almost lost against the yellow walls.

  ‘Murry is the name of my birth mother who I tracked down.’

  Laure sat with her hands in her lap, waiting. Joseph Broad looked down at his feet and then up at Laure.

  ‘She lives in a rundown area near Nottingham. In a tower block. I went to look before I made contact. It shocked me as to how bad it was. No one should have to live like that. The contrast between our lives was dreadful.’ He gestured to the wallet.

  The wallet, the Brooks Brothers shirt, the upmarket city shoes all told their own story.

  She waited as he collected himself. Trial and error had taught her that silence was powerful and acted like a sponge to draw out the sting. Often those who donated imagined, in deciding on this big step, that whatever it was driving them had been harnessed and brought under control. They knew what they were going to say. They had it down pat. They rehearsed it before they came. They knew how they felt.

  Except, they did not. When it came to the point, very often the reservoirs of pain and anguish broke their banks and swamped their good intentions.

  Laure smiled encouragement at Joseph Broad.

  ‘I made contact,’ he said. ‘We talked on the phone. She told me that at the time she felt it was impossible to keep me. Her circumstances were rock bottom and she thought I would have the chance of a better life if she gave me away.’

  His distress impelled him to his feet and over to the small window – a reaction which he might have been surprised to learn was a common one.

  May’s sneeze fractured the silence. ‘Sorry, sorry.’ She found a tissue and blew her nose.

  ‘Do you know Paris?’ Laure asked Joseph.

  ‘I’ve done the sights.’ Joseph returned to the chair. ‘I’m here for business a lot but mainly see the inside of the hotel.’

  ‘Do you mind leaving your story in a strange city?’

  ‘Should I?’

  ‘It’s a question worth asking.’ Laure opened the file on Joseph Broad which Nic had prepared. ‘It might tie in with why you want to leave a donation and why you decided to look for her.’

  Joseph Broad’s lips turned a shade paler. ‘It was a feeling. OK, I had a dream where I was minus my legs. I’d had a heavy night but the feeling bugged me for weeks afterwards. When I mentioned it to my partner, Paula, she said it was because I’ve no roots.’ He attempted to laugh. ‘I said that was cod psychology.’

  Laure asked gently, ‘Can I use a cliché? Just because you’re paranoid does not mean they’re not out to get you. Paula might be correct.’

  Joseph took ten seconds to process the suggestion. ‘I was adopted at six weeks and lived in Surrey with some nice, good people. I was well treated and I loved them but, always, always I felt this despair and I never knew why. They’re dead now but, since they died, I’ve had this urge to find out who I am. I paid a researcher to do the preliminaries and he located my mother and the agency who put me out for adoption. Via the agency, I made contact and we spoke on the phone.’

  ‘It was OK?’

  ‘It was OK.’

  Joseph wasn’t telling the truth which was, probably, too difficult to handle at this point and it was not for Laure to probe. May extracted her laptop from the rucksack and Laure shot her a warning look.

  ‘The ticket?’

  His shoulders tensed. ‘She promised to meet me in London. I offered to send a car but she wasn’t having any of it. We agreed she would come by train and I sent her the ticket for London.’ He edged the ticket towards Laure. ‘This is the return bit. First Class.’

  Both Laure and May remained quite still. The finale to this story was predictable – and breathed sadness.

  ‘She promised she would come. She did promise.’ His gaze slid past Laure. ‘I can’t get over how pleased she sounded when I first made contact. She told me that you never stopped thinking about a baby that you gave away. She told me that my name wasn’t Joseph but Barney after my grandfather. I told her that she could call me Barney.’

  A hush held the room.

  ‘And what did you tell her?’

  His lips moved but no sound came out. He tried again, the words slipping and sliding away from him. ‘I told her that I longed to know her.’

  Laure looked down at the file. Her mastery of the art of remaining unmoved by another’s distress was still not perfected.

  Joe looked first out of the window. Then at the floor. Then at the well-kept hands grasped tightly in his lap. ‘I waited for three trains to come in. Nothing.’ His eyes glistened. ‘You would have thought…’ A pause. ‘Wouldn’t she be curious to see what she had given away?’

  May coughed. Laure frowned at her.

  She rearranged the papers in Joseph Broad’s file. ‘I’ve talked to many people doing this…’ she gestured to the file, ‘and I know from—’ She cut herself off. ‘I’ve come to understand that guilt and regret are the most difficult of burdens to carry. You need courage to deal with them and sometimes people just can’t summon sufficient amounts. They’ve been too hurt. Or worn down. I’m not a professional psychotherapist, merely an observer, but I would urge you to consider if your mother needs more time.’

  ‘She may.’ He paused. ‘I don’t.’ Between the two utterances, his features hardened into anger.

  Laure made up her mind. ‘Three things. We offer you the chance to place the object in the cabinet. Some donors find that part of the procedure important. Secondly, we ask you to provide a description as to why it is here. Thirdly, you must specify what you’d like done with an object after its time here is up.’

  He leant across the desk. ‘Please write: “I am your son and you failed to meet me.” And put it where you wish. I’m leaving this evening.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  The previous suggestion of tears that she had spotted earlier had left a tiny slug’s trail at the corners of his eyes. ‘I’m as sure of it as anything.’

  The ‘it’ encompassed what Joseph obviously considered a failure and he was the sort unused to failure. His anger and confusion were demonstrably painful to him and painful to witness. At her observation post, May shifted uneasily.

  Joseph pushed the ticket across to Laure. She picked it up. It contained none of the imperfectly masked emotion of its donor.

  Nic returned from escorting Joseph Broad downstairs and reported that he had slotted a hefty offering into the donation box before leaving.

  ‘Poor guy,’ said May. ‘But it did him good coming here. Don’t you think?’ Neither Nic nor Laure replied. She looked from one to the other. ‘Are there moments when it gets to you and the positive energy runs out?’ Not that Laure had doubted it from the first meeting, but May was shrewd.

  Nic looked up and his gaze locked with May’s, and it was he who replied. ‘From time to time.’

  Laure slotted the railway ticket into a plastic wallet and labelled it ‘Joseph Broad/Murry’ with the date.

  May was poised over the keyboard of her laptop. ‘Do you have much feedback?’

  ‘Yes, we have. A lot.’ Nic got in first. ‘I can show you if you like.’

  Feedback was preserved faithfully in the archives. Many had written in. ‘Visiting the museum has cleansed me’, wrote one. ‘I am now able to face myself’, wrote another.

  *

  Before she left that evening, Laure made her customary evening round, walking from room to room to check
that all was well and in situ.

  Her brother Charlie teased that she had the Florence Nightingale chromosome.

  Maybe.

  Knowing oneself was such a huge task, mostly uphill. Never finished.

  ‘Good answer,’ Charlie had said. ‘But you – and I – are more piecemeal than many we know.’

  Apart from the bursts of laughter coming from the office upstairs where Nic and May had holed up, there was only the clock’s tick and the click of her heels on the floorboards to break the post-visitor hush.

  Irresolute for once, she hovered in the doorway of Room 3. Where to place Joseph Broad’s railway ticket? Beside the doll with the smashed-in face? Alongside the milk tooth in the matchbox? They were all connected, as May had been quick to pick up. The convergence between Jamie’s anger and Joseph’s childhood despair fed directly into a shared experience of adult treachery to children.

  Room 3’s floor was particularly uneven and it had been necessary to prop up one leg of the cabinet containing the framed Czechoslovakian railway ticket. The notice underneath gave the date, where it was issued and its destination. The label read in English, French and Czech: ‘A railway ticket for the route used by people leaving Czechoslovakia for Austria in the 1980s. This was an escape route favoured by those fleeing from the regime. Many did not make it.’

  In the early days of the museum, some visitors were curious to know its history and Laure told stories of eastern European dissidents who had been caught by the dogs or the guards at the crossing point into Austria – narratives of flight, fear and uncertainty. When asked how that particular ticket represented a broken promise, she replied, ‘I’m not allowed to give details’, which only increased speculation.

  As the museum developed and filled up with objects, interest in the ticket waned but she clung on to it long after she should have done.

  Having unlocked the cabinet, she reached for the frame of unpolished wood which she had chosen because Tomas had loved the forest.

  She held it against her chest.

  CHAPTER 5

  Prague, 1986

  MY GOD, IT’S A GREY PLACE, THOUGHT LAURE ON FIRST sighting the city through the windows of the limousine sent to pick up the Kobes family from the airport. Unlike the rainbow Paris which she knew well. Or the green and brown Yorkshire of her childhood.

  Over the succeeding days, she revised her opinion. There was colour if you sought it out. It streaked through the baroque stones of Hradčany, the enormous castle complex hunching over the city, which she could see from her employers’ apartment in the Malá Strana (the Strangers’ quarter), directly beneath it. Later on, she became familiar with the sly summer sparkle of the Vltava river dividing the Malá Strana from the confusing matrix of streets in the Staré Mĕsto (the Old Town) and was treated to the swathe of summer green up on the Letná Plain.

  It wasn’t a sexy city like Paris. Yet, there was something deep and mysterious about it that even the summer sun could not penetrate. Resting at its heart was a history of changing faiths, of persecution, of demons and music. It was a haunting place and a haunted place, its past littered with ironies.

  Take the sentence in the book Prague on a Shoestring, with which she had armed herself. ‘Once the capital of the Holy Roman Empire, Prague is a Protestant capital with a magnificent Catholic cathedral.’

  Petr Kobes, her employer, told her that the Czechs called their city matička Praha, ‘little mother Prague’, but, he added with the smile that charmed her, it was as well to be aware that one of its most famous writers, Kafka, had written: ‘this little mother has claws’.

  In the Staré Mĕsto, a couple of drunks were propped up against a door with studded nails. Further down the street, another slumped on a bench, an empty bottle of Becherovka rolling mournfully on the ground beside him.

  You could smell the booze as you passed. Nothing new there, she thought. Any day of the week there were drunks back home. ‘The English are hopeless with drink’, her wonderful, if a tiny bit superior, French mother had said more than once. They have drunks in Paris, too, Laure reminded her. Her mother had an answer for that one. ‘Parisians are better at it.’

  This bunch looked especially depressed. Not one of the grey-looking men and women gave her so much as a glance as she passed by them with the children. In that minatory lecture on Prague, Petr warned her to take care. ‘The drunks will rip your fingernails out if they think they can sell them for Slivovice.’

  Same old, same old, she thought and grasped Jan and Maria’s hands even more tightly.

  Yet it wasn’t same old. Most things were strange and that was the point. Encountering the new, and absorbing it, was intended to help her negotiate the shock of her father’s dying. Having collapsed halfway through the first year at university, she knew she was a mess and her mother packed her off to Paris. ‘My city will heal you,’ she said. ‘You can return to university later.’

  Laure resisted. Before her father’s death, she hadn’t the slightest notion of what ‘grief’ meant. What it entailed. How it worked. Nothing of its intimacies. Nothing of its obstinate capacity to drag a person down. She wanted, and needed, to dump that grief on her mother, to let her take responsibility for it. Her mother was wiser. ‘You’ll be amazed what going away can do,’ she said as she cradled the weeping Laure. ‘Because you’re so sad you will be receptive to the experience in a way that’s different to when you’re happy.’ She stroked Laure’s hair. ‘Think about that.’

  ‘Where are we going?’ asked Jan.

  ‘To the Old Town Square.’ Laure touched his shoulder. ‘I hope we’re going the right way.’

  Her mother had been right. The point about Prague was that it wasn’t home where it was permissible to collapse. Nor was Paris home, where she had first joined the Kobes family. Being in exile was a therapy.

  In the Paris of her childhood visits, Laure had never felt a second’s homesickness or alienation. Nothing had changed when she walked off the ferry, caught the train, and stepped down onto a platform in the Gare du Nord, invariably littered with cigarette butts. Nowhere smelt like Paris and, inhaling it down to the bottom of her lungs, she felt the darkness of the past few months begin to shift and lighten. Three weeks later, she was on her way to Prague with the Kobes family.

  It was hot here. Hotter than she was used to. The continental climate. Very hot summers, very cold winters – she exhumed a remnant from geography lessons. To her surprise, it suited Laure. She liked the radiation from iron railings, the heat spreading over her skin and the damp patch welling between her shoulder blades. She liked that the deep, sharp blue of the sky showcased a brassy sun which reminded her of the book on medieval paintings displayed in the local library by Miss Boyt, the optimist. ‘I will never give up trying to civilize you,’ she informed the sixth formers. ‘So, you might as well give in. Especially you, Laure Carlyle. What with your French mother and all that, you should be aware of these things.’

  Miss Boyt’s logic escaped Laure. Nevertheless, from time to time, she rifled through the books and picked up a fact or two and she was increasingly pleased that she had.

  Here she was.

  If the heat suited Laure, it did not suit her charges, ten-yearold Maria and the eleven-year-old Jan. Both children were sticky, uncomfortable and making their displeasure felt. However, there was no point in returning to the Kobes’ apartment as Eva had instructed them not to return before five o’clock. A certain detachment from her children seemed to be Eva’s modus vivendi. Used to her own mother’s all-embracing parenting, Laure asked herself if this was quite normal.

  She had not made up her mind. Yes, managing the two children was far from the easy ride she had blithely assumed but it was a quid pro quo situation. She tilted her face up to the sun. There were unexpected compensations for it had never occurred to her that children were fun. Nor that she would feel so protective of them.

  ‘Oh, Mees Laure, our mother likes you to take us to bars …’ Jan had turned out to be an
excellent tease and she had to keep her wits sharpened. Marie was a soberer child who needed to think about things and was easily hurt. Close in age and, thus, competitors, she and her brother were at the stage where they did not get on.

  Unsurprisingly, Laure’s French was approaching faultless (and the Kobes children spoke mostly French) but handling the Czech language and currency was going to be tricky. She bent over and adjusted Maria’s sunhat and said, ‘Let’s find an ice cream. But you will have to ask for it, Jan.’

  The trio had tramped across the Charles Bridge which spanned the river between the Malá Strana and the Staré Mĕsto, stopping now and again to look at the statues, many of which were still damaged from the Second World War. Below, a grey-green Vltava flowed seawards. Apparently, said the reliable Prague on a Shoestring, in the fourteenth century, a saint had been thrown into the river from this bridge. For his beliefs, no doubt, even as he promised loyalty to King Wenceslas who had ordered the execution. Personally, Laure echoed her father’s robust political views: it never did to put one’s trust in princes.

  From the bridge a street led directly towards the Staré Mĕsto square where, she was relieved to see, there were a few shops. Venturing into a couple, she found dark interiors and sparse stock. In the third, a notice hanging on the wall read in large black type: ‘Workers of the World Unite’. A smell of disinfectant in the fourth wafted over them from a back room.

  There was no ice cream to be had.

  The children were turning less cooperative by the second and Laure speculated what sort of country was it that had no ice cream during a blazing summer. Was it that ice cream was capitalist? Or did Czechoslovakians not care for it?

  An odd set of rules apparently applied. The chief being: if there was demand, let’s not supply it.

  Maria tugged at Laure’s hand and wailed with heat and weariness. Jan spoke up for both. ‘Laure, we want to go home.’

  She was pretty sure Jan meant the comfortable apartment near Neuilly, Paris, in which the Kobes were housed by Petr’s firm. Not the apartment close to St Nicholas Church in the Malá Strana where the family were established for the summer.