“That’s not quite it,” Daisy agreed, laughing. “We’ll practise later, but come along now. I’ve got an appointment with the Director of Geology. You had better both try to squeeze under my umbrella. Why on earth did you sit on top in this rain?”
“You can see better,” Belinda pointed out, and Derek added, “It’s more fun. Besides, it’s not raining very hard and it’s warm—after all, it’s summer—and I’m not very wet, but I shall be if we all try to share the umbrella ’cause I’ll get drips down my neck. You ladies can have it,” he said grandly. “And I’ll carry that for you, Aunt Daisy. What is it?”
“A tripod for the camera. Be careful, won’t you? It’s Lucy’s.”
The ’bus moved on down Fulham Road. The policeman on point duty held up the traffic with white gloves and whistle, and they crossed the street toward the Brompton Oratory. Belinda, the Londoner, pointed it out to the provincial Derek.
“It’s a sort of church,” she explained knowledgeably,“RC, I think. And that great big building next door is the Victoria and Albert Museum. We went there from school—not the church, the museum. Didn’t you write about that one, too, Aunt Daisy?”
“That’s right,” Daisy assured her stepdaughter-to-be. “I’m doing a series of articles on London museums for an American magazine.”
As they walked down Cromwell Road past the smoke-begrimed Italianate church and neo-Renaissance museum, she listened to the children’s chatter. Derek’s stay with the Fletchers seemed to be going well, in spite of Belinda’s grandmother’s antipathy towards the boy’s aunt.
Old Mrs. Fletcher, in agreement with Daisy’s mother, the Dowager Lady Dalrymple, strongly disapproved of the daughter of a viscount marrying a middle-class Detective Chief Inspector. Daisy suspected that Alec had occasional qualms, fearing that she would regret stepping outside her own class.
She herself had no doubts whatsoever. She was a working woman. Her father dead in the ’flu pandemic—like Belinda’s mother—and her brother killed in the trenches of Flanders, she had chosen not to sponge on the cousin who inherited the title and the Gloucestershire estate. As for living in the Dower House with her mother, nothing could persuade her. She and Lady Dalrymple had not seen eye to eye for years.
So the Honourable Daisy Dalrymple worked for her living, and this morning she had a business appointment.
“Come along, you two, don’t dawdle.”
They crossed Exhibition Road. Behind the railings rose the long façade and towers of the Natural History Museum. The soot-blackened building was liberally adorned with murky terra cotta in elaborate friezes and tracery around the windows, the world’s flora and fauna petrified. Beastly gargoylestopped the downspouts, and statues of beasts posed between the windows of the topmost story.
Climbing the steps to the entrance, Belinda asked, “May we go and see the birds and butterflies, please, Aunt Daisy?”
“Butterflies!” Derek groaned. “We have plenty of birds and butterflies at home. Just like a girl! You’d be just like all the rest if your father wasn’t a Scotland Yard ’tec. You said there’s dinosaurs and whales here. Who wants to look at butterflies when there’s dinosaurs and whales?”
“There’s all sorts of horrid insects, too,” Bel told him, “the kind boys like.”
“You’ll have plenty of time for all of them,” Daisy promised. “You can go off without me, but stay together. Go to the butterflies first, and we’ll meet in the Dinosaur Gallery at quarter to one. I’ll treat you to lunch in the refreshment room.”
“Gosh, honestly?” Belinda breathed, eyes shining. “Spiffing!”
Accustomed to restaurant meals when his parents visited his prep school, Derek was less impressed. “Good,” he said with uncharacteristic brevity, taking off his damp cap and stuffing it into his pocket as they passed between bearded Darwin and bewhiskered Huxley, seated in marble majesty. “Bel, look, there’s stone monkeys climbing up those pillars.”
“They go all the way up and over the arch,” said Belinda. “Come along, you can see from here.”
“Oh yes!” Derek nearly fell over backwards craning his neck to look up at the vaulted roof, part glass, part flower-painted panels, seventy feet above. “Crikey, it’s big!”
Like a cross between a cathedral and a mainline terminal, Daisy thought, but cleaner than the latter, at least. Inside, the ubiquitous terra cotta was the honey colour of Cotswoldstone, patterned with a slate grey which matched the wrinkled skin of the huge African elephant looming in the centre of the hall.
Derek had to take an admiring turn around the elephant. Then the children went off to the west wing to hunt for birds and butterflies, while Daisy presented herself to the Keeper of Geology.
Dr. Smith Woodward’s neat, pointed white beard and moustache were no match for Darwin’s magnificent hirsuteness. A slight, elderly man, almost entirely bald, he looked up from a desk covered with papers to view Daisy with some perplexity through studious pince-nez. “Miss … ?”
“Dalrymple. Daisy Dalrymple. I’m a journalist.”
“Ah yes.” The paper he had been reading still in his left hand, he came around his desk to shake her hand. He walked with a limp, a relic—Daisy guessed—of one of his adventurous fossil-collecting expeditions.
Until she rang up to make an appointment, Daisy had assumed geology was all about “rocks and things,” as she said to her house-mate, Lucy. At the Natural History Museum, the switchboard girl told her, rocks and things were the province of the Keeper of Mineralogy, and geology was all about fossils.
“I’m delighted to meet a young lady who is interested in palæontology.” He spoke with a slight North Country accent. “I flatter myself I was instrumental in admitting ladies to the Geological Society. It was after all a lady, Mrs. Mantell, whose discovery of Iguanodon teeth led to one of the first important studies of dinosaurs, and Mary Anning found the first plesiosaur and ichthyosaur. What can I do for you?”
Daisy had already explored the museum and framed her article, aimed at American travellers visiting London whohad an odd afternoon to fill in. Now she all she wanted was to ask a few questions, and to request permission to take photographs of some of the more spectacular exhibits.
Dr. Smith Woodward, plainly enamoured of his subject, answered the questions with such a flood of information that Daisy was hard put to it to take it all down in her idiosyncratic version of Pitman’s shorthand.
He was particularly impassioned over the skull of Piltdown Man,Eoanthropus dawsoni, as he called it. Sure that Daisy must be eager to take a photograph, he took her to see it in the Fossil Mammal Gallery. Daisy did her best to produce murmurs of enthusiastic appreciation. To her, the controversial relic was no more than a couple of scraps of brown-stained bone.
