Читать книгу Here’s Looking At You - Mhairi McFarlane, Mhairi McFarlane - Страница 22

When she was eight years old, on a trip to see the Italian family, Anna’s dad had taken her to see the Ravenna mosaics. While her mother, with a trainee consumerist in Aggy, had done the rounds of the boutiques, Anna was stood with cricked neck in the saintly hush of the Basilica of San Vitale. Her father told a sketchy outline of the story of Byzantine Emperor Justinian and his consort Theodora.

It was enough to get her hooked. She was utterly lost in the story of the daughter of the bear-keeper of Constantinople’s hippodrome who became an actress, prostitute – her dad had gone with ‘she made money from her adventures’ but Anna wasn’t stupid – and Empress of the Roman Empire. She stared at the regal beauty depicted in those tiny glittering tiles and felt as if those lamp-like dark eyes were staring directly into her own, communicating across the distance of centuries.

It was as close as she might come to a religious experience; the sense of finding something you were looking for, being transformed in a moment. Anna’s family weren’t religious, but in some ways, Theodora became a deity for Anna. Here was an inspirational woman who’d travelled very far from her beginnings, who demonstrated that the start point need not define you. She was a heroine, a role model. Well, there had been some fairly wild activity in the process of making a name for herself, involving all the orifices, and Anna wasn’t going to try that. But in general.

Her parents had tried to slake her newfound thirst for knowledge by buying her one of those hardback A Brief History of All the History There’s Ever Been books, with lots of pictures. She devoured it in days and wanted more. Eventually her mum let her have free run of a library card and Anna was able to get to the good stuff, proper detailed lurid biography.

Books showed Anna other universes, promising her there was a big world beyond Rise Park. It might not be overstating it to say books saved her life. She never understood why some of her friends thought history was dry and dusty. Young Theodora was getting up to shit a sight more colourful in AD 500 than any of them in the twentieth century, whatever Jennifer Pritchard was claiming went on in Mayesbrook Park.

Some went into teaching because they loved imparting knowledge, or more often, bossing people about. Once Anna overcame her fear of standing up in front of an audience – through therapy and practice, and in the early days, a gin miniature – Anna enjoyed lectures and tutorials well enough. But for her the raw thrills were in research.

It was the ‘eureka’ moments – where she felt like the first detective on the scene, finding the vital clue. Then she wasn’t merely consuming historical fact, she was adding to its sum.

It felt like some kind of full circle, punch-the-air joy when lovely John Herbert, curator of Byzantine history at the British Museum, had got in touch and asked if she would help him put together an exhibition on Theodora. Her inner child, who’d stared up at that gilded, domed ceiling and been transported to another time, was dancing a jig.

Anna was translating texts and helping to choose and caption the exhibits. She couldn’t think of anything more wonderful than getting to fiddle around with bits of the past, to raise the dead in some small way. Anna had only assisted with the odd aspect of exhibitions before, a good excuse to poke around at the British Museum.

This was the first time she’d been a behind-the-scenes driving creative force. She’d worked late for months to prep for it, willingly.

As she tripped off for her first meeting about Operation Theodora, she enjoyed every second of the walk through Bloomsbury, even beaming foolishly at passing strangers. This was a chocolate-box pretty part of the capital, the London of films and TV. Peaceful, wide streets, the green space of Russell Square, red phone boxes that were now historical monuments themselves, existing only for overseas tourists’ photographs, ransom demand calls and massage parlour business cards.

She arrived at the back entrance of the museum, like a VIP. She signed in, with a nod of familiarity from the reception desk, and made her way to the meeting room. It was a blazing brilliant modern white, with desks arranged in a horseshoe, as if they were having a table read for a drama. Anna would’ve much preferred something full of careworn wood and leather that was reassuringly cluttered, dust motes dancing in cidery-yellow autumnal light. Order and fluoro-lighting reminded her too much of classrooms.

John smiled benevolently at the sight of her.

‘Ah, the woman of the hour. Everyone, this is Anna Alessi from UCL. She’s our academic liaison and resident expert. You might think I’m the resident expert. However, I’m a glorified shopkeeper. She sources the products, checks what’s fit for purpose for sale, as it were …’

As he spoke, Anna scanned the room, smiling and nodding hellos in turn, until her eyes met James Fraser’s.

She almost physically started with surprise, and couldn’t be entirely sure whether she made a noise.

Her bouncy cheerfulness stopped so abruptly it almost had a sound effect. She knew her face was a mask of repulsion but it was too late to rearrange it. What. The. Fuuuuccckkkkkkk …?

James looked very disconcerted, if not quite as ruffled as she did.

John was still talking: ‘… So this is James from our digital helpers over at Parlez. James is the project leader, and his colleague who handles the technical design and development, Parker …’

Anna mumbled a vague greeting at a skinny twenty-something with asymmetric hair, and dropped with a thud into her seat.

She fussed with getting the notes out of her bag as a way of not having to meet the eyes in the room. Her heart was making a ker-plunking noise. She could hear the valves pulsing, as if they were amplified.

How in the hell had this happened? What sort of grotesque prank was being played on her this time?