Seni Glaister - The Museum of Things Left Behind

Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

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London SE1 9GF

www.4thestate.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate 2015

Copyright © Seni Glaister 2015

Seni Glaister asserts the moral right to

be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record of this book is

available from the British Library.

Cover images © Shutterstock.com

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

Source ISBN: 9780008118952

Ebook Edition © May 2015 ISBN: 9780008118969

Version: 2016-05-11

For my brave and brilliant father

Prof. David Glaister

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

The Characters

Epigraph

1 In Which a Letter Stands Out

2 In Which Treason Is Narrowly Avoided

3 In Which a Formal Communication From a Foreign Entity Is Delivered

4 In Which News Travels Fast

5 In Which a President Addresses His Nation

6 In Which Enough Tea Is Grown

7 In Which the President Has Doubt

8 In Which a Protestation Is Made

9 In Which PEGASUS Has Her Wings Clipped

10 In Which a Royal Visitor Arrives

11 In Which Plan B Might Work

12 In Which the British Visitor Is Made to Feel at Home

13 In Which the Visitor Goes Exploring

14 In Which Tourism and Recreation Go into Battle

15 In Which the President Loses His Cool

16 In Which the Dancing Begins

17 In Which the Visitor Gets a Lesson in Timekeeping

18 In Which Lizzie Makes a Bedside Visit

19 In Which the Curiosities Are Examined

20 In Which Lizzie Exerts Some Power

21 In Which the Americans Play Ball

22 In Which the Visitor Gets Down to Business

23 In Which the Purpose of Education Is Questioned

24 In Which Lizzie Beats the System

25 In Which Love Is the Answer

26 In Which a Deal Is Done

27 In Which the Piece Fits

28 In Which There’s Education in Moderation

29 In Which the Chief of Staff Plots

30 In Which the Troubles Escalate

31 In Which Lizzie Shares a Secret

32 In Which the Ministers Measure Up

33 In Which Tourism Is Boosted

34 In Which Laughter Spells Trouble

35 In Which Lizzie Supposes

36 In Which Lizzie Dines Out

37 In Which Tea Is Taken

38 In Which Dancing Spells Doom

39 In Which a Walk Is Planned

40 In Which Lizzie Begins to Understand

41 In Which a Meeting Is Tabled

42 In Which Sergio Faces the Music

43 In Which Lizzie Explains the Birds and the Bees

44 In Which the Bell Tolls

About the Author

Acknowledgements

About the Publisher

The Cabinet

The President – Sergio Scorpioni

Minister for Defence – Alixandria Heliopolis Visparelli

Minister for the Exterior – Mario Lucaccia

Minister for the Interior – Rolando Posti

Minister of Finance – Roberto Feraguzzi

Minister for Health – Dottore Decio Rossini

Minister for Agricultural Development – Enzo Civicchioni

Minister for Education – Professore Giuseppe Scota

Minister for Recreation – Marcello Pompili

Minister for Leisure – Tersilio Cellini

Minister for Tourism – Settimio Mosconi

Minister for Employment – Vlad Lubicic

Chief of Staff to the President – Angelo Bianconi

The Proletariat

The Postman – Remi

The Stationmaster – Vinsent Gabboni

Patron of Il Gallo Giallo – Dario Mariani

Patron of Il Toro Rosso – Piper

The Clockmaker – Pavel

The Potter – Elio

The Visitors

British VIP – Lizzie Holmesworth

American Consultant 1 – Chuck Whylie

American Consultant 2 – Paul Fields

Alieni theam faciunt optimam.

(Strangers make the best tea.)

CHAPTER 1

High above the city, in the dustiest, windiest, sparsest corner of the north-west quadrant, Remi was sorting the mail. He had arrived out of breath at the sorting office. He glanced at his stopwatch and noted, with a flicker of irritation, that he was at the upper end of the time he allowed himself for this short journey. The early-morning rain had added an element of risk to some of the sharper corners, and on several occasions he’d had to slow almost to a stop to avoid injury to himself or damage to his bicycle. Happily, though, he lived on the same level as his workplace, and his commute was generally a straightforward three-kilometre cycle ride on the slippery paths that snaked through the tea plantations from the small home he shared with his mother. In a month or two, with the onset of the harsh summer sun, these paths would quickly mould into dusty, deeply grooved channels. In turn the channels would soon evolve into narrow ruts, which would hug his bicycle tyres so snugly that he could ride much of the way with his eyes closed – a feat he had often attempted with considerable, albeit unrecorded, success. Even in the wet spring months his journey to work was not strenuous; his bicycle could probably still find its own way through sheer habit, and this was certainly the easiest section of his day’s circuit. That morning, however, his journey had been interrupted not once but twice, on the first occasion by a neighbour, who needed help with a stuck pig, then shortly afterwards by a second neighbour, who held the firm belief that a problem shared was a problem halved. Remi had wondered, as he pedalled furiously to make up for the lost seconds, whether the sharing of a problem exactly doubled it, providing it with two minds instead of one in which to fester, and he further worried that the problem, like the simplest of organisms, was simultaneously dividing and subdividing in his brain and that of his neighbour.

As always, however, Remi’s most pressing concern had been his prompt arrival at the office for, despite the absence of a supervisor’s watchful eye or any sort of mechanism to monitor his comings and goings, Remi’s deep commitment to the state had engendered within him a work ethic unlikely to be rivalled within the whole of Vallerosa. In his decade of postal duties he had never been late for work, notching up instead some two hundred hours of unpaid overtime through his systematic early arrival. This uninterrupted record of excellence counted for little, however, and the banked hours bore no currency other than within his own conscience. Had he been pushed to verbalize the seriousness with which he approached timekeeping, he would probably admit that if he were to stray from his self-governed schedule on more than one or two occasions, he would not hesitate to sack himself.