HAPPENINGS
IN A MUSEUM

     During the second week in April Dr MacGregor, senior keeper in Antiquities was due to courier 21 objects to a museum in America. The items included Henry VIII's hawking gloves, his stirrups and a pair of spurs belonging to Charles I. The movement of precious objects around the world, meeting various exhibition deadlines was a regular part of museum life and Dr MacGregor was looking forward to this particular trip.

That is to say he would have been looking forward to it had it not been for a small change in his daily routine. The change was in the dust. Emile Charpentier's dust to be precise which was everywhere. In phials, in packing cases , in cabinets and drawers. Charpentier himself, that enigmatic man from Paris, had vanished. The invigilators in Antiquities began to wonder if they had dreamt him up. He had disappeared without trace. All that was left were inconsiderate piles of dust on MacGregor's desk. In the two consecutive weeks that he had been at the museum, tying up loose ends, (his words) with his small multicoloured glass bottles of substances,he had managed to gather and collect, rake up, and parcel hundreds of samples. Dr MacGregor, not well pleased, with his thoughts turning to Arizona and the desert heat, slowly began to see what Charpentier had so cunningly, so craftily orchestrated. It was clear that he, Arthur MacGregor, archaeologist, museum keeper and poet, with the same passion as it so happened that Charpentier had for truffles, had somehow been left this task by the Frenchman. The task of writing the definitive History of Dust in all its movements.

And so, setting aside his other projects, the secret trading routes of walrus ivory, the sound catalogue of one glove clapping, the dialogue between two medieval shards, Dr MacGregor began the mammoth and not altogether pleasant task of sifting through the dust. There had been only few meetings with Charpentier and they had not gone well. The Frenchman, maverick at the best of times, was in shock. His mother, the beautiful Charlotte had died, his newly discovered father was too heartbroken to be responsive and the Department of Antiquities was less than overjoyed to receive his dust. MacGregor, whose interests lay elsewhere, felt peevishly(like Boffin in Our Mutual Friend) that some things were just not to be found in dust. Alarmed further by a fit of sneezing, he began to worry, with some justification, that he was beginning to suffer from archivists fever. Perhaps this was the end he thought gloomily. Nevertheless having given his word he began cataloguing this vast collection that had landed so unexpectedly in his small,overcrowded room.