HAPPENINGS
IN A MUSEUM

     May, and the wanderers returned to the fold. Dr Macgregor, with the Arizona sands barely off the soles of his shoes, was in fine fettle. There is nothing quite like the vastness of the desert to concentrate and refresh the mind. Dr. MacGregor was delighted to be back once more, a keeper amongst his charges. Ready to be charmed by everything from the fragrant early summer light that raked across the cases (something that usually annoyed him), to the piles of dust in his room. There was he felt, a certain challenge in returning to a job so hurriedly discarded, and with this thought in mind he renewed his efforts in cataloguing the 40,000 samples still sitting stubbornly on his desk.

As he sat, windows thrown wide open, shuffling his index cards, Dr. MacGregor mused silently on the Charpentier family and their remarkable collection of dust. Having been absent during the drama of Charlotte Charpentier and Sir John Ash (he was in Malaga at the time nursing a fever), he could not feel much passion for the subject. Aware of the investigation into the authenticity of Ashmole House, he reflected on the many thousands of people who had walked through the famous portals of this museum. Feet that had entered, shoes that had long worn out, footfalls now stilled. Spaces within shoes once filled with living, articulated, and animated flesh. Charpentier had his obsession with dust, but with MacGregor, it was shoes. Shoes were his fetishes. Or rather, those things which once filled them and now were no more. Dr. MacGregor shifting in his chair, on that warm May morning with the sounds of a promising summer in his ears and the sun so warmly on his back remembered with some satisfaction that he too, had a small collection of his own. Emile Charpentier, son of John Ash, inheritor of Ashmole House, for all his dust, did not possess what Dr. Arthur MacGregor did. Did not have what he, MacGregor had stored away carefully in brown conservation-friendly boxes, wrapped in individual acid-free tissue paper. Nor did Charpentier own that superior system of cataloguing and labelling known only to MacGregor, or indeed own the original Tradescant labels, some of which can still be seen around Antiquities, their thin blue octagonal line barely faded by time. For MacGregor possessed that rare thing seldom seen but always recognizable: he possessed absence made solid, stillness made tangible and life, in all its eccentricities and shapes made whole. He possessed shoe-lasts! Hundreds and hundreds of them. Inarticulate and ancient. In that moment, on that particularly fine May morning, he decided to bring them out and display them beside his other more ancient charges. But first, as a mark of respect and also, with reference to their age, he bound them. Not all history, reflected Arthur MacGregor, somewhat pointedly, not all history lay in dust.