Safe Mansion

 There was a collection of handles on the wall. To put any collections at all on walls was something I never understood at the best of times, like animal heads as trophies or various varieties of fork obtained for show rather than use. Forks with long or short tines. Forks more like garden implements than cutlery. And forks tuned for different purposes of music or memory.

Paintings, of course, were fully intended to go on walls, to be viewed separately as well as cumulatively within the room’s context. Most paintings were framed to give some comfort zone between them and the room. Every room has its own context, you see. Some call that context atmosphere or decorative personality. A room with its own original or inherent quality as a living-space. Or a room whose very sense of existence as a room was force-fed by human intervention with such collections on the walls or other imposed alterations.

Well, all forks had handles on today’s mansion wall. Except, of course, one variety of fork. A variety that had tines but no handle and called a Dunsany fork after its inventor. Often used in the old days as a childhood mouth-clamp to prevent irregular growth of the jaws. But more often used today – when fine-tuned – to sit as a specialist bridge on a violin. So, on further reflection, it would be understandable to have the history of forks upon a wall, just for show, educative as well as visually aesthetic. More of a sculpture as art-installation than a painting, of course. To repeat myself from elsewhere these generic items with tines entailed muck rakes, turnip snoflers, faggot forks (with just two wide-set tines or prongs), dung probers, dock extractors and a species of fork that had two tines or prongs but not so wide-set as the faggot fork, more about the distance between my eyes.

But to have on your wall just the forks’ handles or, now I’m thinking about it, the handles of many different implements, all without their business ends? That was slightly more eccentric than seemed acceptable, don’t you think?

He looked daggers at me as if I were the mad one in ill-timedly broaching the subject of decorative discrete handles at all. And he possibly feared that he was mad, too, in listening for as long as he had listened to me going on about collections on walls. He was the Lord of the Mansion, as it were. A man of some standing who used to work in the cabinet office. I had been invited for an audition as his potential biographer of the time he was Covid minister and I had taken my nerves in hand – as, like many writers, I was untutored in social skills – and arrived, brief-case in hand, full of proof statements as to my experience being a writer-up of lives, some dead, a few still living. The subject of wall-collections had arisen because I had commented upon the collection this Lord had on his own wall. I treated the subject as a sort of ice-breaker or app-decoder. I had decided to eschew mention of the otherwise safe mansion’s lack of ceilings or roof. Much less security than even a safe house with wide open doors.

“Handy things,” I said, nodding towards the wall collection. “How many have you got?”

“Three hundred around,” he said, in an irritated voice. I could read in his eyes that I was not going to get the job. I could go for broke.

“Are they all handles to safes?” No answer. “Safes with combinations?” No answer. “How do you remember all the codes?” No answer. “Are some of them pretend safes with nothing behind?”

I must have crossed some politeness threshold. I was shown the door. I don’t suppose anyone ever wrote my biography. My memory of the mansion and its silent music was now shrinking even as fast as I did myself. If not a biography, at least you have this very memento of words by someone else that is more than what most people like me get written up about themselves. A memento of how I spent the rest of my days in deep-tined darkness picking at a lock from inside with the sharp end of my elbows, because I no longer had hands. No mean feat.