Chapter 12
12
A little time later, Charlotte’s assumptions about the life and times of the Lower Brambleton Observatory had been blown wide apart, and then some.
‘So, let me get this straight,’ she said carefully, after he finally paused for breath. ‘You’re telling me that this place was not only the hotspot for asteroid spotting in the south-west, but also party central. A kind of nightclub for the astronomy community?’ She gave a smile. ‘If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were having me on, Brian!’
‘Where else would a bunch of astronomers come to have a good time?’ Brian’s eyes twinkled like the stars that, when night fell, would still gaze down at the observatory. ‘I mean, your generation, with your internet and your YouTube, documenting everything at the click of a smartphone… you’ve no idea of the excitement of seeing something for the first time with nothing but your eyes and a telescope, and the experience of sharing those discoveries with friends of a like-minded disposition. When we knew something big was coming, it was star charts and sky maps to the ready, supplies in and nights under the stars. And if those supplies happened to comprise several bottles of good claret or a decent Scotch, then so much the better.’ He paused again. ‘What goes on in LBAS stays in LBAS. Until now, of course.’
Charlotte considered her own undergraduate studies, and had to concede that she, too, had experienced a few riotous nights under the stars.
‘It does all sound rather idyllic,’ she said.
‘It was a different time,’ Brian replied. ‘Before we all settled down, got more stressful jobs, had families. Small children tend to put paid to pulling all-nighters in an observatory, although there were a few occasions when the children came with us as well. Of course, after Laura and Martin passed away…’ He trailed off.
‘What happened to them, Brian?’ Charlotte asked gently.
Brian’s face fell as he replied. ‘They were killed in a car accident in 1995,’ he said quietly. ‘They’d been up here to shut the observatory down for two months, as was usually done for January and February. There’s no heating up here, and we had to adhere to at least some health and safety rules, or the council would have stepped in and closed it permanently. They left their kids, twins, a boy and a girl, with Martin’s mum, and were spending the evening closing things up, making sure everything was locked down tight until the weather got a bit warmer. The frost was so bad by the time they were driving back down the hill, whoever was driving lost control of the car, and they crashed into an oak tree.’ Brian shuddered. ‘They were killed instantly. I can’t bear to think about what might have happened if the kids had been in the car with them.’
‘How awful!’ Charlotte murmured. ‘It must have been such a shock for everyone. And those poor children.’
‘It was,’ Brian replied. ‘After that… well, there didn’t seem much point in keeping things going. None of us really wanted to, after that. We still meet, from time to time, but it was never the same. You get tainted by tragedy, you know?’ Pulling himself back to the present before Charlotte could respond further, Brian shook his head. ‘You’ll be wanting to look around,’ he said, a brisker tone in his voice. ‘I’ll leave you to it. I don’t know what else you’ll find here that the university will consider of value, but you’re welcome to take what you think is worth archiving. Goodness knows, if you don’t, then it’ll all just go in a skip anyway.’
‘I promise I’ll treat whatever I find with the respect it deserves,’ Charlotte said gently. ‘I’ve been trained to look after things, and even if I don’t find any more evidence for the Winslow archive, I’m sure that the more contemporary papers that have been stored here are worth saving for posterity. It’s not every day somewhere with such a long history is decommissioned, and one with such amazing resources.’ She still couldn’t quite believe the inner sanctum of the records room had been so well preserved, given the state of the rest of the building.
She glanced around the records room again. Apart from the dust, it really was in remarkable nick for somewhere that hadn’t been used in years. She wondered, again, how it had escaped the attentions of the vandals. So many buildings like this, especially those in the middle of nowhere, ended up covered in graffiti and broken beyond repair. But somehow, this part of Lower Brambleton’s observatory had survived relatively unscathed. It was like a time capsule from the early 1990s.
Brian said goodbye, arranging to return and lock up in three hours’ time. He’d laughed when she’d suggested that she could phone him, reminding her again about the lack of signal. She resolved not to stay for the whole day, since Lorelai had charge of Comet and she was still finding her bearings, but as Brian left her alone, she couldn’t resist wandering around the room that had been the observatory’s research hub. It was silent now, although she could make out the sounds of the wild birds overhead, probably nesting in the secluded nooks of the dome. She imagined what it would have been like back in its heyday, with keen astronomers congregating here to log star patterns, cosmological phenomena, and the trails and paths of comets across the sky, at all times of year. Certainly, the technology had changed, and it was easier now to document things digitally, but she felt electrified at the prospect of getting her hands on the original handwritten or typed notes that were bound to be lurking in the filing cabinets and on the shelves of the records room.
She’d have plenty of time for that. Today was about getting a feel for the observatory and its history. She’d need to develop some systems if she was to do justice to the stacks of paper and documentation that she was going to have to sift through. Pulling open the top door of an army-green steel filing cabinet, whose label, handwritten, was still attached to the front but had long since faded, she let out an involuntary gasp as she saw how crammed full of paperwork it was. Some of it was suspended in document files, hooked snugly over the rails of the drawer, while a lot more had just been shoved into cardboard document wallets of varying hues and thickness. It would take some doing to get this lot in order.
It’s like Miss Havisham got a hobby and worked out how to use a telescope , she thought, giving a short laugh. The sound faded into the dim light of the records room, and, feeling oddly unsettled for the first time since Brian had left, she shivered. Maybe it was the thought of Dickens’s tragic character, but the observatory suddenly felt a lot bigger, a lot bleaker, without Brian showing her around.
Best get used to it , she told herself firmly. She was a research team of one on this venture, and from the looks of it, she’d be occupied from dawn until dusk for the duration of her stay in Lower Brambleton. She realised that she was feeling more nervous now she’d seen the size of the job than she had before she’d come here. The context that Brian had given her had made her all the more aware of the imminent loss of it. She found it strange that she hadn’t encountered anyone as yet who felt a sense of loss for the observatory’s looming demolition.