Ecurie Ecosse

The cabinet was to be the solution to her husband’s pressing storage problem. Its glass shelves, she foresaw, could be supplemented with many others to accommodate and display Martin’s collection of scale model die-cast vehicles, now numbering several hundred miniature cars, trucks, buses, construction vehicles, and the like, then uncomfortably housed in shoe boxes on the floor of their bedroom closet after their twin sons had shown little interest in them, to Martin’s initial bafflement until he remembered his father’s similarly vain efforts to share his own childhood passion for electric trains with Martin. Gloomily disappointed, Martin had admitted defeat, stopped buying the boys toy cars for Christmas and birthdays, and reluctantly bundled them away out of sight in the closet. Soon thereafter, such models disappeared from toyshops, victims, like Victorian lead soldiers, of children’s changing tastes in toys. But Michelle encouraged Martin to keep buying them for himself, at flea markets, antique fairs, from friends and relatives, and, soft-hearted and magnanimous, she had singlehandedly moved the cabinet into the bedroom vacated by the twins, then away at university as a surprise for Martin. She did this while poor Martin was trying to put up the Christmas lights on the back porch, entangling himself in the cord, breaking a few bulbs, putting them up in the wrong order, and then finally walking down to the local hardware store to buy a set of unbreakable LED lights. She had never seen her husband as happy as he was after his lighting fiasco, humming to himself as he stocked each shelf with its contingent of vehicles, arranged in rows alphabetically from AC and Austin, Bentley and Borgward through to Volvo, Volkswagen,  Zagato, Zil and Zhiguli. Durable die-cast metal models are no longer made, except in hideously expensive bespoke limited editions for display purposes only. Nearly every model car for children made today is disposably plastic at least in part and designed for a short life. In the cabinet along with exquisite enameled road signs and roadside billboards were metal military and commercial vehicles, milk floats, double deckers, semi-trailers and dump trucks, sports cars, racing cars, SUVs and tractors, as well as a host of sedans, station wagons, and convertibles, most of them in mint condition, beautifully detailed and artfully engineered, with only a few play-worn. Some of these he had tried to repair: these, he told Michelle, were “in the infirmary.” They languished there for years, perhaps beyond medical care, on eternal life support, needing the craftsman’s painstaking precision so woefully lacking in Martin’s hands.

“The cabinet is for my husband,” she had told the neighbour, “so he can double the number of shelves inside. He has lots of collectibles.” But the man was not interested. He nodded and turned away, glad at last to be rid of the thing.