The Butterfly Cabinet (12 page)

We were always at odds, Julia and I. Sometimes we tried to get on, often we did not, but it made no difference; it always ended in one of us feeling aggrieved. As a child, I had a treasure, a vulcanite hair comb brought back from London for me by Father. It was not a particularly expensive object, it was of a crude chain design with a nonprecious stone and it was much too big. Father did not have much of a sense of proportion. Still, I treasured it: a gift from him was unusual and I practiced putting up my hair, looking forward to the day when I might wear it. I was playing with it one day when Mother called me away and when I came back to where I was sure I had left it on the dressing table, it had disappeared. I suspected Julia, of course, and went looking for her, found her in Mother’s room. She said she did not take it, she did not know where it had gone, and Mother said nothing, but all through the room was the unmistakable smell of singed hair, and the next day, in the ashes of Mother’s fire, a little blackened paste stone.

Mother insisted on brushing my hair, every night one hundred strokes, her one maternal act toward me. I sat beside her at the dressing-table mirror and as every pass of the silver-backed brush
dragged at my tangled curls, I watched and felt the skin at the nape of my neck pull out like a bat’s webbed wing. I used to catch the flesh of the inside of my mouth between my back teeth and bite back tears until she had finished. If I sniffled at all, betrayed the pain, she grew agitated, brushed harder, insisted she was not hurting me, that I cried to irritate her, ungrateful, unruly-haired child that I was. It was as if she concentrated all her maternal duties into that one exhausting act between us, and having dispensed with it, she could rest easy. Julia never cried, of course. Julia had our mother’s sleek, shiny flaxen mane that fell into place without the slightest coercion.

It will be some time before I require hair combs or brushes again. On my arrival here, a warder laid the blades of a pair of scissors cold and flat against my scalp and cut all my hair away. For the first time, I can see the shape of my skull, how it dips at the temples, how my ears protrude, the widow’s peak of my hairline. I look like a lunatic, head shorn, mad eyed, pregnant. Still, I wish I had the Italian dresser here. In a whimsical moment I imagine that the scrap of sky over Oranmore is trapped on its enchanted surface the way the sky is sometimes captured on the glassy strand at low tide, that I could pass some time lying on my mattress gazing on it, watching the clouds glide in and out of vision, waiting for the gulls to suddenly appear, and just as suddenly vanish.

It is strange how we remember things. Edward’s pretty dresser is as far removed from my memory of our honeymoon as is a pansy to a heather. I find it hard to believe that this is how he recalls our first days together, these pasteled landscapes and misted views. We postponed our honeymoon until the spring. From Italy we journeyed north into Switzerland and France. Edward wanted to walk the lower slopes, feel the Alpine air in his lungs, he said. I walked with him some days, and filled my pocket box with butterflies, and spent the evenings with the striking hand-colored plates from Berge’s
Schmetterlingsbuch,
identifying
and setting my finds: the zebra-striped scarce swallowtail, with its sapphire-jeweled train; the sooty Camberwell beauty—rare sights at home.

What I remember best is a June night near Menton when I drew back the bed cover and found a Spanish moon moth on my pillow. My heart seized. Impossibly far north, against the white linen its pale green body moved translucent. Rusty-veined, swallow-tailed, the markings on its wings like lidded eyes, its skeletal frame suggestive of the hair and bones of something dead. I gated it between my hands and my breast, moved to the window, where the curtains twitched in the breeze, and stood there, feeling the appalling thrum of it against my skin, the life of it battle between my fingers. Then I leaned out, released my hands and freed it into the night. Edward walked in and stood by me at the window, his fingers resting on my shoulders. “It
is
a lovely night,” he said.

He had been a patient husband with me, allowing me time to slip out of my whalebone armor, undress and slide between the covers before he entered the room in darkness. Those early nights he had treated me like a nervous yearling, never once touched me without speaking to me first, had pushed the hair gently back from my forehead and kissed me there before we both fell into the relief of sleep. Slowly, we found our way around each other’s bodies in the dark, grew bolder with each passing day, mapping new territories of skin with our fingers and our tongues, until we had discovered every surveyed inch of each other. On that night in Menton, I pulled the window shut and turned toward him, heard the moon moth beat its wings against the glass outside, and I reached up and kissed his lovely throat. Against my waist as I pushed toward him, I felt a movement and I reached down then, between his legs, and felt the swell of what was there beneath my fingers, and at my ear his intake of breath sucked the air from around me. I pushed my body further into his in search of the beat
of his heart, the pulse of him, to feel again that appalling desire for life battling within.

I ought not to write such things, I suppose, nothing intimate or self-incriminating. I should have learned that much from the inquest: my one opportunity to speak; my words preserved and recorded, repeated over and over again at every new hearing until even I began to believe them all true. It is company, this little journal; undemanding; a good listener; it waits patiently for me to write my way through to the truth.

Sometimes at night, I think I hear the sea. It is the drone under the bagpipes when Mr. Campbell used to play for us at home in Priorwood, a wind that does not gust or pass, unwatery, steady beneath every other sound. Here, time is not measured by the hands of the clock, the circling of cogs that turn and lock into place. It is fluid, capricious, unmeasurable. Some days, I feel like I have spent it all. On other days, and they seem no different on the surface from the ones that have gone before, I find myself with an hour to spare between the sewing room and the putting out of the gas, bewildered as to how this surplus came about, paralyzed by choice. To write, to sew, to pray, to put away, to sleep.

Charlotte was as soft and as round a bundle of girlhood as ever was produced. She never tired of embraces, begged constantly to be allowed into a lap, the opposite, in fact, to the child that I was. When she was a baby, and put to bed at night, she would clutch her woolen doll under one arm and with the other, reach up for a lock of my hair, curl it around her finger until sleep overcame her. I leaned over her cot while she curled and curled, ringleting me at the temple. When her own hair grew long enough she curled that in its stead, twisting and twisting until she slept.

I am in among thieves and rogues and madwomen. Deliberately, they have put me beside a prisoner who mistook her own child for a dog and trampled it underfoot. Along the stretch of hall with which I have become familiar are housed a drunkard
and a prostitute; a suicide; a woman accused of poisoning her unborn child and driven to madness by her insistence on her innocence; a blasphemer; a Fenian sympathizer and me. Between us, we make up several circles of Dante’s hell, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the radial exercise yard where we trudge, one behind the other, in three concentric circles, never permitted to speak or sign to each other in any way. They mean to make an example of me so that no one can say I was treated better than a common thief, but they err on the side of caution and treat me worse than anyone else. I polish the floor, keep up the luster of the brass basin, roll up my mattress and bedclothes, mimic the model prisoner. It is excruciating to have to perform these menial tasks in front of warders and other prisoners, to watch them jeer and smirk at me, while all the time I am doing my best to disappear. I make no sudden movements here; I deflect attention; I have learned to become small. I am camouflaged to the best of my ability.

23 OCTOBER 1968

You’d think the way people go on that if they stand too close to old age and loneliness they’ll catch it themselves. I suppose that’s true in a way, because you do catch it, if you stay around long enough. But you don’t get it from other people; you don’t get it from anybody but yourself.

There’s to be no putting the clock back this year, did you know that, Anna? By rights, it should be changing in a week’s time, but we’re staying in British Summer Time, the papers say, for the whole year. Wouldn’t that be great, if it turned out that way? Sunny and bright in December and January. It makes you realize what a farce the whole thing is: how we put numbers on the hours passing as if that gives us any say over it, when the hours will pass all the same, regardless of what time we call it.

I dreamed a dream again last night, one I dreamed a lifetime ago. I dreamed that Charlotte was dead again. There were people, men, two or three of them, their backs to me, carrying her coffin into the house, and there was going to be another wake because the first one had been conducted all wrong. All those stiff-dressed men in the drawing room looking at her for bruises, and none of us allowed in to see her, to twine a rosary through her fingers
or make the sign of the cross on her brow or say an
Ave
over her before she was coffined. Peig’s keening was for real then, all right. She couldn’t lift her eyes for days. And when she stopped keening, she lashed out with her tongue. You couldn’t have looked at her sideways. When she opened her mouth it was to spit out some new venom at the mistress: “A child is not a horse to be tied to a wall,” she said, “and have the spirit beaten and starved out of it.”

In the dream, though, when the men brought Charlotte in, there was a smell of incense burning, and kelp, wet and salty, fresh from the sea. They lifted her out of the coffin and put her in her little bed, where she lay, eyes closed, her arms straight down by her sides, the fist of her left hand clenched tight. The men turned round and then they were Daddy and Sam and William, and they all smiled at me, and Daddy put his finger up to his lips to shush me and they all walked out. I knew it was important for me to sit down on the chair by her bed so I did. Then Charlotte opened her eyes and winked at me and stretched out her arm and began to open her hand. She was wearing a nightdress that wasn’t a nightdress but was the linen damask tablecloth from the dining room. I could see that whatever she was holding was bloody and slippery and I didn’t want to touch it but she kept motioning for me to hurry up and take it, and how could I refuse her? How do you refuse a dead child? I got up and leaned over and looked closer, sure that what she was trying to give me was some part of her, a heart, maybe, or a liver, however foolish that must sound. What I could see of it put me in mind of the innards that used to lie on newspapers in the scullery when Peig was gutting a rabbit or a hare, red and black, sinew and slime. But I had no choice but to reach out and take it, and when I looked down to see what it was, it was a key, white and spotted with rust, and then it was gone, the way things vanish in dreams, and a white and brown speckled butterfly was knocking its wings against the glass of the window.

Mammy used to say, “Dreaming of the dead is news from the living,” and here you are, Anna. Here you are, the both of you.

I never saw the mistress with a cloth in her hand but the one time, the day after Charlotte died. She went round every mirror in the house before they were covered or turned to the wall and she polished them till they sparkled. As if that would make a difference to what she had seen. But she never set foot in the wardrobe room, not after the day she found Charlotte.

Sometimes I think I hear Charlotte, her light foot on the stairs, feel the breath of her passing my ear. I think she might want something from me. I think she might want what all ghosts want: to hear the truth about what happened told.

After the funeral was over, me and Madge were sent up to clean the wardrobe room. Peig said the wardrobe was French, all in mahogany with two big mirrored doors. We had to empty it of the old clothes that were kept there and scrub it out. The wooden pegs were still where they’d always been, on a picture rail that ran around the room; but the ring had been taken away. We were to wet the wallpaper with carbolic acid and strip it off the walls and take it down to the laurel trees and burn it. Pretty wallpaper it was, white with red flowers, hardly a mark on it. I didn’t like to be in there. I knew that Charlotte had been buried in the grave in the churchyard in Bushmills. But the whole time we were working, I couldn’t shake off the feeling that she was still there, that she was trapped in the mirror in the wardrobe. When we had it emptied, me and Madge pulled the wardrobe out, turned it toward the other wall. And when I went to tear the paper off behind where it had been, I found a little spoon, wedged in tight at one of the joins. One of the children must have hid it there, I suppose, but for what purpose I don’t know. I don’t think it had been there all that long. It was sticky with some kind of medicine, calomel maybe, or syrup of ipecac. The mistress was a great believer in purgatives for anything that ailed you, cough or cold. I slipped it in my apron
pocket, washed it and put it away that night. We heaped brimstone in an iron dish over a bucket of water, shoveled live coals out of the nursery fire over it and sealed up the door from the outside. The next day all the clothes from the room were washed with carbolic and boiled. Then the door was opened again and Paudie was sent in to lime-wash the walls.

One Wednesday morning, a few days before the trial in Dublin, there was a fluster in the house. All the younger men were in the big meadow harrowing the ground for the potatoes, and me and old Peter were called to the library. Mr. Carter, the carpenter from town, had been to the house every day for a week, for what purpose we hadn’t been told. “I need help with this,” he said. “It’s to go into the carriage and onto the Dublin train.” He pointed to what looked, in the dark room, like Charlotte’s dolls’ house on the library table. I couldn’t work it out: why would the magistrates want to see her toys? But it wasn’t Charlotte’s dolls’ house on the table; it was a model of the castle itself: the battlements and windows, the big porticoed entrance, the chimneys and part of the basalt wall. I didn’t like it, not one bit, and I could see that Peter didn’t either. Mr. Carter took the roof off so we could get it out the door and then he slid the attic rooms out like a drawer and I could see the wardrobe room, plain as day, the door off the nursery; the master and mistress’s rooms; the hall outside. He had made models of the staircases and all the bedroom furniture, exactly where they were in the rooms; the very windows were glazed. When we got it in the carriage, he slid the top floor back in and put the roof back on, like the lid of a pot. It gave me the strangest feeling to see it leave the castle, as if we were all going with it, our little tiny selves, all in our rightful places, inside the model house, all going on the train to Dublin.