Angels and Insects (2 page)

They were all three pale-gold and ivory creatures, with large blue eyes and long pale silky lashes visible only in certain lights and shadows. Enid was the youngest, still with a trace of childish plumpness, wearing blush-pink organdie trimmed with white rosebuds, and a wreath of rosebuds and a net of rosy ribbons in her hair. Rowena was the tallest, the one who laughed, with richer colour in her cheeks and lips, with the coil of hair in the nape of her neck studded with pearls and blush-tipped daisies. The eldest, Eugenia, wore white tarlatan over a lilac silk underskirt, and had a cluster of violets at her breast, and more violets at her waist, and violets and ivy woven in and out of her sleek golden head. Their brothers, too, had the gold and white colouring. They made a charming and homogeneous group.

‘Poor Mr Adamson had no idea we were having a Ball at the beginning of his visit,’ said Lady Alabaster. ‘Your father wrote immediately to invite him when he heard how he had been rescued at sea after being cast away for fifteen days, very terrible, in the Atlantic. And your father, naturally, thought more of his eagerness to see Mr Adamson’s specimens than he did of our own projected entertainment. So Mr Adamson arrived to find the whole house in turmoil and servants running hither and thither in the greatest possible disorder. Fortunately he is much of a height with Lionel, who was able to help with the suit.’

‘I should have had no dress suit in any event,’ said William. ‘All
my earthly belongings are burned, or drowned, or both, and they never included a dress suit. During my last two years at Ega I had not even a pair of shoes.’

‘Well, well,’ said Lady Alabaster easily, ‘you must be possessed of immense resources of strength and courage. I am sure they will be equal to a turn around the dance floor. You must do your duty too, Lionel and Edgar. There are more ladies than gentlemen here. There always are, I do not know how it comes about, but there are always more ladies.’

The music struck up again, a waltz. William bowed to the youngest Miss Alabaster, and asked if she were free to dance. She blushed, and smiled and accepted.

‘You look at my shoes with a new consciousness,’ said William, as he led her out. ‘You are afraid not only that I shall dance clumsily but that my unaccustomed feet will stumble into your pretty slippers. I shall endeavour not to. I shall try very hard. You must help me, Miss Alabaster, you must take pity on my inadequacies.’

‘This must seem very strange to you,’ said Enid Alabaster, ‘after so many years of danger and hardship and solitude, to take part in this kind of entertainment.’

‘It is quite delightful,’ said William, watching his feet, and gaining confidence. The waltz was danced in certain kinds of society in Para and Manáos; he had whirled around with olive-skinned and velvet-brown ladies of doubtful virtue and no virtue. There was something alarming in the soft, white creature in his arms, at once so milky-wholesome and so airily untouchable. But his feet were confident.

‘You know very well how to waltz,’ said Enid Alabaster.

‘Not so well as your brother, I see,’ said William.

Edgar Alabaster was dancing with his sister, Eugenia. He was a big, muscular man, his blond hair crimping in windswept, regular waves over his long head, his back stiff and straight. But his large feet moved quickly and intricately, tracing elegant skipping patterns
beside Eugenia’s pearly-grey slippers. They were not speaking to each other. Edgar looked over Eugenia’s shoulder, faintly bored, surveying the ballroom. Eugenia’s eyes were half closed. They whirled, they floated, they checked, they pirouetted.

‘We practise a lot in the schoolroom,’ said Enid. ‘Matty plays the piano and we dance and dance. Edgar likes horses better of course, but he likes any kind of movement, we all do. Lionel’s not so good. He doesn’t let himself go in the same way. Some days, I think we could dance forever, like the princesses in the story.’

‘Who wore their slippers out secretly every night.’

‘And were exhausted in the mornings, and no one could understand it.’

‘And refused to marry because they loved dancing so much.’

‘Some married ladies still dance. There is Mrs Chipperfield, look, in the bright green. She dances
very
well.’

Edgar and Eugenia had left the floor and returned to their positions beside Lady Alabaster’s sofa. Enid went on talking to William about the family. As they passed the sofa again, she said, ‘Eugenia used to be the best of all, before she was unhappy.’

‘Unhappy?’

‘She was to be married, you see, only Captain Hunt, her fiancé, died quite suddenly. It was a terrible shock, poor Eugenia is only just recovering. It is like being a widow without being married, I think. We don’t talk about it. But everyone knows of course. I’m not tittle-tattling, you know. I just thought—since you are to stay here a little time—it might be helpful to you to know.’

‘Thank you. You are very kind. I shall not now say anything unwittingly foolish. Do you think she would dance with me, if I asked her?’

‘She might.’

She did. She thanked him gravely, with a slight lift of her soft lips and no change in her deep, distant eyes—or at least that was how
he saw them—and put up her hands gracefully to take his. Her presence within his grasp—that was how he thought of it—was lighter, more floating, less springing than Enid’s. Her feet were deft. He looked down from his height at her pale face and saw her large eyelids, blue-veined, almost translucent, and the thick fringes of white-gold hairs on their rims. Her slender fingers, resting in his, were gloved and only faintly warm. Her shoulders and bust rose white and flawless from the froth of tulle and tarlatan like Aphrodite from the foam. A simple row of pearls, soft white on soft white with a shimmering difference, rested on her collarbone. She was both proudly naked and wholly untouchable. He guided her round the floor, and felt, to his shame and amazement, unmistakable stirrings and quickenings of bodily excitement in himself. He shifted himself inside Lionel’s dress suit, and reflected—he was, after all, a scientist and an observer—that these dances were designed to arouse his desire in exactly this way, however demure the gloves, however sweetly innocent the daily life of the young woman in his arms. He remembered the palm-wine dance, a swaying circle which at a change in rhythm broke up into hugging couples who then set upon and danced round the one partnerless scapegoat dancer. He remembered being grabbed and nuzzled and rubbed and cuddled with great vigour by women with brown breasts glistening with sweat and oil, and with shameless fingers.

Nothing he did now seemed to happen without this double vision, of things seen and done otherwise, in another world.

‘You are thinking of the Amazon,’ said Eugenia.

‘Are you gifted at thought-reading?’

‘Oh no. Only you looked far away. And that is far away.’

‘I was thinking of the beauty of everything here—the architecture, and the young ladies in their gauzes and laces. I was looking at this very fine Gothic fan vaulting, which Mr Ruskin says is like the ancient imagination of trees in a forest, overarching, and I was thinking of the palms towering in the jungle, and all the beautiful
silky butterflies sailing amongst them, high up and quite out of reach.’

‘How strange that must be,’ said Eugenia. She paused. ‘I have made a beautiful display—a kind of quilt, or embroidery almost—out of some of the earlier specimens you sent my father. I have pinned them out very carefully—they are exquisitely pretty—they give a little the effect of a scalloped cushion, only their colours are more subtle than any silks could be.’

‘The natives believed we were collecting them as patterns for calico. That was the only way they could explain our interest to themselves, since the butterflies are not good to eat—indeed, I believe many are poisonous, feeding on poisonous plants. And it is those who are the brightest, and sail about slowly and proudly, flaunting their colours as a kind of warning. They are the males, of course, making themselves brilliant for their brown mates. The Indians resemble them in that. It is the men who dress in brilliant feathers and coloured paint and stones. The females are quieter. Whereas here we men wear carapaces like black beetles. And you ladies are like a flower garden in full flight.’

‘My father was so sorry to hear you had lost so much in the terrible shipwreck. For your sake, and for his own. He was eager to add to his collection.’

‘I managed to save one or two of the rarest and most beautiful. I kept them in a special box by my pillow—I liked to look at them—and so they were there to hand to be snatched up, when we saw that we must abandon ship. There is pathos in saving a dead butterfly. But one in particular is a rarity—I shall say no more now—but I believe your father will be glad to have it—and you too—but it is to be a surprise.’

‘I hate people who tell me I am to have a surprise and will not tell me what it is.’

‘You do not like suspense?’

‘No. No, I don’t. I like to know where I am. I am afraid of surprises.’

‘Then I must remember never to surprise you,’ he said, and thought he sounded foolish, and was not surprised when she did not answer. There was a little crimson stain, the size of a medium ant, where her round breasts met, or parted from, each other, where the violet shadow began. There were blue veins here and there in the creamy surface, just under the skin. His body pulled at him again, and he felt dirty and dangerous. He said, ‘I feel privileged to be allowed to be a temporary part of your happy family, Miss Alabaster.’

She looked up at him, on this, and opened the large, blue eyes. They were washed with what looked like unshed tears.

‘I love my family, Mr Adamson. We are very happy together. We love each other very much.’

‘You are fortunate.’

‘Oh yes. We are. I know that. We are very fortunate.’

Since his ten years in the Amazon, and even more since his delirious days afloat in a lifeboat in the Atlantic, William had come to see clean, soft English beds as the heart of some earthly Bower of Bliss. Although it was well after midnight when he retired to his room, there was a thin, silent housemaid waiting to bring him hot water, and to warm his sheets, whisking past him with downturned eyes on noiseless feet. His bedroom had a small carved bay window, with a stained glass roundel depicting two white lilies. There were modern comforts within its Gothic walls—a mahogany bed, intricately carved with ivy leaves and holly berries, spread with goosefeather mattress, soft woollen blankets, and a snowy bedspread embroidered with Tudor roses. He did not, however, climb immediately between the sheets, but carried his candle to his desk and got out his journal.

He had always kept a journal. When he was a young man, in a village outside Rotherham in Yorkshire, he had written a daily examination of his conscience. His father was a successful butcher and a devout Methodist, who had sent his sons to a good local school, where they had learned Greek and Latin and some elementary Mathematics, and had required them to go to chapel. Butchers, William had observed, categorising even then, tend to be well-fleshed men, outward-looking and with strong opinions. Martin Adamson, like his son, had a mane of dark, shining hair, a long, solid nose, and sharp blue eyes under straight brows. He took pleasure in his craft, in anatomising the slain, in delicate knifework and artistry with sausages and pies, and he was dreadfully afraid of Hell Fire, whose flames flickered at the edge of his daily imagination and consumed his dreaming nights. He provided prime beef for mill owners and mine owners in their places, and scrag end and faggots for miners and factory workers in theirs. He was ambitious for William, but without specificity. He wanted him to have a good trade, with possibilities of expansion.

William trained his eye in the farmyard and amongst the bloody sawdust of the slaughterhouse. In the life he finally chose, his father’s skills were of inestimable value in skinning, and mounting, and preserving specimens of birds and beasts and insects. He anatomised ant-eaters and grasshoppers and ants with his father’s exactness reduced to microscopic scales. In the days of the butchery, his journal was full of his desire to be a great man, and his self-castigation for the sins of pride, of lack of humility, of self-regard, of sloth, of hesitation in pursuing greatness. He tried schoolmastering and supervising wool-carders, and wrote in his journal of his distress at his success in these tasks—he was a good Latin teacher, he saw what his students did not see, he was a good supervisor, he could detect laziness and ameliorate real grievances—but he was not using his unique gifts, whatever they were, he was
going
nowhere, and he meant to go far. He could not read those circular and
painful journals now, with their cries of suffocation and their self-condemnatory periods, but he had them in a bank, for they were part of a record, of an accurate record, of the development of the mind and character of William Adamson, who still meant to be a great man.

The journals had changed when he began collecting. He had taken to long walks in the countryside—the part of Yorkshire where he lived consisted of foul black places amongst fields and rough land of great beauty—and he had at first walked in a state of religious anxiety, combined with a reverence for Wordsworth’s poetry, looking for signs of Divine Love and order in the meanest flowers that blew, in bubbling brooks and changing cloud formations. And then he had begun to take a collecting-box, bring things home, press them, categorise them, with the aid of Loudon’s
Encyclopaedia of Plants
. He discovered the Crucifers, the Umbellifers, the Labiates, the Rosaceae, the Leguminosae, the Compositae, and with them the furious variety of forms which turned out to mask, to enhance the underlying and rigorous order of branching families, changing with site and climate. He wrote for a time in his journal of the wonders of divine Design, and his self-examination gave way insensibly to the recording of petals observed, leaf forms noted, marshes, hedges and tangled banks. His journal was for the first time alive with a purposeful happiness. He began also to collect insects, and was amazed to discover how many hundreds of species of beetle existed in a few square miles of rough moorland. He haunted the slaughterhouse, making notes on where the blowflies preferred to lay their eggs, how the maggots moved and chewed, the swarming, the pullulation, a mass of mess moved by an ordering principle. The world looked different, and larger, and brighter, not water-colour washes of green and blue and grey, but a dazzling pattern of fine lines and dizzying pinpoints, jet-black, striped and spotted crimson, iridescent emerald, sloppy caramel, slime-silver.