Angels and Insects (24 page)

‘I am twenty-seven,’ said Matty Crompton. ‘I have only one life, and twenty-seven years of it are past, and I intend to begin living.’

‘But not in the rainforest, not in the Amazons. There is Esmeralda, which looks like Paradise on Earth, until you see that all the houses are closed, that all the life is vegetable, not animal, that a poor man’s face is crusted with Mosquitoes, and his food is alive with them, and his hands running blood. The place is in many ways an
Inferno—
’

‘But you will go back there.’

‘My work is there. And I know how to live that life.’

‘I will learn. I am strong. I have not lived softly, contrary to appearances. I am resourceful. You need not heed me, once the voyage is over.’

‘It is a daydream.’

‘No. It is
what I will do
.’

He hardly recognized the ironic practical Miss Crompton of earlier times. She paced and turned. She swung on her heel, with her hand on her hip.

‘Miss Crompton, Matty—’

‘My name’, she said, ‘is Matilda. Up here at night there is no Matty. Only Matilda.
Look at me
.’

And she put up her hands to her head and undid the plaits of her hair over her ears, and shook it out, and came and stood before him. And her face between the dark tresses was sharp and eager and hungry, and he watched how trimly she turned and said, ‘I have seen your
wrists
, Matilda. I dreamed about them now and then. You have—remarkable—wrists.’

‘I only wanted you to
see me
,’ said Matilda, less confidently, once she saw that he had indeed seen her. He saw that her cheekbones were high and sharp, and her mouth was hard, not soft, but full of life. He saw how quick she turned at the waist, and thought quickly of a greyhound. He said, ‘I don’t think that was all you wanted.’

‘I want you to be happy,’ said Matilda, fiercely.

William stood up, and looked her in the eye, and put his hands on her waist.

‘I will be,’ he said. ‘I will be.’

He pulled her against him, the unyielding Matty Crompton, the new hungry Matilda.

‘Shall I stay here?’ he said. ‘Or shall I go back, now?’

‘I should like you to stay,’ said Matilda. ‘Though it is not comfortable here.’

‘If we are to travel together, you will find we look back on this as a Paradise of comfort.’

And in a way, in many ways, they did.

Two more pictures. William went to see Eugenia to communicate to her his decisions. She had put it about that she was ill, and had her meals brought to her in her room, which was not unusual enough to cause any comment in the household. He sent her a message by her maid, saying that he wished to discuss certain arrangements with her. When he came in, he saw that she had paid great attention to her toilette. She was dressed in silvery-grey silk, with bright blue ribbons, and had a posy of rosebuds at her breast.
She looked older; the calm glaze had gone from her look, and was replaced with a new softness, a new overt sensuousness.

‘So you have decided,’ she said. ‘What is to be my fate?’

‘I must confess I am more interested in my own. I have decided to leave you. I shall set out on an expedition to explore the further reaches of the Rio Negro. I have no intention of returning to this house.’

‘I suppose you will wish me to write a cheque for your passage, for your expenses and so on.’

‘No. I have written a book. The money from that will suffice.’

‘And—shall you speak to anyone—shall you—tell?’

‘Who can I tell, Eugenia, whom I should not destroy in the telling? You must live with yourself, that is all I can say, you must live with yourself as you can.’

‘I
know
it was bad,’ said Eugenia. ‘I know it was bad, but you must understand it didn’t
feel
bad—it grew little by little, out of perfectly innocent, natural,
playful
things—which no one thought wrong—I have never been able to speak to any other living soul of it, you must forgive me for speaking to you—I can see I have made you angry, though I tried to make you love me—if I could have spoken to anyone, I might have been brought to see how wrong it was. But—
he
thought it wasn’t—he said—people like making rules and others like breaking them—he made me believe it was all perfectly
natural
and so it was, it was
natural
, nothing in us rose up and said—it was—
un
natural.’

‘Breeders know’, said William curtly, ‘that even first-cousin marriages produce inherited defects—increase the likelihood—’

Eugenia cast down her lashes. ‘That is a cruel thing to say.’

She was clasping her own hands nervously in her lap. She had the curtains half-drawn against the sunlight and to hide the shadows of tearstains. She was lovely, and complacent, and amoral, and he sensed that she was now waiting for him to go, so that she could
resume her self-nurture and self-communion. At some level, what had happened was
inconvenient
to Eugenia, and he was about to remove the inconvenience, himself. He said, ‘Morpho Eugenia. You are very lovely—’

‘It has not done me good,’ said Eugenia, ‘to look pretty, to be admired. I would like to be different. ’

But William could not take that seriously, as he watched her compose her mouth, and open her wide eyes, and look hopefully up at him.

‘Goodbye, Eugenia. I shall not come back.’

‘You never know,’ she replied vaguely, her attention already sliding away from him, with a pretty little sigh of relief.

And the second picture is very different. Imagine the strong little ship,
Calypso
, rushing through the mid-Atlantic night, as far from land as she will be at any point on this voyage. The sky is a profound blue-black, spattered with the flowing, spangled river of the Milky Way, glittering and slippery with suns and moons and worlds, greater and smaller, like spattered seed. The sea is a deep blue-black, ribbed with green, crested as it turns, with silver spray and crinkled crests of airy salt water. It too is swarming, with phosphorescent animalcules, the Medusae, swimming with tiny hairs, presenting a kind of reverse image of the lavish star-soup. William and Matilda are standing on deck, leaning over the rails, watching the ship’s nose plunge down and on. She is wearing a crimson shawl, and a striped scarf in her hair, and the wind stirs her skirts round her ankles. William’s brown hand grips her brown wrist on the rail. They breathe salt air, and hope, and their blood swims with the excitement of the future, and this is a good place to leave them, on the crest of a wave, between the ordered green fields and hedgerows, and the coiling, striving mass of forest along the Amazon shore.

Captain Arturo Papagay, whose first command this is, comes
past, and smiles his rich, mixed smile, white teeth in a golden-brown face, laughing dark eyes. He has brought Mr Adamson a curiosity. It is a butterfly, found by a midshipman in the rigging. It is amber-gold, with dusky borders to its wings, which are a little dishevelled, even tattered. It is the Monarch, says William, excited, Danaus Plexippus, which is known to migrate great distances along the American coast. They are strong fliers, he tells Matilda, but the winds can carry them hundreds of miles out to sea. Matilda observes to William and Captain Papagay that the wings are still dusty with life. ‘It fills me with emotion,’ she says. ‘I do not know whether it is more fear, or more hope. It is so fragile, and so easily crushed, and nowhere in reach of where it was going. And yet it is still alive, and bright, and so surprising, rightly seen.’ ‘That is the main thing,’ says Captain Papagay. ‘To be alive. As long as you are alive, everything is surprising, rightly seen.’ And the three of them look out with renewed interest at the points of light in the dark around them.

Lilias Papagay was of imagination all compact. In her profession this was a suspect, if necessary, quality, and had to be watched, had to be curbed. Sophy Sheekhy, who saw with her eyes, and heard in her ears, the unearthly visitants, was apparently more phlegmatic and matter-of-fact. They made a good pair for this reason, as Mrs Papagay had intuited they might, when her next-door neighbour, Mrs Pope, had flown into strong hysterics on hearing her new nursery-governess talking to Cousin Gertrude and her infant son Tobias, both drowned many years ago. They were sitting at the nursery table, Sophy Sheekhy said, and their clothes, though perfectly fresh and dry, gave off an odour of salt water. They wanted to know what had become of the grandfather clock that used to stand in the nursery corner. Tobias had liked the way the sun and moon followed each other with smiling faces on its dial. Mrs Pope, who had sold the clock, wanted to hear no more. Mrs Papagay offered asylum to the composed little Miss Sheekhy, who packed up her few belongings and moved in. Mrs Papagay herself had never progressed beyond passive writing—admittedly voluminous—but believed Sophy Sheekhy might work marvels. She did from time to time astonish and amaze, though not frequently. But this parsimony itself was a guarantee of authenticity.

On one late, stormy afternoon in 1875 they were proceeding along the Front, in Margate, to take part in a séance in Mrs Jesse’s
parlour. Lilias Papagay, a few steps ahead, wore wine-dark silk with a flounced train and a hat heavy with darkly gleaming plumage, jet-black, emerald-shot, iridescent dragonfly blue on ultramarine, plump shoulders of headless wings with jaunty tail-feathers, like the little wings that fluttered on the hat or the heels of Hermes in old pictures. Sophy Sheekhy wore dove-coloured wool with a white collar, and carried a serviceable black umbrella.

The sun was setting on the grey water, a great dusky rose disk, the colour of a new burn-mark, in a bath of ruddy gold light poured between the bars of steely cloud, like firelight from a polished grate.

‘Look,’ said Lilias Papagay, waving an imperious gloved hand. ‘Can’t you just see the Angel? Clothed with a cloud and with a rainbow on his head, and his face as it were the sun, and his feet as pillars of fire. And in his hand a little book open.’

She saw his cloudy thews and sinews bestride the sea; she saw his hot red face and his burning feet. She knew she was straining. She desired
so
to see the invisible inhabitants of the sky sail about their business, and the winged air dark with plumes. She knew that that world penetrated and interpenetrated this one, grey solid Margate equally with Stonehenge and Saint Paul’s. Sophy Sheekhy observed that it was indeed a spectacular sunset. One of the angel’s fiery legs flared and extended, leaving momentary rosy ripples on the dull water. His swollen grey trunk bowed and twisted, wreathed with gold. ‘I never tire of looking at sunsets,’ said Sophy Sheekhy. She had a pale face like a full moon, a little pitted with craters from a mild attack of pox, and shadowed here and there with freckles. She had a large brow, and a full, colourless mouth, the lips habitually lying restfully together, like the folded hands. Her lashes were long, silky, and almost invisible; her veined ears could be seen in part, under heavy wings of hay-coloured hair. She would have been unsurprised to be told that the sun and moon are constant sizes to the apprehension of the human eye, which confers on them bearable dimensions, roughly the size of a guinea coin. Whereas Mrs
Papagay, with William Blake, would have divined an innumerable company of the Heavenly Host crying, ‘Holy, Holy, Holy, is the Lord God Almighty.’ Or with Emanuel Swedenborg, who saw great companies of celestial creatures sailing through space like flaming worlds. A gathering of angry gulls was disputing a morsel in mid-air; they rose together, screaming and beating, as Mrs Papa-gay’s angel dislimned and grew molten. His last light cast a momentary flush across Sophy’s white face. They quickened their step. Mrs Papagay was never late.