Angels and Insects (5 page)

William watched Harald’s face attentively during these addresses. When Eugenia was present, he watched her face, when he dared, but her eyes were always modestly cast down, and she had a great capacity for stillness, sitting with her hands quiet in her lap. Harald changed aspects. At times, with his head up, and the white fronds of his beard catching the light, he had a look of God the Father himself, piercing-eyed, white as wool, ancient of days. At others, speaking quietly, almost inaudibly, and looking at the black-and-white chequered floor beneath his feet, he had almost a bedraggled look, to which the slightly musty, frayed quality of his gown contributed. And at others still, he reminded William briefly of Portuguese missionary friars he had met, out there, with feverish eye and ravaged faces, men who failed to comprehend the incomprehension of the placidly evasive Indians. And this analogy in turn would make William, sitting in the English stonelight on his hard bench, remember other ceremonies, the all-male gatherings to drink
caapi
, or
Aya-huasca
, the Dead Man’s Vine. He had tried it once and had seen visions of landscapes and great cities and lofty towers as though he were flying, had found himself lost in a forest surrounded by serpents, and in danger of death. Women were not allowed to taste these things, or to see the drums which summoned the participants, the
botutos
, on pain of death. He remembered the fleeing women, faces covered, sitting amongst the decorous English family, men on one side, women on another, watching Eugenia’s
pink tongue moisten her soft lips. He felt he was doomed to a kind of double consciousness. Everything he experienced brought up its contrary image from
out there
, which had the effect of making not only the Amazon ceremonies but the English sermon seem strange, unreal, of an uncertain nature. He had smuggled away a
botuto
under blankets, in a canoe at night, but it was lost with all his other things, under the miles of grey water. Perhaps it had brought him ill-luck.

‘We must never cease to be thankful to the Lord for all his many mercies to us,’ said Harald Alabaster.

A workshop was set up for William in a disused saddle-room, next to the stables. This was half-full of the tin boxes, the wooden crates, the tea-chests of things Harald had purchased—apparently with no clear priority of interest—from all over the world. Here were monkey skins and delicate parrot skins, preserved lizards and monstrous snakes, box upon box of dead beetles, brilliant green, iridescent purple, swarthy demons with monstrous horned heads. Here too were crates of geological specimens, and packs of varied mosses, fruits and flowers, from the Tropics and the ice-caps, bears’ teeth and rhinoceros horns, the skeletons of sharks and clumps of coral. Some packages proved to have been reduced to drifting dust by the action of termites, or compacted to viscous dough by the operation of mould. William asked his benefactor on what principle he was required to proceed, and Harald told him, ‘Set it all in order, don’t you know? Make sense of it, lay it all out in some order or other.’ William came to see that Harald had not carried out this task himself partly at least because he had no real idea of how to set about it. He felt moments of real irritability that treasures for which men like himself had risked life and health should lie here higgledy-piggledy, and decay in an English stable. He procured a trestle-table and several ledgers, a series of collecting cabinets and some cupboards for specimens that would not lie flat and slide conveniently in and out of drawers. He set up his microscope, and began to make
labels. He moved things from day to day from drawer to drawer as he found himself with a plethora of beetles or a sudden plague of frogs. He could not devise an organising principle, but went on doggedly making labels, setting up, examining.

His saddle-room was dark, and stone-cold, except where the light came in from the window, which was high up, too high to look out of. He worked amongst the noise and smells of the grooms mucking out the stables, the steaming scent of dung, the ammoniac whiff of horse-piss, the plod of leather boots, the swish of hay on a fork. Edgar and Lionel were both keen horsemen. Edgar kept an Arab stallion, a gleaming chestnut with a silky-muscled, arching neck and eyes that rolled white in the half-dark of his box, where he paced, baring his teeth. His name was Saladin. Edgar’s hunter was Ivanhoe, huge, iron-grey, full of oats and a great leaper. Edgar was always accepting challenges to jump impossible objects on Ivanhoe, who always rose to the occasion. The two of them were in some ways alike, rippling with muscle, standing tall, somehow strutting with pent-in force, not flowing, like the confined Saladin, like the mares and foals in the paddock, like Rowena and Eugenia. William could hear Edgar and Lionel coming in and out from rides as he worked, the quick clatter of iron on stones, the scrape of horses wheeling and dancing. The young women sometimes went out with them too. Eugenia rode a pretty and docile black mare, and wore a blue riding habit that matched her eyes. William tried to manage to come out of his cavern to watch her mount, her neat little foot in the groom’s hands, her own gloved hands on the reins, her hair bound in a blue net. Edgar would watch William from the height of Ivanhoe’s saddle. William sensed that Edgar did not like him. Edgar treated him as he treated the intermediate folk between the family and the invisible, speechless servants. He offered him the time of day, a nod on meeting, and no encouragement to converse.

Lady Alabaster spent her days in a small parlour, with a view over the lawn. This room was a lady’s room, and had dark pomegranate-red
wallpaper, sprinkled with sprigs of honeysuckle in pink and cream. It had thick red velvet curtains, often partially drawn against the sun: Lady Alabaster’s eyes were weak, and she frequently had the headache. There was always a fire lit in the hearth, which at first did not strike William, who had arrived in early Spring, as anything unusual, but brought him out in sweat under his jacket as Summer advanced. Lady Alabaster appeared to be immobilised, by natural lethargy more than by any specific complaint, though she waddled, more than walked, when she progressed along the corridors to eat luncheon or dine, and William formed the impression that under her skirts her knees and ankles were hugely, maybe painfully, swollen. She lay on a deep sofa, under the window, but with her back to it, oriented towards the fire. The room was a nest of cushions, all embroidered with flowers and fruit and blue butterflies and scarlet birds, in cross-stitch on wool, in silk thread on satin. Lady Alabaster had always an embroidery frame by her, but William never saw her take it up, though this proved nothing—she might have laid it aside out of courtesy. She did, in her fading voice, point out to him the work of Eugenia, Rowena and Enid, Miss Fescue, Matty and the little girls, for his admiration. She had several glass cases of dried poppy-heads and teazles and hydrangeas, and several little footstools, over which guests and servants stumbled on their way into the dimness. She seemed to spend most of her day drinking—tea, lemonade, ratafia, chocolate milk, barley water, herbal infusions, which were endlessly moving along the corridors, borne by parlourmaids, on silver trays. She also consumed large quantities of sweet biscuits, macaroons, butterfly cakes, little jellies and dariole moulds, which were also freshly made by Cook, carried from the kitchen, and their crumbs subsequently removed, and dusted away. She was hugely fat, and did not wear corsets except for special occasions, but lay in a sort of voluminous shiny tea gown, swaddled in cashmere shawls and with a lacy cap tied under her many chins. Like many well-fleshed women, she had kept
some bloom on her skin, and her face was moony-bland and curiously unlined, though her pale eyes were deep in little rolling pits of flesh. Sometimes Miriam, her personal maid, would sit by her and brush her still lustrous hair for half an hour at a time, holding it in her deft hands, and sweeping the ivory-backed brush rhythmically over and over. Lady Alabaster said that the hair-brushing eased her headaches. When these were very bad, Miriam would apply cold compresses, and wipe her mistress’s eyelids with witch hazel.

William felt that this immobile, vacantly amiable presence was a source of power in the household. The housekeeper came and went for her instructions, Miss Mead brought the little girls to recite their poems and tables, the butler carried in documents, Cook came and went, the gardener, wiping his boots, brought in pots of bulbs, little posies, designs for new plantings. These people were often ushered in and out by Matty Crompton, and it was Matty who came to seek William in his stable for what turned out to be his instructions.

She stood in the shadows in the doorway, a tall, thin dark figure, in a musty black gown with practical white cuffs and collar. Her face was thin and unsmiling, her hair dark under a plain cap, her skin dusky too. She spoke quietly, clearly, with little expression. Lady Alabaster would be glad if he would take a cup of tea with her when his work was finished. He had undertaken quite a labour of love, it appeared. What was that he had in his hand? It looked quite alarming.

‘It has become detached from whatever specimen it was attached to, I think. Several parts of several specimens have become detached. I keep a special box for the most puzzling. This hand and arm obviously belong to some fairly large quadrumane. I see you might suppose they were those of some human infant. I can assure you they are not. The bones are far too light. I must look to you as if I were practising witchcraft.’

‘Oh no,’ said Matty Crompton. ‘I did not mean to make any such suggestion.’

Lady Alabaster gave him tea, and sponge fingers, and warm scones with jam and cream, and said she hoped he was comfortable, and that Harald was not overburdening him with work. No, said William, he had a great deal of spare time. He opened his mouth to say that it had been agreed that he should have some spare time, to write his book, when Matty Crompton said, ‘Lady Alabaster expressed the hope that you might be able to spare a little time to help Miss Mead and myself with the scientific education of the younger members of the family. She feels that they should profit from the presence amongst us of such a distinguished naturalist.’

‘Naturally, I should be happy to do what I can—’

‘Matty has
such
good ideas, Mr Adamson. So ingenious, she is. Tell him, Matty.’

‘It is nothing much really. We already go on collecting rambles, Mr Adamson—we fish in the ponds and brooks, we collect flowers and berries, in a
very
disorganised way. If you would only accompany us, once or twice, and suggest a kind of
aim
for our aimless poking about—show us what is to be discovered. And then there is the schoolroom. It has long been my ambition to set up a glass-sided beehive, such as Huber had, and also some kind of viable community of ants, so that the little ones could observe the workings of insect societies with their own eyes. Could you do this? Would you do this? You would know how we should set about it. You would tell us what to look for.’

He said he would be delighted to help. He had no idea how to talk to children, he thought to himself, and even believed he did not like them, much. He disliked hearing their squeals when they ran out over the lawn, or through the paddock.

‘Thank you so very much,’ said Lady Alabaster. ‘We shall truly profit from your presence amongst us.’

‘Eugenia likes to come on our nature rambles,’ said the quiet
Matty Crompton. ‘She brings her sketchbooks whilst the young ones go fishing, or collect flowers for the press.’

‘Eugenia is a good girl,’ said Lady Alabaster vacantly. ‘They are all good girls, they are none of them any trouble. I am much blessed in my daughters.’

He went on nature rambles. He felt coerced into doing this, reminded of his dependent status by the organisation of Miss Mead and Matty Crompton, and yet at the same time he enjoyed the outings. All three elder girls sometimes came and sometimes did not. Sometimes he did not know whether Eugenia would make one of the party until the very moment of setting out, when they would assemble on the gravel walk in front of the house armed with nets, with jam-jars on string handles, with metal boxes and useful scissors. There were days when his morning’s work became almost impossible because of the tension in his diaphragm over whether he would or would not see her, because of the imagination he lavished on how she would look, crossing the lawn to the gate in the wall, crossing the paddock and the orchard under the blossoming fruit trees to the fields which sloped down to the little stream, where they fished for minnows and sticklebacks, caddis grubs and water-snails. He liked the little girls well enough; they were docile, pale little creatures, well buttoned up, who spoke when they were spoken to. Elaine in particular had a good eye for hidden treasures on the undersides of leaves, or interesting boreholes in muddy banks. When Eugenia was not in the party he felt his old self again, scanning everything with a minute attention that in the forests had been the attention of a primitive hunter as well as a modern naturalist, of a small animal afraid amongst threatening sounds and movements, as well as a scientific explorer. Here the pricking of his skin was associated not with fear, but with the invisible cloud of electric forces that spangled Eugenia’s air as she strolled calmly through the meadows. Perhaps it was fear. He did
not wish to feel it. He was only in abeyance, until he felt it again.

One day, when they were all occupied on the bank of the stream, including both Eugenia and Enid, he was drawn into speaking of his feelings about all this. There had been a great fall of spring rain, and various loose clumps of grass and twigs were floating along the usually placid surface of the stream, between the trailing arms of the weeping willows and the groups of white poplar. There were two white ducks and a coot, swimming busily; the sun was over the water, kingcups were golden, early midges danced. Matty Crompton, a patient huntress, had captured two sticklebacks and trailed her net in the water, watching the shadows under the bank. Eugenia stood next to William. She breathed in deeply, and sighed out.