The Specimen (30 page)

“Soup?” he ventured, little expecting any response; her muteness towards him was absolute. Gwen seemed not to have heard him, and so he continued to watch Augusta should she fall
into difficulties with her stick, or the fire, or both. Then Gwen reached to her side and held a tatty book up and waved it, only a slight twist from her wrist. Edward didn’t know what to
make of this latest peculiar enterprise, but, at least, he had managed to get some kind of reaction from her, which might, at a stretch, be interpreted as communication.

Gwen’s post-partum melancholia had been sudden and severe. It had not affected her ability to function as a mother, which surprised him, but she had suddenly one day taken ill and refused
to speak or paint. She would spend long hours walking the perimeter of the
casinha
with the baby in a pouch, native style on her back. Or she would suddenly take instead to lying for days
on end in her hammock. The malaise had not affected her appetite too badly. She seemed to be aware of the need to fill her stomach in order to nurse the child. She sang to it, whispered lovingly to
it, but she would speak to no one else; not even Maria, who told Edward, without his asking, that European women always had some trouble of this kind and that he should keep an eye on her but stay
out of her way. Edward resented the inclusion of Maria in their number, but knew that hiring anyone else would probably result in the same deluge of un-asked for advice. Sometimes, he did wonder if
it was something more. He wouldn’t put a name to it; he wouldn’t call her mad. It was like no kind of madness he had ever seen. His entomologising rambles became truncated as a result.
He scrutinised her, from a suitable distance, for signs of a change in her condition, either good or not so good. He couldn’t even bring himself to use the word ‘bad’. There
seemed to be nothing bad about her. Occasionally, she appeared to be staring intently at something far away, and so absolute was her concentration, that Edward, more than once, fetched out the
telescope to discover her object of interest.

During all this time, Gwen read and re-read a book. He was not permitted to see it. He knew that she kept it inside her painting bag, modified within the first week of their arrival to exclude
tarantulas with an interest in art. If Edward came within twenty feet of the open book, it was snapped shut and tucked under Gwen’s arm or inside the tight folds of the pouch across her
breastbone.

Edward was sure that the tatty article she had just waved at him was the same volume which had received such intensive attention. It had a curious title:
Eternal Blazon
. He’d
vowed to get at it one day and see what could possibly be written there which could be so consuming.

Augusta let a trickle of urine, travelling part of the way down her chubby legs, fall to the ground. She stamped gleefully in the wetted earth and squatted again to poke at it
with her fingers. Edward cast a glance towards Gwen. She opened her blouse and placed the book next to her skin. Edward backed away as she got up and removed Augusta from the mess and took her away
to clean her, murmuring that she was a rascal, in a voice so quiet no one else would have recognised it as speech. Gwen left the child with Maria and returned to the pot. Edward fetched his gun out
to the verandah and began to clean it, taking extra care over each section. He was far enough away now, for Gwen to carry on without hindrance. She turned her back to him again and spent an hour
doing something which Edward was not allowed to see. Eventually, she stood and stretched, and with the book in her hand went inside.

Edward went over to the pot. The concoction was beginning to congeal. It looked, for all the world, like glue.

Pará, Brazil. July, 1863.

The last of Edward’s specimens had been packaged carefully and crated up, ready to be shipped back to England. Some were to be sold; the rest were to be kept safely in
storage until their own return. Edward had decided that this was the best way to do things. They would now quit the
casinha
and take a boat up into the country to search for specimens as
yet unknown to science. The Grindlocks had told him that Coyne, now back in the country, was interested in taking part in the expedition. Edward knew he needed a guide and so agreed to take him on.
All this had been arranged, and Gwen had not spoken. Her manner was curiously ordinary despite the muteness. He had taken her silence to mean that she agreed with his plans wholeheartedly.

Now, she had broken her silence. Edward’s mouth hung open, she thought, in quite an idiotic way. What was there not to comprehend? She waited whilst she folded the last
of her moth-bitten clothes into her trunk. The only things which were not packed into it were her drawing things, and her tin of paints.

“What do you mean, what plan?”

“I have always intended to leave, Edward, when the child was big enough to stand the journey.”

“But,” he said, “if she is big enough to stand the journey, as you put it, over the Atlantic, then she is big enough to take part in this excursion. It is what we came here
for.”

“It is not the excursion, Edward. It’s me. I don’t want to stay here with you any longer. I have had my fill. I cannot continue.” Perhaps, she thought, this is more
arduous than the voyage I face, and she drew comfort from that.

“Who have you told? The Grindlocks, have you told them?”

“No, why on earth would I do that? I’ll make my own arrangements. I can explain my return in terms which will cast no aspersions on you, if that’s what worries you.”

Edward threw his arms out, and Gwen stepped back, unsure the gesture was nicely meant. But Edward began to grab at handfuls of his hair.

“You have to come with me. I can’t do the thing—not on my own. Those two weeks, remember, when we first came here. It was hell without you. You. You
are—necessary.”

“I’m not. You can collect things without me.”

“We had an arrangement. An agreement. I trusted you, for God’s sake.”

“To do what? To keep on lying? To keep on pretending that we have some kind of affinity? We don’t. Nothing binds us.”

“Our daughter, Augusta. She binds us. She would be fatherless.”

“She already is. It makes not a jot of difference.”

“You can’t take her. I won’t allow it.”

“You don’t have to allow it. We are not husband and wife.”

“The law favours me, as her father. You count for nothing. Nothing!”

“You have no interest in her. You can’t collect her.”

“I have every interest in her, and I will not permit her removal.”

“We’ll see about that. In any case, Edward, I can’t be a part of this excursion whilst you persist with the idea of including Mr Coyne.”

“I had every impression that you were rather taken with him.”

“I’ll not get on a boat with him, under any circumstances. He is altogether a menace.”

Edward swivelled on his heel to face her, and his hands dropped away from knotting his hair. “Since when have you ever regarded Coyne as a menace?”

“From the moment I met him.”

“This is just bluff. You had something with him, and now you want to hide it.”

“Don’t be absurd!”

“That is exactly the answer I would expect from a guilty party.”

“Listen to yourself! You’ll drive yourself mad over nothing if you keep this up. I’m going home, Mr Scales, and I’m taking Augusta with me.”

Edward pressed his eyes with his fingers and for several long moments did nothing but breathe heavily through his nose, which made a dry whistle with every intake. Then he spoke from behind his
hands: “Will you at least come and see us off?”

Gwen suddenly felt sorry for him. He looked, and sounded, so pathetic, “Yes, of course, I will.”

“You’ll want to have your luggage sent on to the Grindlocks, I suppose. I shall see to that for you.”

Gwen gave a small nod.

“Gwen,” he said. She was moving away from him, but he caught her by the arm. She stood and waited for whatever was to come next, but all he said was, “I do love you. You know
that, don’t you? Above all else.”

At last, she gave another small nod and he let her go.

Vincent Coyne’s blue spectacles flashed in the sun; his teeth seemed yellow beneath them in the harsh light. He strode up and down the deck of the two-masted boat,
slapping its sides and slapping the crates of Edward’s things like tethered beasts which had previously irked him. Still, Gwen looked on the scene with a glad sense of detachment. It was
nearly over. She must have smiled as Vincent Coyne looked up and saw her.

“Hey,” he shouted, throwing a clenched fist high in the air, his gaze fixed on her. “She’s here.”

Edward appeared from underneath the awning. He looked harassed. Augusta leaned precariously off Gwen’s hip where she had been sitting quietly. She flung her arms out towards Edward.

“Bring her on board, just for a minute,” he said.

“No. We’ll wave from here. Here will be sufficient.”

“Don’t you trust him?” yelled Vincent, vicious, playful.

“We don’t need to complicate her day.”

“It’s not complicated, Gwen,” said Edward. “Just let her have a little inspection of the boat. Bring her aboard for ten minutes.”

This will be the last thing, she thought, that he will make me do. In half an hour the boat will be setting sail, and I will be able breathe freely again. She relented and carried Augusta onto
the boat.

Edward took her into his arms and held her high up above his head.

Had that been the signal, thought Gwen later, for the men to cast off? Around her, the scrambled activity, the sails filling, the ropes thrown, the men jumping here and there with careless
concentration, calling to each other short words of affirmation: they were leaving.

Her heart pumped with hatred as she saw that it was useless to make a fuss, or to demand that she be allowed to alight. He had devised this, and she remembered now his warning to her after Frome
had walked away; that she should not make a fool of him again. I’ll wait, she thought; there’ll be some chance later. I’ll use this time to think of every possible pitfall. But
the hatred surged through her like molten glass; its colours twisted and settled in her breast, hardening her resolve to one day be absolutely free of this man. She walked to the stern and faced
away from him, alert all the while, to the presence of Vincent Coyne.

Edward wrote in his diary:

Edward emerged from under the awning with an ink-laden pen in his hand. Gwen watched him with a certain amount of satisfaction as he gripped the rail and reached over to be
sick before staggering back. And now, as she trailed her gaze back to the open water, she saw her trunk, tucked in with some of the crates.

Vincent Coyne stood at the bow, his arms pounding the air in time to a song he was singing. The wind caught it up and shredded it, the words lost as soon as they left his lungs. Phrases from the
now unreadable volume preyed on her mind yet again. It was not only that the ghastly details of his past had been concealed from her but read about by others, nor was it that he had kept his
marriage to himself—perhaps she could have found some way to reconcile herself to these things if it were not for the fact that her own name, and that of her sister, and of her family home
had been so casually thrown into the pages of the book while Edward himself had never been named. In the whole damn compendium of confession, it was Edward whose identity had been protected. Gwen
turned her face into the wind.

Lower Amazons. August, 1863.

They were unpacking boxes properly for the first time since they had left Pará. Before this, they had worked and lived on the boat, stopping in a place for three days, a
week, or ten days, and then moving further on, so that Gwen was never able to make any arrangements to get away. Now, she was in a small house rented from some person or other whom Vincent seemed
to know. Setting up tables and trying to keep Augusta in sight, Gwen turned around for the umpteenth time to find that she had trundled off again. Following Augusta’s trail of discarded
objects, and piling them into her arms as she went, Gwen found herself confronted with the spectacle of Vincent rummaging through her field bag, as she had come to think of it.

Immediately enraged and finding herself incapable of finding the right sequence of words to whip out at him, she simply stood, with her arms full, waiting for Vincent to notice her. Outside, she
heard Edward speaking to Augusta. She watched Vincent’s hands.

He pulled out the stuck-together book, and Gwen made an instinctive move towards him, dumping her armful of things and stretching her arm out towards the book.

“That is mine,” she said. The firmness, the tripping anger in her voice thrummed on the bare walls. “As is everything else in that bag.”

Finally, lazily, Vincent looked up; his expression masked, as always, by the blue tinted spectacles which she had so loved when she had first seen him. But there was a fever over his top
lip.

“Where’d you get this?” His question, demanding, arrogant. The way he held her property in his fist. He began to flick through the book but, of course, was frustrated. He
knocked the stiff brick of glued paper against his knuckle. “What’s the point in keeping a book you can’t even read?” Tremulous, his voice wavered between incredulity,
annoyance and laughter.