The Specimen (36 page)

There were thirty-two letters in all, ranging in length, detail and tone. In none of the letters did Gwen mention anything of Augusta save for the mention of her “young
companion”, which he knew Euphemia would not have passed over lightly. Edward buried his head between his knees and rocked on the floor until he almost passed out. He wanted to smash things.
If only. If only. If
only
he had stayed just a week more before leaving for England. He banged his head on the carpet until his vision was nothing but sparks of brightness, pinging back
and forth, up, down. He didn’t have the vocabulary to curse the woman. All words had gone from his head. All was vacant, leaving only sadness and regret and self-pity. And fire. A burning
gripped his heart, and squeezed at the life of him as the possibilities of his future seized his imagination. He gathered the papers up to shove them back into the book, taking up another document
thicker than the rest, which had slipped from its resting place. His own hand stared up at him: November 13, 1859.

He didn’t need to read it. Snatches of phrases rose to the surface of his mind before he could stop them: “. . .
please destroy it in the fire . . . a testament to my failings .
. . be assured that she was nothing compared to you and that my wife is nothing . . .
”

He screwed up the letter and threw it into the empty grate, scrabbling for matches, falling painfully to his knees at the hearth. Striking, striking, striking. The stink of the unwilling matches
curling in the air.

When Pemberton had given him the news that Gwen was alive, that Augusta was alive, there had been a feeling of weird levitation—of his not really being a part of the scene. Reality, as
Edward’s father might once have said, had not yet jumped up and bitten his arse. Now, he wanted to go. Take a train to London, and find her. But he stayed rooted to the carpet, crawling,
placing his hands on her letters, spreading them. In some, she asked for nothing: she gave Euphemia an account of a walk in a park, which Edward thought he recognised. She told Euphemia about a
visit to the gardens at Kew, and her impressions of the Glasshouses. In another, she detailed a visit to the Zoo, with intimate observations of other visitors, which were both funny and poignant.
Edward knew that there would have been a small hand in hers; that these were not solitary excursions. Some letters were posted all on the same day—and then there would be a silence which
would last for months before the next letter.

Edward felt deeply ashamed at every mention in her letters of her missing work. It was his fault. He’d locked her things into cabinets, made a museum of her. He’d let Pemberton look
at those sketches and paintings, and then he’d taken them back, locked them away again as if they still belonged under glass. The embarrassment of his having to be asked for them again, so
that they could be returned to their owner. He might have pissed in his shoes for the shame of it if he hadn’t busied himself with wrapping them in parcel paper and slipping in a note. And
her lost money. Christ, her lost money. Euphemia had spent vast amounts refurbishing the house after the death of their father, and he’d never thought on it. Installation of the gas and a new
bathroom with hot water. She’d employed an army of gardeners and had ripped out everything that was overgrown. And his extension to the library—her wedding gift to him, she had said.
And he had accepted it. Too keen to believe that it was anything other than a romantic gesture.

And in amongst all of this extravagant activity she had steadfastly refused to allow Edward to erect a memorial to Gwen. Always claiming that she knew that she was still alive somewhere. Her
genius; the simplicity of it.

He’d married Gwen’s sister so that he might hear Gwen’s voice again. It had been for the facsimile of Gwen, as conjured by her sister. And this was the only thing which had
kept him from falling over the edge—a black pit in his mind or a real edge; he could have picked one of many along the coast. All he needed to do was go to her bed.

She wouldn’t call him Ted. If she did, he shrivelled, and there was nothing to be done for the rest of the night.

He went to her room without a light, and slipped between the covers, pulled the hot body, stumbled into her. Re-enacted fragments of time spent with Gwen on damp ground, under trees and always
in uncomfortable places. He pulled the body to the floor, or he made her stand, awkward against the corner of a piece of furniture. Or he’d just manage to pretend, for as long as he needed
to, that this was her, this was Gwen’s arm, hot against the cool, smooth sheets. This was her thigh, yielding under the pressure of his fingers. This was her, pushed up close to his face, her
sea-salt, crusting on his fingers. This was her, the way he had always wanted her to be. The way she had been before she’d known anything about him. He held her and buried himself in her for
as long as he could bear it.

He wouldn’t ever have to go and do those things again. He wouldn’t have to see, or puzzle over, her triumphant face in the morning.

Pemberton’s promise—that he could arrange a meeting if that was what he wanted. Edward had said nothing at the time. If? Why should there be, how could there be, an
“if”?

He rose unsteadily, and opened all the shutters in that little mausoleum. He shunted the windows open, each one a fraction to let in the air, the sound of the rain, and the sound of a thrush
singing. He opened the cabinets where he’d laid all those things of hers, and removed them. The paint-box and her brushes. Living things again, because of the knowledge that her eyes would
look at them again, and her fingers could turn these dry cubes of dust to life again. Everything was not as it had seemed. He laughed at the absurdity of it, that she could have come back from a
certain death. That her mouth could speak. Yes, there was that. Her mouth could speak; her hand could write. He pressed his open hand to the filthy gloves she’d worn on the ship, which
he’d never thought to replace. How could he scrape the pieces back? He was trying to stem the fury now. Trying to press back the need to destroy things and to cause physical, irreparable
damage to the woman he must call his wife, who should only ever have been his sister-in-law. He hated her with every single cell in his body. He wanted to kill her.

London. Saturday, August 4, 1866.

In all endings, there are beginnings.

In this place, he looked so different. The years spent away from him had drawn him very differently in her imagination; and, of course, she hadn’t yet managed to find the courage to look
at her sketches of Edward to remind her of particular days or minutes she’d spent staring at him. In her imagination, he’d roamed faceless for so long. A peculiar ghost; even the vivid
corona of pale fire had grown dim.

He’d spotted her first, so that she’d been caught looking past him until he’d been so close that she’d begun to move away from the man obscuring her view.

She couldn’t ever have dreamed of him looking so—old; and tamed. She moved her hand to get a smut out of her eye, and he grabbed it, thinking she was going to embrace him, in this
very public place, where no one would bat an eye at a man and a woman embracing on a station platform. His clutching instantly startled her and also reminded her of why she had liked him so much in
the beginning, before she had known.

But what did she know, now, that would have made any difference to her back then? Everything, nothing; she mustn’t let herself forget any of it.

Sulphurous pong, smuts, bodies pushing, elbows, smoke, whistles, shouting. I shouldn’t have agreed to this, she thought. And then, but there was no other way. Edward held Gwen clasped to
his chest, and she felt the thud of his heart through their summer clothes. She braced herself in the stiff shoes she still found so impractical and uncomfortable to wear.

“Edward,” she said, pulling herself out of his grip enough to breathe, “perhaps we should get a cab.”

He wouldn’t let go of her. She hadn’t imagined this kind of fever. She hadn’t imagined anything at all beyond the simple fact that she would see his face again. He gripped her
hand as though Vincent Coyne was about to abduct her again, even though it was absolutely and utterly impossible and quite silly.

Somehow, they both got into the cab, and the door was shut without trapping the yards of her dress. Straight away, Edward fell into a gush of sobbing. This is horrible, she thought. How can I
get him to stop? But, she patted him, anyway, all the time looking over his shoulder out of the cab window.

By the time they reached the gardens, Edward was in a better state and only looked as if he had a mild case of hay fever.

They wandered aimlessly, Gwen knowing that Augusta was quite happily spending the day digging up an ants’ nest in the garden with her long-suffering nanny. The thought of her
daughter’s interest in ants brought to mind the moment she had discovered what Edward had done with all her own work. The work she had done with the ants and which he had taken such pains to
disparage at the time in Brazil had been written up in a paper and presented to the Royal Society under his own name. She had been denied recognition for her work. She had been denied the chance to
prove that a woman might be a person of science in the field of Natural History.

She looked at him, and wondered if she still felt the same anger. She didn’t know whether the time for accusations and recriminations was yet past. She had thought she would know it,
finally, if she could have the chance to look into his face again. Now, when she looked at him there was nothing she could find of what she had thought of as his devious attitude; his features were
a new canvas and he was so much the stranger to her that she felt some of the weight of fury lifted from her.

They came to the water-lily house.

“Shall we go in?”

“Won’t you find it, the heat, rather uncomfortable?”

She laughed, “Come on.”

But they both became very quiet as they walked in, perhaps both of them remembering Edward’s exultation, that first day on landing at Pará.

It’s just like the tropical Glasshouses, at Kew, wouldn’t you say?

And her reply:
I wouldn’t know, I’ve never been.

It was nothing like it, of course. They faltered on the threshold and then they ignored the stifling, humid air and forged on. But neither of them bargained for the effect it would have.

Outside again, they walked until they found a niche to sit in.

“Those lilies, they were everywhere.”

“On that day. Yes, I know.” She almost took his hand and sat back, holding her gloves in her lap. They stayed there, like that, in silence until it was time for Gwen to go. Before
she stood up to leave she said softly, “There is still the small matter of the birth certificate. You brought it with you.”

“The—No, I’m sorry. I forgot.”

Two days later, on Monday, Gwen took the omnibus to the address Edward had given her. She’d committed it to memory at the gardens, torn the slip of paper to shreds as
soon as she’d been out of sight of him.

The house had the closed-up, musty smell of a place left alone for too long. Gwen wondered whether she would take the smell of it away with her on her clothes.

Edward opened the door to her himself and led her into the bowels of the place. In the morning room, a daybed was covered with blankets despite the heat. Under it lay glasses and plates. In a
corner of the room, a pile of dust sheets which Edward had not bothered to have taken away.

“Edward,” she faltered, shaken by this scene, “haven’t you, have you no one here, to see to things? To look after you?”

Gwen made herself look at Edward in his pathetic state. He hadn’t washed or changed his clothes since she had last seen him. His face was covered in rough stubble. From his mouth, a fetid
cloud of breath which hung in the musty air. His lips were stained with streaks of dried red wine. Crusts of sleep at the corners of his eyes and amongst his lashes.

This man is stuck somewhere else, she thought; he’s neither at the end of something nor yet at the beginning of anything.

“Tell me what you plan to do here, Edward.”

He regarded her blankly, and then with an expression which asked Gwen why she was asking such a stupid question, he advanced closer to her. She had to move her head to the side and hold her
breath. Gwen let Edward put his arms around her, let him put his face to her neck and snuffle into the delicate collar of her dress.

Then she pulled out of his grasp and stood apart from him again. “Edward, I think you need to make some changes here.” She tried to sound comforting, though it resisted her.

“Changes. Yes, everything must change now,” he said slowly.

“In the wider sense, they inevitably will. But, Edward, I’m talking about practical matters. I mean, for instance, that you must attend to your toilet; change your clothes. Have a
hot bath—though if you have no one here, that may have to wait. Find a barber. Open up more rooms. You need to be in a fit state, Edward. I can’t talk to you when you are like
this.”

“Like this?”

“Edward.” She couldn’t take it; she hadn’t imagined it would be quite so unpleasant. “You stink. Your clothes. Your breath is offensive—when was the last time
you drank a glass of clean water?”

Edward stared at her. “I—you say I stink?”

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have.”

“No. You’re right; I probably do. I must apologise.” He swept a hand through his hair. “What you must think of me.”

“I think you have had a shock. I am standing here, with you, when for years you have imagined that I was, that both Augusta and I were dead. I think, when you saw me at the station and at
the gardens, it wasn’t quite real for you. There were so many things we thought of saying and couldn’t say any of them. I think both of us are wondering where on earth we should begin;
what should remain unsaid and what should not.”

“You seem to know exactly what to say, and I—”

“I’ve had years to think of it, of this meeting, Edward. You have had only a matter of weeks.”