The Specimen Page 12

  Hettie took Gwen by the arm and guided her through the hall and into the drawing room. Pippi was still hanging onto Gwen’s other sleeve. The house and its people were swallowing her; this unconditional acceptance and the solid ground made her dizzy. Gwen could not catch what Pippi was saying; the child was asking her something. She smiled down at her, and the girl scampered off.

  “Very cooling, you’ll find, Mrs Scales,” Mr Grindlock said. “Come and make use of the coolest air, over here.” Gwen looked up at the ceiling where she saw the contraption. She followed its cords away into a corner where a man sat working rope pedals with his feet.

  The children were all over the place; on and off the chairs and up and down off their parents’ laps. Mrs Grindlock was doing her best to be firm.

  “Mrs Scales will not appreciate it. Take it away.”

  “But, Mama, I have it on a string.”

  “A monkey?” Edward asked.

  “A spider. They are taking it away. Aren’t you?”

  “A spider monkey, now that is something I should like to see,” Edward said.

  “No, no, Mr Scales,” Hettie said. “A spider.”

  “Well, I am interested in all creatures.” He walked across to peer over the huddle of children’s heads. “Ah, goodness me, quite a monster.”

  “I think, for the sake of Mrs Scales, these little revelations must come by degrees. Children, I really am going to become quite stern with you. That is better.”

  But Gwen’s attention was still drawn to the fan working away above them all. The man, half obscured by a screen, silently pedalled, as if none of them were in the room with him. Gwen tilted her face upwards and closed her eyes, feeling the currents of air stroking her neck.

  Later, while everyone in the house dozed, Gwen was alone in the room where she and Edward were to sleep. Edward was below her in the citrus courtyard, writing. She stepped away from the window. She’d been spying on the way he hunched over the papers perched on his knees, his ink positioned precariously on the tray at his side. She couldn’t see anything of his face; he was wearing a straw hat with a wide brim. She could make out the faint, feverish scratching of his pen mingled against the peculiar and penetrating scrapings of insects. The noise of them got into her head and stayed there. Grasshoppers and hearth crickets would be as whisperers now.

  There had been a package waiting for her on the cane chair beside the wash-stand. Earlier, when Edward had been in the room very briefly, she’d made a point of not acknowledging it.

  “Better than you thought. The arrangements suit us.”

  She’d gaped as he turned his back and left her alone in the room. She eased off the string and paper.

  It was a small, half-bound volume of tan calf and marbled paper with a swirling amber and bronze design flecked with touches of black. Gwen turned it over in her hands, reading the gold lettering on the spine. She ran her finger over the words indented slightly into the surface of the leather: Eternal Blazon. She frowned; it wasn’t a romantic novel, was it? Sent by her sister as some kind of pathetic joke. It would suit her sense of humour; the carefully blocked name on the packet label which was only half her own, with merely, “Pará, Brazil” as the address. Gwen flicked the pages casually and found them unslit. Holding it away from her body, she read the frontispiece: “Eternal Blazon, or, Confessions of a Nondescript”. So, not one of her sister’s books after all. Who else? She blanched at the thought of Edward giving her a book with such a title. Whenever he’d given her a book, he’d given it into her hands and watched her face intently for whatever it was that he hoped to see.

  Two-thirds of the way down the page there was a line which read “Printed and Bound for the Author, London 1859”. Rather strangely, there was no mention of who had provided this service. Gwen’s stomach fipped, and she snapped the book shut. She worried at a tiny flap of sore flesh inside her mouth until she tasted her blood. Eternal Blazon—Eternal Truth. She knew it from somewhere, but her wrung-out brain wouldn’t let her place it. It’ll come, she thought.

  Sunlight slashed the room in half, and a small, brown lizard spread its body against the wall and sunned itself. Gwen watched its barely perceptible breaths and dropped the book silently onto the bed to fetch her drawing things. She worked several sketches over the page, making enlarged details of its mottled, nubbly skin, its head and its feet. The lizard moved every now and then, allowing her to make studies of it from different angles. And then, it was gone. Shooting out of her sight, along the wall and over the edge of the window frame as quick as a bird. Gwen tidied up the sketches, adding areas of shading, giving more weight and substance to the creature. She put her things away and stretched. Hearing someone’s footfall outside the room Gwen shoved Eternal Blazon along with its packaging into her sketching bag.

  The girl with the pet spider—Pippi, was it? —came into the room, and Gwen scanned the floor around the girl’s feet in case the spider had come in with her.

  “Shouldn’t you be resting?” Gwen didn’t feel comfortable alone with the girl; she didn’t really know how to speak to her, or what to say. The girl shrugged her shoulders and jumped onto the bed. Gwen watched as Pippi sprawled on the covers, rumpling them, and then pulled herself to the edge, hung her head over, arms falling down by her ears.

  “I lost Hercules. He likes to hide in dark places.” She raised herself up with a solemn look on her face, but then broke into a grin. “Your face is a picture.” She laughed. “You’re scared of spiders. Most people from home are scared of spiders.”

  “But you have an affinity with them.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You like them, as a friend.”

  “Almost.”

  Gwen relaxed a bit and sat down on the cane chair. “Almost. Then why do you keep the spider?”

  “To watch it.”

  “And how do you watch it?”

  The girl narrowed her eyes and frowned. “Like this.” She put her elbows on the bed and supported her chin in her hands and opened her eyes wide.

  “I see. I like to watch things, too. In fact, I was watching a little brown lizard a few moments ago. Here.” Gwen pulled the sketchbook out of her bag and flicked the pages to the right place. She held the book out for the girl to see.

  “Gecko.”

  “Is that its name?”

  “Yes. You shouldn’t keep your things in bags like that. Hercules might crawl in. It needs to have a tight string or lots of buttons. Hercules can do this . . .” She made her hand into a tarantula and lifted the edge of the bed clothes before making her hand crawl under the sheet.

  Gwen’s body jerked quickly, in a shudder of revulsion. “And what would be your advice, if I should meet Hercules, or one of his kind inside my bag?”

  “Don’t squash him.”

  “And after I haven’t squashed him?”

  The girl rolled over and stared hard at Gwen. “Find someone who isn’t scared of spiders.”

  Chapter XXIII

  Edward wrote in his small pocket diary by the light of a single candle, so as not to disturb Gwen’s sleep.

  The relief of being finally on dry land again, for both of us, is unquestionable. This evening I felt it as a palpable entity. The landing of all my equipment will take a few days at least, as the ship is anchored some distance from the port due to the fast currents and the silting bottom of the river. The landing stages seem hardly fit for the purpose they were made, but I must trust to those with greater knowledge and experience in these matters for the time being. Meanwhile, we are commodiously accommodated by Grindlock, merchant of cocoa and other such goods. His family and house being large and almost as riotous as the auditory assault emitted constantly from a plethora of faunae so new and alien to us. That is, the house does seem to have its own character, if that is possible. Everything about the place excites me. My brain is overloaded with senses, questions, possibilities, desires. I wish I could say the same for my concubina companion. I would not have imagined her to be s
o beset by an apparent misery. Perhaps it is merely the heat and humidity—it can be a shock if one has never experienced it before. However, a niggling doubt creeps, and I suspect that it is more deep-seated than that. On arrival, we were introduced to the entire retinue of the Grindlock household including giant forest spiders, and a small monkey which bit Grindlock on the hand (he made very light of it saying that the creature has never liked him). Also the servants. I did wonder that the lady of the house did not discreetly offer my companion a chance to freshen herself. We were fairly dripping with sweat from head to foot. We drank some cold tea, which I gathered was offered quite genuinely in place of a bowl of water and towel. Gwen hardly touched her tea. She kept looking up at the ceiling fan with quite an addled expression and stared at the negro fellow operating it for so long that I thought she would draw attention to herself. I made a buffoon of myself with the children, and so Gwen was for the most part left alone. There was an absolute downpour after a light lunch of cold ham. Some of the children ran out during the rain into the courtyard where there are growing several different kinds of citrus. The Grindlocks indulge their progeny somewhat. Gwen ate two oranges and a few other fruits which we do not see in England, their skins quite deformed with uneven knobbles, their colour quite unappetising. Her mood was lightened a little, I think, watching the children getting drenched, and she was more the person I left England with for those few moments. But on our ramble about the town (escaping the Grindlocks’ offers of attendance with good grace), the mood darkened again. I did my utmost to cheer her spirits. I fear I annoyed her a little, or perhaps a lot. It is so difficult to know how to behave with her. Sometimes I think perhaps I made a mistake. There are certain fundamental aspects of her character which I know nothing about. The attraction of this state of affairs is no longer a sufficient basis for our project here. Coaxing her along the crowded streets was almost akin to cajoling a reluctant and grumpy child. It occurred to me this afternoon that I have no firm idea of how old she is. This thought kept me preoccupied for such a length of time that I did not notice when she fainted at my feet on a street none too salubrious, to say the least. Some of the natives living in the hovels there procured a cart and we arrived back at the Grindlocks’ abode amidst much fuss (to the apparent amusement of all the small Grindlocks). Thank God, none but servants were there to greet us. We have managed to pass it off as an adventure, citing sore feet, which, I believe was not untrue. When she took off her boots, Gwen’s feet did seem to be in a hideous state, and I have put cushions underneath them as she sleeps to drain the fluid. It would seem to work.

  Now, I am concerned for her. Gwen has never been the type to faint; she even said so herself. She tried to dismiss it as a reaction to the heat, but the heat had passed; the air was much fresher after the rain.

  Swollen feet and fainting do not bode well though; am I to have to search for another assistant before we have even begun? Perhaps it will not come to that.

  Edward snuffed out the light with spit on his fingers and, having no blotting paper, waited for the ink to dry in the dark, listening, for the first time, to Gwen’s breathing as she slept.

  Chapter XXIV

  Apart from a limited and limiting wardrobe, Gwen had brought with her two sets of watercolour paints, several good brushes of different sizes, leather-bound journals of good paper to paint in bought by Edward in London, as well as her smaller sketchbooks, and her most treasured possession, her microscope. Edward was convinced that the end result would bring some reward. There were already some studies: good likenesses of Edward reading on the boat—on the rare occasions when he had not felt ill, and there were a couple of impressions of Pará, done before the lighter had been ready to take them.

  However, she felt no inclination to begin work right away. The idea of kudos did not greatly concern or excite her. She was perplexed by her own reaction to having arrived, which was so different to Edward’s. She was aware of a vagueness, as if she saw everything through a mist. I am suffering from apathy, she thought. It puzzled her.

  Mr Grindlock had found them a casinha, a little wooden house in the suburbs. Finally inside it, with her things around her again, Gwen wanted immediately to lie down. It had been a very strange experience, that first night in the Grindlock guest-room, where being suspended was forsaken in favour of more solid furniture. The enormous bed had allowed her to sleep, eventually, without having to touch Edward. In the dark of the room with only a light coverlet over their bodies, she’d sensed Edward’s heartbeat: it had reverberated softly through the mattress. Being flat on her back had not dispelled the sensation that her body was still at sea. As he’d fallen asleep Edward had begun to snore. Gwen had sighed loudly and plumped her pillows vigorously, banishing all thoughts of eerily articulated and oversized arachnids roaming free of restraining tethers. Even so, she hadn’t slept well after the first night. Bad dreams had woken her, the details hazy but still disturbing as they persisted, festering in the hot, damp space between Edward’s body and hers in the foreign bed. She had seemed to keep her sister company all night.

  A verandah encircled the whole building of four rooms under wide eaves. Here, as the cookhouse was not yet ready for use, Gwen found Maria. She was already boiling water for tea on a small stove.

  Gwen thought she would like this woman. She was glad that Maria had none of the deferential habits of Susan in Cornwall. If anything she had been relieved to get away from the “Yes, ma’am” and the bobbing Susan insisted on, even though she had been told not to.

  Bearing the tea tray in front of her Maria said, “There are people in the town who could build a bed quickly.”

  “I’m not sure if our budget extends to large pieces of furniture,” said Gwen; a proper bed was too much of an extravagance, and she didn’t know whether she preferred the idea of big spiders hiding under her bed-covers or not.

  Maria poured the tea and flicked the leaves from the strainer out over the verandah palings. “Wouldn’t cost much.” She poured two more cups of tea, drinking one before Edward left his unpacking and came out to join Gwen.

  “Mrs Scales,” she said, before Edward was within earshot, “I know how you Europeans like to have your babies.”

  Gwen laughed. “We are certainly not planning to start a family here, Maria. We have work to do. And, in any case, a bed would take up far too much space.”

  Maria looked her up and down, and said nothing.

  No, Gwen definitely didn’t want to share a bed with Edward. A bed was far too much like a statement of subservience, somehow. Gwen still felt uneasy about her status. She felt that she had to find her own way of existing in this set-up. It was a game, after all, what they were doing. Some of the rules had been foisted upon her, but the rest were unwritten, unspoken, unknown. She could pretend that she was his wife, but she didn’t think it was necessary to have her sleep disturbed at quite such close range.

  In the night, Gwen was woken by a thump from Edward’s study and a faint trickle as he relieved himself over the edge of the verandah. She listened to geckos moving across the walls, and tucked her muslin net in about her more securely. The strange lizards were a delight to her; it was the large hairy spiders, whose nests she had seen under the eaves, which bothered her. Knowing that the ones living under the eaves were now secured in labelled specimen jars did not help. Edward, still unfailingly exuberant, had enthused about the proximity of nature in all its variation. And where a vacancy existed, she had reasoned, it would immediately be filled.

  “Such a small creature,” he had said, and laughed.

  “I would say it was anything but small.”

  “It’s smaller than you. It isn’t poisonous . . . All the best houses in town have them, you know. Think of the Grindlock children.”

  “I would rather not.”

  “Well, this one is dead now. You can come out of the mosquito net. Besides, if it fancied biting you its fangs would go right through that muslin. Sorry, that’s not at all funny.”


  “If it wasn’t poisonous, then why did you use a pencil to poke it, and not your finger?”

  Gwen’s skin crawled; she was embarrassed for Edward because he didn’t quite know how to behave with her. Standing next to him, looking at the revolting spider, and listening to the rising pitch of his voice, she wondered if he had ever really known how to behave with her. Before settling down to sleep again, Gwen made sure that there was no part of the muslin which touched her; she had already lined the rest of the hammock with a thick blanket. Dear God, she thought, but the rest of her plea was wordless.

  Alone and naked in the dark, Edward listened to the sounds of the night. He shifted inside his hammock, aggravated by the image earlier that evening of Gwen with that thing at her neck. It was already very grubby. Like a sickly fetish. She touched it, fiddled with it, could not seem to leave it alone for a minute. Though the temperature had dropped considerably, it was still too hot for his blanket.

  He could not help but recall the effect of a similar pressing heat. For much of that indelibly marked, and unseasonably hot week in May 1858, the closed stuffiness of the little rooms kept by Natalia had produced in him a state of lazy and surprising contentment.

  God damn that woman. But even as he thought it he retracted it. He could neither resent nor condemn her, only his own stupidity. He got out of the hammock clumsily and went to relieve himself.

  Chapter XXV

  Carrick House. October 17, 1860.

  Euphemia woke at six in the morning and sat up remembering where she had stuffed one of Gwen’s letters in a hurry the winter before. Its place in the library was too tantalising to ignore, and in the dark she reached for her dressing gown. While Euphemia lit the lamp in the hall, she heard the barely perceptible clatter of Susan riddling the grate in the kitchen. Holding the light to the bookshelves Euphemia let her fingers run along the spines until they came to the place. She pulled out the thick volume, made very slightly thicker by the papers she had hidden there. Her fingertips lingered for a moment over the broken seal before she pulled the letter from the envelope.