The Specimen Page 15

  “You what?”

  “I concur; I’ll not let you have that microscope. You’ll be obliged to locate another or return to England.”

  “There is no other! There is no other microscope in this place that I might have.”

  “Oh, come now, Mr Frome,” Gwen said wearily, sitting down, tired of it all now that Edward was on her side again. “I’m sure there are other, more gullible people in possession of a microscope whom you may yet endeavour to hoodwink.”

  “No,” he spat, “there are not!”

  Gwen laughed and kicked off her fancy house slippers, leaning back to put her feet onto a footstool. She wriggled her bare toes.

  “Then we must, Mr Scales, declare this breakfast party over and done with. I do hope, Mr Frome, that your return voyage to England is uneventful.”

  “You sly bitch.”

  “How dare you!” Edward shouted. “Apologise immediately, sir, or I’ll see you.”

  Gwen sat up, astonished at Edward’s swift change in tone and, moreover, dumbfounded that he—had he?

  “Edward,” she said, standing up and putting a hand lightly on his arm, “I don’t think it very wise.”

  “No, you are quite right,” he said, relaxing as Frome backed away clumsily. “He is no gentleman; I’ll just fetch my whip.”

  “Are you threatening me, Scales?”

  “Indeed, I am, although I perceive you are something of a coward, and I may not have to act on it.”

  “You’ll regret this, see, you will.”

  “I doubt it most wholeheartedly.”

  Gwen and Edward watched as Marcus Frome marched away from them, turning back every now and then to glance over his shoulder to convey what they supposed were meant to be sneers of contempt. Edward put his arm around Gwen and raised his hand in farewell. As Marcus Frome disappeared from their sight she rounded on him.

  “Hypocrite,” she said separating from him. “You’re as unspeakable as that wretched man.”

  “It wasn’t as it seemed, Gwen. I made no promise of anything.”

  “Don’t make things worse. I am not an idiot.”

  “I know that.”

  “Then please do me the honour of not behaving as if you didn’t. Furthermore, I wish to make it abundantly clear that my few possessions are mine and mine alone.”

  “Absolutely; Gwen, please forgive me, I should have given you fair warning.”

  “And you had ample opportunity; but whatever promise that Frome man thought he had extracted from you last night, you were too much of a weakling to put him right.”

  “The Bordeaux was very—”

  “It was certainly far more ‘eloquent’ than you. Don’t ever let anything like this happen again, Edward, or I shall follow that odious creature back to England.”

  “You can’t possibly mean that.”

  “Can’t I?” she sat down, loosening the sash at her side and breathing out.

  There passed some minutes where they would not look at each other. Edward paced up and down the verandah, and Gwen put her slippers back on her feet. She fiddled with them, slipping them half off and on.

  Presently, Edward came to a halt. “I have excused your behaviour this morning for two reasons. The first being, as you quite succinctly surmised, Marcus Frome is an odious creature—of the lowest order. The second being that I excuse you on account of your condition.”

  Gwen’s slippers fell to the floor. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Which part?”

  “All of it! I can’t believe what I’ve just heard. My behaviour? Have you forgotten, Mr Scales, that I am not, in fact, your wife? You have no business excusing or not excusing me. Almost selling my possessions. You have no business treating me so—”

  He caught her up by the arms and pulled her close to him. “Haven’t you understood? At all?” His eyes roved her face. “You’re tied to me, whether either of us likes it or not, by your condition. And I’m not asking you, I’m telling you now. Don’t make a fool of me again.”

  “If anyone has made a fool of you, Mr Scales, it is only yourself.” Gwen picked his hands off her and sat down, utterly livid.

  In the aftermath of Frome’s attempt on her microscope she couldn’t sustain the bravado she had felt in his presence.

  I just don’t have a single thing to say to him, she thought. And she slithered down into a capsule of loneliness. A crushing wave of homesickness came over her. All she wanted to do was stamp off and tell her sister what a thoroughly annoying and bumptious man he was; that perhaps she had been right to try and stop her from leaving Cornwall. She couldn’t think how Edward might have arrived at the conclusion that just because she had agreed to this condition, as he called it, to be his mistress, he had the right to fume over her with his idiotic words.

  The humidity gathered around Gwen and Edward; they were deadly silent with each other until Edward left with his nets and other equipment. I am leaving, she thought, watching the stiffness of his gait as he walked away from her. I shall go home. She pictured herself packing up her few things, nesting the microscope in its box amongst her clothes. Infernal man, she muttered, but she made no move to do anything except kick her fancy slippers across the floor and let down her hair. Slowly, she began to plait it into a thick rope, and when it was done, she spent a long time wrapping the rope of it around her wrist and along the length of her forearm.

  Soon after turning in that night, she heard the shuffle of Edward’s bare feet on the floorboards as he scuffled his way towards her in the dark. She lay still in her hammock and did not speak.

  “I must apologise,” he said. “Everything I said before, in England, everything I told you, it still holds true. Please forgive my unutterably dismal attitude today. I couldn’t bear it if you went away. There would be no point.” There seemed to be a moment in which he intended to tell her what, exactly, there would be no point to. The space for the words was there—and then it closed. She heard him turning blindly in the dark of the room and his retreating footfall to his own hammock.

  Gwen lay awake for a long time wondering to which conversation in England he could have been referring. After a while, she heard the alarming, deep choking rattle of Edward’s snoring. She muffled her head with a blanket and tried to sleep.

  Chapter XXIX

  Pará, Brazil. Old Year’s Night, 1860/1.

  Of course, she had known. She must have, mustn’t she? No, she still didn’t think so. The knowledge sickened her and tore at her. She felt shredded and raw under Edward’s gaze and Maria’s solicitations. And fat. And stupid. And desperate. What was to be done about it? Nothing. Her half-formed plans to return to Cornwall were as substantial as a drop of ink in a barrel full of water. And so she’d started work.

  Gwen arranged the first insects she intended to paint into her book. Very delicately, she reached into the middle of the wooden case and tugged a pinned butterfly free from its base of cork. An afternoon breeze caught the edges of the stiffened wings and the insect twirled around on its axis like a vibrant miniature windmill. Cupping her hands over the insect she brought it away from the main thrust of the breeze, and she stuck the pin into another piece of cork set onto a wooden wedge.

  She began to sketch out very lightly the outline beginning with the bulbous eyes and delicately flurry thorax, down to the abdomen, which was as brightly coloured as the rest of the butterfly. She imagined it alive, its fat pulse. It was now thin and pinched, the result of its handling. Edward did not collect every single insect himself. Sometimes children came to the house with things they had caught. One of them said he had collected for another Englishman a few years before. He brought Edward some specimens which he said the other man had not been able to catch.

  Gwen stared hard at the butterfly. Making the thing properly, scientifically symmetrical was a challenge in itself. At home, she’d always accepted her slight mistakes as part of what it was to spend time staring so hard at one creature or landscape. Now, she felt entirely useless. She lig
htly sketched out the first half on the left of the insect. She shifted in her seat. Her internal workings were not her own. There seemed an awful lot of wind to pass, and at frequent intervals. And she had become terribly constipated. These things were easy to deal with when Edward was not at the house. She put down her pencil, got up and expelled a lot of wind loudly. When he was there, she spent as much time on the verandah as possible; it gave her the most dreadful stomach ache, trying to hold it all in. Maria had told her to eat lots of fruit from the garden. The mangoes were very sticky and drippy. Maria laughed at her complaints, saying that as it was she had an easy time of it.

  Maria sat with Gwen, it seemed to Edward, for most of the day. When he left the house after breakfast and his first morning ramble, they were sitting in hammocks slung under the verandah; when he returned, they were in exactly the same place. Yet, he knew this could not be true because each evening there would be a new set of studies in her painting book. The first time he leafed through her paintings he had been beside himself with expectation. He had put off looking because she had not offered to show him anything yet. He was disinclined to ask her while the prickliness of the atmosphere over Frome and the microscope had not quite been smoothed over. But, one evening, she said casually, “Did you see what I have done today, Edward?” and continued to swing in the hammock with her eyes closed.

  So, after he had organised his day’s quarry—he fiddled about with the mangled bird he’d shot for quite a while—he stepped cautiously over to her workbench by the window as if the insects inside the pages might suddenly detect his presence and fly off.

  They were better than he expected. Better than he had hoped for. He took a pocket magnifying glass and held it to the page. She had painted the individual hairs on the thorax of a butterfly. It was modelled in gouache so that it seemed to stand proud of the paper, even hover just slightly above it, the tips of the wings coming down to touch the paper. He went out onto the verandah with the book in his hands.

  “Gwen, these are magnificent.”

  “I wish there was a way of painting them to look the way they do when they are alive. Feeding on nectar or floating along.”

  “These are marvellous things.”

  Edward had worried that she might not be up to the task, or that her condition would become her priority. She seemed these days to be as focused in her work as a man might be. The sheer body of it was testament to that. Her condition seemed to be irrelevant to her.

  Gwen had been learning Portuguese from Maria. Keeping her feet in the air, propped up inside the hammock made her restless. As the heat gathered between eleven and three there was little she felt like doing, anyway. As the temperature soared, the silence of the place was absolute, only punctuated now and then with the odd penetrating whine of an insect.

  Every day, it was as if the oppressiveness had been only a part of her imagination as the rain, suddenly released, poured down to enliven her spirits, and sharp cracks of thunder erupted overhead. And every afternoon, she doubted the relief which was to come. In the stillness, she doubted the ability of the birds to start up their calls again. And over each new tree bursting into bloom in the morning out of the blanket of green she was as surprised and delighted as she had been the first morning she had seen it. “You are fighting, fighting all the time.”

  Gwen looked up from the letter she was trying to write. “What?”

  “The heat, Mrs Scales. You have to let it through you. You have to let it soak you up.”

  Maria observed the Christmas festivals in the town, leaving Edward and Gwen to themselves. They did not exchange gifts, and they did not attend any services at any of the churches. Without Maria, they got on with each other as well as they could. In England Edward had once remarked that he couldn’t imagine Gwen inhabiting an interior. He couldn’t imagine, he had said, what it would be like to see her contained within four walls. And he still could not, for there had not been many occasions when he had been inside a building with her. And that seemed as if it was another life, anyway. He looked at Gwen and at the rain falling off the verandah roof. The clothes she wore concealed her shape. They were an odd combination of styles. Maria had brought some items to the house, and together the women had connived and contrived to transform Gwen’s appearance, slowly. Now, when he looked at her properly he would easily have mistaken her for—what? Not quite a native. Her skin had changed, too. He pictured the dark line of melanin, which he assumed was marking her belly, and almost wanted to take her there where she stood. She wore her sleeves short. The slippers he had bought for her spent most of the day under the hammock. The sight of her toes and their new colour drew him out under the eaves. She loved listening to the noisy frogs and toads. Pointless to try and talk, even with the shutters closed inside the house. The frogs had released them both for the time being of the arduous business of making conversation which did not include references to the past or the future. This had been one such evening. Edward had gone into his room to try and write up some of his notes but he’d been unable to concentrate. His jagged writing skittered and meandered over the page; the ink was blotted badly, and there were smears made by his grubby thumbs. Out collecting, if he had a thought to put down he’d get distracted before the words were formed on the page. He’d found himself, some days, trying to write with the insect nets still gripped in the same hand, his fingers contorted.

  Edward looked at Gwen. Why shouldn’t he just go to her now? No words would be needed. He felt a familiar drawing in, as though he were a hawk moth, in awe of her scent, unable to resist. He came up close to her, his fingertips touching the bare skin of her arms, and she gave a half jump, half shiver of surprise.

  “Won’t you let your hair down for me again?” He spoke the words right into her ear and pulled the thin, ebony rods from the coils piled onto her head. The rope of hair fell heavily down her back, but she hardly moved, barely gave any indication that she had heard him speak or that he had touched her. After half a minute her head turned in his direction. He saw her lips moving, the words lost in the amphibious chorus.

  “In London the bells will all have rung out.” His lips touched her face. “Loosen your hair for me again. This rain is perfect for it; do you remember what you said?” He grasped at her and fumbled underneath her clothes.

  “Do you think about England that much?” She pulled away from him, detaching his fingers like so much sticky cobweb. “What is that?” They were roaring at each other now. The moment, if it had indeed been a moment, was gone. They both strained to hear. Edward cupped his hand around his ear, and made out two distinct male voices, one Scottish and one American.

  The Scot was saying, “I keep telling you why it’s Old Year’s Night, and yet you still insist on calling it New Year’s Eve, which any reasonable man would agree is tomorrow night—tomorrow being the first day of the new year.”

  “Oh, indeed; just as you like,” came the other voice.

  Gwen and Edward both tensed at the sound of the heavy treading on the boards of the verandah. What must we look like? she thought. “Give me those,” she said and took her pins back and piled up her long plait, jabbing everything into place. She tried to alter her features into something resembling a welcoming gaze. But still, she thought, we must look like two startled rabbits. The men careened around the corner.

  “Ah. A Happy New Year’s Eve to you good people both.”

  “I must apologise for Mr Coyne. He means to wish you a good Old Year’s Night.”

  Their arms were draped around each other’s shoulders; it was impossible to tell which man was being supported or if the stance was of mutual beneft.

  Inside, with the shutters closed, it was just about possible to converse properly. The younger man spoke first; he wore a pair of spectacles designed to shade his eyes from the sun. The glass was tinted Madonna blue, the frames sparkling slivers of silver. They gave his eyes a most astonishing aspect. Gwen had to acknowledge the effect, even though it did seem a little bit affected.


  “Vincent Coyne, glad to make your acquaintance, sir, ma’am, on this fine New Year’s Eve.”

  “Gus Pemberton, also pleased to meet you, madam, and sir, on the last night of the Old Year.” His voice was playful, like a rolling sweep of cool air.

  “Scales. As a matter of fact you are both wrong.”

  “Wrong? Hey, we got the wrong day. Ha! Sorry to bother you. We’ll just go squish some more of those toads and come back tomorrow.”

  “No.” Gwen said. “Don’t go now that you are here. We just meant that clocks at home have already struck the hour.”

  “Have you been to every house in the neighbourhood?” asked Edward, a little warily.

  “Oh, no, sir, indeed we have not. We have been sent by your friends in town. Mrs Grindlock is a fine, fine lady, for whom I have the very highest regard.”

  “Excuse him, he isn’t always like this.”

  Gwen said, “That’s perfectly all right, Mr Pemberton. I’m sure half the population of the town is in much the same state.”

  “I can assure you the numbers amount to more than half.”

  Edward breathed in through his nose. “Perhaps some coffee.”

  Gwen looked away and grimaced inwardly at Edward. Mr Coyne slithered into a lacquered cane chair. Pemberton turned to Gwen. “I’m sorry we startled you. We did call out but the frogs—”

  “—drowned us out.” Vincent tried to sit up. “O da Casa.”

  “O of the house?”

  “It’s the proper thing to do, in the jungle you know.”

  Gwen suspected that Vincent was suddenly not quite as drunk as he had been outside. She smiled at him. “I haven’t been into the jungle yet, so I am still ignorant about that kind of thing.”

  Vincent’s eyes made an unabashed tour of her person and stopped at her middle, just for a second, before slewing his gaze around the room. “You speak the language, not quite so ignorant.”

  Mr Coyne was extraordinarily beautiful; he wore the whiskers on his chin clipped to a neat point, rather than cultivating the bushy side-whiskers, which, Gwen thought, made most men who wore them resemble guinea-pigs. Not handsome. Mr Pemberton was handsome; Gwen registered it. The two men were like a pair of elegant butterflies, opposites but perfectly matched; whereas Edward, in comparison, was like the longhorn beetle grub. She watched his squirming accommodation of the unexpected guests with cool fascination.