The Specimen Page 8

  Gwen squirmed in the dark and closed her eyes as her sister spoke in various pinched baby voices before settling on the one which a lady recognised.

  “I’m here, my little dumpling,” the woman called out.

  Gwen’s heart thudded; she didn’t want this. It wasn’t right. But she wasn’t going to be weak about anything this evening.

  It took some time, as there were a number of obstacles in her path. When at last she reached her sister’s side at the head of the table she put out her hands to feel for her. She took a large handful of hair and tugged it. Gwen had been wondering what she could do to stop Euphemia’s performance. When it had no effect at all she grew angry. She pulled very hard this time, and Euphemia let out a squeal, but continued to talk in the baby voice. Completely enraged, Gwen pinched her sister’s arm through her silk shawl. As Gwen held on to her flesh, Euphemia cried out and in a pathetic voice murmured, “Stop. You’re hurting me.”

  A low wail began from the lady’s direction. The wail was punctuated with sobs and half-uttered, unintelligible sentences.

  Gwen let Euphemia go.

  The woman slid off her chair in a faint.

  Gwen fumbled for the matches. As the wick took the flame the scene came into view. Someone ministered a bottle of smelling salts to the already recovering client who heaved herself back up onto her chair. Satisfied, soothing noises came from all directions. The evening had been a success. The woman, whose name was something like ‘Bella’ was moved to a more comfortable seat where she could be crowded and petted some more. Gwen whisked up the decanter and went off to fetch fresh water, saying to no one in particular, “If she hadn’t had herself so tightly laced then there wouldn’t be all this fuss.”

  Euphemia was still at her place at the head of the table, apparently in the last stages of recovering herself from the trance.

  Did this woman do what she had once done? Euphemia shivered, remembering the sensation of cold air on the soles of her feet and the warmth then, between them, as this woman’s husband had pressed his hands against her arches, the insteps slippery in that particular brand of intimacy. Was that, and the other thing, what married women allowed their husbands to perform on them? Or were those things especially reserved for another kind of woman? She remembered the taste. The pungent saltiness and the slime in her throat. How idiotic she had been, to have imagined herself any different from the kind of woman she knew she had imitated. Euphemia made another little groan. She had been surprised to see Isobel again, and immediately reminded herself that nothing should be surprising any longer. She had been right to end it. Trust no one and nothing but your gift, she said to herself, and Euphemia opened her eyes.

  Chapter XV

  June, 1860.

  Gwen’s face turned up into the deluge of rain and her long hair, undone, loose at last, was plastered over her naked body in thick strands which trailed off over the ground.

  She stood up and peeled her hair from her body to plait a dirty rope, then wrapped it up in a shawl, a turban of silk dirtied and wet. They were both suddenly aware of the cold summer climate now. The rain continued to pour down through the trees and landed large droplets onto her clavicle and onto her breasts, which were firm and rounded on her chest. He pushed away the question of her age as he brushed at the leaves stuck on his own thighs. Oak, elm, ash. He gathered her up into his arms and kissed her neck, sucked at the rain which pooled on her collarbone but the moment was gone now, and she was cold, reaching for the damp blankets. He hated this parting. He both loathed and loved this weather.

  Gwen was laughing now, as she dried herself, her jaw juddering in spasms. “I don’t know how you can stand there,” she said, wrapping the blanket tightly around herself, shutting out all sight of her body. She craned her neck, holding the weight of her hair with one hand and gazed up into the latticework of branches, then closed her eyes. The sensation of the spattering rain on her face.

  When he had days like this, he could imagine himself doing something unthinkable, just so that he could have her to himself, all the time. For a split second, he held the image of Isobel, drowned at his hands in her rose-spattered bathtub, and this girl forever in his arms. A moment of intense ecstasy, which made him hard again, and which he did not bother to hide as he reached for his own grey blanket.

  He ached to pull her onto the ground with him then, and just as she let her head down again and opened her eyes, the words spilled out of his mouth. He couldn’t stifle them.

  “I want you. I want to take you. I want to do, to do other things to you. I need to, I need to so very badly, to have you for my own and I can’t—I’m—it’s all impossible and horrible and wonderful all at the same time.”

  He saw her face collapse in disgust.

  “Don’t spoil it, Edward. Why do you have to spoil it now? There’s no need to make excuses. I can well imagine.” She was rubbing herself more thoroughly now and struggling with the inconvenient reality of being naked and filthy wet in a hidden spot of her garden, trying to rub some warmth back into the numbed parts of her. “I’ve known long enough and only too well that you and I would never cross paths in normal life. We occupy different spheres.” She gave up trying to talk and manage the task with dignity.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t ever be sorry; I couldn’t stand it.”

  They both rubbed their bodies in silence and then walked a short distance up a steep path to the old schoolhouse where they had left their piles of clothes forty minutes before.

  It was a tiny building, once used for summertime lessons a dozen years before, disused now and crammed with old bits of garden furniture, bird baths, broken tools, mouse-traps and garden machinery. A gin-trap hung from the wall, its crushing teeth feathered with spider-webs. There was a small, wooden dovecot in there, and a perfectly good, sturdy table which had been cleared of broken plant-pots and brushed clean and now had a striped blanket over it. This was where they had laid their clothes. Gwen had found a serviceable chair amongst the tat and used it sometimes to watch the rain from the open doorway.

  They shut the door now, closing themselves into the peculiar stuffiness of the schoolhouse. Something small scuttled in the rafters. They looked at each other. Her mind was empty except for the thought that she needed to wash herself. The rain came down around the schoolhouse, falling onto the old thatch and pouring off in noisy splashes. It was as well that there was some kind of noise for them both to focus on because neither had said anything yet. Edward was trembling. She couldn’t tell whether he was overcome or just plain cold. She certainly felt clammy. But it was impossible for her to leave him there yet; he had a vacant look in his eyes and seemed rooted to the spot.

  “Edward,” she almost whispered, afraid now of what was happening.

  “I have failed you,” his voice cracked.

  She stepped up to him, careful not to crush his naked toes under her shoes and grasped him with both hands. She felt annoyed, suddenly, that the aftermath of this event, which had come to its conclusion only ten minutes earlier, had opened a chasm between them that she alone was now compelled to dispel. She shook him slightly, not caring if it seemed odd. “I’ll see you in two weeks.”

  “Tomorrow,” he said. “I want to see you tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow I’ll be busy. I’ll be just the same in two weeks’ time.”

  “The day after tomorrow—will you see me then?”

  She let go and turned away. She put on her ankle-length coat and finally unwrapped her hair, and put her hat on before taking up her bag of sketching things and paints and her old umbrella. She let herself out into the rain without looking back, pulling the door shut behind her with her head bent against the drive of the rain and wind.

  Gwen made herself stay calm. It was nothing. It was everything. For more than a year she had lived in perpetual waiting. The ache in her groin spread down her legs and she powered them forward and up along the overgrown, meandering pathways until she reached the tended areas o
f garden nearest the house.

  It would come the next day. There would be nothing until the morning except this growing ache, like a goblin’s fist in her muscles, here and then here; reducing her by degrees to a knotted heap of pain and subdued only slightly by bags of hot wheat. She could never have agreed to see Edward in that state. Sweating and rushing to empty her bowels every half hour. Sometimes when it came, she vomited, doubled over the chamberpot. It came alternately less and more. The last month it was less. She braced herself now. Whatever it was, that had made Edward react in his peculiar way could wait—and she certainly didn’t intend crying herself silly over it.

  A hot bag of wheat clutched to her belly, she remembered the flash of bizarre scientific inspiration which had occurred to her as she’d lain on the blanket. She placed a glass trough on the table in her room next to her microscope. She squatted, rummaged with her fingers and then wiped the result into the trough. Quickly she put the trough into position and looked through the microscope at her specimen, focusing in disbelief at the frenetic movement of undulations in the tails, like eels of an indescribably small size.

  Chapter XVI

  July 8, 1860.

  She said, “You probably fell asleep, and dreamed it. You’ll have to tell me what you think you’ve already asked me.” Her heart pounded, in a way which made her feel nauseous, which made her feel like an idiot female. He’d never asked her anything. This was what it felt like, she supposed. Or did it? The wind was getting up again in the trees; its sound crammed her ears and knotted her brain. She knew that she would accept, having never dared to even think of this kind of conversation happening between them. She watched his face; he looked so confused.

  “I am quite certain that I came here, two days ago. We met in that very heavy storm. You were hurrying away and I caught up with you. I can’t have dreamed it, Gwen. I was soaked to the skin. And you had forgotten your umbrella—you were wearing that huge hat. Rivers of rain fell off you, as though you were a—”

  “I didn’t go out that early, Edward,” Gwen spoke slowly, tried to keep the anxiety out of her voice.

  “Well, in any case, let us not argue over it. I was inconsiderate to ask you in such a way in the first place. But you must have received my letter by now? I sent it the same day.”

  “No, I haven’t had your letter. Ask me again, Edward. It isn’t raining yet. Besides, you must know by now that I’ll accept.”

  “I have been making preparations,” he said, “to go to Brazil, and I would like you to consider accompanying me, as illustrator of the natural world there.”

  Gwen’s heart thudded in a different way. Don’t let him see, she thought. But she fixed her gaze on his face, and as she did, she knew that she didn’t want the thing she’d imagined. It was only vanity, and it made her cringe to think of it. “You are asking me to go with you to a place that is very far away. I have lived all my life here. I would leave my sister alone. It is a large house to be alone in. There are other things to consider, besides.” Inwardly, she leaped in excitement. Stuff the silly thought that he was going to ask for something different. Now her garden seemed to be a gate, not the prison she had resigned herself to. She would be with him every day, and those interminable weeks of waiting to see him would be over—perhaps for years.

  “These are not insurmountable obstacles.” He faltered. A sister? She’d told him that she lived alone, hadn’t she?

  “This has come out of nowhere. Why Brazil, of all places?”

  “Because of you. Because when I visited the Glasshouses at Kew, I was constantly reminded of you, and this place. You in this place, and you painting away at your beetle studies, and what you said, about beauty and science.” He did not say that it was also because of something she had once told him about there being more insects in the world than any other kind of creature. Edward had discovered, during a conversation with Jacobs one night, that some believed most of the world’s insects had not yet been named. He thought if he was to stand any chance of finding an insect as yet unknown to science, then the Brazilian forest seemed the best place to begin. He had begun practising his scalesii inventions again.

  “You want me to run away.”

  “Think on it,” Edward said, his voice flattened. Their meeting was over. He began to move away. Five paces. He stopped, half turned. “I have already bought the best-quality artists’ paper and some vellum. Sketchbooks. I would rather it was your work filling the pages than that of some stranger.” He felt inside his jacket, brought out a folded document and held it out to her. “Look.”

  Well, that’s still not good enough, she thought. Can you not tell me now that you love me, after all? But she held onto the papers for long minutes, reading off the list of provisions and equipment. So many different items. Her brow wrinkled in concentration. “What are the numbers, the codes beside each entry?”

  “Let me see. Ah, yes. It is to indicate which crate each item shall be packed into.”

  “This,” she said, her finger on a line of script. “Surely, this is not right.”

  He came closer to her, and she smelled the sweat of him in his ungainliness.

  “Oh, yes. That is quite right.”

  “Such a size. Will that be necessary? What on earth could one find to preserve—or is it meant to be used the way one packs fruit, I wonder?”

  “Well, one never can quite predict, but that is the thrill. Don’t you see?”

  “The weight would be almost immeasurable.”

  “I had to have it. I went to the glassworks and there it was, and it—well, it inspired me. Yet not half as much as you.”

  Half an hour later, he was getting ready to leave again. He picked up the lacquered bamboo sticks which had held her hair in place and handed them back to her. He turned away while she twisted her hair into a knot.

  “Did you hear that?” Gwen touched Edward’s sleeve. “I thought I heard it before; I’m sure I’m not mistaken this time.”

  Edward looked at her, and as their eyes met, they both heard the noise, louder this time and undeniably there. “Some kind of animal? Perhaps a weasel with a rabbit,” he said.

  “No,” Gwen shook her head, and looked away into the middle distance, scrunching her eyes into slits as though that might make her hear better. “No,” she said again, the blood gone from her face. “It’s more human.” Gwen was yards away from Edward, before he realised that he was running after her.

  Edward did not want to go into Carrick House now. He’d thought about what it might be like in there often enough; conjured up a picture of something extraordinary, even though he knew that in all probability it was the kind of house you would not remark upon except for its occupants. Now he had discovered that his wife had been there. Spiritualism and hokus pokus; Isobel was mocking him again. He’d been so sure that she had been lying, calling his bluff. He knew for certain that Gwen was not a Spiritualist. The very idea that she would indulge in that particular abomination was so preposterous. He’d laughed in Isobel’s face. But she’d described the house in such detail. What was he to do? He thought of Gwen with her furrowed forehead scuffing the ground with her foot and imagined that he knew what it must be like, to be her. Waiting for him to appear. Looking under the tree, not letting herself hope that he might be there. And then the chill from the ground penetrating their bodies. No wonder she was guarded, angry. She was besieged by his long absences, and now Isobel, too, with her silly games. He’d meant to ask her to come away with him in a different way. He’d meant to use different words, but they’d rolled around at the back of his throat. His apology for his inconsistencies; it was a bolus refusing to be anything but that.

  The house appeared from behind the screen of tall laurels: red brick, amongst so much green. Edward stopped in his tracks to admire it. Gwen caught his arm and pulled him forward into its shadow. “This house,” he said to her, “it’s barely twenty years old, is it?”

  “What? Oh, yes. The other one was demolished to make room for it
. I’m told it was a scandalous thing to do. At least they left the garden—”

  It began to rain. Hard spittles smacked the windows at his back as Edward suppressed his desire to flee the place. Gwen turned to the bundle propped up in the chair. “Mr Harris, help is here now. I’m sure Mr Scales will be able to get your eye open.”

  Edward hesitated, concentrating on the pool of light at the table.

  Gwen went outside and pumped a jugful of water. She brought it to the table with a glass. Edward looked critically at the dwarf. His eyelid was swollen, and where Euphemia had stitched the lids together, there was a general crustiness of blood mixed with yellow secretions. Edward glanced at Gwen, wishing that some of her apparent calm would settle on him.

  “I can remove these, but, as for the rest, I am no specialist. I will be as careful as possible.”

  “I’d be much obliged, sir,” said Fergus.

  Edward said, “We’ll have to bathe it first. Some boiled and cooled salty water would be best, I think.”

  As Gwen moved around him organising things, checking the water was at the right temperature, spooning salt into it, Edward wondered at her composure. Bed sheets tied around a man, pinning his arms to his sides, fixing his head still—he couldn’t imagine the terror of it. He couldn’t imagine why this man had not been able to save himself. Did she pounce on him? Did she trick him? Somewhere in the house Euphemia was locked safely away in her room. Edward recalled Gwen’s face as she’d led Euphemia away from the scene. Euphemia bedraggled and wild-looking, slumping into her sister’s arms, letting herself be moved away. Madness. There were all kinds of madness. Perhaps this was what Gwen had meant when she’d told him that there were other things to consider. Not the shame of being the mistress at all.