Miss Benson's Beetle

by Rachel Joyce

  By now a small crowd had gathered, waiting for Margery to do something even more entertaining, like leap through a ring of fire, or produce a saw and cut herself in two. She had no idea where to look.

  “Marge?” The woman with yellow hair noticed her for the first time. She pulled something from her pocket that turned out to be pink and stuffed it on top of her head. “Is that you?”

  It seemed to Margery that everything paused. Even pigeons. Even the clock. The small crowd turned to look at the yellow-haired woman, now struggling to gather up not one, but three whacking great suitcases and a red valise, then turned for a good look at Margery in her pith helmet, as if there were a tight line running from one to the other that made no sense. Margery saw nothing but a wall of eyeballs, swinging left and right.

  “Marge!” called the woman again. “It’s me!”

  Margery wondered if it was too late to pretend she was someone else. A woman who happened to be carrying an insect net on behalf of another person altogether. She shoved it inside her coat until a helpful man called, “Don’t suppose you’ll catch much in there.”

  Well, everyone thought that was hilarious.

  Meanwhile, the short woman tottered across the concourse, her luggage so heavy she could only wave at Margery with her foot. Her hair was a stiff puff with the perky hat pinned on top: about as useful in terms of sun protection as a beer mat on her head. She wore a bright pink two-piece travel suit that accentuated her round bust and hips, tiny sandals with a pom-pom at the toe, and her nails were painted like juicy sweets. A blond bombshell, twenty-five if she was a day, and Margery was old enough to be, if not her mother, then at least her maiden aunt.

  “What are you lot all staring at?” the woman said to the crowd, at which point it wisely stopped staring and moved on.

  Being close, and also half Margery’s size, she had to tilt her face upward to speak. She wore so much makeup that her face was orange. Her mouth, by contrast, was bright pink, her eyelashes thick and black. And then there was her hair, which was such a luminous shade of yellow you could have shut her in the dark and still found her. Only her eyes were natural: dark green with tiny gold flecks.

  “Enid Pretty,” she said merrily, as if announcing her arrival at a party. Margery was speechless. There was less chance of this woman blending into the background than there was of Margery winning a beauty pageant. The humiliation she had suffered while waiting and the terrible hurt that had been dealt her by Miss Hamilton, along with something else, something so old she couldn’t even name it, all these things now regrouped themselves into a base longing to lash out at Enid and humiliate her, as if it was completely normal to wear safari helmets in railway stations and completely odd to go without them.

  She pointed at Enid’s tiny excuse of a hat. “What is that?”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “What are you wearing?”

  Enid blinked. “Clothes and stuff,” she said, all question mark.

  “This isn’t a cheap holiday to Butlin’s. It’s a field trip to the South Pacific. The post is no longer available.”

  She was turning to pick up her luggage when Enid grabbed Margery’s elbow. She had shocking strength for someone so small and brightly colored. “Please,” she hissed. “Don’t do this to me, Marge.”

  The way she said it implied they had been friends for a long time and what Margery was about to do was the kind of thing she always did, and for once in her life she should try doing something better. Margery pulled herself free. She reached for her Gladstone bag.

  But in her desperation to get away she made the move too fast, igniting a flash of pain right through her hip. Her body pitched forward and, for a terrible moment, she thought her leg was coming off. It hurt just to breathe. Enid bent close.

  “Marge? Why aren’t you moving? We need to hurry.”

  “It’s nothing. Only my hip.”

  “Your hip?” Enid shouted, as if Margery was not only disabled for the moment but also deaf as a post.

  “It gets stuck.”

  “Do you want me to whack it?”

  “No. Please. Please do not whack my hip. I might fall over.”

  Enid cast a terrified look toward the platforms. “We’ve got to hurry, Marge. We can’t miss our train.” Then something seemed to click in her mind and she said, “Right. I’ll sort this out. Wait.”

  Before Margery could object, Enid had gone again, legs moving like scissors—her pink skirt was no wider than a sleeve—but not with her abundant luggage: this she left behind. A paper boy bawled out the headlines: “Norman Skinner to hang for murder of call girl!” A flock of people surged forward to buy the latest edition. The story had been in the papers for weeks and still no one could get enough.

  “Marge! Marge!”

  Here came Enid, pursued by an enthusiastic young porter with a trolley. Swiftly he loaded Margery’s equipment and suitcase, followed by Enid’s luggage. “Oh, you are so clever, oh, you are so strong! How could we possibly manage without you?” she sang, though she snatched up the lightest one—the red valise—before he could get his hands on it.

  “Your train leaves in five minutes,” he said. “We’re going to have to make a dash.”

  Dashing would have been a very good idea, except that Margery was stuck.

  “Still?” said Enid.

  What came next verged on assault. Enid sprang behind Margery, buckled her round the waist with the strength of a bear, and yanked upward. It was like being seared. But then—by some miracle—the pain was simply not there. It was as though a hole had opened all the way from Margery’s head to her foot, and the pain had spat through the end of her toes.

  “Better now?” said Enid, dusting off her gloves.

  “I think so.”

  “We need to hurry. We have three minutes.”

  They made a ridiculous pair, as they chased the porter, like a brown ostrich coupled with a pink-hatted canary. Gulping for breath, Margery noticed the way men caught sight of Enid and stared, as she wiggled past at high velocity, clutching the handles of her valise with both hands as if it were a motor propelling her forward, either oblivious to attention or so used to it she took it as read that men would stop and watch. The guard was already raising his flag as they fled past the barrier and reached the train.

  “Here you go, ladies,” said the porter, swinging open the first door they came to. “Are you sure I can’t take that suitcase?”

  “No, ta,” said Enid, taking it in one hand so that she could help Margery. (“Thank you, but I can manage,” said Margery, hoisting herself upward with difficulty.)

  The door was barely closed. The whistle went. The train pulled out.

  * * *

  —

  “So, the thing is, you should have seen it. I said to him, I said, ‘You don’t think I’m going to buy that, do you? Because that hat, I said, that’s not a hat! That’s a helmet! I can’t wear that!’ ”

  Or: “I knew this woman, this is true, Marge, and when she died, she had a worm in her belly the size of a hosepipe!”

  Margery had never been a talker: she always felt she came across better if she stuck to letters and cards. She’d had a correspondence once with another beetle enthusiast that had gone wrong only when they’d met for tea. “I thought you were a man,” the woman had said. (“But I’m called Margery,” said Margery.) After that she didn’t even want to talk beetles; she just crumbled her scone and left. But Enid Pretty was Margery’s polar opposite: now they were safely on the train, she wouldn’t shut up. It was as though she had a button set to “on,” and unless Margery found “off,” Enid would continue forever. Talk, talk, talk. Half the time there wasn’t any hint of a connection—she just leaped like a mad woman from one subject to the next. She didn’t even pause for periods. As well as saying multiple times that she couldn’t believe Margery was a real-life
explorer from the Natural History Museum—no time to correct her—and that they were going to the other side of the world, Enid also covered safari hats, terrifying parasites, the weather, Mr. Churchill, rationing, the weather again, and her own personal biography. Her mother and father—lovely people!—had both died of Spanish flu when Enid was tiny—so sad!—and Enid had been brought up by neighbors. Worse: she still couldn’t get the hang of Margery’s name. She was calling her “Marge” as if she was a highly processed alternative to butter. Then a woman squeezed past with a toddler, and Enid changed tack all over again.

  “Babies! Don’t get me started on babies!”

  “No,” said Margery, not wanting to get her started on anything at all.

  Too late: Enid was already off.

  “I love babies. Maybe it’s cos I had no family. I had a twin but she died at birth. My husband said that’s the reason I talk so much—”

  “Excuse me. You’re married?” The question burst from Margery several moments later, but Enid was going so fast she appeared to be speaking in tongues.

  “Didn’t I say that in my letter?”

  “About a husband? No. You said nothing about that.”

  Enid stalled. She paled. She actually looked struck. “Well, it doesn’t matter. He’s away.”

  “Where has he gone?”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “Has he gone away for work?”

  To Margery’s confusion, tears now filled Enid’s eyes, making the gold flecks even fleckier. “That’s right!” she said. “For work!”

  After that she was off again, telling a horrific story about a dog she’d seen chained to a wall and eating its own paw. Nothing, it seemed, could happen to Enid without her needing to recount it in tortuously small detail to someone else. Outside, rain stuck to the window in beads that shattered and stippled. Beyond that, row after row of gloomy houses. Desolate allotments, where bits of underwear hung on lines, and privies were patched together. Margery had no idea how she would survive five weeks on a ship with Enid Pretty, let alone climb a mountain. By the time they reached Tilbury, she felt murderous. If she could have killed her, quietly and without anyone noticing, she would have.

  A huge crowd crammed the departures hall. It was hard to believe they would all fit into Australia, let alone on the RMS Orion. The liner stood waiting out in the dock—the very opposite of the chaos inside: solid and massive, with a custard-yellow hull and a single funnel. Its porthole windows were lit like a city, even though it was broad daylight.

  Enid threw a glance over her shoulder, as if checking for someone she knew. “So let me get this straight.” She had to shout to be heard. “We’re crossing the world to look for a beetle that isn’t there?”

  “No one has found it yet. They’ve only seen it.”

  “Isn’t that the same thing?”

  “No, Mrs. Pretty. A thing doesn’t exist until it has been caught and presented to the Natural History Museum. Once the Natural History Museum has accepted the beetle, and read my descriptions and notes, and found that it is genuinely a new specimen, it will be given a name. And then it will exist.”

  “Even though we’ll already have found it?”

  “Yes.”

  “So we’re going to find a beetle that isn’t there?” They were back at the beginning. Fortunately, a customs official appeared and Enid got distracted. “You do think he’ll let us on the ship, don’t you?”

  Margery smiled. It wasn’t that she had begun to like Enid. It was more that in that moment she had experienced the rare pleasure of liking herself. Crossing to the other side of the world to find a beetle suddenly seemed such a simple and beautiful thing.

  “Of course. All you need is your passport, Mrs. Pretty.”

  But Enid went the color of cold porridge. “Beg pardon?” she said.

  It was one thing almost to miss the train to Tilbury: it was on a whole new level almost to miss the liner to the other side of the world.

  Margery did not intend to wait for Enid Pretty. She fully intended to board the ship without her: fortune, it seemed, had come to her aid. But as Enid was led off to a private interview room, Margery paused to explain to the customs official in a helpful way that she had only just met this woman and they weren’t even friends. The customs official folded his arms and asked why they were traveling together if they didn’t know one another.

  Which was how Margery found herself being led off to her very own private interview room.

  “Why are there two women in your photograph?” asked the customs official, checking her passport. The room was no bigger than a newspaper stand. Also, he was wall-eyed: she wanted to be polite but had no idea which one to look at. “Is the other woman the blonde?”

  “No. She is not.”

  “She looks like her.”

  “She looks nothing like her. The woman in the photograph has brown hair. I’d never met her before. She just charged into the booth.”

  “Another woman you’d never met before? Is this a habit?”

  He then asked if she would like to remove her watch, her hat, and her boots. Margery wisely interpreted that none of these were actually questions, but she had tied the laces in a double knot for safety reasons and it was difficult to get her feet out. “They’re not even mine,” she said, stalling for time.

  “Oh?” he said. “Are they stolen?”

  This, she realized afterward, was his idea of a joke, but not until she’d turned hot as fire and denied it so many times she sounded like Peter after the Last Supper.

  Two policemen entered the room and, without even saying hello, began an inspection of her bag of collecting equipment. When they almost dropped the ethanol, she yelped, not because it was her only bottle but because, in a room that size, a smashed bottle of preserving fluid would be enough to floor all four of them. “You seem nervous,” one said. Sweat prickled her hairline; her heart was running uphill. “Anyone would think I had done something wrong!” She laughed. “Anyone would think I had committed murder!” Only comedy had never been her strong point and she now sounded like a woman who had done both those things. “Next you’ll be putting the noose round my neck!” At which point everyone stopped examining her killing jars, and point-blank stared, even the first customs official, though he had one eye on her head, the other on her feet.

  Then from the next room she heard Enid’s wild laugh. The door opened and yet another man squeezed into the room—sardines had more space in a tin—and began whispering something that made the others grin. “Your friend’s a card,” the new arrival said. She was about to remind them that Enid was not her friend but thought better of it. “Off you go,” he said. They handed back the boots, her watch, and her helmet, and repacked her Gladstone bag with such care she could have wept. And that was the swift and miraculous end of Margery’s first-ever police interview.

  By the time the door to the adjoining room opened and Enid flew out, fixing her buttons, her cheeks like red dots, there was only time—yet again—to run. “Quick!” she shouted. “Follow me!”

  “Again?” said Margery. The rushing, the crushing, surely they had already done that. Enid grabbed her suitcases as if they were the hands of children and pelted through the door. Outside, people crowded the jetty, waving balloons and shouting. They were hemmed in on every side—it was like pushing through a wall. There was a brass band, there was bunting, there was a woman sobbing her heart out and, to top it all, there was rain, the fine British kind that sticks to your skin like mist and soaks you in minutes.

  “Don’t you dare go without us!” shouted Enid. She seemed to be threatening the RMS Orion itself. But the deckhand was already stepping down with the chain to close the gangway; the foghorn sounded. Any moment now it would leave. “Stop that right now!” she yelled.

  Margery plodded in Enid’s wake. A vertical seam of pain ran the length
of both legs and, no matter how hard she tried, she was unable to gain full access to her lungs. Her Gladstone bag was considerably heavier than her suitcase, and she swapped them from one hand to the other until she was unable to tell whether it was better to continue with the throbbing in her right arm or change to instant pain in the left.

  “Wait! You wait!” bawled Enid, at the deckhand. Spotting them, he dropped the chain and ran down to help. She sprinted past.

  “Not me, darlin’,” she called over her shoulder. “Help the lady behind.”

  * * *

  —

  Despite the awful weather, the decks were packed. As the ship slid free, the band on the jetty struck up with a round of “Rule Britannia,” and passengers hurled down hundreds of thousands of streamers that filled the dock in a giant web, while Enid whooped and blew kisses, though presumably not to anyone she knew. “Goodbye!” she shouted. “Goodbye, ol’ Blighty!” After that, Margery stayed on deck, watching as everything she knew pulled away and lost shape, the docks, the coastline, fishing boats, until even Britain was a small gray hat on the horizon. She was doing it—she was finally doing the thing she’d dreamed about as a child, the thing she’d given up on in her twenties, and deep inside she felt a leap of excitement because it was finally happening and she could hardly believe it. It was so easy to find yourself doing the things in life you weren’t passionate about, to stick with them even when you didn’t want them and they hurt. But now the time for dreaming and wishing was over, and she was going. She was traveling to the other side of the world. It wasn’t just the ship that had been unmoored. It was her entire sense of herself.

  Enid fetched a handsome steward to help with their luggage. (“Oh, you are so kind!” she trilled. “Oh, you are so helpful! Thank you, sweetheart! I’ll keep the red one!”) He told them about the wonderful things they could do onboard. Not just the free dining and swimming, but all the extra clubs and activities. Getting there was half the fun. He pointed out the lines of yellow deck chairs, a whole arcade of shops, a hairdresser, a cinema, and even a ballroom, while Enid gasped and clucked, like a hen laying an egg. Yellow was the company color, he said. No other ship had a yellow funnel, like the RMS Orion’s.