Miss Benson's Beetle

by Rachel Joyce

  The man hid his face. “Go! Go!” he cried, looking like a person who’d been kissed and told off at the same time.

  They had done it. They were through.

  * * *

  —

  A motor launch carried Margery and Enid to the flying boat. It was fully light, and the illuminated portholes reflected in the water like smashed jewels. As the driver cut the engine, the launch drifted beneath a high, broad wing. Inside, the fuselage was divided into cabins with comfortable seats and tables, and there was a heady smell of grease and paraffin. A nice stewardess showed them to their places and gave them a fully illustrated guide to air travel, while a steward offered barley sugar to stop their ears popping, though Enid—speeding now with excitement—swallowed hers without sucking and had to be whacked on the back to dislodge it.

  “Let me get this straight,” she said. “This thing lifts out of the sea and flies?”

  One by one, the engines started. Slowly the plane began to move forward, twisting from left to right, stirring up a zigzag of foamy water, the port float rising a few inches as the wings tilted to starboard. Enid screamed and gripped Margery’s hand so tightly that she lost all feeling from the elbow down. As waves buffeted the plane from both sides, it moved faster, water foaming at the portholes and filling the tiny interior with green light. Enid went from terrified to ecstatic in the space of a second. “Yes, yes, yes!” she shrieked. The nose began to lift, the sea level dropped down the windows, speckling it like pearls, and, with a scraping, boomy sound, the plane finally rose clear of the water and lumbered upward into the morning sky. Every muscle in Margery’s body strained to keep the plane air-bound. Even the ones in her feet.

  The plane climbed. Up. Up. Shuddering. Shaking. An improbable amount of noise. Margery’s ears popped. The boomy sound seemed to have taken residence inside her chest. Do not look down, she told herself. Do not look down—

  “Look down, Marge!” yelled Enid, also yanking her by the neck, so that Margery had no choice. She looked.

  The plane’s shadow traveled the ground below, like a black beetle. Already things were shockingly small. Houses had shrunk to the size of cotton reels. Roads were no wider than string, with dots for cars. Everything looked so fragile—she felt she could pick it up in her hands. And now here were clouds, little puffy things, while far down, the sea was a sheet of tin.

  A tingle like an electric shock ran up from the soles of her feet. If the world was wonderful enough to contain jumping fish, and green sunsets, and these tufty clouds—even crazy, wild women with yellow hair—there must also be gold beetles…and then what else? How many other beautiful things were out there, waiting to be found? The stewards served lobster and champagne, followed by ice cream and coffee in little white cups, but she could barely tear her eyes from the window. Here was the endless expanse of the Pacific, cobalt blue, dotted with islets that floated like precious stones. Liners the size of the RMS Orion that were no bigger than ants. Then, at last, the archipelago of New Caledonia: emerald islands with pale coral frills as if a child had scribbled all round them with chalk, and—finally—one in the shape of a long rolling pin.

  As the plane dropped, the emerald became a patchwork of dark trees with huge mushroom-shaped crowns. Pale scrubland, lagoons of clear water, a heart-shaped green swamp, pointing fingers of white sand and, running the length of it, a red mountain range like a bumpy spine.

  * * *

  —

  The sight grabbed the breath from Margery’s chest. For once, even Enid was stuck for words. Britain and rationing and rain seemed to belong to another planet.

  “Enid, I have to tell you. I am not an explorer from the Natural History Museum. I taught domestic science for twenty years.”

  Enid barely shrugged. “That’s okay. I can’t speak French. I just know bon shoor.”

  Suspended in the blue vault of the sky, and side by side with Enid, there was no other place that Margery wanted to be.

  Welcome to Paradise! New Caledonia, land of palm trees and coral reefs, home to the Kanak people, and where the kagu bird sings!

  The first European to discover the island was Captain Cook in 1774. Since it reminded him of his homeland, Scotland, he called it New Caledonia. One hundred years later, Napoleon ordered the annexation of the islands as a penal colony. He renamed them Nouvelle Calédonie. This means New Caledonia, but in French. (See Chapter 5, “Useful French Phrases.”)

  The island’s history is not a happy one. In the early part of the nineteenth century, the worst scum of the white race—whalers, sandalwood gatherers, blackbirders in search of slaves, and plain buccaneers—came to these beautiful, primitive islands, and left the white men’s curses in the shape of vice, drunkenness, gunpowder, and disease. The indigenous Kanak people—handsome, hospitable, happy in Nature’s abundant supply of all their needs!—were almost wiped out.

  Today the islands—fertile and beautiful—abounding with forests and tumultuous waterfalls, are also inhabited by Europeans, mainly French, and South East Asians of Indonesian or Vietnamese descent. The Kanak people live among tribes and have their own customs. They are a happy-go-lucky breed. It is quite all right to call a man “boy”! This is a widely used term. They will smile and wave in return.

  Margery sat beneath a banana tree with the Reverend Horace Blake’s illustrated pocket guidebook. It was as much use as a chocolate teapot.

  Nouméa sprawled haphazardly: a golden-white beach on one side, palm trees with tops like feathery hats on the other. The mountain range stretched behind. It had rained in the night and drops hung in braids from leaves, while everything smelled of pine and frangipani. As the sun lifted, the sky flashed with bright colors that belonged to other things. Traffic-light green, birthday candle pink, egg yolk yellow, mailbox red. Briefly the mountains held those colors, too.

  This mountain range…she’d never known anything like it. It seemed to go on and on forever, and light played across it, like emotion on a human face. At dawn, it was one pink mass, green by midday, with cloud shadows resting on it like mats, or even sliced off at the top by mist, blue at dusk, so black by night it seemed darker than the sky. She saw a peak with the shape of a triangle, another like a curate’s hat, one like a sleeping elephant. But nowhere could she find any that resembled a blunt wisdom tooth.

  Answered prayers can be frightening, suggesting—as they do—an obligation to act. Margery had her assistant again. She was finally in New Caledonia; they had been there almost a week, staying in a boardinghouse by the port. She had found a well-appointed bungalow in the far north of the island, called the Last Place, and paid six months’ rental in advance. She had bought a new map and found a bus that made the journey twice a week. She’d seen French colonial buildings and narrow streets where houses were painted yellow and pink and blue; French cafés and bars, boulangeries, squares with palms and fountains. Fruits of every color. Fish of every size. Giant kauri trees. Palms with hairy trunks. Ferns with leaves as large as paddles. Flowers like lanterns. People dressed in all kinds of ways, some wearing light European clothes. Children bare naked. Men in skirts. Women with their breasts hanging out for everyone to see, others in missionary frocks that almost reached their feet. And insects, insects everywhere. Not just beetles, but flies, grasshoppers, moths…All this newness, this strangeness. This wonder. And yet now that Margery was ready to begin the expedition, she was completely stuck.

  Problem one. Admin. She needed to get her permits stamped at the correct French government offices. She also needed an extension to her visa. Without the official permits, she would not be able to present the beetle to the Natural History Museum, and without the visa, she couldn’t stay in New Caledonia for more than a month. But there were twenty-three offices to call on, and none of them seemed to share the same opening hours. “The French Caledonian people,” wrote the Reverend Horace Blake, “are not like the British. They
are very sociable. They enjoy fishing and cricket.” There was an illustration of a Kanak man holding a cricket bat, and another of a white man fishing, but nowhere did the Reverend Horace Blake mention that the French left their offices for weeks on end, and neither did he mention that they sometimes closed their offices and turned them into other things instead. L’Office Centrale de Permis, for example, was now a milkshake and hamburger restaurant. Margery had written twice to the British consul, asking for help, but received no reply. Every day she set out with Enid, following roads that turned into hot squares, then little alleyways and stone steps, where brightly colored washing was strung overhead like flags, and children carried baskets of chickens or pawpaw, and once a small pig. So far, they’d found only four of the twenty-three offices. Several, it turned out, had never been there to begin with, and others possibly didn’t exist at all.

  French. Another problem. Everywhere she went she heard words and sounds she didn’t understand. Vowels that ran like small motors, tongues purring, explosive combinations of consonants. She tried the everyday phrases in the guidebook, and no one had a clue what she was talking about. If anything, they looked concerned. She had no idea how to get it right.

  Fortunately, Enid had a flair for communicating in a foreign language that took everyone by surprise, including speakers of foreign languages. She didn’t give a damn about getting it right. She got the hang of basic words like fromage and café au lait, as well as scarabée for beetle, and the minute she got stuck, she mimed. “Bon shoor!” she would yell. “Have you seen un gold scarabée?” Or “Do you know un mountain dans le shape of un wisdom tooth?” She flapped her arms like wings; she pretended she had a great big beetle stomach; she even showed people her back molars.

  Enid’s inquiries could attract a small crowd, laughing joyfully and offering gifts she might like, such as fruit, or coconut milk, and once an old baseball cap. They also caught the attention of a smelly stray dog that was halfway in appearance between a white rabbit and a baby seal. Enid adored this dog and called it Mr. Rawlings. As far as Margery was concerned, it was the most useless dog she’d ever met, but it followed Enid like a shadow. She fed it scraps when she thought Margery wasn’t looking and smuggled it inside the boardinghouse at night so that it could sleep on her bed.

  Three. The very serious problem of Margery’s luggage. Only her tea chest of food supplies and camping gear had arrived. All of Enid’s luggage had been delivered, even the red valise—which she’d stuffed beneath the bed, quick as a shot—but there was no sign yet of Margery’s suitcase, and no sign either of the Gladstone bag containing her precious collecting equipment. “But you did label it?” said Enid. Margery circumnavigated this question. She’d been on the point of labeling it as the RMS Orion docked at Brisbane, but then Enid had waltzed into the cabin. After that her mind had been on other things. Nevertheless, they went to the office of the airline every morning to inquire, and were told not to worry, the missing luggage would come that afternoon, straight after siesta, and every day it didn’t.

  (Siestas. Another mystery. Who knew that at midday an entire population could drop whatever they were doing, and pass out? Needless to say, Enid took to siestas like a duck to water.)

  And there was one last thing, harder still to explain. Now that she was here, Margery felt overwhelmed. It wasn’t simply the beauty of the island. The color. The smells and dazzling light. It wasn’t even the paperwork and loss of her luggage. She didn’t actually know what to do next. It went without saying that she was in New Caledonia to find a beetle, but it had been a lot easier to think about finding it when she was nowhere near it.

  She couldn’t admit that to Enid. She could barely admit it to herself. So she clung to her paperwork as if it were a lifeline. She needed to get the admin right. She needed it very much. Because as soon as she had the proper extension to her visa and twenty-three official stamps on her permits, everything else—including her suitcase and equipment, but, most of all, her faith in her own judgment—would turn up. She really believed that.

  A pair of eyes blinked from the shadows. A green lizard emerged, the size of a dog. It lumbered toward her, and stopped to eat an ant. She couldn’t believe how long it took. The little jaws, the flick-flick of the tongue, the great rippling pulse of muscle below the shoulder. Ant eaten, it turned and poked its tail at her and slunk away.

  She went to wake Enid.

  “I just don’t understand why we’re stuck in Nouméa,” said Enid. “I thought you were worried someone else would find the beetle first.”

  “We are here because of our paperwork,” said Margery. “And, anyway, I have no luggage.”

  “Why can’t we go without that stuff?”

  “Because I can’t climb a mountain in my best frock, Enid. And I certainly can’t do it without my equipment. You don’t even have proper boots. Besides, we could get arrested without a visa. As soon as I have it all sorted out, we can go to the bungalow. The bus leaves every two days.”

  “The bus?” repeated Enid. “We came here on a flying boat, and now we’re making the adventure of our lives by bus?”

  “There’s no other way to get there.”

  “Mules?”

  “No, Enid. We absolutely will not go by mule. That will not be necessary.”

  They were taking petit déjeuner in one of the charming French cafés that lined the Baie des Citrons, but Enid had woken in a bad mood and was flipping through The Times without actually reading it. Not that there was any need. It was dated August 1950—everything it reported had happened when they were still at home. Apparently, British newspapers arrived in New Caledonia only spasmodically—it could be Christmas before anything new came. And even though Enid kept trying, she couldn’t get a signal for her radio because of the mountain. Meanwhile, she would still say nothing about Taylor, or how she’d got past his gun, and if Margery asked about Perce, she simply shook her head. Out in the bay, white surf flicked a coral reef, and beyond that, the open sea was dark blue. Within the irregular arc of coral, the water was as still as a lake—blues of all shades, along with shadowy green and purple. Men were unloading fishing boats on the sand, and a woman was hunkered beside them, scooping out fish innards and slopping them into a bucket. Birds hopped round her.

  “The kagu,” said Margery, helping herself to another croissant.

  “The what?” said Enid.

  “That big white bird. With the spindly red legs. They’re indigenous to New Caledonia. They can’t fly.”

  “Oh,” said Enid, remarkably unimpressed. “That’s probably why they’re indigenous to New Caledonia.” She pushed away the newspaper and glanced left and right, as if checking for someone. “This is mad. We should leave. What difference does it make if you don’t have your paperwork?”

  “If you must know, I made a mistake once. I don’t wish to make it again.”

  “What kind of mistake?”

  Margery drew her mouth into a plum shape. “If you must know,” she said again, because saying old things twice seemed safer than saying new ones once, “I stole my boots.”

  “You stole them? Where from?”

  “From the school where I worked.”

  “You stole your boots from a school?”

  “Yes, Enid. This is not a laughing matter. It is now in the hands of the British police.”

  But for Enid it was a laughing matter. She laughed a lot. “I can’t believe you stole your boots. What came over you, Marge?”

  “I don’t know.” It was a question she still asked herself but without ever coming up with an answer that she deep-down believed. “The point is, we can’t just go. Besides, I’m waiting to hear from the British consul. I expect a reply any day.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we’re British. It’s about connections, Enid. Who you know. The British consul will help us. He could sort out my visa.”

&n
bsp; Enid whipped a cigarette from her packet and lit it. A shot of smoke escaped from the side of her mouth as if she were on fire. She said, “Someone is still following me.”

  “No one is following you. Or, rather, everyone is following you, but you’ve only just begun to notice. Even mangy stray dogs follow you.”

  Enid ignored that. She just patted Mr. Rawlings and fed him half a croissant. She said, “He was on the ship. Remember? He followed me in Aden. And I’m sure he was there at the camp in Wacol.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know. I never really saw him. I think he had no hair.”

  “But why would he be following you?”

  Enid shrugged. Or maybe she shivered. “The trouble is that you think we have time and we don’t, Marge. We need to leave this place and start searching.”

  To Enid’s relief, the lost luggage arrived at their boardinghouse that same afternoon. There was only one snag.

  * * *

  —

  “It’s not hers,” said Enid. “And her Gladstone bag is missing.”

  The French delivery boy said (in French) that the luggage looked like Margery’s. He was dressed in white with canvas shoes to match. Someone had sewn a brocade trim onto the shoulders of his shirt—presumably his mother, because he looked all of twelve. His skin was golden and fluffy, much like that of a peach.

  “How could you possibly know what her luggage looks like?” said Enid. “You’ve never seen it.” (This in English, but with a mime of a person looking for something and carrying a suitcase. The delivery boy was delighted. He sat down to watch.)