Miss Benson's Beetle

by Rachel Joyce

  Enid was still floating with her hand on her belly. She was singing. Then she said, “Did you really never want kids, Marge?”

  “No, Enid.”

  “Were you a good teacher?”

  “I was terrible.”

  “Your cooking is very bad.”

  “I know.”

  “But you were in love? With the professor? He broke your heart?”

  “There were complications.”

  “Complications? What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know. Some people are born to be left.”

  “Oh, sod that,” said Enid. “That’s an awful thing to say. It’s like saying it’s a woman’s duty to suffer.”

  And, actually, Margery could see that, even though this was indeed the belief on which she’d been taught by her aunts to build most of her adult life, Enid might be right: there might be a weakness somewhere in the foundations, a flaw. But she wasn’t able to think of that yet. “Well, it doesn’t matter. It happened years ago.”

  Enid fanned the water toward Margery, like a gift. Margery took it. Then Enid went quiet but not in a normal way, more as if she had a hundred things to say and hadn’t a clue where to start. “Have you ever—”

  “What?”

  “Have you ever done anything terrible? Have you ever been in a real mess?”

  “I was in a mess after the professor. I gave up on everything. Why? What about you?”

  “Me? I’ve been in loads of trouble.” Enid laughed. Then the laugh stopped. It stopped so abruptly that nothing seemed funny. It was like the quiet that had not been quiet. “But no matter how awful life was, I would never want to give up. I would always want to keep living. Just waiting for that moment when it might get better. You need to remember that, Marge. You must never give up again.” She touched her belly. “We are not the things that happened to us. We can be what we like.”

  Sometimes Enid still surprised Margery—the way she could look into the air and come out with a piece of wisdom, as if an invisible sign had just lowered in front of her and she was reading it aloud. Points of sunlight landed all around them and danced on the water, and the women moved their hands, making the light dance even more. There were dragonflies the size of birds.

  “Promise me one thing.”

  “What, Enid?”

  “If I lose this baby, don’t tell me it’s for the best. You’ll want to because you’re my best friend. You won’t want me to feel pain because it’ll hurt you, too. You know that, Marge?”

  Margery reached for Enid’s hand. Her skin was cold and wrinkled. “I would never say that losing your baby was right. I know what your baby means to you.”

  Enid ducked her head underwater. When she came back up, her hair was so wet it was completely black. She looked like a seal.

  “You know, we could go anywhere in the world. We could just keep searching, you and me. We could go anywhere we like.”

  “But how would we get my collection home? How would I present it to the Natural History Museum? Anyway, what about your baby?” Margery laughed. “You talk some nonsense, Enid.”

  High up, they heard the dog barking. Enid whistled but he didn’t come down. Then they swaggered out of the bathing pool. The sun hit the water so sharply it was like walking into a blaze of light. They found their way to their clothes. “Look at me,” said Enid. “Look how fat I am, Marge.”

  “Are you sure there’s only one baby in there? How are you going to last until May?”

  They dressed slowly. Their skin was wet and so were their clothes. Margery’s hair felt heavy and cool on the back of her neck. Enid whistled again for Mr. Rawlings.

  An hour later, they were still searching. Enid called and called, shouting his name more and more desperately, “Mr. Rawlings!” They went on all afternoon. They kept to the path, they went off it, they tried the places he knew. They clapped their hands and called until their throats were sore. It was already getting dark when they came to the edge of a ravine.

  “Oh, no,” said Margery. “No, no, no. Enid, no.”

  Fear ripped through her. Fast and reptilian. Enid stood at her side, working her tongue in her mouth as if she were checking it for water. They were motionless, gripped in each other’s arms, starched eyes wide open, mouths dropped.

  The dog had fallen twenty feet. He lay on the stones at the bottom of the ravine, like something tossed away.

  Enid’s loss resembled an endless forest in which she could find no landmark. She kept staring at nothing, bewildered, as tears ran down her face. Everything came back to the dog and made her cry, even things that had nothing to do with him. “He was such a good dog,” she said all the time. “He was such a good dog. Why would he run off like that, Marge? I don’t understand.”

  They buried Mr. Rawlings near the spot where she’d hidden the gun. Margery didn’t ask why. It made sense to Enid, and that was all that mattered. If Enid had asked her to construct a mausoleum, complete with a statue, she would have done her best. Enid had not lost her baby, but she’d lost the nearest thing, and even though it was almost unbearable to watch, Margery knew she must allow Enid to grieve. She had climbed down the ravine, gripping hold of roots that came away in her hands even as she pulled at them, her feet shooting away from beneath her. She had lifted him, this solid weight, in her arms, and struggled to carry him back to Enid. He’d seemed so much heavier than she remembered. She’d never made any secret of the fact she disliked the dog, but his importance to Enid made Margery humble. They did not think of music as they buried him, but it rained—pearls spilling from the sky, then the giant leaves—and that was music of a kind.

  Every day, Enid went back and sat by Mr. Rawlings’s grave, her legs wide, fanning her face with her hand.

  “He was lucky. He was a lucky dog. I’m frightened everything will go wrong now.”

  She had a belly like a whale. But still. She seemed to diminish, as if she’d lost something that wasn’t just a dog but deep inside her. She became an even more concentrated version of herself, pared back to her essence, both fierce and starkly vulnerable. No matter how far they went—and they really didn’t get very far anymore, certainly nowhere near the top of the mountain—she always wanted to come back and sit with the dog. She collected stones to take to him, and as she arranged them on his grave, she talked about him endlessly. She blamed herself for going into the bathing pool. She blamed herself for letting him out of her sight, then being too slow to catch up. And even though Margery had tried not to think about him, as they sat by the dog’s grave and Enid wept, and talked and talked, and piled new stones on his grave, there was something untrammeled about her pain that reached inside Margery, too. It was the professor who came back to her. It was his loss she felt now.

  * * *

  —

  History is not made up by events alone, but also by what lies between the lines. The friendship Margery shared with the professor lasted ten years. Not that he called it that, and neither did she. By leaving it nameless, it remained secret, and without obligation. She felt lucky. Lucky that this great and distinguished man had chosen her, of all people, to work at his side. She accompanied him to his lectures, having copied out his notes and put them in order, and she sat not at the front where people might notice but hidden in the middle. They went to tearooms, where he always introduced her to the waitress as his niece, reaching beneath the table for her knee, and a little higher. He gave her a present every Christmas and birthday, small things like a new notebook, but he could have given her an acorn and she would have been happy. She called him Peter, which was not his first name, but it was as if everything was a secret between them, and that gave her a feeling of being special, even if no one said it.

  She was twenty-seven when her aunts died. They did it without fuss or, indeed, pain relief. They refused to rest. The bronchitis that killed them took one and th
en the other; in death, they went in a pair. Margery inherited everything, including the now almost-blind Barbara, who refused to wear glasses so that life was an infuriating blur and she was constantly bumping into it. She died a year later. Finally Margery was alone.

  One afternoon she was in Professor Smith’s office at the museum, pinning specimens, when she said, in a rush, “Professor, there is something I need to say. I now have the means to go to New Caledonia. I could fund our expedition.” It was not a speech she had planned—or, rather, it was not a speech she had planned to make—but now that she was in it, she didn’t dare stop. That she should not make a fool of herself or even hint at her true feelings had been such reliable guides until now, and it was like pushing herself into an unknown country where everything grew wild. She staggered on. “I’m in love with you, Professor. I love you with all my heart. I have loved you for years.”

  There was a pause during which she felt she would pass out with anticipation, and he turned wax pale. He confessed the truth. The truth took less than a minute. Afterward, he asked her forgiveness and wept, and said he did not know how he would live the rest of his life, but at least she was young, and there would be plenty more opportunities for her. His distress seemed to take up all the emotion in the room, so that what was left was a small, strange neutrality that made her say things she didn’t mean and also without emotion. She suggested that perhaps it would be better if she did not come to the museum again, simply voicing the worst scenario so that they could build back from there. Instead he thanked her for being so sensible. He had always known she was a strong young lady.

  And that was it. It was over. Ten years of her life had been snatched away, and yet he was actually wiping his eyes and opening the door. She put on her coat, her hat; she picked up her handbag, feeling that she had somehow done this to herself, wondering how it could be reversed before it was too late. Waiting for him to call her back. She left, her cheeks burning, her legs weak but still behaving like sensible legs, still moving, people glancing away as she passed—the cleaners, the pot washers—as if she had become a difficulty, an embarrassment, even a joke, that no one wished to see. The shame was crushing. She had no idea how a person could get over it.

  The truth had been as plain as it had once been about her father and brothers. Any other woman would have spotted it a mile off. And even though she was ransacked inside, she still could not connect with what that really felt like. In every glass case of the museum, she saw the reflected and slightly red face of a stranger. A young woman who was not good enough for pot washing, let alone love, yet who’d stupidly dared to lift her head above the parapet and believe she might be. The impossibility of her life was apparent to her as it had never been before. Most women of her age were already pushing baby carriages.

  Later, she trudged up the stairs to her flat. She got every photograph of herself that she could find and—meticulously, methodically—she cut her head from each one.

  A week later, she took a teaching job. She exchanged her love for a career in domestic science. There would be no more searching for beetles. No more wild talk of New Caledonia. She threw out her insect net, her killing jars; she put her notes into a box. She never saw him again. She was a woman who’d had a period of excitement, who’d dared to dream of adventure and the unknown, but who had retreated instead and made no further disturbance. She had not killed her love. How could you kill something that wasn’t there? She’d simply walked away.

  * * *

  —

  They were sitting by the dog’s grave. Enid was adding more stones. It wasn’t a mausoleum yet, but if they hadn’t been due to go home in a few weeks, it could easily have got there. Enid said, out of the blue, “He was married, wasn’t he? He had kids. That’s the reason Professor Smith broke your heart. That was the complication. The reason you gave up.”

  “Yes, Enid.”

  “Did he pay for your work?”

  “Of course not.”

  “He didn’t even pay you?”

  “I believed we were above that.”

  “Oh, Marge. That man took you for one hell of a ride.”

  It came back to Margery as if she had never felt it before, the hurt and humiliation, the limitation, too, like being squeezed into a tin, when you heap your love somewhere so small and thin. Sensing there was nothing she could say to heal this wound, and honest enough not even to try, Enid laid her hand on Margery’s. It was as neat as a shell.

  “We never had much luck in love, you and me.”

  “No.”

  “Or maybe we just looked in the wrong places.”

  “Maybe.”

  “But we have each other now. We’ll be okay.”

  Margery looked at her, and her eyes smarted with tears. “Yes, Enid. I think we will.”

  Enid lifted another stone. But she didn’t add it to the pile she’d made. She passed it to Margery. And, without having to ask, Margery understood what she needed to do, and put it on top of the pile. Enid passed another, another, another. A blue one, a round flat one, a stone with a hole through it. Margery added them to the grave. She thought of nothing except balancing them carefully so they would not fall. And gradually Professor Smith was yet another thing there was no need to carry, not even in the darkest recesses of herself. There was no need to keep Professor Smith or any memory of him. The man was gone.

  Enid hoisted herself up to get more stones. She said she wanted to find some real beauties to finish Mr. Rawlings’s grave. Margery continued to arrange those they had. She even began to make a little ring of ochre-pink ones toward the top. Then suddenly Enid shouted as if she’d been hurt and Margery sprang to her feet.

  Enid wasn’t hurt—she was clutching her belly—but her face had lost all color. She stood pointing at a shallow hole in the soft red earth, freshly made, leaves pulled back, pine needles in a heap.

  “The gun,” mouthed Enid. “The gun. It’s not here, Marge. Someone’s taken Taylor’s gun.”

  Mrs. Pope had decided to do a little investigating of her own. It wasn’t that she expected the women to be criminals. Not as such. She just wanted some rational explanation for the way she felt about them, the suspicion and unease she couldn’t bring herself to admit might be misplaced.

  So she was going to make a few innocent little inquiries. She had no idea where they would lead.

  It had all started when she was emptying her husband’s wastepaper basket: Maurice was getting careless. He dropped things into bins that staff should not see, and wives should not see, either—the man couldn’t keep his hands to himself. What she hadn’t expected to find were the torn-up scraps of a letter from the Natural History Museum woman. Intrigued, she put together the pieces like a jigsaw. The letter said something about needing his help to get a visa. Miss Benson had given the address of the boardinghouse where they were staying, and since it was only a short ride in the car, and since it was a lovely day, and since Mrs. Pope had nothing better to do, she decided to pay a visit.

  Just in a friendly way.

  The owner of the boardinghouse was one of those difficult French women. She complained extensively about a dog the women had smuggled in. She went on and on about this dog. No, she had no forwarding address for Miss Benson, because if she did, she would send her a bill for the dog, though now that Mrs. Pope mentioned it, she remembered there’d been some kind of issue with her luggage.

  “What kind of issue?”

  “It never arrived.”

  “Do you mean they left Nouméa without it?”

  The French woman shrugged. All she knew was that they’d gone in a jeep, very early in the morning.

  “A jeep?” Mrs. Pope was aware of sounding too excited. Alarm bells were ringing inside her, like chimes. She said, “I suppose they bought the jeep for the journey?”

  The woman shrugged again. All she knew was that she’d never seen the
m with a jeep before, and suddenly they had one. Mrs. Pope thanked her for being so helpful and promised that if she saw the women she would mention the complaints about the dog.

  It took several calls to find the lost-property offices for the airline, but once she had the right one, there were no more hitches. She drove straight there. Yes, they had received two items of luggage belonging to the passenger Margery Benson.

  So where were they now?

  They were in the cupboard, waiting to go back to Britain.

  Mrs. Pope moved her tongue precisely as if she were clipping out the words with scissors. “You mean that you have them here?”

  Yes, yes, said the very helpful official. Would she like to take them?

  Mrs. Pope said thank you, she would. She would like that very much. Splendid.

  The official asked if she could see Mrs. Pope’s paperwork. Mrs. Pope said she could not understand what difference her paperwork would make. She was simply trying to help a poor British woman who’d been left stranded on the island without her luggage.

  The official said that if she did not have Mrs. Pope’s paperwork, she could not let her take the luggage.

  She said in her best French, “Seriously?”

  The official looked right back at her and said, “Yes. Very seriously.” As if she was actually accusing Mrs. Pope of deceit.

  Mrs. Pope drove home and collected her paperwork, but by the time she got back, the office was closed. She watched the official, flipping the sign on the door from Ouvert to Fermé. She rapped on the glass. The official waved and pulled down the blind. It wasn’t even midafternoon.

  The office was closed for the rest of the weekend, though Mrs. Pope drove down twice while Maurice was at the golf club. She was in a foul mood, even at the concert that evening in aid of the local missionary school. It hurt to keep smiling.

  She went back with her paperwork, first thing on Monday. It was a different official this time, and he said nothing about needing authorization. She waited as he went to a cupboard at the back to fetch the luggage, feeling a sudden prick of disdain that it should be so simple. He brought out a battered plastic suitcase, not even real leather, and an incredibly heavy Gladstone bag, both of which he placed at her feet.