Under Glass

by Claire Robertson

  A dozen steps along the path through the neighbouring tents and she appreciates the gifts Chetwyn has made them: the grass floor and the shade of the great tree. Their settlement is a few dozen tents, most of them either in shade but on sand, or on firmer ground and without a tree to shelter under.

  There are trivets and tripods over the fires before each tent or lean-to; she will need one of these, or one of each. A few of the tents have, to one side of the opening, a stand that holds a basin and ewer, and this she covets, too. Without meeting their neighbours, mother and daughter are soon beyond the encampment and in the town proper, to flatter the scattering of buildings on a sandy plain.

  They approach a long, low, whitewashed building. She becomes aware that two men standing together on the wooden walkway in the shade of the thatched eaves are discussing her. She stretches her neck, draws herself up, turns her head towards Sophronia to hide her face from the men and is pleased. What is new here is prized, and she is new. What is rare is prized everywhere, and here she is rare. There are many more men in the place than women; this was avidly discussed on board, among them, although without anyone venturing to say out loud what this might mean for the women heading for the place.

  She tugs at her gloves to tighten them against the webbing of her fingers. Anchorless in this place, she is somehow still tethered by long lines leading on one side to Chetwyn in Old Panda’s country and on the other to their goods out in the bay, deep in the hold of the Lady Lee.

  With the birth of her child Mrs Chetwyn acquired a habit, a mental tic, in which she would imagine the very worst that might happen – in a flash, a brutal, vivid image that she conjured and flinched from at the same time. She wishes she did not do this, but she does. Now, as she stands a few steps inside the low building that seems to be at once a chandler’s, grocer’s and ironmonger’s, she sees great wheels dropped by sailors, falling fathoms deep into the bay, taking their heap of crates and boxes with them in a tangle of ropes and other bindings, all gone, in an instant lost. Had the storeman or the proprietor or his pair of customers been watching Mrs Chetwyn at this moment they would have seen her set her mouth as though against pain, and seen the moment pass.

  She has fewer referents for her morbid ritual when it comes to Chetwyn’s fate – Zulus, Africa, elephants – but she helplessly conjures tusks, claws, jaws, trampling: her elephant is Indian with mean red eyes, her lion a tiger. Fast as lantern flashes he is opened, agonised, gone, and she is back in the store and among barrels of greasy nails and a smell of newness.

  She had discovered a nest of supplies in the tent – hard soap, tooth powder, a pot of scented grease. They were English in make, and familiar to her, if not from her own household then from the hoardings of omnibuses and the sandwich boards of Home and her cantonment home. The fact of English goods in a trunk in a tent on this sandy plain at the lower end of Africa did not occur to Mrs Chetwyn as a matter for wonder or even notice. Instead they struck her as both wantonly immodest and too modest, in the sense of cheap. These were not what they used, but she supposed Chetwyn had never seen their toilet soap in any state but unwrapped, and was not to know. She would set this right before his return. The matter of the right sort of soap brings the matter of his eventual return squarely into the realm of the unremarkable and inevitable next week or the week after that. A matter merely of waiting.

  It is her turn to be noticed by the shopman and she comes forward, Sophronia by her side, and finds other soap – another name, also recognisable – and pays over her coins. She remarks only that, judging by his close interest in the transaction, she could have traded them for more than she had done. At this first inkling of how this place might work – that coins are scarce enough for new coins to be so artlessly welcomed – she knows she has learned one of its secrets.

  Back at the tent, Griffin has water boiling and is, as Mrs Chetwyn and Sophronia reach their fireplace, raising a cannikin of milk to her nose to sniff it. A twist of paper is laid on a cloth on the grass, and cups and a new-looking tin teapot. Tea, at last.

  The milk that Griffin is adding to their cups, a competent tilt of the cannikin for each, has come not from a tin in the stores in the tent, but is fresh, brought by a pair of young women whose passage through the little settlement is bringing out the encampment’s people, tent by tent, or bringing back to their canvas those residents who have been abroad gathering food or attending to private matters in the bushes.

  Mrs Chetwyn stands quite still in the thin steam from the cup held to her face, watching the milkmaids move among the tents, then move off, towards the thatched huts and daub houses that comprise the rest of this end of the town. Sophronia, too, is on her feet and staring, unblinking, at the pair. Mrs Chetwyn thinks she ought perhaps to tell her not to look, but she checks her instruction to herself to put down her cup and hold her hands over her daughter’s eyes. As a matter of practicality, if she adopts this course she will have to keep Sophronia constantly blindfolded or at least blinkered if she is never to see a naked person, for now that the village is waking, does not every second one come, bare-legged, bare-chested, bare-armed, bare-buttocked – she dares to form the word in her mind and why should she not when they prove the fact of it right there on the sandy street – yes: bare-buttocked. Naked as art.

  Sophronia has anyway, unprompted, turned her attention from their naked neighbours to her milky tea.

  At the tent nearest theirs, a man Mrs Chetwyn judges to be about her own age – which is to say, in his very early twenties – has emerged and has dragged into the open area in front of his dwelling an arrangement of wood battens that he quickly secures until they are formed into a pair of three-cornered frames joined with crosspieces. He ducks back into his tent and re-emerges with a pile of books that he sets on the ground. One after the other he peels them – for they are damp – from the pile, opens them with delicacy and hangs them, splayed, by their spines on the battens.

  As he works he seems to be aware of the girl and the two women watching him, but does not acknowledge them until he has completed his task. There are a dozen or more books and many more pamphlets spread in the sun like seabirds when at last he straightens his back and looks over his work. Then he turns and crosses the few yards from his territory to the edge of theirs, and Mrs Chetwyn puts down her cup, shakes her skirts and comes to meet him. He holds a hand on his hat and he raises the circle of straw and says, ‘Mainfred Berriball. How do you do? And you must be Captain Chetwyn’s people. His, er, party.’

  Mrs Chetwyn confirms this, gratified that Chetwyn has spoken of their coming.

  ‘Been expecting you for a week or so. Mind you, it’s a good thing you did not arrive earlier. Few days ago, almighty storm, washed clean through the lot of us, though I dare say you might have been spared even that,’ and he rolls his eyes with pantomime envy at the Chetwyn tent, which, as well as being on grassed ground, is at a higher elevation than the rest of the tents. At noticing this and learning that it is a covetable circumstance, Mrs Chetwyn feels suddenly that she misses her husband most keenly.

  The neighbour, the Berriball, is gesturing at the effect of the flood waters on his library, now hazing the air with moisture as the sun does its work. Mrs Chetwyn steps closer and makes out the titles of some of them: Honniball on Sheep; The Science and Practice of Cotton; Old Partridge’s Goat Farming; Indigo: A Guide to its Cultivation, Harvesting and Process.

  These have been arranged along the longer, lower rungs of the frame. Above them, a score or more flimsier documents curl at the corners and buckle: pamphlets and slight books on joinery, carpentry, painting landscapes, portraits, decorative finials, Bauernmalerei, on carving in wood, stone, ivory, horn and tooth, working thread or yarn into embroidery, crochet, tapestry, knitting, nets.

  There is a collection on collecting: plants, butterflies, shells, moths, beetles, and as if to answer the practical question they raise, two small books on drying and mounting these and mammalian, avian and reptilian gleanings, too. At
the very top is a pocket book whose title Mrs Chetwyn does not exactly make out, though she guesses from a glimpse at its list of nouns and premises that it has to do with the dress, grammar and comportment particular to being a gentleman.

  Berriball snatches it away almost the instant her eye falls on it, and flings it into his tent with a sideways flick of his hand that marks him as a sportsman, whatever else he is determined to make himself over into in this new place.

  He is a bright-complexioned, high-coloured man with eager blue eyes and vivid hair, harbouring in his midsection

  an oven of vitality as he stands, fists planted in his sides, turning this way and that as if to say, Now point me to my next task and set me going.

  In a moment Mrs Chetwyn has been volunteered as that task – acquainting her with D’Urban, at least – and after he has most adeptly chased a troop of dark-faced monkeys back into the tree, and called over a child and set him to watch the Chetwyn and Berriball tents against a return of the raiders, and assured Mrs Chetwyn that they are free here to walk as they are walking, together, under the properly respectable cloak of colonial permission, Berriball shows them back onto the main way of the place, Mrs Chetwyn by his side, Sophronia and Griffin following. Mrs Chetwyn does not reveal that she has already come this way today, by herself.

  Before they have reached the first cross street on the sandy roadway, Mrs Chetwyn knows Berriball for perhaps a generation out of the servant class, from people who are well set up but not rich, and while certainly not of the city or the port, not quite countrified either – so a village, in Essex by his accent, and she would guess son of a small shopkeeper. As she sniffs the air and follows the spoor of his lexicon, dress, ways with gesture, the adjustments his body makes or does not make to hers, he is likewise reading her, or at least trying to.

  She is not a tall woman (she is towered over by her child’s ayah), and perhaps too slender to flatter the fashion that year for fringe and border, and chevrons, and stripes. Her complexion is delicate, her eyes grey, her mouth twitching with good humour, ill humour, resignation, anyone’s to read. Beneath her bonnet is an abundance of many-coloured hair.

  Chetwyn, who was his neighbour for a week before he headed for the wilder country, Chetwyn he had marked as coming down as he, Berriball, was going up, perhaps descended from the younger end of a county lot, a few generations back. A rising class is unsettling the old certainties, and somewhere in the swirl of unsorted Englishmen, that is where he would put Chetwyn. Moneyed, perhaps, by his fine, jealous, careless treatment of it as both nothing and everything.

  Berriball, guessing by what he can see and hear, recognises in Mrs Chetwyn the churn of old and new, of rules living alongside fine scoffing, but can put no nicer point on it than that. She mentioned India, but he cannot exactly set her down as one of the rosy cargo sent out to loiter ‘on Calcutta quay/Where woman goes for mart the same as mangoes’ (Hood’s Humorous Poems being among the damp booklets). For one thing, she speaks well, using the modern idiom and manner, and carries herself in a way that announces her worth. Nor can he put her down as neatly as combining in herself anxieties about her birth and complacency about her wealth, or, as he puts it, ‘Vice versus.’ He would guess she is complacent about both, anxious about both, as if the rules might not entirely apply to her.

  One of the very few words by which Mrs Chetwyn betrays her unorthodoxy is ‘hay’, which she never says but with a pulsing of her throat, a loosening of her jaw, to produce a sweeter word, a word more like ‘here’, like ‘heh’: Bringing in heh for the horses, the here stacked in the fields, a humble standing challenge to winter.

  What would she say? She would claim that hers was a story to be told forwards. Let her husband have a history. She will manage their lives’ invention. In this regard she does not doubt that she has stepped (or been hefted) onto the new land as a better version of who she might be in England, or even – or perhaps more so – under the glass cloche of life in India. Here is a place to settle matters differently.

  They are on a shabby plain across which white men, a very few white women, and rather more native men and women cross paths, every one of them, to Mrs Chetwyn’s eye, moving with a sort of survivalist sloth, as if aiming no further than the next bite or sup or place to lay his or her head. If a city (Calcutta, London) is like water and has a flow, here the circumstance of there being too few people and too little purpose, and the overall sparseness of people and purpose combined, have the effect of making it water that has settled. Port Natal, she thinks, is puddling and thickening, contracting in the sun.

  ‘You want to see it at the return of a hunting party,’ says its guide and defender Berriball, ahead of her by months and rushing to remedy her silent contemplation of the scene. ‘And we have had a dance not a month since in the general store.’

  On her passage through London en route to Calcutta five years before, she and her party had been drawn like pins to the Great Exhibition, among which she had chiefly admired the glassed-in tremendous trees. She had not then heard of Port Natal, let alone looked out for its products. Later, when she was wed and returned to England with her husband and child to prepare for the colonial life, his father had got out the catalogue of the Works of Industry of All Nations. In its many pages the Port of Natal, partnered with the Cape of Good Hope, warranted not quite two columns; when they winnowed out the larger colony, Natal had perhaps three mentions that were its alone. It sent the usual cotton, and the usual chess pieces turned in figured wood. And it sent a pair of polished ox horns still attached to their head, measuring from tip to tip eight feet four inches, and twenty-one inches in circumference.

  The Cape had seemed to her eccentrically keen to be admired for its sea-elephant oil and sheep-tail oil and walnut oil, but even it had better products to show and many more that were wrought, not just cut from the body of an animal. Let alone the spheres-taming machines of the better countries. Already she was ashamed, in Hull.

  Now that she is here there is nothing to do with this embarrassment but begin to spin from it a prickly pride.

  They are passing one of the long, low buildings that, under its cap of thatch, might be a grocer, hotel, public house or magistrate’s office. A group of young, naked men is clustered about a white man who has in his hand a pyrotechnic penny cracker; he strikes a lucifer with his other hand and holds it to the flax wick. The young men watch the fizzing wick closely and sniff with appetite at the smoke it produces. The man holding the cracker keeps an eye on the narrowing gap between the flame and the touchpaper and, at the moment he judges right, flings it into the air over their heads, where it bursts with a black cracking report, scattering the audience, and bringing from the store a red-faced man to berate the company, ‘Fire! Thatch! Have a care you fools!’ The white men nearby laugh and point at the fleeing youngsters.

  Mrs Chetwyn notices, however, that one of the young men has moved towards the man who lit the fuse, not away, and even now is braced in a martial stance, arm drawn back over his shoulder, his hand in a fist as if to clutch the staff of a spear, his gaze fierce and fixed on the man, demanding that his challenge be met.

  Sophronia cringes into Griffin’s sari folds and Berriball is drawling, ‘… starting like girls before a boys’ trick.’

  In this way the first morning is paid out: newness, tent life, finding food, removing several of her many petticoats.

  Towards noon Berriball makes a bold gesture to test the outline of his neighbour, and his new freedoms in this place, and presents to her little daughter a blue ribbon; he reads some hesitation in Mrs Chetwyn at the gift and so he quickly kneels before the child and ties it around her waist and touches his own kerchief and makes a joke about the ‘blue tribe of Port Natal’. The child, thank God, laughs.

  Among Berriball’s damp books is a pamphlet of a dozen or so pages whose title appeals to Mrs Chetwyn. After a meal at Berriball’s fire, of pumpkin and some sort of beef, seized by the business of making a start, and as much by th
e sort of competitive, proving motivation that is part of the fabric of her marriage, Mrs Chetwyn decides she wants a Zulu Companion of her own, and sketches a plan to learn phrases and greetings to astonish Chetwyn when he comes. She crosses to the general stores again and crosses back to the tent with a crisp copy in her hands: The Zulu Companion, offered to the Natal Colonist to facilitate his intercourse with the natives.

  Now the front wall of the tent may be dropped to enclose their bright, small room; now they can strip to shifts and petticoats and loosen at last her stays and corset; now, having set herself a task, she can rest. She is not many words beyond ‘barbaric dialect of their servants’ before Sophronia’s soft snores and Griffin’s snuffles fill the tent.

  Mrs Chetwyn abandons her close reading of the booklet’s introduction and flicks through the pages.

  In the dimming tent, with the swooping, hooting, barbaric dialect of birds without and the animal sleep noises close by, on the edge of sleep herself, Mrs Chetwyn reads from a page in a murmur: ‘Uvela ngapina … Oo-vela-nga-pina. Where do you come from?’

  COSMO

  I know this about us even before I learn that I am not unique: that we are a landmark. Travellers like to remark on it when they crest Missenden’s low hill and gain the front steps. They present it as tribute to secure their welcome: ‘Watched out for you the whole way – Rathbone took the prize for spotting the house, didn’t you, Rathbone?’

  She accepts this and asks them in. Every traveller is invited in, for a meal, for tea, for cold tea or a glass of the rum just then being distilled on the estate. Those who would not have gained admittance never think to ask. They decide for themselves, at the bottom of the hill or earlier, whether or not they will be welcome. As for those who never make the approach, well, we are no doubt a beacon on the road for them, too. We certainly feel their regard, we who dwell in the castle.