Under Glass

by Claire Robertson

  COSMO

  I can whistle. Fuze has taught me. He has taught me to imitate blackbirds, their friendly questions. My sisters cannot. And they may not. Forbidden or incapable, it’s all the same.

  I can whistle, and sit on a pony with Fuze walking by my side, behind the saddle, leaning across to hold me. I do not need Fuze to hold me upright on a horse! I do not need Fuze, but Fuze truly does not need me. He is formal as the Queen’s Minister. But he teaches me to whistle to the blackbirds.

  My sisters’ tombazanes would like to chase me to my bath, chase me among the chickens, catch me and tickle me and find me out. They long to catch me – I feel them wanting this. Griffin keeps them away. Griffin for me, tombazanes for girls.

  We all of us want Fuze, but he does not need foolish us under his heels. He cannot always be worrying about where foolish bantwana are, and this, and that.

  I am only six. There is still time for this all to have been normal: guessing wrong. Guessing right.

  3

  ON A VISIT TO THE SHORE one morning, she arrives as one of the wheels is being loaded from a surf boat onto the head and spread arms of a carrier man, standing waist deep in the small waves; he buckles under his load and screams and sinks beneath the water, and is hastily rescued by four of his fellows.

  She shrinks back, hoping to escape culpability, but feels herself known as the guilty party as the five men next hold their breath and crouch together beneath the sea and tug the wheel free of the sucking sand, and half float, half carry it to the beach, where they tilt it onto its rim and lean into it to roll it to a cart-sized stack of trunks, bales and bits that she would not have recognised as hers but for ‘Chetwyn-Lady Lee-Port Natal’ in the General’s housekeeper’s round hand painted on the bales and trunks and written on labels tied to the rest.

  This she sees when she approaches, with a feeling of disbelief, to inspect the pile. She feels a moment of biliousness, as a glutted diner might feel at a new and groaning table, although she has been, if anything, starved for the last while. Biliousness or effort under a weight, as though she would have the carrying of even the lightest portmanteau for even three paces, which of course she will not.

  These feelings pass, and she is readily engaged in recognition of this or that piece of luggage, remembering new clothes and dainty leather.

  There is cordial, she remembers. There are jams, potted veal and a hardy sort of biscuit, and tins of milk – she had imagined an arrival picnic. She had pictured a spreading tree and hoped for sea cows in the distance; that had been as far as she could see.

  There are, at the General’s insistence, a half-dozen packets of Persian powder, which she itches to get at. There surely is some sort of insect-killing preparation in this place – the profits alone would urge this – but she has been unaccountably reluctant to ask about it while her mind and sympathies have been turned almost wholly inward, as though to firm up the tent walls with her own body, her back and arms, and fold her and her daughter, and tall Griffin, and all that they have been before now, in several layers, and keep them private.

  Now here are their things! The agent, having greeted her with the irritated air of an actor seen before curtain-up, is managing the matter of their transport from the little boat to the beach and the beach to the bed of a wagon. Now she is offered a place next to the driver, and the loading is done (with the wheels the first to be lifted onto the bed of the wagon and soon lost beneath the rest of the Chetwyn chattels).

  She is helped up. Two of the carrier men wedge themselves among the luggage. The man beside her speaks to a boy, and the boy speaks into the ear of a small ox, and he and his train of coupled beasts heave and strain and start them moving.

  The agent walks alongside the wagon. He ignores Mrs Chetwyn and says to the driver, ‘Allow her the choice, then take the rest to Sawley’s. He has laid out for a corner there.’ He strikes the side of the wagon bed with a sidelong fist as they pass, as if to signal his satisfaction at being shot of it, and perhaps of her.

  They are two days into their new estate of fresh linens and other clothes, a mattress laid over the seawrack bed – of Sophronia’s other dolly and Mrs Chetwyn’s toilet water and better petticoats, and pots that allow them to return borrowed pots to Berriball, and a treat of jam and Brooke’s soap – when Chetwyn comes home to find them so cosy and settled in the tent. It is charming now with shawls and a screen, a Turkey rug and a lamp and a gutta-percha ewer where there had been a woebegone square of tilting candles, worn grass, flattened wrack and make-do.

  This is how he arrives: with his head poking into the tent. Sophronia is on her walk with Griffin. Mrs Chetwyn is laid back on the bed, opening and closing a fan above her head, playing with the shadows like a kitten. At least she is clothed.

  She knows in the instant of his looking in (alloyed with fright, alloyed with joy) that she will never be able to paint for him the tent of their time until two days ago, that their privation will be a private memory forever, and exist between them, and she makes herself balance it against what he must have borne on his expedition. But now that he has seen the quaint pantomime set of the tent that he found for them on the high ground under the tree – the inviting bower – the other place of flies, ugliness, boredom and fear is struck as at a scene change.

  How could these be her thoughts upon so wondrous an eventuality as the return of Chetwyn? But chide herself – and feel true shame – as she might, these are her thoughts at this moment: that the world is telling a lie about her, and there is no point at all to her protesting it is not so.

  She is risen, embraced, swiftly out into the bright day: there is no wagon, none of the pale cargo she imagined. Chetwyn has already been to the factor who keeps rooms at the top of the street, and has had his ivory weighed – a pair of smallish tusks, he says – and the skins are with a fellmonger. Most of it not hunted, it emerges, but traded for. But later! He will tell her all, later! Here they both are, in Africa!

  In a moment he leaves again, for a bath he has arranged at the hotel, and a shave of the beard he tugs comically and holds pressed to his neck with one hand as he places a kiss on her forehead. And then he is gone, his crossing the street to the tent seemingly a momentary generous impulse between his arranged ceremonies of return.

  Sophronia arrives a few moments after he leaves, and her face lights up and then subsides into puzzlement as Mrs Chetwyn tells her Papa is returned! And is gone again, and is to return within the hour, and they must hurry to brush her hair and fit her into her other dress, and wash her hands and face, and off with her old pinafore.

  In the midst of this bustle and brushing, Mrs Chetwyn improves her own appearance and Griffin spirits her sleeping place out of the tent. Together the women make up the bed with even fresher linen.

  In a few hours – after a family meal at the hotel, and seeing Griffin and Sophronia settled in Berriball’s tent, and Berriball rolled in a blanket by his own fire – Mr and Mrs Chetwyn retire.

  In due course they lie in an embrace of such comfort on the stifling mattress that it must set the standard for their beds to come, beds of cowhair and horsehair and feathers and coir, under thatch, shingle, slate and tile. They lie in one another’s arms and talk, and she will remember for the rest of her life the things he says, and the shiver of intimacy, how he opens his mind to hers, and she opens hers to his, as though they are not this husband-and-wife, father-and-mother pair, but elevated beings, and the canvas above them has lifted. She had forgotten this, and the comfort of the other, his gentling weight, the tenderness his private sounds called forth in her, the answering urgency too.

  ‘The land is uneasy. Almost uncanny,’ he says. He makes a picture of suspicious homesteads and women alone and marks of newness and strange patterns in the way the cattle are herded and rivers forded. He speaks of a sense of tremors, the quivers that will sweep across the flanks of a horse hours after it has been in a carriage wreck – tremors under the surface, startlement never far, nerves rinsed a
nd drying taut. But oh, the look of it. ‘It has a way with hills,’ he says, and strokes the air as if stroking an animal’s flank, and speaks of hills that follow one another in successive swells to the north, or cut off to the east, all sharing the same blunt, sudden end, to make a valley shared by seven hills, or nine or twenty, refreshing the eye with rise, dip and fold wherever one looks.

  ‘They love their cattle,’ he says. ‘They name them and give them beauty marks, and the thing of it is, when you look at the beasts with their eyes, they are lovable.’

  He is silent.

  She has her head on his arm and her arm across his chest. She is turned towards him, and now he turns towards her and enfolds her in both his arms, and speaks again. He speaks of his love for her and Sophronia, and of their future. He says ‘They will never understand, in England. But we will join ourselves to this place,’ and she feels him breathe. The tighter he holds her, the more she feels herself expand, to take up more space than she has been aware of filling before. Then she turns inward and is safe, and she feels him grow expansive and unstable beside her. They are folded perfectly, one into the other.

  She is almost asleep when he says, ‘There is one come back with me. His name is Fuze’ – he says it ‘Foo-zeh’ – and he is asleep before she can understand.

  In the morning, there he is, the young man, squatting by the Chetwyn family fire while she, blushing in the tent, finishes her thorough toilette, and ties, buttons and hooks herself back into her stays, drawers, chemise, stockings, petticoats, wool crinoline, boots, skirt and bodice, and parts the tent curtains on the day. She is by then so used to her outdoor parlour that she steps smoothly over to the upended stump of wood that is her stool and settles her hand lightly on the teapot on the camp table. She finds it cold. Griffin hunkers at the fire, and a black kettle there is beginning to steam.

  Sophronia, dressed and sporting around her waist, along with the Berriball ribbon, a strip of uncured leather with a square of red and white beadwork, is bubbling over with Papa this and Papa that. Across the fire, this Fuze. Mrs Chetwyn nods to him. He nods back. Griffin watches him from under her brows. Mrs Chetwyn has Sophronia fetch the caddy from the chest in the tent and, busy with measuring out leaves, turns her body somewhat away from him. Soon the milk seller, making her way among the tents, reaches theirs, and Fuze unfolds himself and gets to his feet.

  While Griffin takes charge of the decanting and paying, Mrs Chetwyn watches the milkmaid with Fuze. The girl is addressing him from the side of her mouth in the saucy, sub rosa manner of any London girl – ‘What brings you here, brother? Prospecting new fields?’ Mrs Chetwyn recognises the tones of territoriality, friendly interest, flirtation, and hears Fuze humour her but also close her down in the manner of a man who is guarding the face he presents to the world.

  Mrs Chetwyn, in sideways glances, makes him out as short, solid, young. Her Griffin easily has a head on Chetwyn’s man. She reads in his pierced ears and naked crown the only clues she has to the status of a native man, and puts him as being at an in-between time of life, some years her junior. His hair is cut close and begins high on his forehead over hooded eyes and a mouth that, even as he negotiates the delicate matter of the milk girl’s teasing in front of Mrs Chetwyn, is relaxed.

  The girl leaves the camp and Fuze casts a look towards Mrs Chetwyn as if to apologise, in what she judges to be a most self-collected way.

  Chetwyn returns, and makes the introductions, presenting Fuze to his wife half as servant and half as guide, it seems to her. As they settle to a breakfast of eggs and tea, a vague impression formed by Mrs Chetwyn resolves itself, and she recognises that Fuze is regarding her, Chetwyn, Griffin, Sophronia, the tent, their clothing, the teapot, the entirety of them, in much the way that she has seen men at exhibitions look at models of intended machines, a smarter carriage spring, a better coupling or newer valve – that is to say, with a mixture of interest and appetite, and approval somewhat withheld, waiting for the proof of it.

  He takes a sturdy carved spoon from his bundle and squats to eat his eggs.

  Berriball comes to their hearth to receive Chetwyn’s thanks for looking after the women and to ask in a muted aside to reserve the right to buy Chetwyn’s tent or at least its location when he makes the remove that must surely follow his rejoining his family. Chetwyn readily agrees. In speaking of their removal, Berriball gestures vaguely to his left, further inland, beyond the largest of the trading stores, and indeed after breakfast Chetwyn calls to the man Fuze and they depart in that direction to find out a better home and reacquaint themselves with the business of the town.

  Moments after he leaves, Mrs Chetwyn recollects the wheels, and is reminded by them of the letter. It seems impossible to her that she could have forgotten it for even this night and morning.

  She and Griffin clear away the meal and as they work Mrs Chetwyn notices a difference in herself. It would not have been apparent to an observer, perhaps, but now, when she bends, folded cloth in hand, to pick up the kettle, holding her skirts out of the ash and coals with the other hand, she is not so much giving her back to the outside world as turning herself inward to the family hearth. The motion may be the same, but the sentiment is its own better part by far. It is not easy to sigh, laced as she is, but she takes what extra breath she can manage and settles her shoulders.

  Sophronia is tripping between her mother and Griffin, carrying a cup and saucer with solemn care to the basin of crockery, giving the fire a stagily wide berth, scolding ‘No, Monkey, no!’, braced bravely and smacking her hands together at the creature that leans forward from the tree above her, weaving its head to see beyond her to the larder box.

  This will be Sophronia’s first memory: Griffin and Mother, the green morning, the monkey seeming to hesitate between mocking her and fleeing from her, the sense of there being, close by, Father and Fuze. ‘Foo-zeh,’ she sings, tilting her head in time to the syllables. ‘Foo-zeh.’

  Already she has moved on and is standing before her mother, chubby hands splayed for judgement and, judged grubby, scrubbed.

  Mrs Chetwyn gathers a cloth bag of paper scraps, twine, rule and carpet needle, and settles to tearing papers. She thinks about Fuze. Is he guide or is he servant? She would have known in an instant were she anywhere but here, considering someone presented to her by Chetwyn.

  Chetwyn, along with every other coming fellow, has a theory of the ascent of the species: that the man to be is he who leaves his clan and steps a bit further along the beach or across the swamp or over the mountain. Chetwyn’s theory about the rise of Man by the agency of the exceptional man naturally recognises in himself one such specimen, and she guesses that he sees in Fuze another.

  Fuze’s appraising look, the look she deciphered at the fire as they breakfasted, flatters Chetwyn’s theory, and yet Mrs Chetwyn pictures him in a complete, sudden tableau alighting from a London hackney cab, clothed everywhere but for his hands and face, his features closed down and dulled to city dullness. All that he has to offer, and all due to him, is reduced to a faintly hostile or indifferent or predatory transaction of coin and insult …

  Griffin comes to squat by her side, and pierce papers for Sophronia to thread onto her string. Mrs Chetwyn tears a square of softer paper in two and passes the halves along.

  London had spread so quickly, so far, in the five years between her leaving for India and returning with Chetwyn that she can almost believe that this is the world’s destiny, to be cobbled and raised in blocks and corners and lost to factory whistles, steam and clatter and birdless silence, even this bright bay, full of greyed Fuzes and milkmaids tied into corsets and anchored by skirts.

  But of course their undress is unsupportable.

  Of course this wild familiarity with the world must be domesticated.

  She settles Griffin and the child with the smaller scraps of paper to produce spills, and steps into the tent to fetch from safekeeping the great letter, and place it on the bed, ready for Chetwyn.


  4

  IT IS A WONDER THAT a letter designed to carry such meaning should, in the end, be so ominously vague. Knowing it contains his father’s gift to start them on their life in Africa, Chetwyn takes it with open, happy greed. Mrs Chetwyn stands by his side as he reads it with fine skimming over the greeting and pulls his jaw into the shape of comic terror as the hand devolves from his parent’s to that of a lawyer. He reads this portion – it is no more than a page – and grows silent, sinks to the bed and gives it his more sober attention. He turns the paper about as if to give it a chance to change its content. Mrs Chetwyn, flushing with curiosity as though curiosity bears heat, sees him hollow somewhat, and feels an answering hollowness in herself.

  She waits, unmoving, unspeaking, her pity for his anguish battling her own fury of impatience. But at last he is ready to tell her. He keeps hold of the letter as he gives her the main point of its contents. As she listens she cannot take her eyes from the sheets of paper, now moving with his hand to sketch a gesture, now clamped by his elbow to his side as he contorts to simultaneously ease his collar and run a hand along his scalp, lifting his hair.

  When at last she understands, she cannot hate the letter as he does: it promises them land – land that will be purchased for them with his father’s capital, though he will not name the upper limit they may spend. But the however-many morgen will stay in his widower father’s name, and this is the cause of Chetwyn’s pain. At last Mrs Chetwyn is allowed to read the letter, and can embark on her comfort work: it will surely pass to them upon his death, and he is nearly sixty; it must be that in under a decade it will be theirs. His. Surely. And meanwhile will, by his father’s interest in it, benefit by having a sponsor who will be their helping partner in its improvement, surely. She already knows that here, capital is everything, and by this means they will have capital.