Under Glass

by Claire Robertson

  By noon they have cut a perimeter and made a start, breaking open about a quarter of it, turning the green to reddish brown, flinging small bushes and stones to the edge of the patch with barely a pause in their rhythm of punching iron into earth. Mrs Chetwyn puts on Chetwyn’s hat, and she and Sophronia and Griffin gather the stones into heaps.

  Chetwyn returns with the load of clay and approves her decision; she notices the way he stands, hands on his hips, half his face busy with some casual business of its own – stretching his lower lip over his teeth – while his eyes take her in, take in the digging-over, and he nods. She receives his approval with a spark of mutiny, as if it does not so much seal her decision as diminish it. She takes private revenge: she knows Chetwyn hopes for a Zulu nickname such as men in the town boast about – He Who Sees Farthest, He Who Wakes the Hills, some romantic African badge. She looks again at his elbows staking out twice his body width and chooses a word that could almost be Zulu. Akimbo, she names him, with a silent echo of the women’s easy laughter behind her blameless face.

  The thatcher comes with newspapers from home, three months’ worth, and in them Lucknow is besieged and their once-home a scene of horror and trial. Already the penny-a-liners have arrived and the journals have given it a name – The Indian Mutiny. Chetwyn combs the reports for mention of his men; Mrs Chetwyn imagines hiding Sophronia in the diminishing, dim rooms of the Residency, and it repeats on her at odd moments. Missenden is at once made safer and less safe by the story of Lucknow.

  The thatch extends on every side a fair way beyond the walls of the house’s three rooms, over a narrow veranda the women have floored in shining brown; it is raised about eight inches from the earth, and marked at intervals with forked uprights (in the end they have cut down an entire copse).

  Fuze and the women spend a few weeks raising a hut for him some way from the house; it is round, and attracts Sophronia as a pet or toy might: she laughs to see it, and uses it in the songs she makes up as she plays, and has to be discouraged from visiting it on a Sunday, when Missenden rests and does not see Fuze from sunup to sundown.

  At last every table, pot and chemise is off the pile in the second tent, and the first tent’s bedroom transplanted to the house, and the brass bed assembled and dressed, and there are even pictures on the whitewashed walls, and candle-holders with their silver halos. Oil lamps grace the tables and Patent Sperm stands ready.

  A land crew is due after the rainy season, months away, and for a while the place hangs in suspension between great work done and great work to come. Mrs Chetwyn completes her map, exaggerating the golden square crossed at the diagonals that is their house, and including in its features the future sugar lands at Chetwyn’s direction. They do not doubt that before the thatch is dark, the sugar will be in.

  All will be as they intend it to be. Have they not made a home where no house was, and eaten lettuce from their own earth? She bends to making a fair copy of the map to send to Gordon Villa, and breathes past her body’s heaviness.

  The land crew comes with a rumble of wagons and men. There is a fury of stumping, a sustained ripping attack on the slopes of the land, and at intervals shouts that stop Mrs Chetwyn in her tracks, for these are surely men’s intimate sounds, broadcast. She listens amazed.

  The Chetwyn plough is augmented by two more, and the Boer boy, who left them five months before, is welcomed back and gives satisfactory praise for all they have done with the mud he hauled and the wood he cut.

  Mrs Chetwyn and Griffin bake wheat bread in batches and send it, warm, to the men. All morning they work in the kitchen, with the iron glowing sullen red. She has the energy of a man, and by late afternoon feels the first familiar clench, and her forehead slicks over as her body remembers what is coming. Chetwyn sleeps elsewhere that night and keeps Sophronia by him.

  Griffin is with her in the bedroom, rubbing her back, bringing hot water and cloths, and muttering under her breath without cease. Mrs Chetwyn recognises in Griffin the same emotion that grips her – fatalism and fear, mixed: what is coming must be borne and cannot be borne, both at the same time. Sometimes she sleeps. Sometimes Griffin holds her hand and strokes her forehead. A candle gutters and Griffin lights a new one from it.

  Mrs Chetwyn is still in the grip of it at dawn. Soon, in the short intervals before the terrible waves break in her again, she hears the sounds of plough and harness. They had been coming closer to the house all of yesterday, and now are working on the stretch just beyond the homestead.

  From time to time her groans match the cries of the men as they drive the oxen to the difficult work of breaking ground. It is faintly comforting, and she imagines Fuze’s voice among them, then imagines him exhorting her, and in a delirium and with a roar of pain and will, she brings forth her child, a daughter, and finds herself still doubled with the terrible expelling urge. In confusion about what can be happening to her, and, crying at the injustice that when she has done what she must, has given all the strength she has, she is whipped on like an ox they will kill with this work – and she does think she might die – her body heaves forth another.

  Twins!

  She feels too weak to do anything but lie back and watch as Griffin fusses around the bundles, but if she could rouse herself to make a sound it might be laughter. That her body has kept this secret from her also makes her feel somewhat estranged from her own flesh. Indeed, in her dazed exhaustion, as she lies inert and lets her eyes rest on Griffin, she feels she is watching all four of them from across a wider room: the infants, Griffin, her own bloodied form.

  Griffin cannot quite manage, and when Chetwyn knocks softly and enters with a deferential nod, Griffin astonishes him by handing one of the bundles to him. She has wrapped its weakly flailing arms and legs, but it bucks, weakly, and he, who accepted it like two handfuls of potatoes, brings it quickly to his chest.

  She enjoys his bewilderment as Griffin picks up a similar bundle and advances on him again, and lays it in the crook of his free arm. Mrs Chetwyn smiles wearily up at him and raises her brows, as if at a child who has belatedly grasped some obvious truth, and closes her eyes.

  She can hear Griffin prodding and turning Chetwyn, she guesses to make him face away while she deals with her mistress’s body. She hears Chetwyn at the door to the bedroom call, not loudly but urgently, for Fuze. She is tired, so tired, and Griffin is spreading her and managing the end of the births, and then blessing her surprising body with a warm, soapy sponge and clean sheets.

  They are able to enclose news of the births with the map of Missenden and send it gravid with increase and husbandry to Gordon Villa. It is a fat, important letter, but the reply, when it comes – two months out, two months back – is a noticeable degree less jubilant. Three girls. Girls – that is the tempering of any joy. The General punishes them with faint celebration.

  Mrs Chetwyn ignores him – what can he matter to her, here, with the fascinating babies, and Sophronia become the big sister, and the sensation the birth of twins has caused in a raw district starved of sensation? Their few neighbours, even the men, turn their carts up into Missenden’s lands when they pass it on the way to town, to marvel at the exactly duplicated kiss curls on the twinned foreheads, and the way the babies bend towards one another in mirror image when they sleep.

  COSMO

  In the photographic portrait of us you may see me placed among them in stout guardianship.

  We have to travel to town to procure it. This is the first time in our memory that I or the younger of my elder sisters have left Missenden if you do not count the picnics at Chetwyn’s Camp or our single excursion down the gorge to the river retreat we had named Strand Isle. We seem to pack an entire household for the trip; there are cots, pots, water barrels, pillows. A home on the road is a thrilling matter and there is ‘town’ besides. There is also the solemnity of our parents at any mention of the portrait; this adds a high note of anxiety and so we are out of our minds with wild spirits – wild running, wild laughter, tea
rs – on the day of our departure.

  Nor do we calm by much once we are settled on the cart and leading the wagon down Missenden’s drive. We must wave the house out of sight, we must call out to the horses ahead of us and the oxen behind. We invent a game and strain for comparison between the beasts and the few neighbours we know, and between the shapes of Missenden’s lands from this new vantage and innocent anatomies – knees, heads, elbows.

  We may be flagging, though not by much, when, about two hours into the journey, having been refreshed by the river crossing and all its chances for shouts and fright, scorn and fright, relief and—

  ‘Screaming and chattering like jungle parrots! I heard you a mile down the track! Are you wild monkeys? Are these people your captors?’

  The speaker – the merry chider, addressing herself directly to us in the back of the cart – is a snub-faced, square-bodied person, female in her dingy skirts yet jacketed and hatted like a man, and at the reins of her own cart hung about with goods. Some I recognise – mattress, a chair, boxes of food and boxes of crockery and pots – and many I have not seen before – wooden shapes folded like the wings of great bat skeletons, naked frames and similar frames stretched with white cloth, pots and pots of clean small brushes, not one of their handles unmarked by paint.

  At the head of the cart, almost at the small of the woman driver’s back, a loose, rolled tarpaulin shows the cart’s protection from weather, and lying on this is a long, grizzled dog that glances at us, and away again, with a distracted, friendly look, laughing softly or panting.

  Its mistress is looking us over, one by one. For all her chiding, she gives a look that is, like her dog’s, friendly in a somewhat shy way. She has pulled partly off the track, and her cart is tilted away from us. Now she removes her man’s hat and pushes back her short grey hair, and alights, unaided, clutching and swinging as a man would. As if at a summons, the dog pours her long body off the cart. Mother stays in our cart’s front seat, though bending at the waist and neck in a way that signals courtesy.

  Are we Missenden’s people? Just so. She is in the district for the summer. She hoped to visit Missenden, of course – the green lilies, the water plants, the cultivation in Mother’s laboratory gardens … she is sure she wrote ahead? This claim is made with such a casting of her eyes towards the sky as to be apparently a lie, one she takes no pains to hide.

  Mother looks down the road we are travelling, and looks back, towards Missenden, and we in the well of the cart grow yet more interested in the traveller with her clever eyes and easy ways with our parents, albeit she wears the clothes of a poor arrowroot farmer.

  Mother and Father exchange murmurs and Father leaves us to find Fuze at the wagon; at Fuze’s approach and the start of negotiations on who will return with her, she simply interrupts the men – ‘Nay, nay, I’ll set up camp myself, only say it sits well with you’ – and turns away as if this decides the matter.

  She returns to regarding us as she has been doing almost since she alighted. She stands at the open rear of the cart and reads us, face by face. ‘Twins!’ she says, as one might greet a favourite plate at tea. ‘And you are the reigning sister,’ for Fronia, ‘and you the least of them’ – to Maude, but kindly, as though ‘least’ is as pretty a tag as ‘littlest’.

  In turn the merry, cold eyes find me, and she begins to speak, and then does not speak, cuts a look at my sisters and says in a careful way, measured and chosen: ‘And a son.’

  I see her little nod when Fronia finds her voice and tells her, ‘Our brother Cosmo.’

  Griffin, watchful by my side, she ignores.

  It is conceded that the botanical artist will indeed find and settle on Missenden by herself; no Fuze and no ox will be sent back with her and miss the journey to town. She does not allow it, and Father grows impatient with the halt and does not insist, and so she regains the driver’s seat of her cart and clicks her mule awake, and waits for us to clear the road, watching with a pleased smile.

  Our cart and wagon pass her. The great grey dog does not resume her tarpaulin roll, but keeps her face turned to us as the other cart heaves into motion, and then, perhaps at a signal from the artist, turns and trots after her mistress.

  We camp in the wagon by the roadside that night, and in the morning are wiped and tied into our best clothes, and my sisters’ hair is brushed out and left long with ribbons and topped with bonnets, and mine is dressed with its wide hat, and in caravan we enter the incredible streets of Durban.

  Fuze and the wagon peel off and we are delivered to a brick building and shown in a jostling herd into a public tearoom, where we add our parents’ mastery of it to the satisfactions of the day. The milk tastes off and the satiny tops of the small cakes are the unlikely pink of Maude’s gums when she cries, but every part of that meal is a treat that we will long recall. And there is still the photograph to come.

  I move.

  We know the convention of keeping grim and still as history-book Merovingians before the hooded box, and I hold myself rigid and do not smile – but yet I must have moved, for in the line of clear, sombre, frilled sisters, there is the blur of me. It is only my face – perhaps only my eyes – but enough to set me apart from the clear others.

  When we are back home and at last have the photograph – which Fuze stays in town to collect from the framer; it and its duplications are not entrusted to the runner or a neighbour’s care – our parents pore over it, and debate it as though to continue a conversation begun in another room.

  ‘There is the suit, the boy’s hair – it is demonstrably our son,’ Father tells Mother.

  ‘It could not be other than that,’ says Mother. ‘Yes.’

  ‘I don’t hold with them myself,’ comes a third adult voice, to startle the parents; the botanical artist is at the door of the drawing room.

  She goes on, ignoring Mother’s blanching cheeks: ‘If you want a proper portrait, ask a manual artist.’

  She has reached them, and bends her head over the square of card in its silvered frame.

  We found her camped on the break at the top of the hill, some distance from the house, when we returned from the great visit to town; it was necessary to learn the botanical artist’s name, which was (and we knew to smile at this) Miss Oak. Her goods, at least, were piled about her cart some way off, but the phenomenon herself was settled on the wide veranda, with a table, jars, pots, water, and the batwing slats unfolded to make an easel.

  A sprig of some plant was clamped in an extending arrangement of overlapping battens to bring it close to her face. She removed a forbidding set of spectacles as our cart brought us up to the house, and stood to welcome us, and in the days since has shown no sign of quitting us.

  We are barely aware of her. Every thought is of the trip to town and then the brown miraculous paper thing, better than a mirror, for it shows us how we might be seen, by ourselves and by our English Chetwyns to whom a copy is sent at once with a legend identifying each one of us: Sophronia, Verity, Chastity, Maude and Cosmo. The other is for the mantel in Missenden’s drawing room where at any time of the day you might find one of us, on tiptoe or looking levelly at it, reading the thing, reading our faces.

  The twins, at twelve years of age, seem to me to be the chief achievement, bodies inclined as they are towards one another in a sort of joke of mirroredness, holding hands. Their heads face out of the picture, face the observer and the camera box, but in every other respect their bodies are addressed only to one another’s. They have the air of communion interrupted, of meeting the interruption with unruffled curiosity – Is there something they can help you with? – but alive with the energy of being about to turn back to one another.

  Maude, by their side, is barely contained in the picture, so directed are her energies at being what is wanted – straining both to solve the question of what she is required to be and straining to be it; it is a profound imitation, and the revelation for me is to what degree the photographic process and more-over the pho
tographic result allows one to see so much of before and after – the life before, and clues to the life after – the moment. Sophronia, serene and sixteen, is as she is, already tending towards the opacity of the parents, learning so well to make a face that lasts across the gap of seconds, where the camera has found the rest of us out.

  I am the only one in the picture with legs. Father, behind Mother, behind us all, disappears from the belly down. The twins are seated in a puddle of lace, and shadows take Maude’s ankles and most of her feet; Sophronia is in a woman’s skirts. But, all in white like my sisters, my body catches the eye with its lines – the broad collar, the drop of the jacket, and most of all the line from hip to knee, and knee to boot. I had, at Mother’s direction, I think, shifted my feet to stand them somewhat wider than I naturally place them and – certainly at her direction – held a hand at my hip, a jaunty and almost a rude boy. I decide, on the afternoons I spend with it, to see the blur as energy, as my burning energetic defeat of the silver salts and shuttered eye.

  We soon forget the portrait in the drawing room, but seem to keep in mind that which has been sent on, sewn into muslin, paper and oilskin to make a substantial packet and dispatched with a tufted runner to the port and on to Papa’s aunts in England. We track the ripening summer with the parcel’s imagined place in the world, until, one morning at breakfast, Father meets Mother’s eye and says, ‘It will be there by now,’ and she holds his eye for a moment before both bend their heads and address their plates.

  7

  SUGAR IS A SLOW CROP. It will be at least a year and a half, possibly two, before they can harvest it. The planting goes on, at small intervals, to stagger the crop and thereafter the production when it should begin.