Under Glass

by Claire Robertson

  Chetwyn is familiar with wheels and the simplest gears, more familiar than Fuze, but great ideas are fitted to the human mind, and in no time they are well matched in their imaginings of how they might build a machine for amplifying human and animal force.

  They take the cart to estates to see the working of mills there – the small American mills: black, gnomish, tight-bound fists of greased iron chewing furiously at the cane and extruding the wrung pulp; the great wooden Natal-made mills, knocking and wobbling and mangling and seeming so liable to imminent failure they are more like an idea of themselves than an actual intentional machine.

  The wheels, the great and terrible wheels that travelled with Mrs Chetwyn from Plymouth to Africa, from the ship to the shore, to D’Urban, to here, the proof of her dutifulness and his whimsy, now vindicate him most maddeningly: he could not have foreseen a mill, gears, the perfection of the modified wheels for this, but now these things nonetheless at a stroke wipe out his impractical idiocy, dissolve all justification in one moment from her justified grievance.

  Chetwyn takes open pleasure in, for once in his life, having displayed a genius for planning.

  As if in response to their industry, Gordon Villa softens its disapproval of the babies and warms to the novelty of twins: there come by the post matching soft caps and robes, ivory rattles and a pair of grey felt donkeys on wheels, with an elephant for Sophronia.

  The women who planted the food garden, and returned to spread and polish mud and dung for the floor of the house, and returned again for clearing work around the rest of the garden, have set up home in another round house, attaching themselves to Missenden and the Chetwyns in a natural way that makes them almost neighbours although they are also surely listed as servants of the place. The three of them live in a settled hierarchy with the elder woman, Ma Cagwe, ordering the tasks of the two younger. It is difficult to get from Fuze their exact relationship to one another, as though there is something to be concealed about three women living apart from their chief, apart from any craal.

  Mrs Chetwyn draws breath and retrieves the handkerchief of Wardian litter from her trunk. With the help of the women, and Fuze, she lays out beds. Somewhat tight-chested with the ambition of it, she embarks on her great work of deciphering the seeds.

  As the months pass her garden swells, blooms, dies off and renews itself in complicated stages; there is always something to see, and she is soon settling the nature of the swifter flowers and vegetables. A few others promise by their infant leaves to be oaks or beech trees. There is a baby birch, and several remaining mysteries. Some announce their adult selves from the first month of their germination, putting forth a pair of self-assured little pine needles; others will be cabbage or kale or cauliflower until they are practically full grown.

  She begins to discern, if not patterns, then similarities in the particular parts of the plants – that the whorl of this and this surely makes them cousins; that so many of them resemble one another in their infancy.

  While she works the beds, she considers her lot. The Chetwyns are not rich. They draw on the Gordon Villa monies, and have to account to Meager in his lawyerly office, supplicants in his creaking chairs, enduring his steepled fingers. On each trip to town, seated in the office beside her husband, Mrs Chetwyn reads the satisfaction Meager takes in the exercise of power over them, and thinks it all the keener when he directs it at her, although Chetwyn does not escape either. The lawyer examines him on the strain planted at Missenden and frowns over it on no firmer basis than something he has lately read in The Witness. D’Urban is full of expert opinion on cane, milling, granulation, molasses, saccharative this and centrifugal that, and on the dizzy profits that accrue in these matters, but smaller growers – renters of strips of land on another man’s estate, there to raise cane for that man’s mill – are known to fail all the time, and Meager contrives to lay this at their door as a fine for being so unjustly spared the percentages and scrabbling scale of the colonialist’s usual lot.

  The Chetwyns are not rich, but they will be. The land is owned by the General, but the profits will be theirs. In time, title must pass to Chetwyn, and when it does, the complicated feelings she has for the place will, she knows, resolve into simple loyalty.

  Like the long season of the cane, this waiting to inherit sets its own pattern for their lives. When they leave Missenden and when they return, it is most keenly felt.

  On their way back from a mid-year provisioning trip to the port, she waits on the easterly bank of the Oomzube for the ferry raft to return for her, looking forward to being home. But there is something missing in her feeling for the land, some levity, she would name it, as though, being as they are in effect on another man’s land (that they have improved by their labour (and his money)), they are absolved of ultimate responsibility for it. Their pride of ownership in Missenden – which they yet feel – is missing the lower notes, the gravitational, anchoring notes.

  Months ago she asked her husband who owned it before the D’Urban shopkeeper whose deeds Meager bought with the General’s funds. Chetwyn could not say. He thought it was a king that effected the first transfer in what he called ‘the beginning’.

  ‘The King?’

  ‘Their king.’

  Now, a day and a night since leaving Meager’s office, she is back on Missenden. The cane is as high as a man already. Is it noticeably taller than when they left four days ago? No, it is a slow crop. The girls are surer yardsticks: the girls, and her fascinating seeds.

  After she settles her family she has a moment to herself to visit her botanics, the rows with their numbers scratched on slate, and green breaking the earth here and there in the newer beds, and a wholesome, irregular profusion among those already grown. In a notebook in the house, the numbers correspond to a careful sketch of the seed that is planted there: in its own time, it will introduce itself by its fruit or flower, and she will have its name.

  She spends her last thoughts each night on the garden, and on the house they will build. Perhaps it is a house she saw as a girl. It is white, a house made for the summit of a wedding cake. Cool in the sun, against the green.

  On the morning after her return, Mrs Chetwyn is among her beds, bending to lift a flower head to gauge its readiness for harvest, tying muslin bags over fennel blossoms to guard against losing their seeds to the earth below the plants.

  Sophronia is some beds away, patting and shaping damp earth into mounds – a village of clay, a tray of pies, Mrs Chetwyn cannot make them out. She keeps half an eye on her daughter, and as she idly watches her, she sees Sophronia rock back on her heels at something at her feet, then peer more closely, then pull away again.

  The little girl gets to her feet and looks around her, noticing her mother at one end of the seed garden and Fuze staking a plant at the other, and with barely a blink of hesitation turns towards him and is at his side where he crouches over a plant, saying, ‘Fuze, Fuze, come see,’ and holding on to the sleeve of his shirt.

  Fuze shrugs her off. Mrs Chetwyn hears his dismissive tone. Sophronia sighs and returns to the site of her play and whatever surprised her on the ground.

  Mrs Chetwyn makes a picture of busyness with her body and the angle of her head, watching the two of them from under the wide brim of Chetwyn’s hat. The girl is not entirely cast down, but certainly quieter in the droop of her bonnet and stillness of her shoulders.

  Fuze finishes with the knot he has been working on, and looks over his shoulder to where Sophronia kneels; he stands and crosses to her, and his voice brightens with admiration for whatever it is she has found, and she turns her face to him.

  8

  MRS CHETWYN’S FOURTH CHILD and third pregnancy keep pace with the ripening and eventual harvest of the first cane on Missenden. Gangs of men with broad knives hack at the stalks; she lies in. Missenden’s own oxen haul immense bundles from Home Camp over to Python and the mill, and she brings forth her babe, which is a daughter. In a letter full of amazement at the harvest,
the infant Maude earns a line. They hope the General will overlook, with tact, this sign of another wasted season in her mother’s body.

  Towards the end of the harvest, Chetwyn stumbles onto a snake among the cane trash and is struck. There is a frightening flurry of Condy’s crystals and pressure, and for a day and a night she thinks he will die. He does not, but he comes near enough to remind her that any day, in the field or mill or on a ride to the backlands or the neighbours, he may.

  The younger woman who has settled with them has, by now, transferred her own baby from her back to the ground at her feet, and she takes charge of the latest Chetwyn infant. Once a day Maude is brought to Mrs Chetwyn to dandle and try to provoke to smiles. She watches her mother, then buries her face in Zodwa’s neck. Sophronia, who adopted the twins, brings the new sister under her six-year-old wing.

  Sugar mill, nursery with daughters ranged from six years to a few months, her daily work and the garden giving up its secrets: this remote life surprises Mrs Chetwyn with its fullness.

  Ma Cagwe weaves a tiny box from grass, watertight as she demonstrates, although it does not need to be, and into it they pack sugar chosen by Chetwyn from the first production on Missenden. Mrs Chetwyn wraps it with great care and labels it: ‘Contents: Missenden Sugar, product of Natal Colony.’ It is sent off with the next wagon to pass the estate, to amaze Gordon Villa.

  Soon, too soon for it to be in reply to their sugar, a letter from London is dropped off at Missenden: in it, when the outer covering is removed, is another layer, this one with a black border. Far away, months ago, perhaps as the first cane was giving up its juices to the rollers, or even before that, Gordon Villa had pulled down the shades and closed the curtains, put in the household’s order at a mourning store and sent forth cards and letters like this one: the General is dead.

  Before nightfall, the lawyer Meager arrives from town by horseback for his first visit to Missenden, clutching his dread box and looking over the place as if to secure it against sudden brigands. He expects to be put up for the night: his eyes narrowed with anticipation, he pats his brass-bound travelling office and says they will talk tomorrow. They settle him on skins on the floor of the living room and retire themselves, to shift and turn and try to sleep.

  In the morning, Chetwyn is up before dawn, to go out walking, he says. After a while she dresses and follows him, tracking him away from the close cane lands – now a ragged chaos of stalks and upset earth, a battlefield after an engagement – and to the rise that marks the limits of cultivation on Missenden.

  She supposes it is theirs, now, the land. It is not yet time to imagine this longed-for state; more immediate is the somewhat anxious realisation of what the old man’s death has taken away.

  The triumphs of Missenden have been capped, each one, by the letter to Gordon Villa setting it as the record. Sometimes the fear in the enterprise has also been capped and distilled by the mere fact of describing it – exaggerating it, disavowing it, bending it to a story of triumph after loss, or loss that will surely be followed by triumph. Who would they push against now, and at what altar lay their first fruits? It was not a tethering she felt the lack of. Not a tethering gone, but a circumscription, gone – the immovable object necessary for one’s own volition, propulsion, the ground against which the foot presses to launch itself into a step …

  Out of breath, she reaches the edges of the jumbled little copse, Missenden’s highest point, and sees Chetwyn ahead and above her, settled on a bare rock facing back down the land, towards the sea, leaning into the air like an animal. She settles beside a tree and waits for him.

  The dew is burned from the grass when they descend. As they near the homestead they can see that Griffin and Zodwa have brought the infant Maude, the tottering twins and Sophronia to cowskins laid on the grass.

  Standing on the veranda watching them is Meager, showing by his stiff shoulders and hands clasped behind his back that he is not charmed by this muddle of little girls. Mrs Chetwyn has to check her impulse to take up her skirts and hurry, the sooner to put herself between her daughters and the lawyer. She calms herself by reflecting that after today they might never have to see him again.

  He has consumed the breakfast the house women served him; rather than delay matters, Chetwyn and Mrs Chetwyn go without, and settle themselves in cane chairs on the veranda, and Meager addresses himself to the case he has set on the table.

  He takes from his waistcoat pocket a key on a chain and turns this in a lock among the brass furnishings of the wooden rectangle. He lifts the lid, and manipulates it until he draws a click from the hinge, and the lid is locked upright. He folds out the middle section of the thing to lie on the table and form a desk. He smooths a hand over this, then, shooting his cuffs, slides a leaf of metal from its home to reveal the upright lid to be as hollow as the case, although not empty: a leather folder, attached at the back to the case, falls open from the opened lid, and from this, at last, he draws the dreadful paper.

  He reads out its every word: the hundred pounds to the General’s housekeeper, the five hundred pounds to the servants at his club, the compliments and slights that cause only pity as the dead man’s fingers are peeled away, clause by clause.

  Or perhaps still hold fast: the declaration that approaches with portentous awareness of its own weight, and arrives with a flourish of exotic nouns – on the western bank of the Oomzube River, Natal Colony and so on – at last stands before them: and Chetwyn sees, and Mrs Chetwyn sees, and Meager has the enjoyment of showing them, that the bequest, the core of the will, the upshot, is that there is no change, that Missenden is still theirs and not theirs, for when at last it comes it is trailing a reptilian fee tail: Chetwyn may work it and reap it and own it for the duration of his life, but on his death it may pass only in the male line. Upon his death or renunciation of claim to it, for he may not sell it; he most of all may not will it to his wife or daughters.

  Chetwyn feels the infantilising sting of it, feels his father’s dominion made into capital and levered into position, and brought slowly to rest upon him.

  An entailment is old fashioned but not uncommon – not at all uncommon in the case of a man such as the unranked General, who more than to be loved or to draw breath, had needed to prevail – but Chetwyn feels it keenly as a last parental snub, one that will keep him forever a son beneath a father’s direction.

  Missenden is his and not his – his to build up (or let go to ruin), to live on and die on, but not to sell, nor raise capital against. It had been the old man’s yet to dispose, and would be forever the old man’s, and a different sort of pride would be all that would drive the perpetual son to build it up and keep it whole and pass it on better than he found it – the sort of piqued pride that rises in a man to answer the judging gaze of his neighbour. There is no room to tell the world to go to the devil, not when the land is borrowed and must be returned one day. It is not the comforting pride of ownership; it is the onerous pride of stewardship that he must serve.

  Meager is joined in furious battle with the clasp of his travel desk; this is laid somehow at Mrs Chetwyn’s door, she thinks, for when he has at last subdued it and taken up his hat, he fixes her with a cruel look and raises a brow as if to signal revenge, delivered. It is all she can do to see him politely gone.

  Already Chetwyn has begun to over-characterise the matter: he says he is a tenant now, no more than a tenant, paying with his labour for the right to rest each night on the estate. What if he refuses the sour gift, he says, that night, circling and circling the matter to nip at its flank, hoping for a different response but also relying on precisely the same note coming from it, for he is already defining the arc of his life by this entailment, looking backwards to his free days and forwards to the unvarying, endless entailed years.

  By overstating it he comes, before the birds announce that there will be another dawn, to count it as not so terrible as martyrdom, surely, and after all it is an inheritance, and surely more than any fellow for
a hundred miles around dreams of getting, and he will have the profits of the estate and the profits (multiplying now with his momentum) are bound to be such that, if he is clever with them, they might purchase an estate of their own for him to own clear. Why, Missenden is the seed, handled right. The seed, not the harvest … his need to feel lucky is doing its work. Mrs Chetwyn hears his thoughts plunge and rise, rise and plunge, while she attends to her own calculations.

  Where Chetwyn is so undone by, and then reconciled to, possessing the land so long as he is alive – robbed not of Missenden but of the right to dispose of Missenden – she sees at once the devastating guarantee in the old man’s will and who it truly punishes. Chetwyn, so aggrieved by the will, is the only one of them spared by it. He will never know the loss of Missenden, but for her there waits the prospect of losing her home and knowing it – and knowing until then that all she has, all her daughters have, rides on the knife edge of one sovereign fact: that Chetwyn lives. If he dies before there is a direct heir, they will be off the land before half a season has passed – two months out to find some undeserving cousin with the news that he has a farm in Africa, two months more until he arrives and claims it from them or orders it sold, and every chance that Meager will, even before then, exercise his steward’s spite and banish them.

  She has to plan. She has to plan. Within a week Chetwyn has regained his good cheer and set about the sugar production with more, not less, driven force. This is his wealth: if not the land, then what the land can give him.

  Mrs Chetwyn cannot transfer her loyalty with such ease. The sugar business is just the merest surface of the place, some necessary office that the people and the land must co-operate in but which does not touch on the essential nature of either. Even scraped of its native sod, lilies and ancient trees, and furred over with a uniform waving green pelt, as she saw it but a month back, it is itself, down to the moisture of the soil. She works with it to bring to life her mysterious seeds. For all of her misgivings about ownership or the lack, there is already a partnership.