Under Glass

by Claire Robertson

  ‘Ought I … to look? To look him over?’

  It is a true question, that ‘ought’. He seeks from her the proper form. Perhaps permission also. She is the keeper of etiquette and ethics; he wants to be guided.

  She feels a great weariness of mind sift down to settle alongside her drifting strength.

  She murmurs, ‘You may look, sir. But you need not. It is not required of you.’

  And of course he does not. He brings one hand to the infant’s head, hovers it there, moves it to the swaddled midriff and there it settles lightly. He seems unwilling to touch it, whether from awe or dread she does not care to guess.

  Is she hoping he will stop her before she goes too far? Is he relying on her to force them on?

  But he is not tired, not depleted. He leaves to order a demi-john of white spirits unlocked for the men who have begun to gather between the mill and the house, to tell Fuze a son, tell his daughters a brother, to lean his head against the bark of the mahogany tree some way off in an attitude that looks like gratitude, or anguish too plentiful to contain. Some manner of prayer.

  In the bedroom – it is the three-roomed first house that has stood for this last birth on Missenden – she is roused from her cool, grey state by the bundle’s snuffling summons. Her breasts fill in response and, wincing at the familiar ache, she accepts the rooting babe from Griffin.

  She does not unwrap or even look too closely at it, but draws it closer, helps it to latch and nurse. She notes to herself that there is no difference to how a girl might do it. This makes sense to her.

  Her mind is clear. She will break this matter into its constituent parts and deal with them one by one. She will begin by denying to herself that it is as it is and who is to prove otherwise? It would be barbaric to ask to look and they are not barbarians.

  She finds in it rationality, the rationality of the insane, but she is not mad – although neither is she entirely reasonable when she decides, as she does now, that it might even be interesting.

  She has the isolation of Missenden, she has Griffin, she has as a resource the preposterousness of what she is about, and a store of knowledge on girls, having been one and birthed four before today; for knowledge of boys she will rely chiefly on what she gleaned on board the Lady Lee, when for close to seventy days she had been among several, and moreover seen Sophronia in the light of boys, as well as in the light of other girls.

  There is the fact, most handily, that a boy is both its own thing and in every respect the opposite of a girl; even without the crowded ship, knowing girls, she could have extrapolated boys. Or the son-fit shape of a boy.

  And if that shape comes labelled brave and clever, as boys do, well, to go by the example of Sophronia, that part of the illusion might be complete with no need for her to engineer it. A girl could, if looked at right, make a most convincing idea of a boy.

  But of course the decision comes first and the words for it follow. She is already embarked on it, has been set on her course since it lay in her lap and bawled and embraced the air: red, like the others, cleft like them. It has to be a boy.

  Within a day Chetwyn, reading her strange fury at him about the baby, makes a guess – nothing stated, a guess only, sickening as it is – and, although not able to ask her outright, demonstrates enough of his fear that she keeps the baby close by her and does not offer it for holding.

  She believes he knows full well what she is about and has merely reintroduced his conscience to some schoolboy God to infuriate her with doubt. He behaves like a man with a fear of heights – all must wait upon this fear. He indulges his objections, and she is convinced that he does so hoping – knowing – that she will hold firm to her terrible plan and so she only strengthens her loyalty to it with the muscle work of opposing his weak sounds of doubt.

  His fears tend all to the question of discovery and disgrace, and she is ashamed for him and even argues, silently, for the rights of the baby, though she easily quashes this. First women, then babies, then whoever else waits their turn, facing the Englishman on his hill.

  The baby’s first week draws to a close on seven nights of bawling, snuffling and imagined smiles, and many hours of its mother squinting to see Cosmo through the eyes of a neighbour, a town visitor, a priest.

  Fully on the seventh day Chetwyn at last gets the infant from her, holds it to his face and reads it. He says, as a man might give voice to pain, ‘It is our son?’

  She does not answer him, but only gives that dread level look again.

  Later, with the Missenden daughters gathered at the crib, and their father by to complete the picture, she moves to seal it.

  Sophronia coos, ‘Oh, the little nose! The lashes!’

  She is almost nine years old and parent already to eight new puppies, a calf that will soon outgrow her attentions and three little sisters, of four and four and three. The twins inhale the baby’s scent as they might a pie from the oven, and Maude pushes through them to her mother’s skirts and closes her eyes to make it go away.

  ‘Cosmo, Co-o-smo-oh-oh,’ croons a twin, begging the baby to open its eyes.

  ‘Cozzzmo-oh,’ echoes the other.

  ‘Our brother is sleeping,’ announces Sophronia, and the baby’s eyes open, a distant blue, and it yawns, and gazes from face to face, and kicks its feet in greeting.

  ‘Girls,’ says Mrs Chetwyn, ‘Papa will ride to Port Natal soon to place the notice,’ and he shifts as if to refuse.

  She has their attention and answers the questions beginning there, ‘The notice that tells the world our news. We must remember all the names and the best words, and when it is printed, we will find it in the newspaper and Papa will order copies for us, and for us to send home.

  ‘And he will arrange for Cosmo’s christening.’

  Here is a man who is calmed by the business of business. She knows this about him and relies on it.

  The saddle, the town coat and hat, the shillings at the Witness office, the bored clerk who frowns over his words and at last lets him go, the stammering at St Paul’s and his own impatience at how he sounds that then firms his voice and makes something heraldic of his request to have his son’s christening included in the next christening Sunday … there are doubts on the ride in, but on his return he has in his saddlebag a receipt from the newspaper and from the church a date to hold those doubts down.

  He has the beginnings of a flimsy official record to bring to her. Most of all he has brought back to Missenden proof of his complicity.

  She leaves him that night for the hot breathing tumble of the overcrowded nursery. The room is asleep, only she and Cosmo awake, busy with nourishment. It is a good baby, and goes about its gathering habits calmly, watchfully. She dares not approach too near the business at hand – it would undo her to apologise to the baby, even in her thoughts, to name the thing, to ask forgiveness for it – and so the other work she goes about in the still room, among the small sounds of her daughters, is the erection of a steely permission for herself.

  In due course all of them travel to Durban (as they are learning to call it, no more disloyal French apostrophe, no hesitation in the mouth) to have the baby christened. As they stand around the font in the little church she feels her husband tremble at her side.

  As for her, she keeps her eyes fixed on the wall over the vicar’s head. St Paul’s has a copy of Hunt’s The Light of the World, and has mounted it above the font. She raises her eyes to the feminised Christ bearing his lantern while her husband swallows against his own dry throat and they name their last daughter son.

  The vicar speaks the words, they make an answer, the verger stands in for a cousin as godfather and she keeps her eye on Christ’s soft hair and patient eyes, and chews on her scorn, a weapon she raises against the new heresy, the deeper fear.

  For a while mother and baby, survivors of the same storm, are allied against the world, and Mrs Chetwyn herself is somehow contained within the safe walls of her arms about the infant Cosmo, her head bent over them bot
h, her elbows protecting both. But first come Griffin’s efficient, ungiving hands to take the baby, and there are sororal and paternal rights that she has no grounds to deny, though there rises in her an instinct to do so.

  Soon neighbours are there to pass judgement on the baby, on its size, aspect and grip. Other visitors, when these include a woman in their party, come to greet it.

  Half of her shivers to not have the baby against her body, and half of her steps further away from them all to take the measure of how these people from without the family describe Cosmo; she stiffens at any mention of the delicacy of the baby’s features. When the baby is outright taken for a girl, as might happen if Mrs Chetwyn is not urgent enough in stating ‘our son’, Sophronia quickly puts the visitor right, and introduces ‘my brother Cosmo’.

  Must Sophronia be told? She will surely guess, in time, and until then must be watched. They must all be watched, Cosmo most of all.

  It is this imperative, more than the demands of the world, that seals the separation of Mrs Chetwyn from the baby.

  Watching, she sees how Cosmo, at intervals, sheds one self for another. She thinks the child does not so much grow as outgrow the younger shape. Few things remain constant or even harken to the baby now left only as an imprint on the split chrysalis in Mrs Chetwyn’s memory: perhaps only the eyes, and something of the structure of the face, until she tells herself she cannot imagine a daughter there.

  INTERREGNUM

  1

  FUZE TAKES A HANDFUL OF SOFT, grey twigs from the basket, the ghost of green still on them. To these he applies a lit spill from the fire he has kindled outside. There is no visible trace of the family but they surely linger in the dust and so Fuze burns his twigs. A thread of smoke tests the air. It fattens and coils and he holds his ground to let the scent lick up his body.

  The shades of his great-uncles arrive, ready to preach; his mother pushes past them with hygiene: ‘You don’t know what they did in the house and so you must always, first thing, bring imphepho.’ Seven years across the Thukela, he discovers ritual in himself.

  The smoke replaces the air in this room and considers the next. Fuze precedes it through the door, across what was the children’s room, into the morning.

  Up the hill, at the very top of the hill, the new, white house by the umkomaas tree shows no outward sign of having the family within, but this is its first morning occupied by the parent Chetwyns, the girls and the little boy, who is walking now and can say Fuze. There are curtains in the new windows on the upper storey to blind them; on the uncurtained lower, the sun inhabits the rooms so that they are lanterns throwing back light.

  He has the house in view because the cane is no more than arrowing in the worked ground that marks his new boundary; for most of the life of this field he will surely be screened and he has time to encourage a tree besides. A hedge.

  Fuze brings his hands to his hips. Soon he will head back through the naked fields to strike his one-room round home and burn the air clean there, too. Tonight he will sleep in his new house. Two rooms for him, one for the mattocks, spare wheels, sacks and knives. Four corners to a room, bracketing his place.

  He has to settle with himself the new order of life – a house before a wife, his but not his. For now he patrols his new dwelling, its outer angles, past the front door, the window, the back door. He scuffs the path and doubles over to snatch a weed from between the stones, snaps the stem from the root and casts the parts away from him.

  His thinking is thick with metaphor, but he, Fuze-across-the-river, although tutored in good and wicked animals, has, in his new questioning, tried to cleanse his reasoning of it. He keeps it only for them, reserves this older understanding for them and their doings.

  They are like their cats: gliding wherever they would go, jealous of their haunts. The popular idiom is that they are birds, but they are like cats, these bird settlers. Smacked on the nose, they freeze and wait and creep back. They do exactly as they please and stubbornly stay, beyond the limits of good sense. A puzzling settling determination is in them.

  Fuze returns to his starting point and is at the front door. The incense reaches his nostrils. His house is sweetening by the moment.

  On the day he takes possession of his home, Fuze is by Chetwynish measures twenty-three years old; he knows both that he is a warrior’s age by recent human reckoning and almost a husband’s age by the reckoning his father recalled, from before He Who Made Them Soldiers. What could be the human age of this stalled betweenness that he is now, without cohort, spear, the dress of a man, he cannot say. There is something that is shaping him and has not yet done with the work of shaping him. There is a space in the processes of Missenden that he is expanding (and in places contracting) to inhabit.

  When Fuze was a boy, changing into a youth, a fire had caught the grazing land near his home and crept over the hills and through the valley, burning it back to rock and sand, and black, crumbling spikes where grass had been. A while later, once the land was cool enough to walk on, Fuze had made his way along a cattle path to a small river and found that where there had been a shaded beach overgrown with green bushes there was, suddenly, impossibly, a deep orange bank of clay. He had visited that beach almost every day of his life before that, and certainly since he had first walked out with the goats, let alone led cattle, and never once been aware of the seam of ochre that was there.

  That day had shifted his view of more than the bank; for how could his knowledge of even something so never-changing as the land be anything but the thinnest guess, and rely for certainty on anything but human arrogance? We see only what we see, he thought that day, when he was still a boy. We do not know.

  Attesting to knowing – refusing any admission of doubt – was, nonetheless, the rule among people. He knew full well that the peace of days relied on a loyal affirmation that we under heaven know that such and such is so. He knew this was the rule and yet Fuze, a youth, began to insist ‘but we don’t know. Don’t you see?’

  What don’t we know? That the world is thus and cannot change. That man is thus. But it was as if he was asking them to join him on a spear’s honed edge when they, as men, occupied the wide earth with their certainties. And he learned this: that a stripling speaking once too often, once too insolently, about the ignorance of men, and stopping ears with his why? How? By whose order? will draw the attention of his royal uncles. Such a boy will be knocked down, may trip and fall upon the open hearth and burn his leg, and be shouted away into his mother’s hut to end the argument.

  He had known already that he was, or would be, an inconvenient heir – that by virtue of his mother’s place in the order of his father’s wives, his position in the family would not support the claims of his character and ambitions. Now he had supplied a crisis, and so the next morning, before the herd awoke, Fuze was brought his roll, his spoon and his few things in whispers and, cloaked like a woman, led in a hush from the homestead and left at the edge of the pale. He was told to make his way up the line to his mother’s people, but – shocked, perhaps, by the price of resisting – he had turned from the familiar path and left altogether, inviting himself to be cut in two so that some at least of this demanding half may be saved.

  Perhaps that was what happened; perhaps it is only the story he tells himself. Nonetheless, in exile it has become the meaning of him. He counts his adulthood from that day and carries, with greater care than he gave even to the sleeping mat from his mother’s hands, his refusal to be diminished by needing to know more.

  By the time Fuze is thirty-three, the cane encloses his home on all sides. He has encouraged it to grow even closer. On this side of the house he has the green wall, a corridor of land, a path. Although he does not wear the outward signs, you may see it in him, manhood. He formulates descriptions of life to himself, to the audience of himself.

  As he follows his theorems on the path that he has worn around his house, Fuze is lessoning a particular man on a sandy corner in the port, a trader in herbs a
nd skins whose unfriendly look brands Fuze ‘kafula’ as brutally as if he had dared speak the word for that which is spat out from the mouth, spat out from the land across the Thukela.

  Sugar, Fuze thinks, is beyond the knowing of such as this backward backwoods herb trader who gives him the insult of his eyes. He, Fuze, is master of sugar’s each step, and his eyes know the wrong cut on the cane, the forcing of the feed, the idle eye that allows scum to colour the eventual made thing, the sugar. This is the work of a modern man.

  Sugar is to thin brown water the slow black blood of a bull; it is to reeds the branch of a tree, and to barter, money. A woman may carry in a basin on her head the essential sweetness of a wagonload of the father-plant. But it is also not like money, for money, that denaturing technique, is the concentration of worth in the idea only. The white paper of it, the blackened cold coins, are a pair of the small oxen they call bastard Zulus only for the hours that come between when you leave the actual sugar with its buyer in the square and when you have your actual red blankets, incarnated in the general store and waiting now in a heap outside that building for the Missenden wagon. But a modern man may trade cattle for such thin paper and thin paper for blankets if he chooses.

  In this new country where he has authorised himself, here is increase so swift that a man may reckon it in moments. Land, sugar, money, more land, more sugar, more money. If it can increase, it will be made to increase. Sugar can do this. It takes what comes from the soil and changes it, like iron. It takes what comes from the soil, tempers it with a man’s strength and heat and the pure working of the gears of the mill, and changes it.

  Each morning Fuze leaves his pondering self in the house, there to make and unmake itself in response to the world. He quits that self like Ntombizodwa leaves, before dawn. Fuze the man, the working man, easily overtakes him at the front door.