Under Glass

by Claire Robertson

  3

  SOME THREE MONTHS AFTER COSMO’S first muster, and shortly after his third, it is Chetwyn’s time to die.

  He had again peeled his sabre from its oily leather and packed his red coat to wear amid the farmers in blue jackets and the native lot in yellow corduroy, and so might have been struck down in preparation for battle – an accident with the immense hard head of a horse, perhaps, or a gun. Inquiry, recrimination, a measure of fame in a sparse colony whose men are forming up for war – his could have been a death of at least a peripherally military sort, away from home, brought to his wife and daughters by keyed-up riders eager with their important news, a part of history. Mrs Chetwyn’s to cast as not ridiculous, not a foolish waste, not this inevitability that was yet a terrible surprise.

  He has been laid on his bed in what they have called his dressing room but has for years been the room in which he sleeps. His bashful vanity over the matter of the sabre, the coat, his place among men and dusty, wheeling horses … it cuts her a small wound as she sits by his side in the small hours.

  The smell of petroleum rises from the tin saucers in which the bed legs stand. There is a moth thudding and knocking somewhere. At four o’clock by his pocket watch, in the silence of his percussive and then ceased breath, she closes his eyes.

  Next she tidies his limbs and the bedclothes, and after a moment twists the lever on the oil lamp to dim the room. She again considers the ways he might have died; as for the actual cause: a blockage of some sort and much pain.

  She finds she cannot leave him yet, but continues to sit by his side, filling out the offices of a wife, trying at last to give him enough.

  His red coat. His good-natured return to the vocabulary of war, introducing words such as ‘deploy’ and ‘targeteer’ to the mouths of the colonial boys, his unease as they shone them up, as though this were a game …

  He had ridden off, sitting so straight in the saddle, and been carried home on the back of the post cart, every wagon in the district gone for the week to some new quartermaster. Home to Missenden on the post cart and in terrible pain and tortured by the airless heat, barely able to speak to his daughters or see Cosmo at the end of his bed, and nothing for it but draughts and wet cloths and sips of water as he strained against his own body, and her growing cold, cold and still. Opiates had kept him at least from screaming for most of the time.

  It is for this that she planned sixteen years ago, and wonders now if turning their lives to forever face it had encouraged its centripetal force. All of it, Cosmo, the great game of it, had had as its centre point this moment, and yet she had not, until this moment, seen that. Had he? Had he felt himself entombed in her anticipation of his death?

  She spreads the fingers of her right hand and brings this close to the hair on his head, but knows it would hurt too much to unbend after these frozen months and touch him. Then she rises and steps out of the room to wake the girls and Cosmo, and retakes her chair near the bed and watches her children. She essays one of her quick cold-minded audits of Cosmo-the-son, now that all of Missenden has been brought to the purpose of her boyhood and the purchase is about to be made: Cosmo, browner than a girl, in stance, in open looks and easy capture of the space at this moment so much a son, repays Mrs Chetwyn’s judging looks with convincing maleness, and meets her look with open, air-owning eyes, with one hip cocked moreover, hat easy in one hand, one blunt-fingered, brown, solidly arranged if slim hand, easy with taking and holding, lifting now to brush a hank of brown hair from a wide, clear forehead. She is every inch a son, even down to the scanter tears. On either side of Cosmo, girls gulp and sob.

  Flattering herself as the survivor, Mrs Chetwyn rises in her own estimation for having laid in so safe and clever an insurance, better than buried gold, all those years ago, against this day. And sickens herself, too. There comes to her thoughts a clear voice. It says, ‘Death will not be cheated.’

  Sophronia is saying something about crepe, and Mrs Chetwyn nods her consent, and the body on the bed offers the insult of its meaty vacancy, of absence, of seriousness that will not be bargained away.

  Soon black crepe covers arms, covers backs, drops in pleats as stiff and weirdly yielding as some hellish toadstool gill and black as a mamba’s unhappy grin. In this heat to be trapped in black will dissolve a woman to tropical mulch, and all the admitted women on Missenden, in stays from breast to hip and thence in petticoats to hide their legs, and without even a cage to keep their limbs in circulating air, are further clad in crepe from neck to boot, and give off an unhealthy scent, as though their bodies have been forced in a frame in Mrs Chetwyn’s greenhouse, ripened and left to go over.

  But it has come down from their mother that they will be in full mourning for a month. It is furthermore her plan that they will thereafter be abruptly back in fresh day clothes, with no lilacky melting out of the shadows, no mauve timidity to announce their return by degrees. And they know they can bear a month.

  This is women’s time, this moon of sadness performed for Chetwyn, and to the dim stifled rooms come neighbourhood women dressed in proof of serving the proper form, to let it be known to her on the African hill that they, too, know the rites. To the loss of Father is added the female misery of sitting among neighbours for hours in lightless crepe, dissolving under their skirts, guarding their eyes, their voices, their larger movements. Joining in a mimicked death, it seems.

  Cosmo’s costume changes only in that his stock is black and his trousers dark; he has never been allowed the common bright Empire scarlet or the green shirts of lesser boys. His shirts, now as always dun, relieve the eye among the sisters’ weeds, and ease his mourning lot. He has a dark jacket for when he steps off Missenden or into its drawing room.

  There are vital matters of the estate to spring him from the muffled house, and once sprung she may ride in private for hours, or walk, and remember, and in company with Fuze mark the loss of Father from the breaks and green corners of Missenden.

  The month of women passes in a long four weeks. Then come the colonial males.

  The idea of these five women set out on Missenden’s rich downs like fruit, like flowers, with no familial head and only a boy by, infects the towns and every farm around, and, as if a gate has been opened, draws them, and travelling men new to the colony besides.

  In they turn at Missenden’s white pillars and, under Miss Oak’s despising eye, set off up the drive; to the house they press, looking right, looking left, measuring, setting the worth of it. In fact, the wealth of Missenden acts as a restraint on the intentions of many of the men. Had Mrs Chetwyn and her children been a Durban boarding house of women and a boy and not the family of this estate, they might have been even more tightly besieged. Even the boldest of the droning men feels that Missenden’s material bounty underlines his presumption. Many of them manage to subdue their compunction, though, and too old and too young, on they come.

  Mrs Chetwyn pours tea. The unabating visits oblige her to break her own edict and continue with half-mourning, in a clammy grey gown that she is, as she hands over a cup, plotting to burn when this is over. Her armpits itch and her arms prickle under the wool.

  The man accepting his tea, a distant neighbour, has styled himself uncle on the few occasions she met him before now – uncle, elder. But today he wears the bright cravat of a lover and is regarding her with a combative air. It matches the bristling strut with which he entered the room and, borrowing from the permissions of his previous self, made an overfamiliar greeting that involved a whiskery cheek and the medicinal sting of his talc. Now he is actually preparing to profess love to her, with resentment of her as the petitioned one and a desire to please her doing battle in his guarded and unguarded looks.

  She weighs her own permissions here – can she confront this? She surely cannot confront this. She will have to dredge up humour to deflect him, play on her weakness, simper even; at the extreme there might be tears. She weighs the counterfeit spending of them, the added bit-back irritatio
n of the part.

  He, warmed by the deference of her delicate business with the cups and plates, and by her looking at him, shifts in his chair, clears his throat and begins the story of his uneventful journey from his home to hers, sure at least of her womanly eye on him and her womanly ear.

  On they come in their elliptic collars and tethered studs, their bloodstone-buttoned vests. They come in pairs for courage and the sport of it, or singly and, on finding other fellows already there, light cigars to smoke them out. When they leave, Mrs Chetwyn has the maids set out bowls of cold water in the drawing room so that the next morning the air may be almost sweet again.

  An ungainly grain cart comes with three clergymen clinging. Mrs Chetwyn on the veranda, lining up her daughters, allows herself the measured thought that at least they have all come at once, and by lunchtime Missenden will be shot of them – she corrects herself: after lunch. Churchmen will want feeding.

  She consults Sophronia in a murmur about the larder, and bends her thoughts to what sort of table she can set. The conversation opens largely without her. All of the girls are daily more practised in empty talk; when she is not distracted, Mrs Chetwyn employs an armoury of sharp looks for the twins should their smooth phrases about the minutiae of the weather and enquiry about the road from town, down to particular rocks, down to asking after this or that tree as one might a neighbour’s health, move too close to making public their parodic games.

  Now they have free rein, and one of the priests seated in a line with his fellows on the sofa has begun to narrow his eyes.

  Maude notices her mother’s distraction, notices the twins’ energy pressing them towards outright laughter, notices the priest noticing.

  He is a stiff-necked, richly whiskered man somewhat younger than his companions but yet old enough to have thrown his hat in the colony-wide ring that is the Widow Chetwyn’s pursuit – even though, as soon as he seated himself between the larger men and had taken in the self-assured room and the direct daughters, he had known his suit to be hopeless. Maude has noticed this, too.

  Sophronia enters the room and gives a mild nod to her mother, who turns to the three men.

  ‘You will join us for luncheon, I hope?’ Not having noted their names, she brightens her smile to cover the blunt ‘you’ and gestures Sophronia forward to present her to them, and they stand to bow and introduce themselves again. Sophronia should have first claim to any wooing on offer, but she shows least interest in it, even less than the twins, as it washes around the closed keep of her family.

  The missionaries talk about themselves: two are attached to the bishop’s household in Pietermaritzburg. The third is a missionary proper.

  ‘How absolutely thrilling,’ says Maude.

  The flanking two turn to look at their missionary colleague. He clears his throat. He says, ‘Indeed. Zululand, perhaps, but more likely Pondoland, what with all the … the bother. Although one hears there is bother aplenty there, too.’

  The missionary has unbent. ‘Zululand’ and ‘there, too’ are underlined with gestures towards these – in precisely the wrong directions as it happens, but he has been turned about by the room.

  Maude says, ‘That is tremendously fascinating.’

  The twins lean back, as much as their stays will allow, and turn their heads from their sister to the priest. Mrs Chetwyn is also regarding her youngest daughter, as she thinks of her, in the light of these new intimations. She decides, in an instant, Why ever not?

  She says, ‘Maude, dear, would you like to look out Father’s maps? Perhaps the Reverend St John Vine would be so kind as to …? It is rather a large portfolio?’ And Maude Chetwyn and the missionary are paired and released into the library for a promising, and then sufficient, fifteen minutes.

  The gentlemen retire to wash up. Maude surfaces in the kitchen, joining her twin sisters who are assembling a cold collation on the wide table.

  Around the table they go, laying out slices of lamb, and pickles, and jams, cutting the green from the ham, mouths twisted in derision for Maude and her mutton-chopped prize. Cheese is beginning to bubble on toast in the open oven. One of the maids has custody of this and a listless soup.

  Cosmo strolls in from a morning at the mill as Maude tells the twins, ‘You are not to laugh! You are not to spoil it for me.’

  Maude slides a loaf of brawn onto a platter and presses home a rubbery shard. One of the twins has gouged a block of Esbensen’s from the tin and is curling it with a spoon. The twins exchange a look and pity wins: they do not even tease.

  Maude lays out young lettuce leaves and cracks their spines with her thumb to get them to lie flat.

  She gathers her courage until she can raise her eyes and look directly at Cosmo: ‘And you! Be … be normal today!’

  He who came, nominally, for the mother is favoured by the youngest daughter, a most approachable nineteen or twenty. It is the other fellows who have left empty-handed: amiable triumph and vindication are the emotions the Reverend Vibert St John Vine carries to bed that night in a guest room at Missenden, where he has been bidden to stay for a few days ‘to help sort Father’s library’ whose every volume Sophronia could lay her hand upon blindfolded.

  Risen from his kneeling prayers, Vine recalls the vision that was granted to him this morning. As he and his brother clergy passed an Indian cane-workers’ barracks on the way to the Missenden estate, there appeared to him the Ephesian Artemis, the many-breasted goddess, on a hill. He had shaken the sweat from his eyes and it was only a pawpaw tree in full fruit. But still.

  Another of the pack is Berriball, Mrs Chetwyn’s first neighbour in Africa, inheritor of the Chetwyn tent when the Chetwyns moved on. He, at least, has written ahead.

  Mrs Chetwyn, anticipating his arrival, recalls a clear-eyed man half in love with the fresh colony, the chances it offered. She remembers how he flung himself into the chivalry of surrendering his tent to Griffin and Sophronia, how he watched to see if she understood his gift. She recalls his many pamphlets spread to dry and wonders if he is improved, and if it is his improvement that has persuaded him that he can now offer for her. Good, let him come. Let them all come, like a migration of beetles that has entered its season.

  Berriball is still choosing his narrative as he directs a borrowed mare onto the Missenden drive. He is much changed; where once he stuttered and was perfectly understood, now he barks. He is uneasy that she will notice he is twice the man he was and that his new corset, bought with her in mind, may not disguise this fact.

  These days he doesn’t dream. He relies on the mind-theft of Cape Smoke to fall asleep, and wakes angry. For years he has not turned a page of Honniball or his scrimshaw books unless to take from it a privy square, and as he tries now to concentrate on inventing a plausible history – cotton, coffee, arrowroot, drought and flood: these as the usual stations – he is visited by an inkling that although he has partaken of the colonial gifts, breakfasting on pineapples that in Mayfair would fetch thirty shillings and so on, and standing higher than other men by the mere fact of standing, his may have been a trajectory rather of degeneration.

  Ordinarily he would call it toughening up, and despise his greenhorn ideas about making everything himself and spending energy on polishing up the shining hour when there were bodies to direct in the business of breaking ground, and loneliness that lived in his brainpan like a silver sphere, a cold, ringing sphere. But now, at Missenden, it seems a shabby matter of poor brotherliness to his younger self. He has had years unbothered by books. Further, having intended to astound himself and the colony with mastering many languages, Berriball has picked up only some contemptible Zulu and Dutch. Chiefly, he has restocked an armoury of foul English words that carry a weaponly edge, to deploy when most afraid.

  But he is dismounting now at the house of a lady to whom his better, younger self made gifts, and that self somehow will exist still in her picture of him, he dimly knows.

  The little girl from the tented camp – Sophie, was it? – h
as a woman’s form. And she has multiplied. There are four of them ranged alongside Mrs Chetwyn, but the eldest daughter’s features stand out.

  She is regarding him steadily. The flash of a thought comes like luck to his mind: that he has by some miracle aroused loyalty in her. Could the investment of attention to the little girl more than two decades ago have raised this crop, peaches from a sucked stone flung into the veldt? Even as he recognises the chance fortune in it, he is claiming the rights of the proximate agent of it, but distrusts this thought, too, as soon as he has it. He tells himself to concentrate on the matter at hand.

  From one of the saddlebags he brings a gift for Mrs Chetwyn – it is a piece of silk, and blue. It was chosen in the Indian quarter two days ago with no more thought than what he could get away with for the shillings he had left after the corset, but he was not wrong in scenting luck: in Sophronia’s eyes the blue silk is in conversation with the ribbon he tied around her waist when she was a small girl, and she on the veranda is transferring to him a share of the benevolence she keeps such guard over.

  Berriball, who had planned to own much of the colony at least a decade before now, will never own land, but, within days of arriving at Missenden and being invited to stay, has been offered the management of the heart of the estate. Mrs Chetwyn needs a man at the mill; she reasons, why not Berriball? He is unattached and there is at least a faint history between them in this unstoried place …

  He accepts immediately, stiffly, and leaves her to be alone and unparcel it. The shock of his good fortune rushes through his limbs – she must never learn the quantum of salvation in her offer; he feels he might almost cry in gratitude that his new-landed self is somehow being called forward at last.

  Striding along a break, away from the house, he punches fist into palm – he will serve his rescuer as no squire has served – the mill! The mill at Missenden! It will be admired from here to Mauritius.