Under Glass

by Claire Robertson

  No more brandy. He must hold himself apart, and white, and keep himself away from brandy and moreover the old men’s spinning smoke.

  He is out of breath and has come out without his hat. Moreover, he is lost in the cane. He chooses a path, doubts it is the right one, sets off along it anyway.

  And his risen resolved blood begins to do its work. Well, yes, it is no great feat on the part of the woman to see what is there to be seen. He is equal to the work – he is Berriball. He has been no more than recognised as the man he is. Another way of looking at it is that it is in fact lucky for her he came along when he did (just the mill? What about the management of the cane? If this were his land he would appoint himself to the cane, too).

  He is in sight of the white house and in need of a drink. She will need to be educated to his worth and his due. He will be equal to this education. She offered him a wage, but he will have his reward as well.

  The woman’s daughter – Sophie, or something like – is rising from a veranda chair at his approach.

  4

  BUT MRS CHETWYN HAS KEPT the land for Cosmo. Cosmo, with Fuze by. She has the parenthood of one of Missenden’s managers and, as regent, the employ of the lieutenants. She need not direct the work of Cosmo, Fuze or Berriball to reign. Where she so lately, but three months or less since, received the revelation of how Missenden – and Chetwyn – had been mapped by her decision to raise her youngest daughter as her son, now in the mapping habit she can draw a new scheme with herself at the centre.

  She is heavy, fully in her seventh month. They have agreed to greet it as a miracle, this child of Chetwyn that will prove his immortality. She shares with no one that it is, to her, a matter for dread. Visions of congress in a grave wake her even though she knows – she knows! – that the true parent of this child is probably even now directing the wrapping of a root bole or slapping the pages of a letter from Kew on the sloping ground above the bay.

  She visits Chetwyn’s mound in the family plot it has inaugurated in Elephant Camp. She cannot touch her middle in front of the grave but arranges her skirts and turns away to hide it. As she walks back down the hill to the house she mulls in her mind the botanical word ‘emergence’: able neither to fruit nor to advance the plant by branching off, an emergence comes from the shallowest layers and forms only, at its best self, a prickle or a thorn.

  Never has she had so distant an engagement with her own gestating. She had known she was done with bearing, and yet here she is, in her forty-fifth year, bidden again to bear what has to be borne.

  At first Fuze, with Cosmo named master but yet needing Fuze almost to breathe for him, feels the complementary pleasures of being tested (and found equal to the task) and being needed: they mix to a green force in him. Accustomed now after several musters, Fuze takes to riding every day. Dawn finds him saddling two horses, eager to start.

  Afternoons are for tutoring, because, over the hill, Berriball needs Fuze as much as Cosmo does. If the mill is a simple matter of feeding and crushing, the boiling house is a manufactory with processes and the new man knows nothing of these.

  It is a week since Fuze began to walk him through the protocols, and Berriball has, if not understood them, at least mastered them in rote fashion, enough by now to forestall Fuze when he begins to explain again. But today a new question has arisen, an interesting question to do with the bagasse, filtration, a second pressing; the inciting element is doubt about the quality of a load of lime. Fuze, missing the Captain, leans into it with an appetite to undo it and reassemble it.

  The two of them spend the afternoon working in a way that reminds Fuze of women mixing cob with unfamiliar clay, a matter of hands doing the reading and small attempts, reversals; they enrol even their mouths to taste and guess which way to proceed. There is something about the property of the lime, or the property of the sugar, or the correct heat, that they are straining to understand.

  At last Berriball resorts to marks on paper. He scratches a while, then he straightens and tucks his pencil behind his ear and says with an unhurried sort of resignation, ‘I just don’t know.’

  Fuze, emboldened by fellow feeling, by a week of being listened to, by this touching on his favourite thing, shakes his head and answers: ‘And me, I don’t know.’

  For a blink they are equals, even companions. But a chin pulls back to its neck, and a face twists with what is perhaps meant to be private contempt, and fleetingly and unmistakeably as a scent, Fuze hears, behind Berriball’s unfriendly huff of amusement: ‘Well of course you don’t know.’

  He has long considered mangoes for Fuze’s Camp; Cosmo has signed for a consignment of healthy young plants; today they will be dug in. Really, there is no satisfaction to equal the building of an orchard. Regularity, husbandry, plenty. A mix of science, reasoning and instinct, the fine equation of something given, something got. The careful rings of banked earth around each fingerling trunk, the soon gift of paler, newer leaves … He cannot admit to himself that his energy arises from his distress at being lost to his gears.

  For weeks Fuze has had no hand in the mill. Having leaned forward once too often to demonstrate the proper employment of a lever, or tasted a pressing after Berriball already approved its clarity, or even having cast too close a glance at the stitching on a sack as it waited for its wagon … well, Fuze is gone.

  He chooses – as he always chooses, now – avoidance over resistance and therefore he throws himself into improvements on this side of the hill, into mango trees and more. Missenden’s first middle age of gentle processes and hidden corners is thrust back to its laboratory youth by Fuze. Toads that have raised generations in cool, cluttered ditches freeze in confusion when these are stripped and mined to bald earth in a matter of days; old, hot heaps of mouldering litter are tossed pitchfork high and spread, and the sun scorches tender earthworm flesh.

  Cosmo, out from under the shade of Father, standing now in law as the heir to Missenden, the inheritor of it, is frozen as the ditch toads. She rides out with Fuze, she signs for plants, she stands near the row of men with mattocks raised to scour the ditches and waits to be punished.

  For her and for Fuze both this is banishment, although they are where they always were.

  Visitors to the house (among whom there are no more suitors; Mrs Chetwyn’s condition stops even them) rarely meet the new master of Missenden. Even the business of the inheritance has proceeded by exchange of letters. Meager is sulking and will not come to shake the hand of the son who set this enterprise rolling out of his reach.

  Only the missionary Vine is there, every day. His mission to the souls south of here has begun, at least on paper. But he has spent only three days at his new home, and has since returned to Missenden. He says he is waiting for a cartload of hymnals to catch up with him. In reality he is wooing, although Maude needs no persuading. She only wants to put him through the performance of it, for she will have every ritual she is owed, from orange blossom to a tall cake and a particular dress. She will be wed in the consecrated chapel on the Cologne estate, and there will be guests at Missenden after. She could plan it in a day with her sisters but she wants the planning of it, too – months of it.

  With every choice, her mother wonders if her daughter is spinning out ‘no’ before all that is left to her is years of ‘yes’. She recalls her own pared-down preparations in her room in Lucknow, the sense that she had, by virtue of simply being herself – female, young, there – accrued enough to make the purchase of a mate. Hers and Chetwyn’s both had been an acquiring impulse, though affable enough to make a start on tenderness.

  Vine has returned to Missenden with a strange confidence but also slackened momentum, a man who has learned that he is equal to the task that had loomed so large, now without the press of the question to drive him on. Doing it had not been his ambition; knowing he could do it, passing that test, had been all of it.

  He says little about the station in Eastern Pondoland, only schools Maude in the name. She repeats it
but she feels it cannot be right. ‘Seek ye seek ye,’ she says, but on paper it is Lusikisiki.

  Vine works up a theory about climate and the colonial mind, and writes to his old tutor at Caius: ‘Particularly for we ocean-weathered newcomers, the phenomenon of every day starting out as, for all of our childhoods at home, only the most blessed summer days have begun, habituates us to the gift of it, yes of course, but further, builds in us the belief that we are not only lucky, but, as all who are lucky believe, that we are deserving of luck – it is our self-worth that is warmed here. Here, we are better men. Here, we find ourselves fine. The sun shines on us because we are likeable. The world itself applauds us. Thus the happy self-regard of the colonist and the native both.’

  Two problems reveal themselves and Vine dispatches them: how to mission a people who know themselves already blessed? He answers with the uses of sin and taxes. And as for too much good sun, we must become expert at making shade.

  He laughs: on the road back from the mission he passed a tumble of rocks and saw among them brown rodentish creatures so moth-eaten, motionless and madly staring that they might have been lifted one by one from under glass in a zoological museum and set down, friable, weightless, by the cart track.

  ‘Stuffed already, with button eyes,’ he tells Maude. ‘I thought of you right away, I thought to remember to tell you.’

  Maude watches him, hoping he will make himself clear.

  ‘There was a big one, he was leaning as though he hadn’t been mounted well, d’you see Maude?’ but he cannot get her to see the marvellous joke of encountering in wild Africa a troupe of creatures related so clearly to the taxidermied specimens of a London museum, down to their fierce, brainless glass eyes.

  Won’t she see the gift of him putting so much of himself, of his Home self, into here as he tries to meet it? Maude thinks it a deal of poetry to expend on a dassie.

  She awakes her cunning, too: she has him, she is sure of that, secured by the pressings of his hands, the leaning of her torso, but she can see that Missenden and her sisters have him also. He has a spot in the garden where he goes in the cool of the morning to write his letters; he has his place at the head of the table at every meal, and on his feet behind Mother’s chair when she summons Berriball for orders. Already the deference and the teasing are his; already the breaking off of sentences, the quick winding down to make way should he so much as lift his head to respond to what they say.

  Cosmo is easy with him. Too easy, as though she thinks herself acceptable in all her parts, in both her selves invited in by God’s gentleman usher, shown to whatever side of the aisle she chooses.

  Missenden at blue noon: what was to the wagoneer’s eye all those years ago a gentle hill is now plateaued by her garden, with further flatness suggested by the house. From the house itself, looking out, there is no question but that this is a redoubt, a seaward-looking fastness. Stepping from the front veranda towards the sea, one is aware of a ha-ha forcing a near horizon, at the limit of the lawn. If one is seated on the bench midway to the drop, the eye leaps and there is no more of the colony to see until the coastal plain and beachside jungle.

  As for the sea: before dawn, in the last of the cool air, a woman in her nightgown, seeking relief on the bench from her hot, hatching body, will have no ocean horizon at all; the pale sky and misted pale view are one.

  At noon a neophyte missioner standing exposed to the sun (or perhaps just looking out from the veranda; he is not so foolish, after all) would see at the end of the garden, caught between the edge of the lawn and the edge of the world, a band of sea so dark and flat it would suggest not a distant horizon but a close, high wall.

  Long before brassy noon, Vibert St John Vine is at his table in the grotto formed by a banana grove and a lower tangle of glossy plants. He makes a pleasing picture, bent over his books, writing something, now and then looking up and moving his regard through the short arc from the house to the view.

  One of the house dogs crosses the lawn to him, subsides under his chair and dozes to the restful sounds of small industry, the man’s boot heel against her back.

  Vine has long since drained the cup he carried on its saucer to the table, but here comes Maude, out from under the veranda’s shade, bearing another. She watches nothing but his back. Before he should turn and see her, she pinches her cheeks and bites her lips, and runs a furtive hand over and under her breasts to alert them, to make them plump here and taut there. At a small sound he turns and receives this evidence of the love she bears him. He nudges a book; she sets down the tea.

  But does not leave. He moves more books and clears a chair for her. Head bowed, hands clasped, how to begin: she begins. She lifts her eyes to direct communion with his and makes confession of her family’s sin.

  He: head tilted to indulge her girlish qualms about girlish things becomes head up at full attention on a neck tendoned with disbelief. Hand comes alive and comforts face, and, oh, must make a fragile shield to hide from it this offence to God, offence to property, offence, most particularly, to his own credulity.

  She has judged it nicely, she believes: she has bought herself an ally to inhabit this secret with her.

  But she has in fact misjudged him. The ruling impulse in Vibert St John Vine is to be heeded, and so, although his courage does not first carry him all the way to the mother, he knows that he will immediately seek out the son, the unnatural girl, the imitation boy.

  As he rises, he informs Maude that they will of course quit Missenden. They will do so ahead of her sister, who within the week will be brought in her female severalty to the laws of men and be made to quit it too. He thinks he reassures her, as doubt grows in her eyes, by saying they will marry in the port town and have priests to stand up for them, but first …

  There will never again be so incontrovertible, so fictively pure, a case of right and wrong before him, nor so large and grand and pleasing a sin. Here is an error of ways to be proved, and he rises tall and taller in his own frame, purified by this blazing certitude. This very moment he will find her and set out, gravely, elatedly, the size of it.

  As he crosses the lawn to the house he quite forgets Maude. He remembers – and is stoked to even greater heat by the realisation – that he has the law in his armoury, too. A sin and a crime against nature and the law, and incontrovertibility as not a single thing in his life or faith is incontrovertible. This is action such as he had never thought to see.

  He hurries to it, and is stopped almost at once at the door of the white house by mild Sophronia, who, with words and silences and the stillness of her shoulders and pale hands crossed below her waist, turns him away.

  Upstairs, Sophronia does not prevail. Her authority over her sisters and Cosmo has never had actual parental weight, and now permission for it is withdrawn, simply and naturally, and she cannot insist that they quit the house or even that they quit the stairs. From two steps below the landing outside Mother’s room to the seventh from the top there are Chetwyn sisters, staunchly seated or standing, listening.

  Griffin is in the room. Mother is in the room. The girls know she has forgotten them, so completely is she not Mother, this that is using her voice for its cries, summoning – what? – to take it away.

  When she is not groaning or crying out she is breathing like an animal, snorting and panting. Worse is her gasp, a private sound of body to body, telling the truth about pain. They hear it all. They do not know her species of agony but they hear enough to begin to hate her for what she is inflicting on herself, for there is no one else in the room but loyal Griffin. Her body is doing this to her. Or must they hate the baby?

  Who is, naturally, a boy. A boy by the evidence the insisting women of Missenden will not leave his birthing room without. Swaddling is folded back from the protesting red bundle and his grown sisters in turn bend over him to find out what all the fuss is about. Not scissioned, then, but fruited: an orchid, one, pleated in the centre, dully purple. A very full reticule, and no different �
�� perhaps only more swollen – than that of little craal boys. Cosmo cannot envy her brother it. But envy would be the mildest of her reactions.

  She leaves her mother’s bedroom fighting for breath, pressing past her sisters. Their realisation of all that this may mean is evident in their open mouths as they turn from the baby to look at her as if to complete a logic problem or arithmetic. Sister by sister, Cosmo is moved to yet another camp.

  She takes the stairs at such a pace she almost falls to the lower floor, but teeters, recovers, gains the door and gains Missenden, and learns in one frightening rush what price she has put on her own sacrifice, what value. As much as the worth of her whole self, that was the worth she had set for being the purchase that saved this place and this family. And now in one afternoon she is counterfeit again.

  She has only the length of the garden from the veranda to the start of the cane to receive these revelations. Waiting for her there, moving towards her down the break with a predator’s appetite, is Vine.

  5

  SHE COULD RUN TO FUZE.

  She could easily outpace Vine and run to Fuze, but having reached him, what is her course but to stand chewing the air for words? Thefts nest within thefts like Chinese boxes; you think you have found – or revealed, or admitted – the foundation crime and there is yet another, betraying the encasing form as it was or would be betrayed.

  She could run to Fuze or simply run, but in the end where can she go but to the edge of Missenden, and who is there but Miss Oak? Griffin is tethered to the birth room; perhaps she will not have to shadow the true son, but she has already surrendered that duty where the false one is concerned.

  Cosmo does not hesitate for long on the wide steps of the cottage. From the depths of the porch Miss Oak is watching her. Somehow she knows already about the Missenden heir.