by Bruno Noble
Deborah frowned. ‘What’s he doing?’ she asked, jabbing with a finger and tucking her brown hair behind her ears so as to not impair her vision as she leant closer.
‘He’s pushing,’ I said.
‘He’s kissing,’ giggled Eleanor.
We looked more intently and I became abruptly aware of a profusion of kissing or pushing larvae, of the fact that they were all, if not kissing or pushing, being kissed or pushed.
‘Actually,’ said Papa casually, ‘he’s eating.’
Deborah’s frown deepened.
‘Eating,’ repeated Eleanor.
‘Yes. You see, when there’s not enough food for them, when they run out of their favourite food, they’ll have a nibble of anything and, funnily enough, because other caterpillars of the same family have eaten the same plant for food, they’ll taste like it, like the plant, they’ll taste like their favourite food, which makes it very unlikely that a caterpillar is even aware that he is eating, well, his own family. And, of course,’ Papa went on, warming to the sound of his voice, ‘there are advantages to this. At moments of food shortage, you not only acquire nourishment yourself but you eliminate the competition and address the problem of food scarcity at a blow.’
We looked closer yet. Our knowledge transformed what in our ignorance had been an assortment of dull plant stalks and slothful insects into a cannibal battlefield. One caterpillar, its back arched, was intent on chomping its way through another’s midriff that had its head and tail end raised as though in pain and surrender. Another, in pulsing concertina, was consuming another from the tail end and yet another had raised itself on its prolegs to better assault another from above. One luckless caterpillar was being consumed from both ends at once. I shuddered.
I could see through the fine mesh of the cage that Deborah’s eyes and mouth were open wide.
‘But why don’t you just give them more food?’ asked Eleanor.
Papa smiled and shrugged, displacing a butterfly from the back of his neck as he did so. ‘Well, it’s more interesting this way, don’t you think?’
Deborah stood straight and shrieked. ‘Urgh! I think it’s disgusting!’ We watched her run out of the greenhouse and down the garden to her mother. I went from having been shocked, to intrigued, to sickened and to bored. Deborah had given me a chance, so I took it.
Crying, ‘Me too!’ I ran out, regretting the insincerity in my voice that, in poor imitation of Deborah’s horror and indignation, sounded hollow, out of the stifling heat and down the cooler garden and into Mama’s embrace, insisting she hug me and comfort me as Mrs Baldock did Deborah.
Momentarily, Deborah and I outdid each other in repetitions of how ‘revolting’ and ‘disgusting’ it had all been, but we tired of the game and went indoors to finish the lemonade, having assured Mama that Papa hadn’t wanted any more tea.
From the cool sanctuary of Mama’s room, I looked out past the patio where the two friends sat and down the length of the garden to the shed with the appended greenhouse and I drank my warm, sticky lemonade. At the same moment that it occurred to me that I could see neither Papa nor Eleanor in the greenhouse, I heard a cry, I registered Deborah’s, Mama’s and Mrs Baldock’s heads swinging around and up and I saw Eleanor run out of the shed into the greenhouse, the length of it and, in turn, out into the garden, the length of it, and to her mother. Her distress, to my surprise, was greater than Deborah’s and mine had been. She flung herself onto her mother, sobbing, her fair hair fanning out onto her mother’s chest. Mrs Baldock smiled above her daughter’s head at Mama as though to say, ‘Impressionable young girls, hey!’ and held her daughter with one arm while patting her back with her free hand.
In the doorway between the shed and the greenhouse, Papa appeared, or at least his shirt did, Papa’s face flashing intermittently between the hanging breeding cages as he made his way down the greenhouse and to its door where, instead of stepping out, he stopped. Given the distance, it was hard to see the expression on his face. He waved, dispersing butterflies, and I was the only one to wave back and then he waved again but this time with what seemed like a shoebox in his hand and appeared to shrug his shoulders. ‘Now, now,’ said Ms Baldock. ‘There, there. It’s only caterpillars.’
‘It’s only caterpillars,’ repeated Deborah. ‘Come on,’ she added in a grown-up’s voice.
Eleanor lifted her face from her mother’s chest, her own convulsing as she struggled for breath. She shook her head. ‘It was. It was. Such a big caterpillar,’ she said.
Mrs Baldock, who had been running her fingers through her daughter’s hair, stayed her hand.
‘He said, did I want to see a really big caterpillar? It was in a box. And he held the box in his lap. And he said, did I want to touch it? And it moved. It was horrible.’ And Eleanor wailed and burrowed her face in her mother again.
Deborah stood behind her mother and placed a hand on her shoulder as if in gentle reminder that she was there too and Mrs Baldock covered it with her own, gently patting Eleanor’s back with the other.
‘You know,’ said Mrs Baldock, ‘I think we should be going.’ She stood, laboriously, still holding Eleanor to her. ‘Come on, girls. Get your dollies.’ It had got to late afternoon; the south-west-facing patio was in shade. There was a cooling in the air and a chilling in Mrs Baldock’s manner. She moved with the deliberation of someone reluctant to accept a new idea, as when the body has acknowledged it before the mind has. It was as though a smell had offended her and she wanted away from it without causing offence to the injuring party. Papa had stayed at the far end of the garden, his discarded jacket and tie his formal representatives at the house end of it, emphasising his absence. Mama didn’t protest. She stayed seated and reached to squeeze Mrs Baldock’s hand as she and her daughters made their own way out.
That was the day I lost a mother and gained a sibling – virtually speaking. It was the day Mama’s eyes glassed over, much in the same way as a shop’s shutters might be lowered and padlocked or a house’s windows’ curtains be drawn and front and back doors locked and bolted while the owners go on extended leave. It was the day she told me that that little lump wasn’t lard but love, that soon I would have a little sister or brother for friendship and company. I could tell that Mama spoke with reservation, with apprehension in place of joy, fearful that the gift of apples she had brought her child might hide a snake.
‘Mama,’ I said and sought to turn her head towards me and force her face me.
‘Yes,’ she replied, removing my hand from her chin and placing both of my hands with hers on her tummy. ‘You can’t feel anything yet but you will be able to soon.’
Papa walked up. ‘They’ve left,’ he observed.
‘Yes,’ said Mama.
‘You’ve told her,’ he stated, looking at our hands on Mama’s belly.
‘Yes,’ said Mama looking into the distance, unable to meet my eyes and unwilling to meet his.
Papa picked up his jacket and tie and walked into the house.
Sharon
Miss Crossbank stood on the dais at the front of the class like an actor on a minimalist stage, her blackboard, desk and chair her only props. Every day, another controlled improvisation, another captivating performance. A roll-call of interchangeable pupils’ names but just one enduring, enviable actor.
We children considered Miss Crossbank old but I knew that Mum and Dad thought her young. She was the first adult whose dress I had noted: a buttoned cardigan, a knee-length skirt, flat shoes, hair in a bun and no make-up that I could detect. She radiated warmth, certainty, fairness, modesty. Through her, I recognised the power of dress: dress as communication, as armour, as shape, as projected persona.
When I reached the age at which I noticed breasts, I prayed to have discreetly sticky-out breasts like Mrs Crossbank’s and not embarrassingly protuberant ones like Mum’s.
Isabella
It was an evening in which Mama was out. She had protested weakly and clutched her distending stomach
pointedly, but Papa had assured her that she would ‘enjoy it very much’. Besides, he would be poor, nay, non-existent company for her: he had a meeting, the first of the new academic year, at which I could serve drinks and offer crisps around and listen quietly for an hour or so before making my own way to bed.
‘A meeting,’ had said Mama, not a little sceptically.
‘A gathering, if you prefer,’ had said Papa haughtily, conceding some ground.
‘A soirée,’ had said Mama mischievously.
‘No, a gathering will do,’ had said Papa coldly, decisively.
Papa drew the study curtains closed and switched the lights on: the desk lamp with a butterfly-embroidered shade, the built-in bookcase lamps and the overhead picture lights that illuminated not pictures but butterflies, the wings’ shadows of which made the butterflies appear larger than they really were and highlighted them in surreal, funereal outline.
I was patted and petted by four men, three of whom I knew by sight, and who, I could tell, considered themselves Papa’s equal by the volume of noise they were unafraid of making, by the relative familiarity they exhibited and by their occupation of the comfortable Chesterfield sofa and a spot by a wingback chair and the fire place. I was ignored by two startled postgraduate students who had clearly had no expectation of finding a six-year-old girl in attendance, and who gave themselves away as junior by directly assuming the two least comfortable chairs in Papa’s study and by only taking crisps when offered them. Professor Rennet was the oldest of Papa’s guests and held himself at a distance, examining the things on the mantelpiece that he had seen before, one by one, before turning to stand with his back to the fireplace and staring at me appraisingly. Behind him, my grandfather stared angrily out of the family photograph at Professor Rennet’s back, his view of half of the room now obscured. My grandfather seemed to regard Professor Rennet with disapproval, perhaps objecting to a goatee that did a poor job of disguising a long chin and swollen cheeks, to long, greasy hair swept back from a low forehead and to a pince-nez that Professor Rennet kept in a breast pocket with a handkerchief when he wasn’t peering through it. As though unwilling to assume a seat before Professor Rennet, Papa stood by the mantelpiece too, one arm on a wingback chair, the other reaching occasionally for the glass of bitter he had placed on the mantelpiece, obscuring his wedding photograph.
‘So, Dr Bicourt, you’re a butterfly collector,’ observed the new man, raising one hand languidly in the general direction of the butterfly display cases on the walls.
Papa smiled affably and delivered his stock reply: ‘A lepidopterist, actually.’
Dr Dearman said, ‘Brian, I should have warned you. Tell John he’s a butterfly collector and he’ll correct you with, “A lepidopterist, actually.” Tell him he’s a lepidopterist and he’ll correct you with, “A…” – oh, what’s the word? It sounds like a rhinoceros. But it isn’t, obviously.’ He waved his hand in the air in invitation to Papa to interpose, and drank some beer.
‘A rhopalocerist,’ said Papa contentedly, and continued to explain, as though to a child, ‘I don’t do moths. Only butterflies.’
‘And – remind us – why’s that?’ asked Dr Dearman, while the students nodded as though the distinction were evident. Dr Dearman tugged at his waistcoat, a habit he resorted to in order to give his rhetorical questions added significance. His eyes, set so wide apart that a canopy of brown, bushy eyebrows failed to shelter their extreme corners, gave him a bovine look that was dispelled by a smile that was sinister for revealing only his canines. His aspect of a malevolent bull was only just more amusing than it was disquieting.
Papa shrugged. ‘The thrill of the chase. In the case of moths, you set a trap in a field in the evening and go back to it in the morning. At least with butterflies you have to chase the damned things. And you get to be out and about on a sunny day.’
‘First you chase them. And then you breed them. You breed them too, don’t you, John?’
‘I must admit,’ said Papa, not answering the question, ‘that the display cases in here aren’t mine, but my father’s. The smaller ones in the hallway are mine, as are others upstairs. I was going to assemble some more, but where to put them?’
‘John,’ said Dr Faben, who, sandwiched between Dr Dearman and Brian, had to lean forward with some effort every time he wanted to lift or rest his glass and had decided to hang onto it. ‘On the way here I was trying to tell Brian why you maintain that philosophy stopped with Descartes.’ Dr Faben wore large, thick-rimmed glasses that, slipping to the end of his nose with his every movement, were only arrested by a wart of sorts and a moustache, the ends of which collected the froth from his beer and that he would suck once his beer glass drained. His thin, colourless hair lent him a weedy, sneaky look.
‘It began with Descartes,’ interceded Dr Dearman, raising a finger. ‘After all, he’s not referred to as the father of philosophy for nothing.’
‘But that’s Plato,’ said Brian.
‘Tosh!’ said Dr Dearman. ‘John, the floor is yours.’
‘Indeed it is!’ said Papa, looking down at his carpet, his floor, and then up with a smile for everyone that lingered, just longest, for the professor. ‘But let’s ask Messrs Baden and Lewis. What do you think, gentleman? With whom did philosophy start and end?’
‘Psht! It’s no use asking them!’ exclaimed Dr Dearman. ‘They’re bound to say, with Frege and Wittgenstein or some such nonsense.’
Messrs Baden and Lewis looked at each other and said, ‘After you,’ simultaneously.
Dr Dearman insisted, ‘John, go on, you’re the Greek authority.’
‘The Greeks authority,’ corrected Papa immodestly. ‘The last time I checked, I was English.’ He shifted on his feet and stood straighter. ‘It’s like this. Plato took us apart and Descartes put us together again.’
‘Not forgetting a little help from God,’ said the professor.
‘And the pineal gland,’ proposed Brian.
‘Isn’t there more to philosophy,’ asked Mr Baden or Mr Lewis ever so tentatively, ‘than the mind and body split?’
Emboldened by the moment’s reflection his friend’s question engendered, Mr Lewis or Mr Baden cleared his throat. ‘I would say that logic tells us that one can’t reach a conclusion from the one premise and that, consequently, the cogito ergo sum argument fails to satisfy.’ He drained his glass. ‘If indeed it is an argument,’ he stated to the silent room.
‘Carry on,’ said Papa.
‘It draws a conclusion from the one premise. A and B therefore C, all right. But A therefore B is a nonsense unless B is contained in or identical to A and vice versa, in which case what we have is a tautology and not an argument.’
‘What did I tell you?’ exclaimed Dr Dearman exultantly, jumping up and down in the sofa, to the extent that he could without spilling his beer. ‘Are you Russell men?’ he asked the young men aggressively.
My father raised his hand and addressed the young men equably. ‘So, tell me, you see Descartes’ problem – how would you reconcile the mind with the body?’
‘I’m not sure I would want to separate the two in the first place,’ said Mr Baden or Mr Lewis.
‘Too late,’ said Dr Dearman. ‘Plato has already done so.’
‘You remind me of the tourist who asks the way to Donegal and is told, “If I were you, I wouldn’t start from here!”’ sniggered Dr Faben, addressing the postgraduate student.
‘Crisps,’ said my father, looking at me. ‘And beer, please.’
‘Let’s ask Isabella!’ suggested Dr Dearman, as I rose to replenish the empty bowls.
I stood, pleased to be included in the conversation.
‘Do you have a body?’ Dr Dearman asked me very seriously, perched on the edge of the Chesterfield.
‘Yes!’ I replied, delighted at the ease with which I answered the question.
‘And what a lovely little body it is,’ remarked Dr Dearman, before adding hastily, ‘And do you have a mind?’
‘Yes, of course!’ I giggled.
‘And is it the same as your body?’
‘No!’ I found the line of questioning hilarious.
‘There you have it,’ said Dr Dearman, reclining with a handful of crisps and looking pointedly at the young men, who laughed loudest to show that they took this all in good humour.
*
Dead butterflies in display cases followed me from the front door, along the corridor and up the stairs all the way to my bedroom, the second room on the first-floor landing, after the bathroom. Then came an airing cupboard, Mama’s and Papa’s room and then, around the L in the landing, the spare room that was to be Gaia’s, should my mother give birth to a girl, or Cosmo’s, should she have a boy.
I looked dispassionately around my room to see what toys and books I could divest myself of and place in my sibling’s bedroom as a welcome present to ease the transition from cosseting womb to, as yet, empty room. The whole thing – how the mind chose the body to carry it or how the body selected the mind to fit it – remained a mystery to me. I had dolls, of course, none of which I felt particularly attached to. It had occurred to me that I played with them not only to pass the time and to relieve boredom but because it was the thing that young girls were expected to do. I couldn’t animate them in the way that Eleanor and Deborah could theirs. I could assign them names but I couldn’t endow them with personalities and give them consistent characteristics. My dolls remained, for me, plastic or, occasionally, china or wooden mannequins with which I could acquire the taste for power and only briefly indulge in the illusion of control and reinforce learned habits of behaviour. Such was the conviction with which Eleanor and Deborah acted their dolls’ lives out, however, that I would grow convinced that their dolls were in some way better and more alive than mine; and I would play with theirs only to realise, by the time Mrs Baldock told me it was time to return home, what I already knew – that their dolls were as inanimate as mine and that the charade I had manufactured with such appetite would fool me only while my suspension of disbelief held.