Night of Fire

by Colin Thubron

  She drove her third-hand Citroën to the outskirts of a village near Petworth. On the passenger seat was her inscribed copy of The World of Butterflies, so thumbed and reread that it had disintegrated into a sheaf of separated pages. Although the day was overcast and there were no butterflies, she could have guessed Arthur’s house by the buddleia and verbena crowding its porch.

  The doorbell sounded deep inside the house, just as she remembered his voice had sounded, as if from someone far away inside him. She felt suddenly nervous, wondering how old he had become, and how she would appear to him. But the door opened on a man unchanged from her memory; his pale eyes looked down from a foot above her and his moustache was no whiter, and still smudged with its disconcerting orange fleck beneath the nostrils. He said at once: ‘What a fine young woman you’ve become!’

  He brought tea and some stale Petit Beurre biscuits into the conservatory, and they sat and talked hesitantly, while she grew used to the faraway rasping of his voice, and looked out at a garden different from any she had seen. Instead of a mown lawn there was a small flowering meadow, surrounded by the different shrubs and flowers that nourished butterflies: buddleia, honeysuckle and mock orange, with swathes of phlox and marigolds. Later she felt ashamed of how much she had eventually talked, of her enthusiasm for experiences surely banal to him: her first sighting of a Swallowtail, and her memories of the Painted Lady year. But he watched her with a kind of remote sweetness, and the distant voice seemed less an impediment than some inborn restraint.

  All round his sitting room, beneath the bookshelves, were waist-high cabinets labelled ‘Papua New Guinea: western islands’, ‘Peru: Huallaga river’ or ‘Ivory Coast: Great Nimba rainforest’. She knew they contained butterflies. She felt as if butterflies electrified and possessed the whole house. In her own home the bookshelves were monopolised by her father’s middlebrow thrillers, and the pictures were framed watercolours of scenes she never noticed. But here the volumes on wildlife, entomology and travel were ranked two deep on the shelves, and nineteenth-century prints of the Blue Morpho and Owl butterfly shone on the walls.

  When she asked him about those labelled drawers, he pulled out at random ‘Costa Rica: Osa peninsula’. She gazed down. Outspread on their trays, sealed in glass, were the lovely winged insects of Central America. They were as exquisite and strange as any she had imagined. Their wings were luminous sapphire, leaf green, scarlet or miniature tapestries of overlapping black and aquamarine scales. There were butterflies with lacquered gold forewings or bat-like tails edged in crimson, others whose wing veins surged black between a blizzard of white spots, still others whose hindwings were enamelled with brilliant eyes.

  For a second she wanted to break the glass and set them free. But they were scrupulously labelled with location, family, genus. Some of the labels were starting to yellow and curl. These creatures were, in their way, more dead than anything she had known, the shimmer of their flight unimaginable now. There were more than a hundred trays of them. She noticed Arthur’s hands as he opened and slid back their drawers, how lean and delicately veined they were. She imagined them killing. She said: ‘You caught all these.’

  He must have heard the sadness in her voice. ‘People rarely do this now,’ he said. ‘These were netted for science, for teaching. It’s not collectors that have driven butterflies towards extinction, you know, but the destruction of habitat . . . everywhere . . .’

  She said bleakly: ‘Yes, of course.’ He was a scientist, after all. Lepidoptery was a science.

  ‘But specimens are not enough. They can’t tell you the insect’s feeding or flight pattern or mating habits, let alone its host plants. That’s all in the field notes. Each exhibit has a history.’ As he walked back into the conservatory, he suddenly asked: ‘Do you know how to type?’

  ‘Yes.’ She had learnt in the past few months.

  Fifty years of collecting and research notes, inscribed in his erratic handwriting, lay in boxes upstairs, he said. Some survived in the indelible ink of a rapidograph drafting pen; but in the tropics, where ink could clog or dissolve, he had preferred pencil; and he feared these records were fading. Before he donated the collection to his old university, he needed all his field notes typed up. He could only offer her ‘pocket money’. But instantly she said yes.

  ‘Shall I take some home with me?’

  He hesitated. His voice sounded even farther away. ‘Well . . . they are my life’s work . . .’

  ‘Then I’ll come to you. I’ll bring my computer.’ She was rather proud of this.

  Now the sun had come out over the garden. Relaxed again, he said: ‘Let’s see what’s out there.’

  They were walking through the spent meadow grass. The air was heady with lavender. Now, among the phlox and flowering shrubs, she noticed asters and an undergrowth of morning glory. They were fluttering with familiar life. A bed of nettles – a favourite plant of the Peacock caterpillar – flourished hidden behind ranks of zinnias. He said: ‘I give them larval plants in the hope of colonising them. But you can’t contain butterflies. They’re wanderers.’

  The sixty or so species in Britain, Stephanie thought, were nothing beside the eighteen thousand flying in the world; but she felt she understood why he nurtured them here. They were a penance for the pinned and cabineted dead. Their short, intense days – nectaring, mating, laying eggs – burned with concentrated life. In a week or two they would leave their bodies behind in the long grass, under the honeysuckle, in the potting shed, but only after their vibrant and obsessive cycle was over.

  She and Arthur watched the clustered insects without speaking. She felt curiously at peace. This collusive silence was for themselves – butterflies could hear nothing – and she copied the rapt discernment with which he watched. Once he leant over a bush with his slight, gangling stoop and transferred a Red Admiral on to the back of his hand. This intimacy intrigued her. How did he know it would stay? At last he blew it softly into flight. She caught a look of impish pleasure. She wondered if he was perhaps lonely, but imagined that like her he cherished solitude. When two Small Whites appeared – they still reminded her of her mother – she asked him: ‘How exactly are we related, Cousin Arthur?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’ He gave a light, rasping laugh. ‘Your mother said it was through a great-uncle on her father’s side. I think that’s right. But her family was complicated.’

  ‘How?’ She was asking him the things she would have asked her mother. ‘She said so little.’

  ‘That was very hard on you, Stephanie, she declining for so long.’ He was looking down on her with something like concern. ‘I never knew her parents. But they were cultivated people, musical. I believe there was Austrian blood. I saw your mother most before her marriage. She was enchanting then, a very quick mind, very sensitive, although she was always pale and somehow weak.’

  ‘Why did she marry my father?’

  ‘I don’t know . . .’ He let the question drift. ‘These things are mysterious.’

  It crossed Stephanie’s mind that Arthur might have been a little in love with her himself.

  Louisa had come back early that weekend, and greeted Stephanie in a dark flurry. Their father had cancer of the liver, she said. It was probably inoperable. He was too angry to talk about it. He had been drinking all day. So what could you do?

  Stephanie did not know how to talk to him. She had never known. He had never taught her. Next evening, after he had returned from work as usual, she found him hunched at the kitchen table, consuming Theresa’s seed cake and a tumbler of whisky. Now that she focused on him – she so rarely did – he appeared vulnerable to her. His stoutness looked hollow. Then she felt a surge of alarm at that brute strength failing. She had imagined him all but immortal. For years their eyes had been averted from one another. Now she saw how his hair thinned back still dark from his temples but had lost its sheen. She had always hated his bull neck, how it defined him. But she noticed its skin was loosening. It was with a feeling
of cold strangeness, as if crossing into a foreign country, that she asked him if what Louisa said was true.

  He stared at her. He seemed to be reassessing her. He had never asked her for anything, nor given it. For a moment she thought he would bark that this was none of her business. But instead he said: ‘It depends what Louisa said.’

  ‘She said you had cancer.’

  He gave a grunt of contempt. ‘They want to give me that bloody chemotherapy’ – this swearing was new – ‘so I suppose I’ll have it.’ He went on staring at her. ‘And where’ve you been anyway? Did you go to that Arthur again?’ He made it sound like a tryst.

  ‘Yes. He wants me to type out his research.’

  ‘Well, whatever suits.’ He swallowed the last of the seed cake, and said more gently: ‘He’s an odd fellow. Your mother liked him.’

  ‘I like him.’

  He got to his feet. ‘What else did Louisa say?’

  ‘She said it might not be operable.’ Her voice sounded small, detached.

  ‘Well she’s talking rot. I’m fighting this bastard. It’ll get cleaned up.’

  Then Stephanie stretched out her hand to touch him. She had not touched him since childhood, and rarely then. Her hand was trembling.

  But he said: ‘Don’t bother with that’, and barged past her into the sitting room. Now she no longer knew whether he was talking to himself or to her or to nobody. ‘I just need time to wind up the fucking company. Put it on the market. Maybe this place too.’

  ‘You said . . .’ But when she met his eyes, their glance had unfocused.

  ‘I said I’m fighting the bastard.’ He was addressing the whisky glass shaking in his hand. ‘Where’s Louisa?’

  ‘She’s gone back to London.’

  ‘Where’s Theresa?’

  ‘She’ll be here tomorrow.’

  ‘All right then.’ She heard the clink of his glass. Then he turned his back. And this was the image she was later left of him: not his face, with its pugnacious vitality, but this repudiating back, still broad in its tweed jacket, its shoulders closed in on the privacy of his obliteration.

  Later, walking in the garden, she peered through her mother’s window again. But nothing had changed. The room remained sealed: less a shrine than somewhere forsaken or unconfronted. The cupboard was still half open on its summer dresses; the pile of records undisturbed, the shadow of a bed. It was six years since her death, and Stephanie no longer had to stand on tiptoe to look in. She wished that even for a day she had known her mother through adult eyes. However much she tried to recall her, to reinterpret who she had been, the memories remained elusive, and strangely few. She had bought a pair of binoculars for studying the downland butterfly transect, and now trained them through the window at her mother’s books and music. The names on the record covers – Lotte Lehman, Elena Gerhardt – meant nothing at all to her, but here and there the disparate book spines – Robert Musil, Marguerite Yourcenar, Elias Canetti – gave out the scent of a Europe she might one day touch on. After her father had died and they opened the room, she thought, she would take these books for herself and experience the world and time they recreated.

  ‘Inambar river, Puno, Peru. 13.4 degrees S 70.3 degrees W c.18m south of Puerto Leguia. Elev. 740ft. Habitat coverage: tropical lowland rainforest. V. diverse, inc. kapok, cedar, tornillo, mahogany (Swietania macrophylla), pona palm, ficus, invasive bamboos. Canopy c.110ft. Date: 3 June 1949, 8.30–17.00. Mid-level humidity. 81 degrees Fahrenheit. Wind 0–2m/hr. Threat to habitat: low-yield agriculture in vicinity of Puerto San Carlos. Species: Morpho helenor, Morpho Menelaus, Caligo eurilochus, Heliconius numata, Heliconius pardalinus, Perides neophilus, Glasswing Greta oto, Hamadryas feronia . . .’

  Every Saturday she typed out Arthur’s field notes with dogged care. The handwriting that he had called erratic was in fact quite clear, although very small; occasionally a soiled or crinkled page betrayed some tropical downpour, or the shudder and slope of the entries had been inscribed, she imagined, by failing gas lamp. At first, when he read over what she had typed, he alighted unfailingly on her small mistakes, but as she became accustomed to his script these strictures dwindled away, until he was reading only for the pleasure of remembrance. Two or three times a day he would interrupt her with a cup of weak coffee or a snack, and she would elicit the stories his notes condensed or hid, his eyes nearly closing while he retrieved memories unshared for years. Sometimes he went over to his cabinets to show her some prized creature captured four or five decades earlier.

  These tales mesmerised her. He had seen whole riverbanks and valley sides swarming with now-protected species. In Papua New Guinea, the Queen Alexandra Birdwing drifted over its dwindling habitat on wings a foot in span. He had watched Rajah Brooke’s Birdwings cover a sodden clearing of the Malayan jungle in a near-solid carpet of emerald and vermilion, and whole troupes of flame-coloured Cymothoes flying through the Congolese rainforest. He had known all the great lepidopterists, from Edmund Brisco Ford to Frederick Frohawk. One year he had watched Alexandra Sulphurs streaming down the Fraser river valley in a cavalcade of yellow and lime green; the next he had been studying the African Swallowtail, whose harem ran through more than fourteen variations of female (including a male disguise) and who protected themselves by mimicking the flight and colouring of toxic species.

  The butterflies’ survival tactics fascinated and sometimes puzzled him. In the evening, after Stephanie’s work was over, he would light his charred pipe and delay her leaving, sitting alert on a high-backed chair or tinkering with his specimen trays. Sometimes he forgot her ignorance and ruminated on taxonomies obscure to her, before pulling himself up short with a muted laugh of apology. But the wonders of butterfly camouflage deepened to a quiet drama in his narrative. Once, in the Amazon, he had seen a Hamadryas pursued by a manakin bird. So perfectly did the butterfly simulate the bark of a certain tree that on landing there it vanished before his eyes, leaving the baffled bird to strike at the trunk again and again.

  There were poisonous butterflies in violent, protective hues, whose steady, disdainful flight signalled their venom, and edible ones that had evolved to fly under the same false colours, copying even their flight pattern. Other species, like the Owl butterfly, had underwings inscribed with frightening eyes, which they opened and shut by flickering their wings, and still others were marked with a false face, close to the tail, so that predators would misdirect their attack, leaving the vital parts to fly away. (Arthur had seen specimens with perfect holes where the eyespots had been.) So some species, Stephanie thought (and perhaps humans were among them), preserved their core by pretending it lay elsewhere than it did.

  The strangest of these tacticians, to her, was the Glasswing Greta, which spread in pathetic series on Arthur’s trays: a creature whose transparent wings, edged only thinly with scarlet, turned it into a flying window pane, barely visible. But most beautiful of all, in Arthur’s words, were the Morpho Blues. His first sight of one, in the Upper Amazon, had moved him like a late epiphany. In the dim forest its iridescent sapphire wings and dull underwings, alternating as it flew, flashed on and off with an unearthly, discontinuous light, to the confusion of all predators, like a glint of ectoplasm.

  The rigor of Arthur’s discipline – the obsession with taxonomy and insect behaviour – seemed to have left undimmed a childlike pleasure in the creatures themselves. Instead of Stephanie’s enthusiasm being met by condescension – she had long ago given up voicing it at home – she felt his lopsided smile and his grey eyes warm on her. He made her feel normal, and intelligent. She even came to enjoy his specimen trays, and cherished the strange intimacy of mutually loving the green-armoured thorax of Siproeta stelenes or – under his magnifying glass – the tiny hairs on the forefeet of Swallowtails, by which they tasted.

  And she wondered about him. You could not look at the world (or at him) with such sweetness, she thought romantically, if you had not known some kind of sorrow. (Somehow she had always paired gent
leness with suffering.) But she did not know how to ask him personal things. On his sideboard stood a photograph of himself ten years younger, perhaps, hand in hand with a stout, soft-eyed woman in a sunhat. In their other hands they cradled butterfly nets, and the country behind them was lusher and more forested than England. The woman looked aglow with health, and sturdier than the man beside her. She was smiling up at him. There were no photographs of children.

  Stephanie, as she typed, always hoped for those rare passages that suddenly broke into story. Then she knew why he understood her. The pursuit of something splendid and evanescent, even the tabulating passion of the collector – the thrill of capturing rarity – she felt she shared. She thought she recognised how you might risk your health and even your life in pursuing that flickering ectoplasm in the forest.

  Once she came upon: ‘De Osa peninsula, Costa Rica. Elev. 170ft. Date: 5 Sept. 1948. Habitat coverage: primary rainforest. Arrive with rotting plantain fruit to attract species of pierid: but no need. Whole forest teeming. Some eighty species flying in a single glade. Different families intermingling, impossible to separate by eye. Flash of malachites, Crimson-patched Longwings, iridescent preponas, Swallowtail perides, and ghostly, transparent Ithomiini. Pools fringed with coral-red heliconids, marpesias, daggerwings. Owl butterflies cover the tree trunks. Thecla damos, Oryas lulia, Morpho amathonte. The whole forest ablaze. I forget to raise my net. Can I call myself a scientist? Not here. Science is why I do this. But you can’t kill in paradise.’

  Another time, just as her day was finishing, and Arthur brewing coffee in the kitchen, she read: ‘I can’t always love them. Again the Pala nymphalid targets my eyes. The most aggressive species in the Ivory Coast. I duck, he crashes into my net, swerving away, returns to his territorial perch. There must be a female nearby. He flies very fast from high up. As he goes for my eyes again, I net him. I pinch his thorax without pity. It isn’t usually so. There’s always a twinge of guilt . . .’