by Ann Harries
It was at this point that two crucial events occurred which set the seal on my future development.
At the age of eight I had begun to notice my mother. It had become apparent to me that she held some special power over my sisters, as if they all wore invisible bridles, the seven reins of which led to my mother’s strong hand. In some mysterious way, I began to understand, she held the rein attached to my own very different bridle. I felt caught up in her current: I began to long for her rough goodnight kiss, always remembered by her at the last minute; indeed, often forgotten. And with the tentative emergence of my new feelings, a kind of abrupt fondness for her only son stirred in my mother’s unmaternal breast. A mutual interest started to develop between us, an osmosis of kindred feeling rather than a release of love. She spent a little more time at my bedside, proportionately less of which was spent in shouting commands at her lap-dog, who now stared at me with pure hatred as her interest appeared to shift from dog to son. (My mother had owned several dogs – though always one at a time – during her twenty-year marriage to my father. Their portraits were displayed along with those of favourite ponies and stallions in a less formal drawing-room, where the family could move about freely without fear of knocking over aquaria, fern houses or domes of stuffed animals.)
On the day in question – 22 November 1859 – my mother had suggested to me that I might like to go Outdoors. It was now evident to her that if I was strong enough to walk about the house I could venture out into the bracing world of Nature, a world in which I had by now some considerable academic interest. A pony would wait by the door (the idea of being Outdoors without a horse was inconceivable to her): I could even sit upon its back for a while and begin to understand the joys of horseriding, in which the imperfect human body flows into that of the most noble of beasts, and is transfigured.
‘But, Mama, I have never seen you ride.’
This was probably the most intimate line I ever addressed to my mother.
She looked at me in astonishment, then rose decisively from my bedside. Prodding with her foot the ever-vigilant Kaffir, she gathered up her skirts and announced: ‘I’m going straight to the stables where I’ll get Lewis to saddle up Blenheim. Watch the wall at the end of the garden, Francis, and not only will you see your mother ride, you will see her fly!’
I can see her flying now, she and Blenheim together, a Valkyrie in the grey English sky, all power and noise and joy. They are frozen in mid-air above the Vicarage wall because I do not want to see Blenheim’s hoof entangle with wistaria, nor hear the jolt of flesh and bone as my mother tumbled down the wall and struck her unprotected head against a dog’s tombstone.
My father, who had that day made a special journey to Birmingham to buy his copy of The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life hot off the press, arrived home to find the body of his wife laid out in the drawing room, her dog curled between her icy breasts.
The next day a new tutor took up his duties.
In the months following her death, I perceived that it had been my mother’s will-power and physicality that had energised my seven sisters, who slowly began to wilt and grow pale without her sustaining radiance. One after another they succumbed to diseases reminiscent of that mysterious malady experienced by Mrs Robert Browning before she married the well-known poet who has done so much to mislead the public about the crowd behaviour of vermin. As they faded, one room after the other grew dark and silent; they lay stretched out on sofas or chaises-longues, too weak to walk across the room. Some coughed and spat blood; others stopped eating altogether; others went mad and had to be put into strait-jackets. Within a year, two had died and the rest had become phantoms, reminiscent of my youthful self. Today only one sister survives; I pay for her to be looked after in a home for female opium-addicts. Such is the fate of women who have happy, carefree childhoods thrust upon them by mothers who die suddenly.
While my sisters shrivelled, a strange new energy entered my pale body. The day after my mother’s death I climbed out of my bed unaided and strolled across the frosty lawn in my bedclothes. The new tutor, Mr James, followed me in his wheelchair, respecting my silence. I stood bright-eyed among the tombstones. After a while Mr James began to whistle. He knew the song of every bird known to man. In an enormous bag slung over the back of his chair he carried his cameras. He pulled one out and showed it to me. I stared into its round eye and wondered.
My new tutor, who resided in our picturesque Oxfordshire village, was not a gentleman. A specimen hunter-gatherer by profession, he had once travelled to obscure corners of Africa, South America and the Far East in order to satisfy the English craze for ever more exotic beetles, bird skins and butterflies. He had sent regular moth specimens to my father which sometimes had to travel across two or three oceans and continents before arriving safely at the Vicarage. Mr James also took photographs of his specimens in their original habitat, in so far as this was possible. Intrepidly, he had carried his heavy load of photographic equipment, including a portable dark-room, to the most inhospitable of environments. One stormy day, while angled upon a cliff in Patagonia with his head in a black bag in order to photograph the nest of a rare type of albatross, he plunged downward, breaking both legs and his back as a result. By some miracle, the handcart remained perched on the cliff, and was rescued by the sailor who found his crushed but living body.
On returning to England James found himself confined to a wheelchair. His means of livelihood no longer available to him, he was obliged to seek an income from his wits, which were not inconsiderable. When he heard of this unfortunate man’s accident, my father, in true Christian spirit, offered him a teaching position in our household, even though there was no vacancy, my sisters being regarded as ineducable. In fact, the two men spent a great deal of time together examining specimens and arguing about the origin of species, my father with his marble-white face and thin grey beard looking for all the world as if it were he who should be in the wheelchair, and not the bewhiskered, sunburnt Mr James, whose eyes twinkled with secrets my father would never know.
James taught me how to take photographs of the specimens we caught in the garden. I was only eight years old, but I much enjoyed preparing the collodion and applying it to the glass plates which would shortly after be developed in his light-proof tent: this activity has continued to be a source of interest to me, even though I no longer use wet collodion.
To all intents and purposes I forgot about my mother. I had quickly learned the dangers of close attachment, and in some unstated way felt responsible for her death simply because I had weakened her by loving her. To the outside world at least, it seemed as if Kaffir, her lap-dog, pined over her demise more than I did, and in doing so increased his loathing of me to a state nearing ecstasy. (He would have nothing to do with my unhealthy sisters, who patted their laps, but were rejected.) I suspect his plan was to tear out my throat jugulars, and to this end he developed a capacity to leap from surfaces high into the air, like a winged creature, my frail neck his object. On one failed attempt to terminate my life with his teeth, he at least succeeded in biting the hand I flung out to protect myself, and for two weeks I had to submit to the inconvenience of bandages.
He was severely beaten and his own life might have been terminated had my sisters not wailed for mercy on his behalf. But I knew Kaffir was waiting.
One day, upon discovering a handkerchief belonging to my mother under my mattress, I made the mistake of holding it to my face for a while, inhaling her brisk perfume and resurrecting sudden memories that in turn released an unexpected moisture from my eyes. I was unaware at that time of the dog’s almost supernatural powers of smell, and was therefore quite unprepared for Kaffir’s sudden charge from the kitchen to my bedroom, and his extraordinary flight from the dressing-table to my exposed throat, which he missed as I hunched my shoulders in self-defence. Instead, his sharp little canines embedded themselves in my left cheek, where he hung
, tearing at my flesh like some crazed vampire, until Elspeth heard my screams and saved my life. I bear the scars of his attack to this day, and dread all dogs, understandably.
For reasons pertaining to the sacredness of my mother’s memory Kaffir was not shot, but was soon after found torn to shreds apparently by a fox, near the tombstone responsible for his mistress’s death.
A few months later my father, whose calm life seemed not to have been much disturbed after my mother’s untimely exit from this life, except for the inconvenience of my sisters’ unexpected decline, took James in his carriage to nearby Oxford to a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science to be held in the brand new University Museum. An American professor was to talk on Darwin and social progress in this glass-roofed cathedral to science, in which God manifested himself free of charge in the shape of dinosaur-skeleton moulds and trays of beetles. Soapy Sam, the Bishop of Oxford, who, through his influential disapproval, had prevented Darwin from being awarded a knighthood, would speak as well. Mr James was magnanimously excited: he claimed to have discovered the theory of Natural Selection himself while capturing Amazonian parrots, and noting their individual variations, but had not thought to put pen to paper on the topic. My father had him lifted into the carriage by a gardener who was obliged to accompany them to Oxford in order to lift him out again, my father being quite unable to bear heavy weights. For the first time I felt the desire to move beyond the confines of my home and to enter the sacred city of Oxford to bear witness to what promised to be an historic occasion. There was, of course, no question of my attending the lecture.
My interest in Mr Darwin’s theories had been greatly increased by my tutor’s enthusiasms and I awaited their return impatiently. When it became apparent that neither man was returning home in time for dinner, and that I would be obliged to spend the evening with my gloomy sisters who took no interest whatever in descent by modification, my chagrin was considerable. The redoubtable Elspeth would have nothing of my sulks, however, and I was made to retire to my bed at the usual early hour.
The next morning I found my father and tutor in a state of high excitement at the breakfast table. It was clear from the feverish nature of their talk that neither had slept but had instead spent the whole night discussing the events of the debate, as it had turned out to be. Soapy Sam had apparently expressed his views on the theory of evolution by enquiring of T.H. Huxley (could he be related to my host’s manservant, I wonder?) whether it was on his grandfather’s or grandmother’s side that he was descended from an ape. In the uproar that followed an elderly admiral waved a large Bible over his head and implored the excited audience to believe God’s word rather than man’s: the admiral turned out to be Fitzroy, the captain of the Beagle during its fateful voyage round the earth, visiting even this colonial outpost where I now find myself. An arch-Creationist, Fitzroy, in spite of the evidence of his eyes, accepted unquestioningly that the hills and valleys of South America had been formed by Noah’s forty-day flood. Now, as a result of his unwitting invitation to that young gentleman naturalist, Mr C. Darwin, to accompany him on the Beagle during his lonely five-year voyage, he had unleashed upon the world the most revolutionary scientific discovery of the century, which turned men into brutes, and undermined the legitimacy of Genesis itself. (Did this dreadful responsibility compel Fitzroy to slit his own throat a few years after the Oxford debate?)
I listened spellbound to the arguments that now raged between my gentle father and my fierce-browed tutor. My father, though an evolutionist, still believed that the creation of species was miraculous proof of God’s omnipotence, and that man was the noblest species on whom God had conferred the gift of intelligence contained in the frontal lobes of the brain: Natural Selection alone could not account for the human mind. Mr James, on the other hand, claimed that in every way man was at one with the rest of the organic world, there was no line of demarcation between instinct and reason, and that there was more difference between a baboon and a chimpanzee than there was between a chimpanzee and man. Mr James was fond of baboons. He had spent a year living among them while collecting baby crocodiles from the Limpopo (on one occasion actually extracting them from the mother’s mouth as she carried them, newly hatched, to the river), and had written a paper (unpublished) on the ability of the chakra baboon’s ability to ferment alcohol by adding berries to warm rockpools, and getting deliriously drunk on the resulting brew, thereby proving beyond question that the baboon is the first cousin of man.
In the doorway Elspeth beckoned. Her apple cheeks were blanched; her motherly eyes had a wildness about them I had not before observed. The two men did not notice my exit. Elspeth could not bring herself to speak, but propelled me towards my father’s greenhouse. As ever, the warm tropical fragrances that billowed from the exotic flora took me by surprise. Lush creepers sagging with brilliant blooms blocked out much of the morning sunshine, creating a density of green shadow that suggested creatures hiding.
The stone floor was adrift with petals. Not the blood-red of bougainvillaea nor the yellow of mimosa but pale soft triangles of gauze that fluttered helplessly as our feet crushed the living creatures among them.
‘Only one wing off!’ breathed Elspeth. ‘What kind of mind would do a thing like that? It’s evil, that’s what it is. Off your father’s prize specimens. It’ll break his heart, it will.’
Was she accusing me? I stared unblinking up at the glass panes of the greenhouse ceiling, where a few surviving moths clustered. ‘My sisters,’ I uttered in a clear voice.
‘It’ll break his heart,’ she whispered into my ear.
Cape Town 1899
I now had a third rendezvous to keep. First, with a sinking heart, I visited the aviaries.
In every cage the birds still clustered together in silence, occasionally fluttering feebly from one side to the other. At least there were no corpses today, but my examination of the nightingales presented me with a new anxiety: the males had shuffled to one end of the cage, while the females gathered together in the branches of an aromatic bush. This was indeed extraordinary behaviour on the part of birds who mixed freely in the wild, and who had formed sexual partnerships in earlier seasons. It seemed impossible that they would feel impelled to burst into song within the next three days: neither courtship nor territory seemed to hold the slightest interest for them.
I did the only thing possible: dug my sharp shoe into the backsides of Salisbury and Chamberlain, threatened to halve their pay, instructed them to redouble their efforts with the nightingales, and stalked off, closing my ears to their sleepy giggles.
A garland of bougainvillaea descended on to my shoulders as I strode up the mountain path. I brushed it away impatiently. Would the child be there? What had I to say to her after I had taught her to whistle? Surely she would not expect me to romp with her in the manner of Kipling and his daughter? Perhaps I could recall the Alice Liddell story, if she did not already know it. It would mean nothing to the child that I had known its author. (Dodgson and I had often strolled to the University Museum to view once more the scant remains of Dodo ineptus, Dodgson imploring me to g-g-guess at the song made by the extinct and ugly bird. (His stammer disappears in the presence of children.) Because he identifies so much with this wretched creature, I had to answer carefully. Something between the gobble of a turkey and the croon of a pigeon, I suggested, resisting the croak of the vulture; a pleasant sound, like water boiling for tea, or gurgling out of a bath. We debated over whether the bird would have had a syrinx, Dodgson’s delicate mouth curling.) Perhaps she might enjoy a recitation of ‘Jabberwocky’.
I plunged on up the mountain path, reciting out loud the ridiculous lines which somehow seemed appropriate to this illogical spot, yet knowing they would have even less meaning for the child than Lear’s verses. But they gave me courage:
‘One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!’
Even as the nonsense babb
led out of my mouth, I felt my auditory nerves pass a message to my brain which caused me to stop short in my recital. Freezing like a primitive animal who hears a twig snap and knows that only a certain species of predatory paw could release that particular timbre of soft disintegration, I listened to the remains of the snigger. A wave of unpleasant heat flushed through my body: it is not often I make a fool of myself, and never have I witnessed mockery of my behaviour. For this was not an amused and friendly response to my foolishness, but more a contemptuous sort of neigh, of the kind I have sometimes heard snorting from the noses of foreign women, untrained in the British art of stifling untoward utterances.
And as I remained frozen I heard too a delicate clink of metal reverberating from the same spot: the sound of draped jewellery swinging against itself – and then the furtive footsteps picking their way along what must have been an upper path for the public. A waft of sugary perfume filtered through the smell of pine.
I had no sooner allowed myself to move forward again than yet another unexpected sound assaulted my ears, though this time the auditory message settled, not in my temporal cortex, but in my heart, which began to throb with a sensation I can only describe as pity. I can quite definitely say that I have never heard a man weep (it is true that my father howled all night on the discovery of his de-winged moths, but that was a form of madness, as his subsequent actions would show); now, the uninhibited flood of male sobs which were flowing from the direction of the teak bench aroused in me a strange desire to investigate rather than flee! Against my better judgement I continued along the path, my thoughts of Maria by now somewhat distracted.