The Specimen

by Martha Lea

  In town, she made no pretence of wanting to hang about at the market and went instead straight to Gus Pemberton’s apartment. In her purse she had folded a piece of paper with a message, asking Gus Pemberton to come and visit her as soon as he was able. If he is not at home, she told herself, I will leave this. But she could not decide. She stood at his door with her hand at the bell pull. She was acting too hastily. He would think her demented. She turned her back on the door and leaned on it, facing out towards the bustle of the market. The sharp light stunned her eyes and she had to shut them tight. I’ll go and find Maria, she told herself. She leaned more heavily on the door to propel herself forward and the door gave under her weight. She turned and pushed on it, stepping into the instant cool and quiet of his vestibule. She retraced her steps, remembered from the day before, to the rooms Gus Pemberton kept. She paused, nervous suddenly of her assumption that it would be perfectly fine for her to walk into his rooms unannounced. To her great relief, the whole place felt empty, and she made to leave, pulling out her note to drop at the threshold. A noise made her catch her breath. A hard slap of a hand on solid flesh. It was quite unmistakable. Then something softer, and with it this time a gruff voice. Gwen stood there, unable to remove herself from the scene of something she immediately knew was very private. Gwen’s throat pulsed hard with the beat of her heart and with it the repeated noise and what she knew were moans of pleasure. You fool, she told herself, you were completely taken up with your nightmare and you have delivered yourself into another.

  “You want her, don’t you?” The voice was unmistakably Vincent’s.

  “Just shut up.” The words of reply belonged to Gus Pemberton, but they were hardly his; they were strained and hoarse.

  “Say it. You want, her, so much. That—belly of hers. You’re. Thinking. Of. It. Right. Now. Aren’t. You?”

  Gwen clasped her hands over her mouth and turned to leave in a hurry, knocking into the doorframe, hearing Gus Pemberton yelling, “Shut up, shut up, shut up.”

  Remove yourself, she told herself. Get out, before you are discovered.

  She woke streaked in sweat, gasping, fingers digging into the flesh of her palms. Maria stood over her. Gwen struggled to compose herself. “What was I saying? Did I speak in my sleep, Maria?”

  Maria shook her head, “No, you were fitful, that’s all, Mrs Scales. I thought I should wake you.”

  Gwen rubbed her face with her hands as though she had come up from under water. “I have to go into town again today, Maria. I must call on Mr Pemberton.”

  The baby turned over in her belly; putting her hand to the unfathomable, undulating writhe of it, she remembered that in her last dream, there had been no child inside her.

  In Gus Pemberton’s apartment Gwen was breathless, hot, thirsty. Gus looked at her for a second but didn’t do what she dreaded him doing. He didn’t treat her as a flustered and confused woman standing inside his door, clutching at the huge belly she bore.

  “Who, exactly, is Vincent Coyne?” She had thought about how she might phrase this as the cart had trundled along the road, the bumps hurting her so much that she had asked the driver to stop so she could get out and walk instead.

  “In what way do you mean?”

  “I mean where is he from? Because he isn’t actually American, is he?”

  Gus raised his eyebrows and jerked back his neck in surprise. “I am not sure that I understand you.”

  “How can you be so sure that he is exactly who he says he is?”

  “I met him through an acquaintance.”

  “And this man introduced you to him personally?”

  “Yes, in a letter.”

  Gwen breathed, in raising the bulk of her belly. “But he isn’t from America, I am sure of it. I am sure he is something else.”

  “Something else? That sounds interesting.”

  “It isn’t really. Has he gone?”

  “Yes. He will leave this morning. He isn’t here; he has gone out to say his farewells. I am simply waiting for his return and then we will take his trunk down to the—”

  “I need to see it. You warned me about him yesterday.”

  “Well, yes, but purely for selfish reasons.”

  “Gus, please, let me see his trunk.”

  It had been left open; Gwen got down on her knees to look at the things inside it. A man not expecting someone to come poking about among his things would not conceal his paperwork, she thought, and her eyes travelled over the pockets on the inside of the trunk lid. Her hands patted the satin and then rummaged into the opening. She pulled out a small bundle of letters and untied the plain cotton tape holding them together. She felt Gus at her shoulder, watching her, but she did not stop, either in embarrassment or in panic at the idea of Vincent’s return. She no longer cared if he knew about her suspicions. Her body sagged a little when she did not find any familiar handwriting on the envelopes. She had almost given up, and was on the point of stuffing the letters back into the satin pocket when the last envelope, unmarked, came to the top of the small pile. She delved in and brought out a collection of calling cards. For a moment she was baffled. Vincent Coyne’s whiskerless face in a fine photographic representation stared out at her from the flat of her palm. On the reverse was his name, nothing more. She put it back with the rest and replaced them. She tied up the tape and after putting the letters back heaved herself up off the floor.

  “I knew that I had seen Mr Coyne before. The first time I met you both, I had the oddest feeling—the feeling that you have lived that moment before and that everything you see and hear is, in fact, just a memory.”

  “I know the feeling; there ought to be an expression for it.”

  “But it was not in the normal way. I felt it only when I looked at Mr Coyne. I felt a peculiar connection to him.”

  “You found him attractive; well, that is understandable enough.”

  “No, it was because of that card,” she gestured at the trunk.

  “I can’t say that I have seen it before.”

  “But I have. On the floor of my sister’s bedroom, just before I left. Do you see?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Yes, perhaps? Yes, certainly. He knows my sister. He has let tiny things slip. Things which I would not usually have noticed if it had been only once.”

  “Can you be sure of—what is it that you are sure of, Gwen?”

  “That my sister has sent him on some errand to drive suspicion and enmity between Edward and me. She has sent Mr Coyne with false information, which she hopes will destroy this venture.”

  “You are talking about this phantom woman, the one who does not exist.”

  “Yes, some hideous thing—I don’t know, I can’t even imagine what she can have concocted. She isn’t sane. I mean to say, she isn’t a lunatic, but my sister was always jealous of everything I did, of everyone I saw, of everyone who wanted to speak to me—though latterly there were very few, if any. I left my home, a place I have loved, to get away from the stifling atmosphere my sister created. And yet I can travel thousands of miles, and still she persists. I sound ridiculous to you. I must be pathetic to you, standing in here, going through these belongings. Like a thief.”

  “I led you to this room, remember. But Vincent is leaving, Gwen. He has not succeeded, even if your suspicions are correct. Neither Vincent nor your sister have driven anything here to destroy your marriage.”

  Gwen turned away at the mention of that particular lie. She hid her face from Gus for a moment, then said, “It was his blue spectacles, as much as his whiskers. He never takes them off, and they altered his features just enough to have thrown me.”

  “Oh, well, that he probably didn’t mean to do. He has sensitive eyes. I’ve never seen him without his spectacles.”

  “And you will be going away as well?” She couldn’t say what she needed to express. That one afternoon alone with Gus had changed her beyond her own comprehension, that to see him leave—she felt that she would not be able to
cope in his absence.

  “But we can write to each other,” he said. “You can give me a regular report on every new insect and bug that you find, and their peculiar habits.”

  “Gus, I am afraid. I am afraid of—I didn’t come here to have a child. I came here to work.”

  “Maria is the best person in the entire world you could hope to have in the house. Trust her.”

  “It isn’t that. I’m afraid of the pain.”

  “She will help you.”

  Gwen wanted to say that she was afraid of death. That she was afraid that the child would die, or that it would be born some kind of monstrous creature, that she herself would die, that she would bleed to death in that little wooden house on the edge of the jungle. That her blood would run through the floorboards and the insects would consume it. But she kept quiet. She let Gus hold her and stroke her hair and lead her away from Vincent’s emptied room into his own.

  Lying on her side, with Gus curled around her awkward, naked, pregnant shape, she wanted him to beg her to leave Brazil with him. She waited on every breath he took, and listened for the change that would come in the deepest part of his chest. But his breathing was regular and easy, and she knew that he was too good a person to try and take her entirely away from the man he thought of as her husband, no matter what else he may privately have thought of Edward. Gwen had to resign herself to the fugitive nature of their time together and the fact that she would never be able to tell him the truth. And while she lay there with Gus, the trickle of his semen running down the inside of her thigh and cooling on her skin, she couldn’t even bring herself to ask if he would ever come back to Brazil, or if he thought that they would ever meet again.

  Chapter XXXIX

  Pará, Brazil. June, 1861.

  Edward was carrying a brace of limp parrots over his shoulder as he leaped up the steps of the house. He had been out since seven. Gwen saw the blunt grey tongues caught between the open beaks and turned away. Edward didn’t see her revulsion; he was too excited. The birds were a pair, a fine pair which had been flying together, and he had brought them down without needing to reload his rifle.

  It had become apparent that skinning creatures near the house was contributing to the ant problem. No specimen or part small enough was immune to the ants’ own predilection for collecting. Maria had smeared bitter sticky stuff on the table and chair legs and the ropes suspending the food-sacks. The birds he carried were already empty of their internal organs. He was so pleased with himself he whistled an improvised tune as he dusted the skins and wrapped them in paper. He thought of his waiting breakfast, and the thick coffee. Killing the birds so cleanly, and being able to retrieve them on his own, made up for the terrible experience beforehand of trying to secure a monkey. Nausea fingered his throat. Why had he done that? Monkeys of virtually any kind were easily obtainable in the city. But then there were the parrots. When he saw them, all the sickening guilt over the ruined and wasted monkey fell away.

  His boyhood days spent skinning and stuffing crows were paying off. He finished the parrots, and packed them away. Gwen would not paint them unless they retained their living form. Squawking, defecating, flapping and intent on destroying everything with their beaks. Gwen seemed quiet this morning. Perhaps it would be better not to talk about parrots. She was not even talking to Maria. He was glad. All that Portuguese being spoken in the house made him feel more keenly that he was on the periphery of the world that Gwen constructed about herself. He slurped noisily at the coffee and looked out across the garden. It was so fantastic to have fruit growing right there. He’d found a use for them. Every day he took the discarded skins to the same part of the forest, a sunny glade where he had first seen the large blue Morpho butterflies. His idea was to create a kind of feast table, to attract them. So far he had collected an incredible number of different lepidoptera species from that one spot. He finished his coffee and called out his farewell again to Gwen. Her reply came to him as an offhand mutter. He took up his insect equipment and bounced out of the house.

  By two in the afternoon his tin collecting boxes were full. He rested his insect nets carefully with the rest of his equipment in a heap on the floor of the verandah. He had come back an hour earlier than usual, full of excitement, eager to show Gwen what his boxes contained. He finally had an excellent specimen of a male Morpho rhetenor, which had eluded his net during his solitary two-week trip, and a slightly less brilliant but no less exciting pair of M. Menelaus, caught as they’d tasted the banana skins.

  One by one, the birds gave up their noises, trailed by the scraping of the cicadas. They stopped and started, stopped and started again, like a partially jammed clockwork toy. The bellies of the clouds amassed overhead were bruised with the swell of rain. As Edward stepped towards Gwen, he felt the first rustle of wind, signalling their release.

  There was an extra stickiness about the house, and the pungent smells of childbirth hung in the air. He felt light-headed, knowing that this scene of the simplest domesticity was a world away from his old life. He stepped closer to see the small jaw, the half-extended tongue, fluttering in sleepy rest against her breast. He tried to imagine himself, for a fleeting instant, making the place where he stood his permanent home. The wind grew stronger, making the slack leaves in the trees talk. He had an impulse to step out into it as the thunder cracked. The child opened its eyes, and he thought it perceived him. It had Gwen’s mouth and nose; Edward’s forehead and brow in miniature wrinkled back at him. A tiny fist had come loose from the cloth bindings and he went to touch it, drawing back at the last moment, remembering his ramble through the forest. He wiped the imagined traces of butterfly onto his trousers. He knew that Gwen loved this time of day best; she would often come out onto the verandah and stand motionless to see it all pouring down off the thatch overhang.

  Gwen woke up; the child began to feed again. She didn’t notice him standing there. He couldn’t bear it; he felt he must break the silence. “Is it a girl, or a boy?”

  Gwen dragged her gaze away from her child, but she was not really seeing him. “A girl.”

  Edward breathed out. Had he been holding his breath all this time?

  She smiled at the child; its jaw worked away drawing the milk down. That strange sensation, that strangest thing which Nature had provided for. She felt sure that she would never get used to it.

  He bent over her and she accepted his kiss on her forehead. When he took his mouth away, she kept her head tilted up as though she expected more than a simple peck on the forehead. Her eyes were closed. He quickly checked the corners of his mouth to see that no dried spittle had collected there before bending forward again to kiss her on the mouth. He had taken too long. She was moving her head back to a more natural position. Damn it. He kissed her anyway, on her cheek. It reminded them both of a place almost forgotten, that bumbling botchedness which had passed for passion in the beginning.

  He would bring back some of those moody birds from the dingy parts of the forest in a cage. She would paint them, and he would let them go again.

  He needed to wipe himself down, and change. He could feel bits of forest caught inside his shirt and ears. He always checked for ticks; he couldn’t stand the way their heads would bury right under the skin. He’d found that a well-heated specimen pin applied to the abdomen did the trick. He gathered himself together, “Have you thought of a name. Perhaps a family name?” How strange, he thought, for her to blush at such a simple question.

  “Augusta.”

  “Augusta,” he repeated, trying it out on his tongue. “It seems very severe. But it has a certain quality about it. Is it a family name?”

  She shook her head. “I just like it. I thought something would come to mind when I saw her face, and that came to my mind.”

  “You know,” he said hesitantly, “if I could have foreseen this moment, that first night I spoke to you in your little summerhouse, I would have arranged our passage the very next day.”

  Gwen’s forehe
ad wrinkled in concentration. He could not tell whether she had heard him properly until she spoke. “We met on the beach, Edward. In broad daylight.” Her eyes were still fixed on the face of her child; it was as if she spoke to the baby, not Edward. “I never spoke to you in that summerhouse. I have never told you, but I found you there one morning. You were—you were asleep, and I thought you looked so exhausted I did not wake you.” She laughed. “At first I had thought you were some kind of vagrant; in point of fact, I was a little afraid of you.” She turned her face up to his and met his gaze.

  He said, “But I remember it so clearly; we spoke for some forty minutes. It was midnight, and you were wrapped against the chill in a very thick old coat and boots which were too big for your feet by far. You mistook me for your gardener. But you were very different from the way you were the next time we spoke on the beach. And I distinctly remember being glad, that next time on the beach, that I could see your face properly and that your attitude towards me was much lighter, much more natural. And I remember thinking what a fool I was to have avoided that part of the coast, fearing that I had offended you.” Edward watched a wave of realisation sweep across Gwen’s face as it dawned on her what he was saying.

  “You could not have known that I had a sister whose most prized possession was her ability to impersonate any being, living or dead, animal or human, including myself.”

  “Gwen, I—”

  “It doesn’t matter; not now.”

  Again, she was speaking to him but looking all the while intently at the baby. He almost backed into Maria. He’d totally forgotten about her.

  He opened up his collecting tin and paused, remembering his jubilation at having the specimens in his possession. He wavered, half turning, deliberating over whether he should not show them to her anyway. As he picked them over, looking for flaws in the iridescent patina, that shocking, crackling blue, he let the knowledge of what he had done with Gwen’s sister that dank morning, and, he now admitted to himself, those other times, wash over his conscience. He’d wanted it not to have been so, and therefore it had existed in his mind as something malleable as putty. A memory reshaped; a physical act becoming a conversation; one person becoming another.