Under Glass

by Claire Robertson

  This material step closer to realising the idea of land opens the gate to a rushing exhilaration in her thoughts – that they should have before them, so suddenly on a humid, cloudy morning in the meanest circumstances of her life, the certain prospect of the most elevated … in the generational cycles of both their families, their direct line has swung from land to landlessness by the order of birth, and now, by an alignment of Chetwyn Senior’s capital and ambitions and an empire’s possibilities, her husband the only son has a chance to redress this by as modern an agent as their own energies.

  For the rest of the day Chetwyn prods and picks at the insult of his father withholding the outright gift, and Fuze, Sophronia and Mrs Chetwyn meet his gruffer self as he insists on at least these, his rights over them. Griffin escapes his attention entirely and she ignores him, which is their habit.

  There is a lawyer here, in Port Natal, who will have the approval and purchase of the land Chetwyn chooses. He judges him an unreasonable, oppositional man before he meets him, but meet him he must, and so Chetwyn’s other trunk is fetched from Sawley’s (Fuze) and benzine got from the general store (Griffin) and his coat and hat wiped down and shoes polished (Griffin and Mrs Chetwyn), and these ministrations bring their share to the improvement of his mood. By the next day he has allowed the prospect of the grand purchase to subdue his resentment, as least towards his father, and in the morning he sets off for the town’s cluster of brick buildings, letter in his coat pocket and intention in his step.

  Mrs Chetwyn, finding her fireplace occupied by Fuze and the tent beginning to catch and give back the day’s heat, gives in to a rebellious impulse that fits her in a deep bonnet and cotton gloves and decides her on a walk of her own, towards the higher ground of the town’s inland horizon. She has not, before today, travelled so far as the ridge. Today, rather than be kept to one room like an infant, she will.

  The edge of the settlement is soon reached, and passed, and she picks up her pace until hers is a shockingly wide stride. The wetter ground that she next encounters would barely check her but for her discovery that such long steps in such a costume (bolstered by barely two petticoats) over and again trap yards of cloth, and these now threaten to trip her up. Mrs Chetwyn halts, and turns through the whole compass to make certain she is alone, then she bends and gathers an armful of her skirts. She holds them before her like a low bundle of laundry and feels the air cooling her stockinged shins.

  She sets off again and moves deep into the now swampy land so distracted by her own daring that within moments she is standing on a hummock of grass with actual water all around her, and there is only the slimmest bridge of ground behind her. Her bootprints have pressed sharp indents into this and these are visibly welling. She is, she realises anew, utterly alone.

  She bends past the bundle of skirts to look at her boots – muddied to the ankles and in places above this, with mud splashes some way up her grey stockings. She lets her skirts fall and clasps her elbows to consider her way forward – her way back. Biting things come to investigate her neck and face and the band of skin between her gloves and cuffs.

  She wrenches off her bonnet and beats the air with it. The cooling of her damp hair gives way to a prickling of slight pain on the exposed paths of her scalp and she swiftly replaces her headgear. Then she breathes to collect herself, and takes stock. By teetering from the hummock that she is on to a neighbouring, higher tuft, she gains a broader view of her predicament; she sees that she is nearer to the apparently dry ground rising ahead than to the start of the swampy ground back the way she came; it will be more trouble to return than to press on. Besides, she wants to.

  There is a regularity of plants in the distance that speaks of a human hand, and among the plants glass winks to say it is a colonialist’s. Balancing with all her concentration, she leans over and unhooks first one boot and then the other, then reaches up under her skirts and unbuttons her stockings from her stays and slides them down, and off.

  A night toilette in the middle of the day, under the open sky: it is as fresh as girlhood and cheers her like wine. She makes a poacher’s brace of her boots and lays them over her neck, and takes up her skirts again, hoisting them to her naked knees, and peers over this great bundle to find where next to place her feet.

  The bottom of the swamp is silky and cool, and although she is sure at every step that she will feel some horrid wriggling thing underfoot, the ground continues soft under the water, and clear of creatures. Her way is interesting, without fright.

  Absorbed as much by looking for the safest way through the swamp as by this brave self she is being, and caught by the fascinating sight of her slim, pale leg above a foot emerging black with mud from each step – how fine it is, now that she sees her ankle under the dark covering, now that it is unfamiliar – she reaches the dry ground of the other side and is standing on prickling grass.

  She drops her skirts and looks up and about her.

  The glass she had seen belongs to a half-dozen slim, tall cases lined up against the wall of a shack, beyond a ragged hedge of sage green. The clean lines of the cases contrast in reproachful regularity with the shabby shack; it leans and huddles in scraps of timber, mismatched windows, sacking and canvas, resembling nothing so much as the bole of an uprooted tree, wrapped for transplantation.

  Beyond this, again in neat contrast to the building, are lines of plants, thick retaining walls, short flights of steps from one level to another, a canopied section. In the distance two men bear a litter of earth down a path, and there is a long, tall, roofed structure without walls wherein figures move about.

  She knows where she is – one of the few prides of the colonial town is this, its botanical garden. Subscription to it is the mark of a gentleman in a place just now setting up its table of such necessary marks. Mrs Chetwyn turns her back to the hedge, and sits directly on the sloping ground, as a child might, and sets about cleaning her feet and restoring them to cover.

  She looks out over the land she crossed; it is not a swamp but really a stretch of very shallow water, broken with tussocks and a small island of dwarf trees. London’s wretched air had been so foul it had felt like cobwebs on her face; here the very ground is clear water. It is jolly with bird life – paddling, wading, stalking – and she imagines herself in the scene as she was a moment ago, a ball of skirts, bonnet and ribbons on bare legs, in her proportions more a rounded chick than soberly made hen …

  The mud is stickily resisting her efforts to rub it from her feet onto the grass.

  A sudden noise alerts her and a sudden handful of sacking appears over her shoulder in a male hand. As though they are marine creatures and her skirts their shell, her feet pull at once out of sight under them. Has he seen her toes? She does not turn around, and when he speaks she thinks it is from a face similarly turned away from her. He says, ‘Here, miss, you will need this if you are to shift it’ – proving that he has, in fact, glimpsed her naked feet, for all he is now at pains to prove his intention not to look. Indignation lays over embarrassment and she releases a slight sound but does not speak. She takes the cloth and is about to make the effort to stand and move away when she hears him leave, and by the sounds of it regain the untidy hut on the other side of the hedge.

  Even with the cloth, she battles to shift the caking mud, but, muddy as they still are, her feet are soon covered in knitted cotton and boot leather. She dare not reach into her skirts as far as her stays, so rolls her stockings to her knees and knots them there, then rolls herself to face the ground and pushes herself upright, flushed with achievement, restored to decency and setting her jaw against the small shame of a moment before – there are surely allowances to be made, and at least it had only been her feet, and that only for an instant. Then the thought comes to her that the excellent view across the water is not hers alone, and her passage may have been achieved under male eyes, and she less clad than a French sea bather.

  Then again, since she has come to this place – Port Natal, not
today’s perhaps ill-judged excursion – Mrs Chetwyn has been so exposed to moments of indecency and immodesty and humiliation as to have hardened that part of herself at least somewhat, and now she draws on that bracing, pragmatic, emerging self to excuse herself and even admit small heresies – doubting, for instance, the harm done. Upright, clad, booted and excused, she looks about her. Now she can see that the figures in the long building are children, and the building itself less large than she supposed when she thought them adults.

  Those figures out in the open, however, bent over the plant beds or hefting earth, are men, and seemingly dividing their labour into the bravest tests of strength and the most delicate of operations, with an air of nursing and care about them. As Mrs Chetwyn looks about her, her hands are shaking out and folding the square of soft sacking. It is mechanical womanly busywork that is nonetheless apparently fascinating to the man at the rudimentary window of the hut, for he is staring at her, and at her hands in particular.

  Mrs Chetwyn gives the cloth one last fold and sets it on the hedge, and waits for him to come out from behind the tangle of rough wood and find her. Meanwhile she watches the children in the open shed, two of them, moving along the length of the building, stopping every few steps and carrying out on a raised bench some small task that, from this distance, she has no hope of making out.

  As though all he needed was for her to be still, after a beat the man comes from the door of the hut, placing his hat on his head as he approaches her. She steps through the gateway in the hedge and he makes a small, off-kilter bow, almost ducking, and speaks. ‘I am McQuairie. Botanist of … of this garden,’ and he indicates the industry and order of the lot with a tilt of his head. His hands hang at his sides, putting Mrs Chetwyn in mind of a spade and fork on the walls of a shed, inert, yet somehow holding the sense of work as they hang there.

  He is youthfully bearded below hair of such dark ruddiness as to seem bloody. His face is pale, the skin opaque as weathered marble, and his eyes very dark. She thinks him simple at first, and then makes out that he is quite, quite drunk. Drunk, and yet no menace comes from him. Rather, an un-membraned quality, as though he is porous and has drawn in enough to fill and alter every part of himself, spongelike and passive.

  His condition and his youth embolden her, and whereas she has been ready with apologies and a small narrative of how she comes to be in his garden, now she only gives her name and tells him, polite as an invited guest, how interested she would be to visit his enterprise here. He seems to accept this as a sensible and welcome turn of events, and he lifts one tool-hand so that she might precede him on the narrow track between two beds, and up three split-log steps, until they are in the main body of the garden.

  Here is another of the glass cases, and as they stop in front of it to watch a man at work there, she is proud to be able to say, ‘We had one of these cases on board – a considerable one.’

  ‘Your ship, Miss Chilterns?’ the botanist asks with a sharpened glance. She does not correct him but only tightens her mouth to trap a smile and gives the ship’s name; he does not register it but his features collapse into petulance, and he speaks of plants killed by seawater or perhaps cooked in their glass casket – he says ‘casket’, as though the plants’ perishing is, in fact, a death, and she thinks she is being blamed – but just as suddenly his face clears and he smiles like a man in love and murmurs a pair of Latin names, and says: ‘At least you survived.’ Now it is her turn for sharp glances, but she sees that by ‘you’ he means a spindly, greyish, feathery plant in a clay pot, under a little branch-and-sackcloth shelter at his feet.

  The man at work on the Wardian case before them now – a different case to the one that travelled out on the quarterdeck of the Lady Lee, this one surely less ornate – is sweeping its every speck of earth and litter onto a stiff piece of cloth, and funnelling these into a cup by his side.

  ‘Some of it will be seeds,’ says McQuairie in explanation of this husbanding of dirt. ‘We never know what might be among it. Could be anything,’ and he seems to lose interest in the case, but to Mrs Chetwyn this is a marvellous idea: that the case’s very packing could, one day, with time and care, be a tree standing where she stands, or a rose, or a cabbage. For probably the first time in her life she considers a seed, the idea of it. Its transportability – the means of a spreading oak or a giant pine travelling in so very possible, so very small and everyday a space as … as a corner of her reticule, from England, to here – to anywhere.

  They leave the man sweeping and scraping out the case and turn off the main pathway through the beds, onto a side path. They are approaching a bed of plants whose bright, full, waxy leaves surround thick stalks. The botanist stiffens and exclaims into his thin beard, ‘No! Yes!’

  He remembers her and forgets himself so far as to take hold of her elbow with a tight, trembling grip, and whisper with forced urgency, ‘It is today! Miss Chatham! It is today!’ and now he is bringing her along the path to a spot in the centre of the bed, where he drops her arm and forgets her utterly, she can tell by the way he is speaking to himself in tones of congratulation and fond assurance, almost crooning, ‘I told you it would happen if you would just wait. You are too impatient. Too impatient.’

  His state suddenly asserts itself in a loss of balance as he leans over to look at something deep in the bed, and he arrests his fall with arms splayed either side of a particular plant. It bears a single flower, if flower is the word for the wild scarlet brush of bristles that seems, even in the shadow of his bulk as he holds himself over it like a beast over small prey, to hold most of the light in its sphere.

  ‘Haemanthus insignis,’ he says in tones somewhere between information, invocation and introduction. ‘The blood flower. This will be his only flower this season, and here he is.’

  Now that she looks at the half-dozen similar plants around McQuairie’s chosen plant, Mrs Chetwyn thinks she can see signs of impending blossoming – of a certain tightness – in almost all of them. The thought comes to her that the swellings and even the crack in that one’s green to suggest the scarlet within are the plant’s version of what she knows as her own most interesting condition to date, and that although he has referred to the plant as male, here is gestation … She will not pursue the thought. Really, she is having an astonishing day.

  The adoration of the plant is over. McQuairie walks himself upright on his hands and looks about him with the air of a man seeking others to whom to broadcast his great news. Finding none, he brushes his spade hands off one against the other and resumes his tour. When the two of them reach the open-sided shed, Mrs Chetwyn sees that the task of the children is, every few steps, to lift and turn desiccated branches, bracts and flower heads. It is a drying shed, and they dry properly only if they are turned, McQuairie says. The business of this place is plants in, plants out. The magnificent barbarous brush plant is being cultivated to the point that the colony might dispatch a case of it in bulb and plant. One of its sort has flowered already in a cold frame at Kew; this has given McQuairie the comfort to experiment with the manner of its shipping. He speaks unashamedly of the ‘heartbreak’ of a case of dead specimens – he cannot, he says, risk testing his theories of transportation on plants that would be new to Kew, not when the pain is so acute should they arrive as rotten jelly or eaten by black beetles or curled in on themselves, dead of thirst.

  ‘Sailors!’ he hisses, then forgets them entirely as the water level rises in his brain again, or so she pictures it. He is a relaxing companion and seems to want from her nothing more than ears that comprehend English. He speaks in vivid snatches about packing methods, and materials, and preparations in which to lay or soak bulbs. He speaks as if there are no questions that she would not want answered, no answer she would not understand, and indeed something in her makes an exceptional effort to imitate comprehension and follow him.

  His is a somewhat housewifely business, she concludes. It employs lore, vigilance and care with thoroughness, thrift a
nd duty. It also relies in large part on the simple matter of deciding to do it, of a man making it his business: this.

  As for plants in, McQuairie says, there are ledgers’ worth: pineapples of three varietals, mangoes, indigo, cotton, sugar, the seed of two hundred flower types and a dozen saplings of monkey puzzle trees.

  His delivery is becoming businesslike, insofar as his condition permits, where until now it has been a sort of besotted enthusiasm.

  ‘What will grow; what will make money.’ He gestures to the beds with a careless arm and loose wrist. ‘Agriculture, you see. I’d put my money on sugar,’ he continues. ‘Bourbon for preference,’ and yawns.

  He has deflated. Perhaps the walk around his domain and the engaging of his faculties of reason and speech are sobering him up.

  The native plants – and these are those he seems to regard with most human fondness – reach him by the hands of native people who have learned he will pay for them, and pay extra if they know the plant’s name, and from amateur colonialist collectors who live to have their family name commemorated in Latin on a plant label, and from the single, week-long collecting trip he is permitted to undertake each year under the terms of his employment by the Natal Botanical Society.

  As for the effect of the gardens on her, she feels she has discovered a floating island, entire, discrete and adrift. It had moved slowly by her where she stood on the solid shore, slowly enough for her to step across and gain it for a while.

  But now she must return to the mainland. She will do so on horseback, he tells her. He would otherwise only have to lead the beast behind the borrowed mount he is due to return when he visits D’Urban next week; she can take it today instead, leave it at the hotel stables and he will find it when he comes.