Under Glass

by Claire Robertson

  And not all her sentiment will bring so much change to this bargain as one dried leaf of chervil to a pot of beef: when Chetwyn dies, he will take Missenden from her if she has made no son by him. She has nursed the heretic hope that she will not have to bear again, but she must.

  First, though, this: Mrs Chetwyn persuades Chetwyn to let her keep the accounts for the sugar operation as she has kept them for their household all their married life; since Chetwyn commenced his great spending of his father’s money the accounting has been all Meager’s, and the thought of wresting this from him is persuasion enough, in a half-hour’s talk, for her husband. She will have ledgers, ink and a rule borrowed from Sophronia’s lessons table, and make an accounting of their life. Thus equipped, she will also turn thief.

  In her new role she travels with Chetwyn and a load of sugar, to sell it at the public sale in the town square. After he accepts the bid, Chetwyn takes to waving grandly – quite shockingly aristocratically – to where Mrs Chetwyn sits, in public view, modern as a motor, factoring her numbers at a lapboard in the lee of the sugar-heaped wagon.

  It is here that payment is made, in drafts or actual notes; she grows practised at which banknotes to accept, and which to turn away as liable to be dishonoured before she can get them to the town bank; this does not happen often, but when it does it is an unpleasant matter until Chetwyn steps in. It is here, too, that she commits the under-recording of the sum each load fetches.

  His staggered planting keeps the little mill and manufactory working almost without cease, and he and she could visit town once a fortnight with a load of sugar if this suited them; but sugar – in any state but the cut cane – keeps, and so they choose monthly. This is at her urging; practising villainy against her own home any oftener would undo her, she thinks.

  Once a month, then, the under-recording of the sale gives rise to a flurry of calculation as she works out the size of the share that will come to her. Curiously, she always does her arithmetic in this order: accepts from the buyer his bid, scribbles this on a slip of loose paper for him, enters a lower number in her book and only then works out by how much she has profited. Not once does she settle on the sum to steal and then subtract it; the order is always a fair portion to Missenden and recording of that sum, and only then hers, as though it is a reckoning mistake, in her favour and at the expense of the buyer of Missenden’s sugar.

  She knows that it is, of course, from the estate that she is withholding money. Not the Missenden of the deep, beloved earth, the lilies and high copse, but the sepulchral place, lost to some male cousin, her former home from which she has been turned out – that despised Missenden of future potential loss that began to exist upon the reading of the will.

  Having recorded and figured her theft, there remains the altogether more difficult business of realising it. There is no question of her banking money under any but Chetwyn’s name, and even if she were permitted such a thing, and would further be allowed to manage it without his signature on every action, Mrs Chetwyn could not have trusted the bank not to betray her.

  No other person in the world must know she has it, and as for the hoarding of it, surely that must be accomplished by burial: therefore, gold. And for gold got in secret exchange, a visit, once a month, to a money lender in the Indian quarter of the town, to be extorted a premium for there being no questions asked.

  Sleepy-eyed young men handle the exchange of white paper notes for yellow coin, or narrow Goan bars, or bracelets, before Mrs Chetwyn steps again into the lane to buy the silk or whatever is her subterfuge. This part of the transaction is not difficult for her. She takes pleasure in the curry and coriander in the air, the cadence of the shopkeepers’ language familiar from her life before Africa, the sense from the money changer that if he somewhat dislikes her, he somewhat dislikes everyone with whom he deals and so she is at least equal in this.

  But when she has her gold she must return to the world of Smith Street with the coins tugging at a pocket in her stays, having been tucked out of sight behind the tottering bolts of one of the Indian shops or, once, in a moment’s writhing under her short cape, in the street. She relies there on being beneath notice, which makes her very noticeability on Smith Street even harder to endure.

  On the main streets of the town she feels herself to be judged head to toe and soul to spoken word by the men – men of her tribe, as Fuze might conceive of it, so great a concentration of them as to stiffen her shoulders and spine, to stiffen the cheeks on her face, stiffen her mouth – as she moves down the street, hotly conscious of her crime.

  This guilty sensibility awakens in her a particular awareness of the mad women of the town. The colony is gathering a reputation in this regard; everyone knows about the bishop’s sister’s mad companion caught clinging to a post and wailing not to be released back into the place. She was thirty-four but insisted she was the age she had been when she arrived, years before, refusing to acknowledge any time spent here. There has been talk, too, of a new mother (hardly new: surely habituated by this, her fourteenth delivery) who took the midwife’s blade and cut her own throat, tendon to tendon, to re-soak sheets so newly changed.

  Mrs Chetwyn passes a woman at the door of a fellmonger. She is explaining something to a man there. She is desperate to be comprehended. Her hand is a claw menacing her own face, nails inches from her own eyes, straining to make herself heard. Is she one of them, or is hers merely the mad urgency of a sane woman?

  But the gold is real. It is surely a fiction as great as paper money and false bookkeeping, but she does not question it. After all, you may feel it cold in your hand, feel it burning your midriff through your stays as you are stopped in the street to be greeted by this man or that couple. You can hold a hand over it on the long journey home and know its whereabouts in transit or in camp, feel it shift under the embrace of your eldest daughter upon your homecoming, and pinch as the weight of the twins in your arms buckles your corset, and feel it chafe as Maude twists and whines for Zodwa. It can be slipped from its hiding place, warm from her body, when at last she is alone in her bedroom.

  In the course of that day, or the next, she will find the right moment to disinter her box from under the old corn-grinding rock that serves as birdbath at the edge of her seed rows, slip in the gold and rebury it on Missenden. She insists: who does it dispossess, the pagan hoard under the grinding stone, the accommodation she has made with the mechanics of the world?

  COSMO

  Life is filling us in the way that estates along the line of hills are starting to gather to them families to join the lone planters, and homesteads for the families, and a network of cleared paths and roads.

  Missenden has the mill and boiling house. It crushes cane for estates for miles around and gets from their untidy drooping wains their sugar. We are therefore, even without another consideration, the place to which they come. But it is, I know even now, when I am barely ten years old, more than this. Settled on its green hill like the summer-white skirts of a woman, Missenden’s homestead, the beacon of it, attracts visitors. And then it holds them at one remove.

  Life away from Missenden is ‘out there’ – and largely forbidden to us, or at least allowed only within the lanes so strictly patrolled by the elders of the estate: we want to be always with the tumble of the Ridge children to the north-east, and the pair of Cologne brothers, sons of the plantation that is our southern neighbour; we may not be, unless this is on tea days at home, when we might steal some rough-housing from the programme of politeness under the eyes of the parents.

  It is in these stolen moments that I learn how shameful is Griffin, or at least the constant having of her by me.

  Today four of us, and Griffin, peel away from the main party at the moment they are engaged with getting themselves and their generous skirts through the narrow channel of the hallway that connects the veranda and the drawing room. We move as though we have plotted it – Sophronia and me and Bernhardt and Leo Cologne – swiftly to our right, off
the veranda, a few steps across the garden and into a cane break; my heart is racing as though this is an escape from jailers, but it is no escape: Griffin is by my side, has turned to follow me with hardly a stutter in her movement, and is there, now, looking from one to the next of us as if to ask, What is your intention?

  We could not have answered her – there is no more thought in this than chickens have to move towards other chickens; it is the separateness we wanted, and now it is ours.

  We slow our step and fall into a pattern of two abreast – the almost-grown Sophronia, the somewhat younger Bernhardt, then Leo and me; Griffin is at my heel.

  The cane stands at almost twice my height. Bernhardt breaks a switch of shoot and leaves and slides this across the wall of growth to cause a slapping, swishing sound amid the shuffling of the cane. The rest is all Sunday silence, a still, laden sky and the heat of the day.

  Leo slips into the half-comical drag-footed gait of a boy who is extracting from the mereness of walking all possible amusement, and my own feet pick up the sway of it: soon we are absolutely in step, swinging our arms and rolling our eyes and exaggerating our dragging steps to make a weird march. The purpose of it is to be doing it together, to tramp along the ground and alert the earth with our heels, and amplify each step. Lodged in me is the delight of this companionable nonsense, the discovery of it (and with it, I must suppose, the discovery of loneliness).

  Our silly walk brings us tripping at the heels of the elder pair, and at my back Griffin is not managing her response to it with the smoothness of before. Her pace is now one step, now a skipping pair of steps; knowing her as I do, I can read puzzlement in her walk, and irritation.

  Leo says, ‘Why does she always follow you? That long coolie maid?’

  I cannot absorb this and keep up the walk, and I stop dead and look at him. It is somewhat in the nature of ‘Why do you have those holes in your face to breathe with?’ – not quite, of course, because I know that only I among the sisters with whom I live have a tall woman in saris always at my heel; this is presented at home as the formalities that attend a princeling.

  I stare at Leo. Why indeed? I can feel a fog settling between me and the words I need. Instead of answering him, I turn to Griffin and say, ‘Griffin, we don’t need you!’

  My voice gives the order but my eyes, which she alone of us five can see, plead. By an act of mercy she simply dips her head, turns on her heel and leaves us.

  I turn back to my companions to find Sophronia frowning and biting her lower lip and Leo continuing his way along the grassy break with a swagger of achievement.

  I can only guess that she follows us some other way – tracking us on the parallel through the cutting thickets of cane, or perhaps she pulls herself up into a tree or recruits a falcon to read the air. Perhaps she knows enough to know that by now I can be handed off to Sophronia. All I know is that although Leo and I resume our funny walk, and take up our duties of pestering Sophronia and Bernhardt, I feel a naked psychic chill at my back, as though along my spine my Norfolk jacket, put on for company, has been cut at the seam and folded open to cold rain.

  We nonetheless have the green afternoon before us. I outclimb Leo, rising through the branches of the spreading, scale-barked tree that marks the eastern, or rivered, edge of Missenden. He tries to overtake me and then tries to hold me back, his hands on my ankle, but I slither free of him.

  ‘Cosmo, you weasel, you climb like a girl,’ he says and Sophronia, who has been seated like a queen at audience on a low branch, gives a scream and drops to the ground, and Leo, Bernhardt and I keep quite still for an instant to see if she will survive. It would be unwise, after that, to address Leo’s insult to me with anything more than a jostle. We climb.

  From the slim, swaying upper branches of the tree, the furthest pioneering leaves almost within my reach, I take in the kingdom of us. At my back, so close that I must look down through the tree itself to see it, is the start of the gorge, and the calm stretch of the river before the series of dropping steps that carry it to the level of the sea in the space of a few hundred yards.

  Next, the wind-shredded tangle of palm and dune jungle. I cannot make out the shore, the absolute line of water on sand, but the wider reach is my broad horizon; before me, as I brace my feet and hold on to a pair of branches as one might hold the ropes of a swing, is the rich carpet of the estate.

  The effect of cane in full growth in some fields – full growth being uniformly almost the height of a boy standing on a man’s shoulders – and in others just starting out and therefore more or less at dog level, is a most satisfying sight from this distance, great smooth blocks with enough texture to suggest softness, an animal covering. Cushions, almost, or thick-folded blankets … and at the apex the alien, complementary, crisp white: the hot white of Missenden’s glaring walls, closing in the parents and their adult neighbours – corralling them with their tea and Dundee cake, leaving us the day.

  The situation of the house on the hill combines with the height of the tree to give a curious sense of being at eye level with our home even though the tree stands on lower ground, so that when a figure in grey and Griffin’s flinty red line come together to the veranda of the house, and stand a while until they are joined by a figure in a pale shirt and trousers, and that figure moves on from them and starts down one of the breaks, I fancy I am eye to eye with him, watching him come for me.

  I meet his eye, his imagined eye, and I am already thinking my way down the tree, my feet feeling for a lower branch. There will be no ordering Fuze to leave us; his summons to the house and dispatch to us is the sign that our hour is over.

  At the end of the day I find Sophronia and lead her to the back of the house, to the reservoir. We are not face to face but lean over the curving wall, shoulder to shoulder, and paddle our hands in the water and watch its spreading and contracting surface throw back the light.

  ‘Fronia …’ I say at last, thinking that I am by my words about to submerge myself in the tank, to slip under the light. But she already knows, and that is worse.

  That night, as I turn over in my mind the surprising business of Leo’s opinion on how we conduct ourselves, I conclude that it is the Colognes who are mistaken in not supplying a guardian for their eldest boy, and that Griffin is the mark of a prudent family. Perhaps they are too poor. And Leo is only envious. For days I will pretend to believe this.

  Fireflies blink in the garden. Or do not – looking into the thick darkness, I think I cannot tell what is before my eyes and what is imagined. But my eyes are open. And my sisters can see them too, the soft, sudden glow, and the way they fade like a message that, having been seen, unwrites itself.

  ‘Look!’

  ‘Look!’

  Behind us Father pinches out his candle, and on the veranda the lamps are going out, one by one, and our noise with them – even we are quiet for a moment. At the level of our feet and up to the height of Sophronia, more or less, they pulse. It is impossible to fix on one and wait for it to light up again, and so there seems to be no rhythm. The light moves across the body of them as though it is separate from them. From the corner of your eye another will come, and you will know you are not before a stage but surrounded in a friendly way by the golden, winking things.

  Admiring sharpens to wanting: Maude has a jar, and by stealth soon has not a fly but a grey beetle. Perhaps it is not the creature she sought, because it will not light up for her. Her enterprise drives me away from them, deeper into the garden. My step cuts a path of darkness as I silence the insects, but they start up again behind me and soon I find myself beyond the lights, with the blinking between me and my sisters.

  Everyone is in white. Everyone is in a nightgown, except Griffin, whose legs show in loose trousers below her shawl and who will not step off the veranda.

  Out here on my own, looking back at the lights and the long white shapes beyond them, it is as though they, the glowing things, are inside my skull, and I am inside it too. We are in a new p
lace.

  9

  THEY LEARN THE NAME OF THE COUSIN, the eventual inheriting cousin who will take all they have. Frederick Redmain Chetwyn. Frederick Redmain who will be eighteen soon, and is a midshipman on the Rose of Sharon: does he even know their names? As only an enemy can, his Missenden cousins imagine him unfairly blessed with looks, firm limbs, vigour. They give him, as enemies will, more than a villain’s share of malice, a dissembling, sly nature and super-human endurance for the years-long, perhaps decades-long, inexorable theft of their home.

  Sophronia, who is eight years old, anathematises him, bitter as a bishop, and teaches her three small sisters to reserve for their cousin the villain’s part in any play.

  The twins intone a pirate’s curse:

  ‘May sharks who live in the Andaman Sea …’

  ‘… enjoy their dinner off his bones.’

  And they run, whooping, knowing they are safe.

  She will have to bear again. There is no way around it. She will have to trust the odds, and believe that the next child – the last child – will be the son the land needs.

  As though thinking alone can make it so, she thinks of little else, tensing her neck and imagining that she is willing a male child into her body. In the night when Chetwyn reaches his crisis she thinks that one thought: make me a son. She has read but has never owned the Aristotle, and although she knows there is a rule about which side to turn onto after the business of marriage to guarantee a boy, she cannot recall it and, fearing she will choose the wrong side, lies on her back, listening to him sleep. How can this that ought to be so much in her control be out of her control?

  Going about her day in the kitchen or the garden, with her household or her sugar accounting slips or her handsome seed record, ignoring her hoard of gold, she believes she has indeed begun the male child she needs, wherever it is that children begin. Perhaps in her heart, proof of life in her. Perhaps it begins there during the private business and drops to her belly, and there sticks and grows. She imagines a swelling fruit, a drupe, growing around the case of him.