Under Glass

by Claire Robertson

He leaves the driveway to cut across the lands; on the rougher ground she reaches by instinct for his arm and he readily gives it, then switches, with great naturalness, to holding her hand with her arm across his body, and his near arm around her waist, and half lifts, half dances her over the resting sugar lands. She is carried along, amazed and glad.

  It is, when they slow and he drops her hand and they reach the spot marked by his handkerchief, a low, round plant resembling nothing so much as an artichoke’s bud, with a protruding growth of truncated, folded leaves. It is not on the road, as distance had led her to suppose, but a good few yards up the slope of Missenden. Once again, he is immediately on his knees, and tenderly over the plant. Mrs Chetwyn also sinks to its level.

  ‘Liliaceae, of course,’ he says, as much to himself as to her. ‘Albuca? Albuca … or … no. I see no way around it. And yet, albuca?’

  His argument with himself again seems to include her.

  ‘I have heard of its flower – white, of course, albuca, white, with green stripes as neat as stuff for curtains. If this is one of the albuca.’

  He settles his fingers on the globe of the plant. ‘This is part of the bulb. I dare not dig it out and risk losing it. It will be far safer to set from seed. But for now …’ He casts about. ‘Ah, yes.’

  This close to the river there are reeds aplenty, and he swiftly cuts a small armful and sets about weaving a cloche. Mrs Chetwyn holds reed to reed while he winds the join fast, and picks up the weaving of the active reed when it comes around to her side of the growing loose open basket.

  As they work he describes the plant – if this is the plant he hopes it is – until she is looking forward to it as eagerly as she might anticipate mail from the town or— No, these inorganic analogies do not suit; she knows the particular anticipation of the gardener, a combination of expectation and wonder, and satisfaction at the blooming of a plant and an instinct to make it welcome as though it bears a gift, or is a gift. She longs to see the Albuca bloom and thank it for its display.

  The cloche is made and settled over the globe and its upshoots. McQuairie and Mrs Chetwyn easily understand that she will have the husbanding and harvesting of the eventual flower’s inevitable seeds. That this is a deep trust is also understood. As they stand and shake out their clothes she chooses cane breaks and trees to map the plant on Missenden.

  He draws her along the public road and back up onto Missenden’s land to show her his wagon. On its bed is a boxlike stack of frames, bound with a metal band and topped with a great screw, and there are glass jars stacked in their dozens to one side of this press. An area of the wagon has been laid with a mattress over which is knotted a cloud of mosquito curtain, and there is a trunk by, and a jug and ewer braced with a leather strap. She recalls his drunken reference to his lone week’s collecting every year under his contract with the Botanical Society, and recognises the wagon as the embodiment of this purpose, a collecting machine and a home in the wild country.

  The gap between the bottom edge and the lowest frame of the plant press is slightly wider than those above it. ‘A few ranunculaceae that may be new. Worth cross-breeding with, I dare say. We shall see.

  ‘I’m staying low this year,’ he says, and she thinks by the pressing gesture of his hand that he means the maximal size of the plants he’ll take. As they leave his camp, where his man has started a fire and set a trivet by, he explains that, no, he means it is the coastal and only somewhat inland belt that is this year his chosen field. The altitude at which one gathers the plant is one of the things to note about it, he says.

  ‘The exact altitude?’ Her mind swims with the size of the instrument one would need for such a determination.

  ‘No, no, to the nearest thousand feet. You establish it quite primitively, by timing the boiling of water from cold.’

  She nods at this. They are nearing the house, and she turns to thinking about all that lives there, upon which there now issue from under the thatch one girl, two smaller girls completely like one another, a babe in the arms of a nursemaid, and at last Griffin, disapproving as she stops the children and arranges them as if in demonstration of her mistress’s lot; she is Mrs Chetwyn again.

  If he is surprised at this abundance of children, he gives no sign of it but comes towards them with hat held off from his body and makes a bow and calls them ladies, at which Sophronia and the twins oblige with giggles, and Maude turns her head to bury it in Zodwa’s bosom, and Griffin stiffens and gives her impression of a deity with eyes carved from coal, glittering.

  Sophronia remembers to drop a wobbling curtsy and the twins hold hands and sway and dip in imitation, and they bring him into their three rooms, this visitor who is like and yet unalike other visitors, and Mama so pretty and shedding the veil of vagueness that almost always drifts around her like a malaria net, so delicate and so perilous for little girls to try to lift aside.

  Missenden has responded to the capital and labour lavished on it in the past three, almost three, years, and combines the freshness of the natural land with pockets of industry. It wears its character particularly well at the time that the young botanist seeks out its mistress, and shows this again in the table it sets for him that night: vegetables more various than pumpkin, grain beyond corn, meat other than beef – beef, corn and pumpkin being almost the staple foods of the colony, at least among the colonialists. Here are pies and breads, two roasted chickens and five colours of side dishes, a pawpaw dressed with wine and sugar, and potted tinned salmon for a savoury. There is wine from Vogelzang in the Cape, and they enjoy that, too.

  Before the meal, Chetwyn returned to greet the visitor, and led him off to inspect the working at the mills. There, and on their return to the house, Chetwyn watched as McQuairie’s attention lit on his possessions, one by one.

  The men wash at a bowl set out on the veranda, where evening is falling with farming sounds – cattle on their way to a safe night in their corral – and the pressing in of the older world, the whoop of a jackal, the dark, chickens restive about their nightly leopard. Then in to a room glowing with lamps and candles, and daughters in white cotton, rosy with washing, come to say goodnight with pretty lisps, then dinner and talk under the rough thatch, between the rough walls.

  Mrs Chetwyn says less than the men. She smiles and sup-plies dishes and glasses and feels the room, the table, her husband, to be as appealing and as inconsequential as the gold-and-blue edge of her plate; she can admire these things, and even run a fingertip over the pattern to remind herself it is real, and it has no import whatsoever. The only vibrant part of her is that hand nearest him and that profile of her own face, as though he is either fire or frost.

  That night, Chetwyn moves upon her with fierceness, as though to force from her a sound, and halts, once, to seek out her eyes in the dim light. She meets his look but feels herself sink away from him, deep and down, until the steady returned gaze she offers is no more than the surface of the well from whose depths she watches.

  He is soon asleep, but she cannot so much as close her eyes. She lies beside Chetwyn in the dark. She pictures the botanist stealing up Missenden’s long flank to stand at the window of her marital bedroom.

  She thinks about something he said over her beds: that when a seed germinates in the ground the pair of leaf-like organs that first appear above the surface are often different – in texture, in appearance – from the succeeding leaves.

  ‘These primary organs, the cotyledons, protect the little bud, the plumule, of the true leaves.’ He passed a thumb over one such pair as he spoke, and she thought she knew the rasp of his skin on them.

  Chetwyn mutters in his sleep and when he stops the silence sings.

  There is a stealthy rustle. Someone is indeed moving outside her window – taking a step or two and stopping as if to listen, then coming closer again. Without a thought she slides from the bed with tensile care not to rock it, and snatches up her bed shawl, and, careful as a deer on naked, high feet, gains the front room and the
n the front door.

  She bends to work free the scissors jammed under the door to keep it closed. After the thick darkness of the house, the starlight is enough to see by – she can make out her seedbeds and the lie of Missenden, and the step down from the veranda to the path, and the path to the mown grass, which pricks her seldom-bared soles.

  She lets her shawl slip from her shoulders, holds it loosely about her arms. There is no breeze but, as she shifts, her nightgown moves against her thighs. The cloth of the gown falls from her enfolding arms to her ankles without a buckle or tie to bind it against her; she is aware of the delicacy of this, the drop of white lawn. She lifts her eyes and finds she can make out the horizon – a glow there gives it away, and after a second of wonder she knows that she sees a rising moon.

  She watches, hardly breathing. Some flowering bush in the beds is giving out its scent, and there is not a sound while she waits. She closes her eyes, keeps them closed for the length of inhaling a breath, opens them with her exhalation and watches the half-imagined line of white appear, and thicken as it rises.

  As if at the moon’s prompt, there come the stealthy steps again, and she, startled by how close they seem, makes a small sound of fright and by that frightens some creature hard by. With a hiss and clatter it flares from its bundled shape to a form four times that size, trembling and spiked and making a picture of fright to answer her own.

  The old porcupine! Her established foe and welcome visitor both, battler of cloche and cover whose dropped-head, self-absorbed shuffle she enjoys enough to allow him his share of established lettuce, whatever he fancies, all but the chary youngsters she takes care to settle under glass or wicker each night.

  Mrs Chetwyn spins like a girl, shawl flaring, and chases him off, laughing silently in her thoughts under the risen moon.

  The botanist’s wagon is packed and inspanned before he walks up to the house for breakfast and farewell. He intends to continue down the coast for two days more, then head inland and loop back to the bay along higher ground; he will not pass Missenden again on this collecting trip.

  Chetwyn shakes his hand and leaves before he does, headed for the great puzzle of his machines, and Mrs Chetwyn pours her guest a last cup of tea and they sit on the veranda in the fresh morning, and he speaks about a certain anemone – rumours of an anemone – an anemone hunt.

  Mrs Chetwyn half hears him, the other half of her attention given to her body. She straightens and feels the press of her breasts against her corset, notes their fullness, and nods – she had known it, and now she knows it again: the cycle has resumed; she is swelling already with it.

  She interrupts him. ‘What grows its fruit within?’

  He shakes his head, inviting her to continue.

  ‘What plant – is there a plant that grows its fruit inside itself, and releases it only when it is ripe?’ Her frown shows her need to know and her inability to express that need. He offers a casual reply.

  ‘Why, all plants. You might say they all … gestate … within. Swell and replicate some part of themselves, release it when it is ripe …’

  But she cannot make him understand the strangeness of her realisation, a moment before, that there is a person within her, perhaps, most incomprehensibly of all, a boy.

  ‘There are some similarities with mammalian, or animate, reproduction, in terminology at least,’ he says, switching delivery from breakfast guest’s to botanist’s. ‘Some similarities, but on the whole they are not analogous. Live young and so on. Plant versus animal.’

  He closes off this unprofitable line by standing and gathering his hat and coat. Mrs Chetwyn does not move for a moment. Then she recollects herself and rises from the table, and walks with him from the veranda to the start of the break, and there he takes her hand and bends over it to kiss it, and to hold it against his cheek for a moment.

  She does not challenge him on this, or react at all. He releases her hand and she brings it to meet its sister at her waist, folds one over the other, and in this attitude of steady calm, planted where she stands, she watches him leave.

  COSMO

  Sophronia stands with Mother when the Christmas smous comes to the front garden. The rest of us are given our turn at the cart, to choose our gifts for each another and for Mother and Father, and Fuze and the tombazanes, with all the mix of purpose and love of a secret transaction, taking turns to beard the smous on the unsistered side of the wagon to haggle in a mutter over hoops, ribbons, scent and flowered cards, the fitness of this handkerchief for Mother with its bright violets in silk, or the tin penknife whose gleaming celluloid backing is surely in this case better than tortoiseshell.

  When we, pious with full pockets, have had our turn with the wagon and return indoors to make festive parcels, Mother calls Fronia back, and the two confer over the ‘big presents’ for each of us.

  Sophronia advises on each one, with her good sense, her knowledge of us, and the careful briefing we have provided as to the nature of box (work or jewellery), the book (adventure or Christian), the toilet set or diary or enamelled thimble.

  This is the crux: she is equally engaged by Mother in choosing her own gift, in steering matters from the girlish to the womanly side of things, calmly and justly settling on the appropriate present, the appropriate outlay for the eldest girl, a person of almost twenty-one.

  And on Christmas morning, in a drawing room kept dim against the incredible heat, to a background of beetle song, Sophronia will make a sound of surprise as she folds back the stiff brown paper, as though in the ten days since she settled the price with the smous she has forgotten what could be in her parcel, and is aptly wide-eyed with delight, and I watch this and think, But you bought it yourself!

  I, who have been taught to be so careful of my humours, am driven out of my reason by the doubled nature of others.

  For almost three years the botanical artist who we met on the road with her wonderful great dog has left a trunk at Missenden and camped on Elephant between her months-long comings and goings. Now it seems she is going to live here, with us. News of this is not told directly to us, not even to Sophronia. Almost nothing is told to us, beyond matters to do with how we comport our bodies and what we say, but (and therefore) we have grown fluent in a second language of eavesdropping and extrapolation.

  Maude brings the news to us – Maude, her eyes narrowed and telescoped with grievance and her hearing amplified with a natural instinct towards dissembling, and as jealous of her place as the yellow bitch at Father’s heel.

  In Maude, the stirring and packing and parental visits to Miss Oak’s tented camp, and the folding of her mule Muley Girl into the animal workforce of the estate where before it has grown fat in the breaks and tasted even Mother’s garden, and the swelling of Miss Oak’s lower right leg, and the firing of the brick kiln that has been cold for years, and the reporting at the back door one morning of the wattle and daub men to throw a new floor, and lastly the dispatch on that same morning of Fuze’s team to a far edge of the estate, in the lower lands, closer to the road – in Maude, these knit into a story.

  This last, the floor team, is the confirmation she has been waiting for, and she brings it to us, and we dare gather bonnets and hats and mount a journey down unfamiliar breaks, all the way to the site where the men have already laid low a great, straight-sided emptiness and lit a fire to take care of the brush. A cutting crew is spaced at the edges of the land to contain the fire; the men pay us no mind.

  ‘See,’ says Maude.

  When it is built, in a while, Miss Oak’s cottage at the edge of Missenden lies on a piece of land whose borders form a blunted almost-triangle (one of the words for it is ‘trapezium’; my sisters would have no word for it at all): wide at its road frontage, and tapering back into the cane, each side meeting a narrow fourth side to make the almost-trigon, the quadrilateral, the convex polygon (I would have to measure it to be sure).

  Miss Oak cannot walk the perimeter of her new home. She limped when she first came
to Missenden, now she hobbles. Her lower leg is red and smooth, a boiled thing. But she has a boy bring the mule in from the sugar lands and hold her steady, and she makes a cooing, sore sound for the animal and for her own leg as two men help her to mount. She has to lean almost until she is lying down on the wide back, and the boy leads them down the long and short sides of the land.

  This is later, on the day her camp is struck and her things are carried down from the camp over the hill. We ride along with the last cart and, once at the cottage, carry jars of brushes, sheaves of paper, footstools and paint pots, chamber pots, cooking pots. I have special charge of Lady Arundel, the great grey dog. Miss Oak directs the disbursement of her goods from a seat on the veranda, pointing with her cane.

  The veranda is deep, almost as deep as the house; the cottage is to her design, a u-shape of rooms around and opening onto the indoors-outdoors roofed veranda where she tells the men to set up her cot, along the house wall, and her easels and stools and paint tables nearer to the open edge.

  This edge, some few feet above the ground, meets it in wide, shallow steps that run the length of the veranda. I and my sisters settle there, around Lady Arundel, as the men and women of the estate bring in the furniture proper, what there is of it. Miss Oak, in her cot behind and above us, stretches out her leg and makes a sound.

  When Father comes at last to call us home, Miss Oak says, ‘One more thing’ and calls him across to stand before her chair, and names it, and Maude bites out to us from unmoving jaws, ‘If one more thing, what were the others?’

  We already know we should not mention Miss Oak in Father’s presence, and watch him now being irritated by her anew. And yet we also see him nod.

  Father, with a smile of revenge that he thinks we cannot read, grants Fuze the acres around Miss Oak’s cottage. It is low, claggy land that will not easily return a worthwhile crop of Bourbon or even Green Natal, but let Fuze have the cultivation of it, and the harvest and selling of whatever he can grow there. Watching Fuze farm some low crop for himself in sight of the cottage will be capital entertainment, says Father. Fuze’s efforts alone would be worth the paper; Fuze in constant sight of that woman will be better than a novel.