Under Glass

by Claire Robertson

  I cannot pity Fuze, who lied to me: he taught me to whistle like a bird but, in the agony of twelve (for I am soon twelve), I cast myself onto the soft, hot ground of Python, despair and resentment mixed at today’s betrayal: you cannot, you cannot make birdsong – your clumsy human heart is not built for it; a blackbird’s song fills a tiny vessel and empties it utterly. ‘Utterly,’ I say, in full tragic flight, and sniff for comfort.

  I listen hard, but there is not even a beetle by.

  Then Fuze finds me. He has a sack. He lets me follow him to a great tree that has been spared, halfway up Python’s hill. He lets me nail my side of the short planks that we are fitting to the trunk of the tree, and lets me be the first to climb them, rung by rung. Griffin, who has been watching me sulk and fling myself about since breakfast, keeps her distance. Having added my tree to the map, she folds her thin, long self and arranges her sari until she is squatting in her own patch of shade, and ignores us. Fuze makes it clear that the tree and the ladder are for my exclusive use, and indeed who else on Missenden may climb like a boy?

  You cannot sulk in the branches of a tall tree. Mine is a private tree that offers no low branch as a way in but could only have been approached as Fuze has planned it. Once among the branches the visitor arrives at a confluence of three; take this slung throne and your gaze is directed down the hill to the workings.

  Afternoons in my tree bend my thoughts to the process of the place, and I retrace my visit to the sugar works and puzzle out the order of each step and the state in which the sugar leaves it. The task I was assigned on the day I visited, the ritual of it, I do not for an instant remember, but I can see the work as though the walls of the refinery have gone and it is laid out before me.

  If this, then that, for even the broken rule.

  10

  ON HER FIRST MORNING ALONE in her new house in Lucknow almost a decade before, new-minted Mrs Chetwyn, a girl no more, had taken up a professional-seeming notebook and pencil and set about inspecting her home. She had proceeded from the master bedroom to the drawing room to the study, second bedroom, third bedroom, sluice room, mud room, pantry, and then down to steps and across a tiny, bricked yard to gain the half-indoors, half-outdoors walled and partly roofed kitchen setup, where she met the cook’s guarded welcome.

  Behind this collection of braziers, brick ovens and stone ledges were a few proper rooms, in the sense that they were floored and roofed, although for ventilation and light there were but the door and a high window apiece, this not glazed.

  The cook, a small, determined man, had seemed to be affronted by her intention to enter the first of these, but Mrs Chetwyn pressed past him. There, on a many-layered pallet of cloth upon cloth, crouched in the corner, was Griffin – the rest of her a mere suggestion located by the liquid shine of her eyes, until Mrs Chetwyn moved deeper into the room and the cook crowded behind her, and they unblocked the light from the doorway and there emerged a girl in a sari, watchful and perfectly still, giving the impression of being not so much afraid as coiled, in an efficient way, to spring from her crouch and across the room should she need to.

  Mrs Chetwyn did no more than dip her head, still holding the girl’s stare, and back out of the room.

  ‘Your wife?’ she asked the cook.

  ‘Sister,’ he replied, watching her.

  That afternoon she called him to her and offered his sister work in the house. Her offer seemed to astonish the cook and almost puzzle the girl, as though Mrs Chetwyn had ignored the code of the place in some manner. Nonetheless, the next day her brother brought her to Mrs Chetwyn on the veranda of her cantonment home and had her crouch before her chair. He introduced her by opening a grimy book of English history with some ceremony and pointing to a name, an English name: Griffin. The book, she understood, was to be taken as some sort of proof.

  Mrs Chetwyn had still barely seen her standing upright. When she did see her, the girl’s unusual height sealed Mrs Chetwyn’s resolve, though she could not have said why.

  She learned about her maid – and decided about her through a mixture of listening and her own inclinations – that she feared and loathed marriage. She certainly resisted the idea of returning, ever, to him to whom she had been married since she was eleven years old, and by whom she had borne several dead children.

  Far from considering the tall girl with the terrible story as an unhealthy presence or an unlucky omen for a bride starting on her own marriage, Mrs Chetwyn was drawn to her, to the simple stillness of her that gave her the air of being carved from hard wood and of being of the same scarce hard wood all the way through. Cut her through at the midpoint and you would find the same stuff there as made up her outer part; wake her at midnight and she would unfold and rise to her full height and regard Mrs Chetwyn with the same serious focus that she offered along with the tea tray when she woke her mistress each morning. These were the terms in which Mrs Chetwyn described the girl to herself.

  Mrs Chetwyn had seen Griffin waver in her staunch Griffinness only once: at the birth of Sophronia. She had remained stoic for the labour’s crisis, lending her fierceness to Mrs Chetwyn as if to conquer her fear and pain with it, but when at last it was done and Sophronia slept beside her mother, Griffin would not leave off from gazing at her, and from her face to Mrs Chetwyn’s.

  It was more apparent to nineteen-year-old Mrs Chetwyn in that moment that Griffin was herself only fourteen or fifteen.

  She was there as Mrs Chetwyn drifted off to sleep, and there when the baby woke and woke her mother. She would not quit the child’s side for an instant, to Chetwyn’s irritation, and at last Mrs Chetwyn, the baby and Griffin decamped to the second bedroom, and Mrs Chetwyn from time to time left her daughter to attend to her husband.

  Griffin, having prevailed, settled back into her impenetrable self: shadow to Mrs Chetwyn and now to the baby too, and appearing to take no notice of Chetwyn. He contented himself with bluff jokes about Griffin couchant and Griffin rampant, and left the females to it.

  At each successive birth Griffin has been as strong and involved as if she were the terrible involuntary spasms of muscle made somehow visible and separate from Mrs Chetwyn’s lying-in, the force that would bring forth this baby, would make use of her, Mrs Chetwyn’s, body for this separate purpose, and operate upon her the terrible theatre of it.

  Now, as they work in the front room, with Mrs Chetwyn correcting Sophronia’s careful letters and Griffin’s hand flashing to and from cloth, eagle-clawed around a needle, the two of them have begun once again to collect their energies and align their minds for a birth. It will not be long now, this endeavour they have always undertaken together in the fearful twilight of the birthing room.

  The new baby comes in summer, as warm rain is driven in swaying sheets across the thatched house at Missenden.

  Mrs Chetwyn’s thoughts catch on each forceful increase of the rain and then its diminution, as though to surrender to its sweeping motion. It makes her feel small, warm and cared for in the interstices, before the next gathering in her body, when she is aware only of the tearing of her muscles, her own kitten panting. She feels Griffin’s iron-cold, hard hand on her arm as if to either draw the suffering into her own body, or to block her escape and pin her there, tethering her to the known world.

  The storm keeps the light dull even outside the shrouded room so that when Mrs Chetwyn calls for air and Griffin draws apart the curtains, the two of them are yet burrowed in dimness.

  Her struggle outlasts the storm, lasts into the clear night. This fiercer struggle, she thinks as she tries to doze before the convulsing hand should be upon her again, the fierceness of it, is surely the mark of a son.

  COSMO

  We quit Missenden at first light. Griffin rouses me and leads me through the sleeping house. She has her carpet bag. I carry nothing, just follow her into the day, then down the drive, then cut left onto a narrow break. The night air, layered in mist above and as dew on the grass at our feet, makes of our passage a tunne
l, a conduit.

  Although I am not fully awake I am urgent, as urgent as Griffin, as we scurry through the cane to gain the wilder edges of the estate, the ruff of great trees and frayed palms. We hurry from the house as though we are chased.

  Where the land changes we stop a moment, and Griffin takes a strip of white cloth from her bag. She ties this to the twisting branch of a tree overhanging the path, and tugs it to make certain of the knot. Only then may we step off Missenden’s land and head down.

  Now the path is earth underfoot and the day reaches us in shafts of lit air. Griffin shifts the carpet bag and slows her pace, and I, properly awake, slow. We are dropping all the time, our descent into the gorge controlled by the switchbacks of the path.

  Exposed roots and the odd trunk show red and white where they have been worn away. If I look down through the leaves and lianas, I can see the path cutting back, only slightly off a line parallel to the path we are on. If I turned off it, grabbed that branch and swung myself down, I would cover twenty steps in a few precarious leaps.

  Griffin’s tall figure in its sari keeps me on the path, keeps me to my careful way, halts any thoughts of ungoverned and boyish swings. The sari, edged in yellow, is of such a deep green as to suggest richer cloth than its cotton. I know it and its border pattern well; Griffin wears it on this journey every time and only then, as though her clothes are a calendar marker, a notation in a daybook.

  The day is heating up so quickly that already the mad bustle of dawn has settled; the birds are quiet again. We have not exchanged a word since leaving the house, and the few words on waking were barely words at all, just mammalian sounds to do with coming along and hurrying, a grunt of pain from me and her hiss at this.

  We have long since left behind the sun-swept reaches of the estate. The mossy air down here in the depths of the gorge is cool, and the birds whir and flutter close by, unafraid of us, in green, in white. At last we reach the river and level out.

  We are below the waterfall – the cascade, in reality – by which the Oomzube takes its last big step down to the sea. We turn right and follow the stream. It flares into a shallow, wide stretch, the light above it blinding after the dim jungle, and we round a bend and there it is, Strand Isle.

  The sides of the gorge, although somewhat eased by their own dropping towards the sea, are still too steep to build upon. But there, a hump of earth has washed up against one useful shelf of rock, and supports a few trees and land flat enough for human needs, and humans have erected a shack – little more than a pavilion, with three sides of a roofed platform left open, the fourth a wall of stone with a place for a fire and a chimney hole.

  The isle is gained by taking off our shoes and stepping through the ankle-high river, which we now do, and Griffin sets down her bundle and I submit to the unbinding.

  As Griffin works on my upper body, I clench my lower, summon the answering clawing. Griffin drops my shirt, and has me step out of my trousers. Somehow, on the isle, we do not remember that I ought to step into them again. Once they have been washed in the river and dried on a milkwood whose low branch offers a neat rack, there they will stay as long as we do. We will be here three nights. We are always here three nights. I will spend them in my loose chemise, reaching below my knees.

  From one corner of the shack I can, when I stretch to my full height, make out the sea, an indistinct blur of blue grey, sometimes nothing more certain than a change in the light. It hurts to stretch but I nonetheless have an instinct to flex back like a bow, away from my centre.

  Griffin lays a fire and sets water to boil. I sweep the platform and unhook a pair of rope-woven camp beds from the wall. I rub my upper arm across my chest, and otherwise try to ignore the tingle and itch. I find my book in Griffin’s bag, and accept a cup of tea from her, and settle in the shade to read.

  Griffin brings out an undergarment and sewing things, and folds herself into a corner where the stone wall meets the platform, and resumes work on a row of five-petalled flowers along a hem.

  Usually on the second day, the worst day, Griffin fits me with soft rags and an undergarment to hold them. There is nothing to do about the pain, but walking helps, and distraction.

  Today we tie stubs of cane, a can of cooled tea and small cakes into a cloth, and the ribbons of broad straw hats under our chins, and set off further downriver. After a while the forest trails into beach plants, and these end abruptly in an opening-out of space. The water brackets this.

  Griffin will go no further into the sea than to let it surge at her knees. I go deeper; I throw myself forward and duck my whole body, my head even, and roll over to float on my back. I tip myself forward and dive, and bob up, and float again. I was made for it, for buoyancy.

  Griffin holds my hat. I am already darker than my sisters, and in a moment surely grow darker yet, then Griffin has me out of the water and under the hat, and a cotton cloth for my shoulders. She watches me with an air of having arranged a gift.

  There is something on the beach, a dark hummock, and we tilt our bodies to cross the sand to it. I think I see it move, and narrow my eyes to compel it to move again, to be alive, but when I reach it and stand over it for a long, still moment, I conclude that it is not.

  The thing is a fish, but unscaled and therefore – and because, also, it has died in the midst of a great laugh – a dolphin. Pewter-blue, seamless and compact, it is a wholly contained creature, offering no point of entry for fellow feeling all along the length of its smoothed-out body, all the way up from its tail, past the swell of its middle, right up to its head and weird laughing mouth and its eye, where my travelling eye makes its sudden acquaintance in a small shock of recognition.

  We seem to approach one another and shrink back again – it is fish, limbless, languageless, and then that smiling mouth, opening to a grey tongue, and that soft, black eye. I kneel by its head, then fold myself forward and prepare to place my cheek on the creature’s jaw, and see as I lower my head – am sure that I see – the flutter of its breathing hole.

  My hat shades its head too, and I lay my arm, bare to the elbow in my wet shirt, along the dolphin’s skin, its dry-galoshes skin.

  I can feel that it is alive, can feel in my own body another muffled shock, as though all of my blood has, for the fraction of an eye-blink, reversed its course – some response to the blood of the dolphin.

  Griffin, forgetting to chivvy me out of the sun, away from the animal, has squatted on the other side of it, also near the head. She reaches out a long hand and lays it where the neck would by human logic be. And so we stay for a while, the three of us, during which, with no outward sign, the dolphin dies.

  The change in its state becomes clear to us after some moments more, and first I peel myself from its body, and then Griffin lifts her hand, and we stand and contemplate it, and look about ourselves as if to discover a reason. In due course we leave the beach for the shady fringes of the river.

  That night I wake in the timeless hours and watch Griffin leaning over a fire she has lit on the far bank, on the sandy beach there. When she has a healthy blaze she reaches down and fetches a pale something from a small heap of these and feeds it into the flames. We will return to Missenden tomorrow.

  I doubt I gave much thought to how they must have explained our absence, every two months or so in the beginning and now every four weeks, clocked by the moon and Maude’s terrible mood.

  I received no hint of what they were told; if I had to guess, it would have been left as another fraternal mystery, beyond the ken of sisters. In a life of harboured clues, all I have to address the question is an overheard slip of conversation, between Mother and Griffin, perhaps a year before our dolphin morning. A murmur from Griffin, and the answering, distracted drawl that, airy as it was, could not hide its guilty tones – Mother had ‘rather hoped the excess of books and tables and geography might have taken care of that. Very well, very well’ – and the exhausted voice, the dissembling voice, had trailed off.

  That we
ek I had been confined to quarters and forbidden games, and afterwards bathed like a babe, shamed, furious and sad; when the ache above and the gnawing below had returned, in seven or eight weeks, Griffin had led the way, for the first time, down to Strand Isle, knotted the ‘Occupied’ white cloth on the branch at the start of the trail, kept silent watch and lit her signal fire for the rags the night before we climbed out of the gorge, and brought me home.

  No one asks. No one asks about anything, and I am, always, careful to guess when I should speak, careful to seem to know my part, doubling my attention and effort to seem to be expending neither.

  Maude, desperate to ask, approaches me once or twice with intent, stalls upon her approach, lingers, frustrated, and leaves without being able to frame the question. And if she cannot ask, it cannot be asked. In its way, the exercise of the gorge has a logic to it – down I go, heavy, and from it I emerge, the fit thing. I have heard it called unprofitable blood that has left its proper vessels, the mark of past and future forfeit. I reason only that if there is a cut, it will bleed.

  11

  ‘COSMO,’ SHE SAYS, LOOKING UP at Chetwyn from the bed, her hair dark with sweat, cutting her eyes to the bundle at her side.

  The room is heavy with the smells of blood, soap, salt fluids. She feels the last of her strength drifting inside her, drifting away, lost in some distant chamber. Near the window, Griffin is busy with cloth that has seen its last use, irredeemably bloody cloth, one of the sites of her depletion.

  She watches him steadily. He says, ‘Our son?’

  She does not reply. Echoing in her head she hears, ‘Why not? Yes. Call it son.’

  Perhaps he hears her mental shrug. He hesitates at the strangeness of her level look, her silence. His feet stay planted on the floor, but his hands, his shoulders, move towards her as though to mime a step.