Under Glass

by Claire Robertson

  Today he leads his men to the sky-brushing stand of cane nearest the homestead, where the great grass grows to twice a man’s height and thick as his wrist.

  Every day since Sunday, the Captain has come to take his reading of the cane, and twenty men have directed their energies by the shake of his head; one day soon he will nod, and Fuze will set his teams to the work.

  Today, a sort of nodding shake – the colour of the cane is close to the desired yellow, the leaves dry at their tips, but on balance, in a bargain between the lowering sky of summer and the thickening sweetness in the cane’s fibre, he may gamble for at least one day more for it to draw from the earth.

  The tilting Chetwyn head settles at last to a brisk shake and Fuze gives the low, scooping signal to his men.

  He has not, for several years now, received the decisions of the master of Missenden as anything but confirmation of what he had known. At dawn as he leaves his house and steps among the cane stalks to relieve himself, his hand, as it rests on one, tells him the state of the crop. Every man has his own indicator. Mainly it is the dryness of the buds that Fuze heeds. As the cane concentrates its force within, it has nothing for the buds.

  At this point in the cycle, this in-between point, it is the practice to direct a fast fire through the cane to burn away the litter of purposeless (sugarless) leaves at the base of each plant, to discourage rats and snakes, to keep the men busy as they wait out the ripening or their turn at the Missenden mill. At least that is what they do in most of the sugar fields, but there never is burning this close to the white house where smuts and soot on a hot lifting wind might mark the walls with black evidence of work.

  Therefore, because this is a Home stand, there is a day ahead of doing with cutlass and gangs of stooped men what clean flames would better accomplish. Fuze starts the men at opposite ends of the stand and takes for himself a station midway between them. On the grassy break, one of several that radiate from the homestead’s gardens, he will watch for fleeing vermin, something to do while the privilege of his office keeps him out of the slicing, irritating green cane and the less than manly tending of the cane litter.

  Cane cutting – work with flashing cutlasses, and moreover the nursing of the knives, the honing, oiling, wrapping of handles and basting of whetstones: this is the true work of the gang, and these things make it a matter for men. So does the scale of it – so many men, a craal’s worth, set against hill upon hill of it. The cutting makes it so; the slashing sweep of the arm, the punch into the cane, the see-sawing of the blade out of the cut.

  They must try to take from today’s lesser labour of small sideways chopping cuts, and the dragging forth of leavings, what skill there is, and ignore their womanish bending.

  Fuze brings his panga down in a showy, almost ceremonial, arc upon the back of a cane rat, a mother rat slowed to the speed of decisions by the ratling in her mouth, severing it at the mid spine. The men nearest him give the elegant blow its due in grunts of admiration. The small violence settles them, and now one starts a work song under his breath, and on the next beat his fellows pick it up, and it spreads from man to man, a modest flame invisible in the sunlight.

  In a window of the upper storey of the white house, over Fuze’s shoulder, a curtain stirs.

  2

  THE DAUGHTERS OF MISSENDEN – in some region of sixteen or seventeen (Maude) to their early twenties (Sophronia, a woman grown) – are not without occupation. There is always a better song with one or two or three un-familiar chords to practise; a knottier sampler; the preserving of fruits in their season – the sticky laboratory mucking-in of it, the material transformation. There is competition with each other (one or more has, one or more wants), competition with daughters on other estates, daughters they might not have met; clothes to sketch and make and mend, books to signal virtue. The daughters grow restless to be seen, but days fill.

  Once a month there is the ritual of hair. It is this that is their destination today as they troop upstairs together, bickering about what is due, and fall silent, one by one, along the landing to Mother’s room.

  In its steps it is the simplest matter: once a month – a true month, by the moon, every four weeks – their mother cuts their hair. One might think upon meeting the girls that their hair has never been cut, so full, long and natural are the auburn of Sophronia, the red-gold of the twins, and even Maude’s thin brown lengths reaching almost to her knees. But cut it is, by just one quarter inch, every four weeks.

  Doing so is one of Mrs Chetwyn’s few certainties about the correct habits of womanhood. The taking up of the shears, the particular rose-patterned basin, the towel and combs; the combing, the caress of holding their damp hair, the snipping off of the ends from successive hanks, working on each of them in turn: for the sisters it is the heart and performance of femaleness.

  Sophronia, at the dressing table, monitors the brushes, the pots, the small glass laid out there, passing a light hand over them in a counting-greeting gesture, a superstitious wave. At the high bed Maude leans, trapping between her hip and the mattress a surreptitious hand, twisted in the coverlet, as last season’s new vervet might dig into its mother’s fur to risk a nip from the usurper sibling there. One twin stands by the other for the duration of the cutting, preceding her mother in orbit around her sister’s head.

  As she combs and lifts and cuts above the basin that Griffin holds to catch the damp chips of hair, Mrs Chetwyn speaks in naturalist, metaphorical, incomprehensible terms about seeds and fertilisation and fruiting, or, when she judges the room is ready, and is calm herself, uses plainer, more deliberate words to set out the female mysteries – female plants, female animals, female them.

  To be a woman was to be much taken up with seeds. Each girl in succession took this to be, at least in part, about their mother’s ranks of sugar amphorae, upright in their frames, the great and silent work she was at every day in the professional side garden where they are not welcome unless invited for snail work or labelling.

  And each in succession slipped from imagining this sort of seed to understanding that the womanly seeds were within her. Sophronia might have pictured a locket-like affair, perhaps nestled in her heart. If a pumpkin relied for its genesis on a pip the size of Griffin’s thumbnail, what must be the size of the seed that could become one of them?

  ‘But a woman cannot engender by herself.’ Mrs Chetwyn leaves this hanging like a ribbon until the unease in her daughters’ eyes calls forth mercy from her.

  ‘You might believe, if you have seen the chickens, that the pullets manage matters without the cock ever treading on them, but that is not the case.’ Snip, snip. ‘Eggs from virgin pullets may be laid, but they will not hatch.’

  The girls wait for what she will say, braced to protect one another from it. ‘You need … it is needed … it is necessary that there is a father and a mother. There is seed from both. They mix.’

  It is a moment before they understand that she has completed her explanation.

  Mrs Chetwyn invokes convention often but equally often sets her own rules. Therefore, even as they leave childhood, her daughters are often off balance, either bound by strictures they only half trust to belong to the proper form, or sent out to go boldly when instinct would clap them back to conformity. A childhood and young womanhood of the arbitrary and the absolute both.

  The twins carry into the room the same impervious selves that they inhabit anywhere you might encounter them. But Sophronia and Maude are altered by being there, or bring altered selves to the room. Maude is every four weeks freshly and painfully the youngest, because Cosmo is never admitted to the ritual. Sophronia, too, feels her youngest sibling’s absence; she is never more aware of the circumstance that dictates Cosmo’s life than when she and these three sisters report to the boudoir.

  As Cosmo is daily instructed in the offices of a son, so they are here, once a month, shown daughtership. Why do these things need to be said? Maude concludes that the drumming home of femaleness th
at is the suspected real purpose of the afternoon is some Motherly occult response to her, Maude’s, own doubts and horrid, unbidden thoughts. Cosmo is … Cosmo is … Maude, an upright bolt of suspicion and jealous looks, the indefatigably jealous watcher, will in the end be the last of the sisters to see what Cosmo is.

  The ritual afternoon takes place in a dream. The light is dim, the sheer white curtains and half-drawn, heavier yellow drapes make a cornerless, egg-lit space. Maude, at the bed, drops her gaze to the green carpet, follows its whorls until the line is blocked by other whorls. Sophronia, at the dressing table near the French window, watches the breeze part the curtains and drop them back into place. Each parting gives her, through the gap in the curtains and the gap in the balustrade, a vivid glimpse of Fuze. He is standing over his men at work on the Home stand.

  As she watches, Fuze’s arm, the arm holding his great knife, comes alive. His other hand is on his hip and is not dislodged from there as he raises his knife arm. The curtain drops. It pauses, swirls back again, and Fuze is pulling the cutlass along the ground, as though drawing a line in the earth with its sharp edge. At the place that had held the tip of his knife something twitches. Fuze tilts the blade to wipe it on the grass and the curtain settles back into place. Mother shakes her hand to shed the scissors into the basin, and Griffin turns with it towards the door.

  Cosmo’s hair is cut once a week, behind the house, outside the kitchen door, by Griffin, and it is nobody’s business. Always, upon rejoining the family newly shorn, Cosmo watches for the moment Father and Mother make their acknowledgement. In the course of the day Mother will slide a hand over the thick, blunt cap of hair, and at some other time Father will place his hand upon Cosmo’s exposed neck, and run one thumb across the open nape.

  It would be eccentric in the extreme to spend an entire afternoon on one’s hair. There is far too much to do: work with paper and ink in the office, wages to count out, tollies to order from the Germans at New Hanover for those Missenden men who take their pay in livestock, once a year at a full moon; a strongbox to manage for those who, like Fuze, have been persuaded to trust money, weekly. There is a deal of riding about and being seen: where the men are mending a road, one must be seen; where they are ready to set cane on fire or choose the moment of ripeness; where the mill is being cleaned; and when it is at full production. Being seen at Father’s elbow when a planter comes to negotiate a rate for crushing, the rate for refining to this state, to that state. Being seen on Missenden as the heir, being seen off it even more so.

  Another ritual in Cosmo’s week involves the cottage at the edge of the land, the deep-browed house that fronts the road and serves almost as a gatehouse to the estate: Miss Oak’s home.

  It has been a few years since the traveller naturalist made her short tour of her new garden on Muley Girl and was helped up the broad stairs to where the air was cool and sour with lime paint. She has turned thrice about herself, scratched at the boards and settled along one edge of the veranda – divan, small tables, an arrangement of pillows just so to relieve her back and lift her knees.

  Miss Oak’s every move is announced with pain so familiar that she would recognise it if presented to her on a sheet as song. Pain this entire ought to describe great twisting, great arcs of movement, but it is the ambitious voice of the smallest shifting, of turning her head without due care, or lifting an arm too high, when she forgets.

  She turns now, and cries out, and curses. Cosmo, reaching the undershade of the deep outdoors room, answers, ‘Halloo.’ From the door at the back wall of the open square comes Bachelor, the man once known for a brief afternoon to the children of Missenden as Donkey Face, who some months after that afternoon quit his tinker and made his way back here.

  He was taken on as Miss Oak’s houseboy, though truly he is nurse companion and body servant, whose incapacity for disgust is, by the old lady’s hosts, alternately marvelled at and put down to a human lack in him.

  But she, she knows him for a saint such as she could not have hoped, but always did hope, to be found by near the end. Miss Oak’s feelings for him reside in the English name she negotiated with him early on: she had for all of her adult life excused herself from the duties of family and society with an imagined future coupledom; her waiting bachelor would be kind, she had promised herself, and here he was.

  Her gratitude for Bachelor does not do much to stay her from cursing him many times a day. At this moment Cosmo has flared in Miss Oak an instant of rage by going first to her minder for a murmured conversation about her health and humour, and only then rounding back to her bedside and the chair there. But she lets it drain back through her, feels its peace, and as Cosmo settles in the chair, Miss Oak is ready to smile at her visitor. Bachelor will bring tea, and she has already had him settle upon her skirts a particular case.

  Cosmo brings from one trouser pocket a striated stone and from another a nub of cane whose budding bract suggests a field mouse if looked at right. There are also gleanings of district news to distract Miss Oak. But it is no use. Cosmo lays out these offerings, then tries averted eyes and stillness to the point of blunt manners – and even the weak ploy of a pretend conversation with Lady Arundel: ‘A rat as big as your head, old girl, right by my feet!’ – but there is no escaping those crow eyes, those quick, deciding eyes picking over her visitor’s face and hands.

  Cosmo never escapes awareness of how under these boys’ clothes a rebellious body is pressing on, a daily challenge to the crucial duty of keeping these changes from the notice of the world. And there is no escape from Miss Oak. Who takes pity on Cosmo now, and hauls from her skirts to her lap the brown case, the size of a tea tray, raised an inch or so, hinged. She turns it so as to share a view of its insides with Cosmo, and lifts the lid on the motley within.

  There is desiccation, there are things drowned in tiny bottles, there are things pinned, tied down with ribbon, a tiny mounted something in a natural pose on a twig.

  This last is, was, a young chameleon whose tail bifurcates an inch from the tip and thence curls in twin circlets with the symmetry of an iron balustrade. The effect is somewhat compromised because the preserver’s art has failed the creature on one of the ends, which is at its utmost point shrivelled and black.

  One of the bottles holds a double-headed ratling, and another a pair whose ratling bodies share a head. There is a beetle whose lovely wings are cruelly fused to one green wing. A circlet of citrus peel is dried to bark though still a grinning devil’s face is visible there in pale scaly growth. There is no horned beetle but that the beetle’s horn twists, no dried pod but that it is knobbed suggestively or split weirdly or doubled where it ought not to double. Mammalian plants and trembling dead things, each with its claim to being not as it ought.

  Miss Oak’s life’s work, as she refers to it, has produced portfolios of serene watercolours on wide, sliding sheets of Whatman paper. Her botanical studies manifest stillness, completeness, proclaim their subjects as the ur-plants of their kind, as entire as if the plant had set the terms of its own capture. London gentlemen with afternoons to fill collect the works of Sapientia Oak, certainly, and ladies settle their drifting gaze on the more-than-lifelike, uncanny things, but in the science salons and societies they are treasured too: for their enumeration, their considerate tour of all there is to learn about each plant.

  Miss Oak is good at what she does – what she has done, for there is only one subject now, and no future of finding out her green sitters in their gullies and on mountainsides. Now it is anomalies she collects, and Cosmo she makes sketches of. There is a portfolio of this new subject, growing in skill as she has learned what to include and what to ignore when it is a sentient thing to be brought to the page; Cosmo has come on from cabbage-still child to this darting-eyed person of fifteen, pinned on the fly.

  Today she means to sketch. The swelling in her shoulder joints has subsided to a level that permits loose sketching gestures and there is something she has wanted to explore. Cosmo wil
l read to her and she will catch a likeness in lead.

  Which is worse? When she cannot work and wants to talk, or when she keeps her silence and has Cosmo read to her? Because she is not silent for long on reading days, and stops Cosmo on the woman’s part, ‘I cannot tell who is speaking unless you speak as a woman for one and a man for the one who is a man. The woman is higher. Think of Maude. How would Maude say it?’

  Cosmo is usually equal to the game. At least they do not have to do the clothes today. In a recent season the Chetwyn children and Miss Oak mounted a play. They lent themselves to it, the twins in their mild, disengaged way granting permission to engage them in this new thing, and with an insistence on order from sensible Sophronia. Maude, so over-accustomed to wanting to be someone other than herself, was nonetheless a wretched actor.

  They pressed on at it, day after day, conning lines or working by themselves to block their moves in a muttered dance. The hilarity at the heart of it was meant to be the appearance of Cosmo in a dress, a week or more into rehearsals when they assigned one another costumes.

  Cosmo shed shirt and waistcoat in one of the inner rooms, but kept sensible trousers and boots on and the dress was unfolded down over these, which showed below the hems of the flounced yellow skirts. The dress was for a smaller girl. The laughter was already dying when Cosmo turned away from them and they must have seen, in the place where the buttons could not meet across the pale, slender, open back, the upper edge of the bandage. The laughter dropped. Some of the girls met their sisters’ eyes, some looked away, and Cosmo saw this, too.

  Not one of them breathed a word about this to their mother, and yet within the day she called Cosmo to her and asked, ‘How do you do, Cosmo?’ and watched her child, snake to mongoose, mongoose to snake. Taking some vegetable reading, like Father in the cane. Vigilant for animal escape, like Fuze.

  And the memory of Miss Oak’s clever, unkind eyes in the corner, watching them all as they cut their own gaze and could not look at their brother Cosmo.