Yes, there is a crisis cresting the hill, visible to all, but the nature of it – that Missenden has had its use of a successful boy, but cannot, surely cannot, rely on there being a man – is never voiced, no matter how long it sits on their horizon.
Only Miss Oak presses to have it spoken of, and even she will not openly press for what she wants to have openly said; she leans into it by darting and pecking, with games, with looking and daring to not look away. She pretends to be vague and says unanswerable things.
It is Miss Oak’s mischief, the exercise it allows, that keeps Cosmo coming back to the cottage. An answering impulse to the unanswerable arises in her: does the botanical artist really want her to actually, today, put away every intricate and spare piece of boys’ clothes? Boys’ strong boots? To rummage in Miss Oak’s trunk of old-fashioned gowns and bring out something whose cloth is pale, sprigged, abundant, and find shoes that cannot hold their shape without a foot inside them, and wrap her head until her hair should grow, and now, today, bury her family’s son and resurrect one more daughter?
Does she really want her to go from one among five to one of five, and Missenden exposed on the hill, in a generation more any man’s to take? She is all that stands between it and the world, and she is equal to this.
Who is speaking? Who is ‘she’?
It is always Cosmo.
3
IT IS CLOSE TO MIDNIGHT. A hot moon has risen. It is several seasons since Captain Chetwyn made him the gift of the fields in the low lands, with some unseemly laughter in his manner as he did so, some watching amusement. But the land has made Fuze almost immune to his employer’s judging habit. It is like a good secret he must keep even from himself.
He had seen too many stunted seasons on what is now Fuze’s Camp to immediately plant the usual cane, and had found utmost conviction and planted nothing for the first years, though he felt the Captain reading his failure.
He penned sheep there to feed the soil and recruited Sim, known to his direct employer as Bachelor, to his scheme and Sim amazed him with his own gift for deciphering the ground. While he did this, sifting the earth in his hand, tasting it, pacing its contours, he was not shy.
Fuze thinks that Sim might have been his friend if their being allies had not interfered with this and made of their talk an eddy, a repeating complaint that trapped the flow of conversation. Sim speaks again and again of the tinker he left for Missenden, his wrath at Sim’s quitting him. Their way was hard-edged, in that it served only increase and every consideration was second to this, but it also borrowed from human ways because for him to seek better wages with a different employer had been condemned as disloyal, and a fist had been raised against his disloyalty, as against a son’s.
It may be Fuze’s land and may not be; it is not clear. This does not trouble him: to own in the Chetwyn way – a man tying a piece of the entire world to his own fate – is a complicated enough idea even without the added complication of the Chetwyn particulars he has gleaned. It is enough to have the husbanding of it for himself.
Rising now in the field is a tender regularity of sweet potatoes. It is not strictly a man’s occupation, this plot, but let them feign a gasp at him as unmanned kafula; across the river they make their own ways.
It may be that in the night he has too many thoughts, that the silence of his room and his fire create a hungry space that he makes thoughts to fill. There is a sucking force to these matters – the concentration of the cane into sugar, or bastard Zulus into white paper money: these build a sucking force for more sugar, more money, more cattle. Only in this does this law find its disproof: an empty hearth, a fire with one man by. These do not draw to them more men.
The gears. He likes best the weird slipping force where the great central gear, the horizontal tooled wheel, meets the downward shaft and from its broad rotation concentrates force into a slim pole. By this concentrated force the gears turn, holding sense in their teeth, holding reason.
4
TO SEE HERSELF AS OTHERS SEE HER – this is what Mrs Chetwyn must achieve. She looks for clues that her secret – their secret – has been guessed. When Gentian Fellowes blushes in Cosmo’s company and arches her neck, is Mrs Fellowes’ reason for calling her daughter back to her side the impulse of modesty, or something else? (Mrs Fellowes, calling Gentian back to tuck away the torn lace of her sleeve, worries that the consuming fact of her family’s poverty is visible to all.) In groups of youths, among the Passmore boys or with the Brecherts, is Cosmo deferred to as Missenden’s son or circled about with unease, as something else? (The Brechert estate has less material shame attached to it but Mr Brechert, hovering between the punchbowl and a comfortable chair in the Missenden drawing room, feels himself to be an imposter and this is why he keeps to the fringes of gatherings; the Passmores from three estates over have their father’s recent suicide to disguise: they none of them think about the Chetwyn son.)
What is the air that blows through the group of them as obviously as a wind, turning their heads, their shoulders in sequence? But perhaps there is no rogue air, for no one but her shows any sign of noting it. (They guess that there is something amiss on Missenden, but no one is as interesting a proposition to the Fellowes as the Fellowes; no one but Mr Brechert sees the world as fully as he. And even if they offer fewer kindly thoughts about the faults they do see, and claim vastly more understanding as their own due, it is a curious fact that they yet believe better of their neighbours than they know of them-selves.)
It has been almost fifteen years since Mrs Chetwyn opened a correspondence with the botanist. At first, feeling herself to be wicked, knowing that with her great and terrible fiction she had made herself nakedly vulnerable to the damning judgement of her husband (and potentially, sickeningly, to the wider world), Mrs Chetwyn gathered McQuairie in a general seeking and courting of allies after Cosmo’s birth.
The spine of her correspondence with him had been its news of his next visit. Every other year he sent word of his intended passage along Missenden’s southern border and his intention to stop a night. She gauged the estate’s progress by his striding up the drive: he slept on cowskins in the parlour of the small thatched house; he stepped from room to room with her in the swallowing foundations of the great house further up the hill; now he gracelessly hunkers in the eventual drawing room for tea before they can escape to her garden.
At first he was a demonstrably younger man and could be teased by her and her daughters, but they grew into equals. She courted him with more seriousness then, and in his own language, scouring plant pamphlets for the components of intelligent questions, and working at her descriptions of her seed work. She told him about sprouts whose early promise was dashed or exceeded, made casual mention of experiments with mulch.
It was to him that she tendered her first theory: that to spur a plant into blooming one should give it a glimpse of its mortality, stampeding it to set fruit by depriving it of water. He laughed as he told her that this productive cruelty was known even to monks minding potagers in medieval France and was her discovery but not, perhaps, the world’s.
She invented other small idiocies and had them reflect ill on her as a way of flattering him. It took much energy to woo him while making certain that no charge of wooing could be convincingly brought against her. And because the chief impression her effort left was of effort, he was duly flattered, if not in the way she intended him to be. By return of each post she had his regard, her prize, and for several seasons on Missenden rather too much of her day was spent in actual or mentally conjured correspondence with Septimus McQuairie, care of the Royal Hotel, Durban.
She made no mention, ever, of daughters or son, nor was Chetwyn a regular character in her letters. It was seeds, plants and planting that supplied the stuff of their exchange, and then, once the topic of the white house was exhausted, it was her greenhouse.
It is almost a conservatory, so near to the side of the house is it laid out, and is the part that most interests he
r, a building she pictures as ephemeral and yet crammed with all the life the main house barricades her from. It offers a manageable third state, a state between the domestic and the natural worlds, and promises her an excess of glass, at last, and control over her seeds and their fruit.
But something about the glass house awakens her old uncertainties, and she turns to him to blanket these with his regard. She consults him on the flow of air, the drainage, the aspect and, in due course, the furnishings.
She does not write to say, only a month after it stands entire and the plants are moved in, that she has had to crossly ask Fuze to devise blinds to shade the overhot glass room; without them it is unbearable for a woman, let alone a seedling. Nonetheless it seeps into her letters, her confession of the English folly of an African hothouse. Surreptitiously she sketches ways to turn the great expensive thing to at least growing something, and hides this from McQuairie, and from Chetwyn, too.
It occurs to her that, whereas the glass house was intended to create an ideal climate, and harness what there is of the world to what she needs of it, she has, in paying insufficient regard to the actual, contrived a great machine that works, instead, on her labours, changing them to suit it.
To grow the merest fern takes articulated blinds and sequences of windows opened and windows shut and comforters of loose dead matter and the engineered drainage of overmuch water. By these means and her will, she at last wrests convincing tropical from the subtropical of Missenden, never inconvenienced by her motive. At night the knocking elbow of a house dog on the house’s wooden floor wakes her and she cannot fall asleep again, but when morning comes she forgets this and writes buoyantly to him of bromeliads and prehistoric cone-trunked trees, and boasts of orchids.
It may be this close consultation with McQuairie that seeds in him some instinct of ownership.
5
YEARS AGO, FUZE SAW A GIRL squatting at the edge of a break. When she stood up she was Cosmo and her dress a shirt that had come untucked.
What was she, this fifth child? A broken boy? Fuze reasoned it out. He supposed she was a true girl and kept thus because, although there were many of their people within a day’s ride, and uncountable numbers of them in the town, the Chetwyns were alone here. There was no one to send to for a boy to raise as their son, no sister’s boy for the family of daughters to call brother. He spent some nights talking it over with Zodwa (the house women knew about the she-boy, this double-sex child; they theorised it was the reason the family kept only women serving in the house, when it was more usual to have boys or men. They also counted it a symptom of their riches, for who but the unfathomably rich could so casually forfeit the bridal cattle a daughter would bring?). They had none of them ever heard of such a thing as raising a girl as a secret boy; it would have been impossible for people to do so, for her nature would have been apparent to all before she crawled. There was no starting on the subterfuges and lies and neighbour-shunning that would have had to attend such a thing among people; long before she-he was discovered the discord would have made it impossible to continue with.
In the light of Cosmo he understands their clothes. Less beautiful but more various than hide, they offer all the choice in the world and speak a language as clear as beads, and consequential decisions are daily based on what they say. He imagines a Durban square of them stripped down to people’s hide and has to flinch at the mottled vulnerability of this lawyer or the frightened creep of that forceful baker woman, without their thin, important stuff to cover them. Their authority is in these changeable things (and is he, a man, then mastered by a jacket and boots as shiny as the door pole in a busy home?).
Fuze concentrates on the next maiden in skirts to pass Missenden, although he does not want to look too long: seeing their own womenfolk with covered legs and breasts is maddening enough for him and every man he knows. A whole body amplified to the status of the secret and the crucial – it is too much. But now he understands their clothes. You could employ them to make or unmake yourself: I am a wealthy woman, I am a brave man, I am a boy.
He had always greatly liked the little boy; he added courage to his gifts.
He would teach him to whistle. Boys whistle.
PART TWO
1
‘COSMO. COSMO.’
It is night yet.
‘Cosmo!’
It is today, Cosmo’s summoned brain remembers, and sends a jolt to its limbs. Father’s voice is amused.
‘Come along, we want to be well on the way before the sun comes up. Coffee and Dutch rusks downstairs.’
There is a figure at the door, its single candle bobbing alongside the one in Father’s hand. Griffin slips into the room and tilts her candle to the lamp, then settles the glass there and sets her light down. Cosmo has slept bound, of course, but Griffin lifts the nightshirt free of the bandage and past her charge’s gaping yawns and unties and resets the bandage and (this is new) helps Cosmo into one of Father’s old military corsets.
She fits the clasps from breastbone to hips and has Cosmo hold it in place while she tugs and jerks and worries at the laces behind. When she is done, the edges meet and in places lap one another, and Cosmo is braced. As it warms, the corset releases a scent of Father, gun oil, horse: another layer between her and the world.
Griffin comes no further than the top of the stairs; in the kitchen, only Fuze and Father, riddling the stove to life, pouring their own coffee, and Father offering rusks and cold chops to the headman, and Fuze pushing a mug along the table, looking Cosmo up and down and reaching to tug a lapel into place.
The newness of how they are behaving together – Father and Fuze, Fuze and him – is deeply interesting, and Cosmo feels the demands on her of this way of being, and lifts her head, her comprehension, to meet it. That Missenden’s men should join her in the playacting that is more real than real life comes dangerously close and could bruise her, she feels, had she not so extra hearty a role herself, today.
The coffee scalds her mouth but she allows herself not even a wince, just keeps very still and holds it back to at least protect her throat.
Fuze and Cosmo saddle up by lamplight and strap blankets and food about the horses, and Father has them douse the lights and mount, and the three of them head down through the cane, loosely abreast, the horses discussing the night in whickers, the riders imagining first light as their eyes adjust to the tilted moon.
Fuze does not often ride, but has ridden enough since that first morning in the bush a week or so after meeting Chetwyn, when they set up near a stream and sent word of having goods to trade for natural plunder, and waited. Fuze had repeated to himself Chetwyn’s drawl, as if making a discovery of little importance, ‘You never really see a black man ride a horse …’ Right, he would ride for that reason, alarm him as it might – the height of it, the carping grunts and exerted breaths of the animal, the deranged speed. He had needed somewhere unpeopled to come to terms with these things, and had led the horse away from the camp and spent a morning gathering bruises and learning.
Today he is amid men on horseback, men on foot. By mid-morning the scattering of location men, farmers and cane cutters heading the same way has swelled to a busy, chattering roadful, and soon they are near the mustering point, as they are calling the fallow indigo field on a volunteered farm somewhat inland of the main road to Port Natal. Here they will camp for two nights and learn to be soldiers or at least act in concert on horseback and in infantry lines, and study the turning of their farmers’ weapons on men.
The three of them split into two parties when they reach the field. Fuze heads to his fellows beyond a stand of trees; there are no firearms there, and no need for Fuze to reveal to anyone that he regularly shoots on Missenden. Father and Cosmo ride on to seek a campsite that will meet their particular needs. Cosmo is aware of Father sitting tall in the saddle as they pick their way among the tents, and keenly watches the small tableau as one man, jacketed in the same red that Father shrugged into as they neared the c
amp, stops theatrically and theatrically salutes, and Father raises himself a further degree in his saddle and snaps a return salute, and men nearby bob their heads in approval.
There are tents in rows and open-sided canvas awnings over cots for neighbours, brothers, fathers and sons; along with war skills they are learning billeting and supply. As Captain Chetwyn and his son near the edge of the camp they are found by today’s quartermaster. It is Meager, eager to name himself friend to the saluted Chetwyn, and point him and his demonstrable heir to the remotest tent in the cleared field. He can be civil to Chetwyns without Mrs Chetwyn by.
Chetwyn had given no reason for his particular need for the last tent of the encampment when he wrote to the militia office ahead of the mustering; he knew enough of civilian men to know they would put it down to some superior military knowledge on his part and write his name on the edge of the plan of the camp with solemn dispatch. It is amazing to encounter all the ways people tell themselves the story of what is before them; this has been his chief education these sixteen years.
Nevertheless, ahead of them now, ahead of Missenden, lies a hostile field to cross with all that Cosmo’s body is not, and all that it is. These daily make a more insistent case for the impossibility for what they are about and prompt his parents to fantastical schemes to do with false marriages, grandsons (by the odds there has to be a boy sometime in their line) who can be called Cosmo’s son. Raising a boy under a false father seems like child’s play compared with their own terrible project. But there is a sense that their luck is running out, and so they snatch from his youth what they can – displays like this, parading Cosmo while he is yet a plausible son.
Chetwyn is wearily adept at putting away from his mind the thoughts of his daughters’ bodies that, though they are owned by him, must not be too nearly admitted as being in existence; but Cosmo’s, as a problem of nature, is his preserve, from shoulder (‘Throw your shoulders back, my … Chest out, Cosmo’) to stride (something in her nature or training has kept her stride long enough for the most confident of boys. Perhaps it is that she has not had skirts and undermatters to teach her the tittupy sway of girls. As a small child, he likes to recall, the child had outpaced its hobbled steps within weeks of being out of smocks).
Under Glass Page 17
