Under Glass

by Claire Robertson

  At the very least, they need this tent out of earshot of chamber pots, or of anything said between them. Not that anything is said between them.

  The horses will learn to muster too, and after they have been unburdened of their riders and the rolls and bags of gear and food, Chetwyn makes as if to lead them to the corral; Cosmo, in charge of deception, reads the man doing the boy’s work as a false note and takes the reins from the Captain.

  The thought of crossing the camp of hundreds of men, to be any moment found out, be any moment the lightning rod of shame on Missenden – these fatherly fears barely exist in Cosmo. This is nothing. The public performance of it is very little beside the fact of it. And besides, this is a marvellous place, mad with energy and paths crossed and trousers hitched and grins directed at no person or every man, directed at the fact of the crowd of them. Men are far easier to be among; they do not look so closely at him as women do.

  Tomorrow there will be sharpshooting among the older boys and a young pig for a prize: this is more interesting, the ambition of it, the double challenge of ‘better’ and ‘girl’.

  Father had put a rifle into Cosmo’s hands when she turned thirteen; loving her father’s hands as they broke the gun, then stripped it, Cosmo was at first better at cleaning it than firing it and would strip and buff and oil the estate’s small armoury for hours at a time: the slide and clatch, the absolute satisfaction of having the parts laid out on a rag, unjointed, disjoined …

  But a weapon so oiled and ready will be fired, and Father had braced Cosmo against his chest, and Cosmo shot at Natal, at the sky over Missenden, then split the air among the upper branches of a tree, then it was the horizon’s turn, and at last a corn sack tied so many paces from them, at a boy’s height and marked with an optimistic circle.

  Cosmo means to claim the purse tomorrow in some barely understood act of revenge on the boys of the muster. The rifle that a moment ago was slid from its long sheath and laid on the bedroll in the furthest tent is no longer too heavy, and no longer bucks but Cosmo is braced to take the recoil. Missenden’s youngest has, Father likes to say, a natural eye. Or an unnaturally good eye.

  This afternoon they will shoot. In the meantime a bugle croaks and finds its note, and the boys and men gather before Father and the handful of other men who have soldiering in their past. The younger audience members sprawl under trees and open-sided canvas. Ranged behind them are their older relatives, and behind these are Fuze and his fellows, all come to hear what must be done should war parties ford the Thukela with their blood up and threaten the ten thousand square miles of this domain.

  Cosmo is on the grass near the Cologne brothers. All three have their legs bent in front of them, their backs bowed. Leo is all shoulders and narrowed eyes these days, jostling where once he spoke, but he has made space for Cosmo. In imitation of him, Cosmo caps her knees with her wrists. Their hands dangle. Hats pushed back on their heads, faces lifted, they hear themselves called men.

  In the pause as the men in charge consult one another, Leo snaps a finger at Cosmo’s hat and says there once were cannibals in this valley, starveling fugitives from King Chaka who snatched travellers for their meat. A grower steps forward and commences an explanation of the patterns of cavalry on the move and in the charge, and Cosmo lifts her eyes to the thicket on a rise behind the speaker and imagines hungry cannibals dashing from it, fast as flicking ant lions, to take him.

  Cosmo could deliver this lecture herself, having been tutored so long by Father in the regimental conventions, in the mess and in battle, with the same musing fondness that he brought to the weapon work – resigned and businesslike as he shared his patrimony with the son they made, shy about boring a daughter with it.

  She drops her eyes to the ground beside her, tugs a grass stalk free and brings it to her restless teeth. In Cosmo’s most scornful year (all of two summers ago) she had refined a scene wherein her grateful parents propitiated her as a god for saving them, saving the sisters, and Cosmo gravely made the gift of herself. It has been several more years since she conjured her real parents, come to save her from these loanfolk and punish them.

  She has the skill of closing off any real consideration of her lot; she can think about the exception of it, the exception that she is, and appreciate how interesting such a life could appear to be; she can dwell on the performance of boyhood and even enjoy the feints and deceptions, and relish the revenge taken daily on the world in inhabiting so great a secret. There is power in this. She has, he has, a clearer view, the reward of being at the edge of things. She thinks even that she has some advantage, from here, as on a cliffside path.

  The children of Missenden are familiar with Father’s story – his theory – of the questioning outlier caste, the exceptional man who goes further than his fellows. But Cosmo has come around to minding that her father never, in all the years of telling the story, reflects on what was in the pioneering fellow’s thinking, beyond endowing him with a breezy heart. Still less if he had not been of a mind to go, but had been sent forth.

  Is this what women are for, Cosmo wonders: to send the man forth? To wait in the cave? Is this what men are for, to embody the woman’s impulses?

  Cosmo does not know if her circumstance makes her wicked or exceptional. An offence, or a leap ahead.

  She hopes they stop speaking soon and bring action.

  Half a dozen sugar planters and townsfolk are ranged in a line, facing the men and boys. As if in answer to Cosmo’s plea, Father steps forward from this line, and with the elegant movements of one who knows he is watched, slides a sabre from its scabbard and salutes them with it. Man and boy and Cosmo, they swallow at the beauty of the blade.

  The air whistles, Father’s arm twists, he lunges and feints and his elbow rises for a premature coup de grace. Sibilant small words – ‘I say!’ – from some of the men, deeper – ‘Hawu!’ – from others. The boys on the ground make animal sounds of wonder, although wonder is not an animal humour, it occurs to Cosmo. She tries to picture a buck gasping at some splendid sight and cannot; there is only trembling in the case of a buck. So what is it about wonder and being human—

  Father has called Fuze forward – ‘I’ll be joined by Missenden’s induna, Fuze’ – and Fuze circles behind the watching group and arrives in front of Chetwyn. Cosmo reads the familiar body, head to foot to small twisting smile, and finds permission: that he will lend himself to this, and he knows the worth of it.

  In Fuze’s left hand, lying easy against his thigh, he holds a blue cloth that Cosmo recognises from the kitchen at Missenden this morning. Father raises the long blade and feints at Fuze’s head, left, right. Fuze is standing side-on to their audience. His head is at the slightest of tilts and he watches Chetwyn’s head, not the blade slicing the space by his ear.

  Father steps back, turns away as though to catch his breath, spins and lunges past Fuze with grunting force, lower down now, in the region of the soft organs. There is not another sound but the blade’s. Father nods to Fuze and turns away again, and while his back is turned Fuze releases his held breath and raises his left arm. He holds it out at his side and gives the cloth a shake so that it hangs free.

  Father, still with his back to Fuze, steps in long strides twice, thrice, four times away from him. He seeks out Cosmo with his eyes and raises a brow: laughing at himself and them all. His eyebrow says, Well, nothing for it now but to do and have done.

  Father is behaving as though he is in conversation and the sword is among the tools of discourse. Fuze is also being elegantly bland about this and keeps the slight smile on his lips as Father whirls, surges to him with a roar, stops short and extends the blade, and with the merest flick of his wrist snicks clean through the unresisting cloth.

  The men and boys raise a cheer that explodes birds from trees and pushes fright through the horse corral like a wave. Cosmo wants to leap to her feet, embrace them both; she slaps her thigh and accepts a punch on the shoulder from Leo.

  2


  MISSENDEN, WITH ITS ADVERTISED menfolk away, has a visitor. McQuairie rides up to the house, a man alone on a horse with no collecting bag by, and Mrs Chetwyn reads in this that he knows Chetwyn is gone, whatever he proceeds to say.

  And indeed he turns out to be the sort of man who needs a pretext. This is one of the things that, afterwards, she minds. With Chetwyn and Fuze and the Missenden son mustered with the rest of the colony’s males half a day away, he comes on a pretext and takes his fiction so far as a performed moment.

  ‘I thought I might consult Chetwyn on the beetle cure—’

  ‘I was riding this way and I thought I might—’

  Nonetheless she welcomes him.

  He needs her complicity, too. He needs to press on her the understanding that she seeks this as much as he does, and that her being home without her husband and inviting him to stay and walking alone with her male guest after the evening meal into the glass house to visit the night bloomers, and shivering for an instant as an animal might, is an invitation. And yet she does not flee him.

  This is the most forbidden thing. The thing most forbidden to her. To have it – to allow it, to not resist it effectively – is a test of bravery. Not courage, but boyish bravado, the impulse of following a dare, of snatching at esteem, and it is this that she cannot resist – this challenge. It is a wilful opening to that which is proscribed, and the control she thinks she exercises is that it must last a moment only. Last only as long as it takes to keep still and accept his mouth on her mouth in the ghostly room.

  Which leaves her immediately entirely vulnerable. It is longer than a moment that his mouth is on hers, and then on her eyelids, and then on her neck. His eyes are closed to her, he has not ears. He presses, dumbly. There is frightening competence in hands that used to shake when he took hers in greeting. If she could believe he was acting under the intoxication of the moment – that it was Passion, the purest reason, that was the motive force, force’s motive … but there is evidence of rather too competent management of this. Of her. Of deciding on Passion.

  She minds this, though she does not struggle. His eyes are closed, but she thinks this is not a true signifier of abandon; this is merely the coin he guesses to be her price. The price of her reason: that he is driven from his senses by need of her. Or perhaps he remembers they once were friends, and cannot look.

  And she is frightened by his violence to her clothes, surely the moment the crossing is made to the undeniable this. She can see no way to return from it.

  Nonetheless, she hears her own clear thoughts.

  As he presses, she thinks that one moment of forgetting himself might bring her across to him. A single one of the vulnerabilities of bodily congress, a single sign of the willing, helpless descent to undefended trust. One sound as natural as that made by a sleeping child, one awkward pause to untangle a limb, perhaps bellies tightening for a moment in shared laughter, and she might even meet him there, on what is now the other side of this.

  His eyes open. He looks past her and she, glimpsing his face by the light of the Earth, sees blank determination there. Sees decision. No one is being swept along. He is driving this. It tells now in the movement of his middle body; this is a fire that has not caught and will not catch, that is kept pulsing to glow and fade and glow only by constant bellows’ straining, by awful willed wheezy pumping, a heaving tears-raising sorrowing comedy of flexing, of a swagger’s hips parodied. She even sees him nod to himself as if he has made a guess about a woman’s body and had it confirmed.

  Minutely plotting against revealing what she is doing, she tries her arms against his shoulders, and the implacable resistance she finds there makes her afraid to test more of her body’s strength against his. Nor can she stop him with words. She cannot find them, though they are only words.

  In the light of what this lacks, she reads her marriage bed and values it at the moment she would be judged by most to be disregarding it. This unending pressing of his sudden bulk, this awful opening of herself, is her punishment. She seizes, inside, and drops away, however much it hurts to abandon her body to him. She has not the courage to scream, but only gathers her thoughts for the retreat. Let her body be read as he is pretending to read it. Let him find his pretext there.

  He spends himself, riding his shudders. She thinks by his muted shout that he congratulates himself. She will wonder later how they compare: the urgency to open her, the need to spend in her. Wonder if in the end there was at least Nature’s excuse.

  He, ridiculously, pretends to be alone the moment he has left her. He turns his back on her and adjusts himself, adjusts his clothes, and then makes a tiny cough and stands quite still, as if hoping to be taken as part of the furniture of the room, stupid among the pots and wicker.

  He is waiting for her to … weep? Beat upon his back? Solve this breach with some captioned tableau? She presses herself up off the bank of ferns and declines the part. He is braced for these things as the rituals of leaving. Instead she bends slightly at the waist and gathers and presses and lifts her skirts so that she might move among the jars and plants and amphorae without touching a single one. She is careful to make no sound. Let him listen for her and guess her to yet be there. Let him turn at last and find her dissolved into the dark. Let him fear her.

  That morning in the camp, Cosmo has won the shoat at bisley. The morning after, Fuze ties its trotters together and lays the bucking pig across his saddle, and Chetwyn, Fuze and Cosmo turn for Missenden; at home they are met by the girls and there are congratulations – from all except Maude, who watches from the veranda of the house (and Mother: Mother is not often where the crowd of her family is; she may be consulted singly, and usually found for this in her great foe, the greenhouse).

  ‘Well done, Cosmo!’ rings out, and Cosmo dismounts and lifts the young pig off Fuze’s horse; it twists at the commotion. Maude, watching, sees that her family is quite mad, and admits the adult thought, the bracing thought, that she must survive them. Upstairs in her room she is steeping pelargonium leaves in vinegar; this afternoon she will soak her hair with this to make it shine. Someone will love her and take her away.

  Mrs Chetwyn is not in her glass house. She hears her husband and Cosmo arrive home, hears Maude quit them, hears Cosmo and Fuze lead the horses and what sounds like a distressed pig around the house, towards the stables.

  Later she looks down through the branches of the mahogany tree from the balcony outside her bedroom and sees Cosmo standing quite still at the edge of the greenhouse, between the greenhouse and the first beds of the seed garden, facing the many panes as though listening for something in the glass room.

  Mrs Chetwyn keeps quite still. She watches Cosmo, who turns her head slightly and then seems to lose interest, lose the scent of whatever brought her here. Is it possible that she can pick up some ripple, or change in the air, as though what happened has left a mark in the way that a ship will leave a path on the sea?

  Watching Cosmo like this, trying to see through her eyes, is a novel exercise for Mrs Chetwyn, used as she is to judging how her child will be seen, how convincingly she passes, how fully she fills the sonly form. Seeing her as she now does, with today’s new eyes, she sees that this is nothing but a girl, and is everything that a girl is; that however short her hair, however boldly her limbs claim space, her sex betrays her in the turn of her neck, in the way all of her composes an invitation to the world to bring itself to be tasted; there is nothing in her that presents itself for the world to accommodate, that sprawls or presses back the air and expects the day to fit itself to her.

  Or nothing but the rather stiff bracing of her body, which suddenly cannot, to Mrs Chetwyn’s thinking, sustain that which it is asked to sustain. There is too much that is hidden about her person for her to be anything but a girl, a woman-to-be. Something in her folds inwards, and this colours the rest of her – the set of her shoulders, the hand tapping the straw hat against her thigh … It is not grace, though there is grace in Cosmo’s body
; it is not grace that suddenly marks her as female in her mother’s eyes. Mrs Chetwyn does not even entertain modesty as the quality she is trying to isolate, the betraying quality that she now so wonderingly recognises. Is it unity? Is it the idea that there is at the heart of the girl some private stillness? Some unbreachable self that is yet able to double within, to harbour, split, engender?

  She turns away, moves across the balcony and into her bedroom. Does she have to make herself accept that in the end Cosmo is only her body, and that Mrs Chetwyn could have no escape either from her own flesh? She knows it is too early to know, but she has, since she dragged herself awake this morning, had the sour certainty that in her own body something was astir.

  Has she leapt ahead of herself, extrapolated from the idea of conceiving by the jealous botanist – this is her certain suspicion – the possibility of Cosmo’s return to daughterhood? Even more witchily, has she summoned a new child to release this son-daughter from her awful duty, and paid the price of it in its hateful beginning?

  She thinks that something in her drives her to where every lesson she learns, she learns a moment too late. Perhaps she has been gathering the ingredients of wisdom, but she will never have innocence and wisdom both; she can never be good. If only she could learn the lesson without having to live it in its bad example, its obverse, first.

  It does not occur to her to run to Chetwyn crying of her undoing. There is too much blame to admit and deny before she can put this into the world; she will never put this into the world. The closest she will come is to engineer a coupling as cover, with her husband, a matter as practical as dressing a sheep for mutton.