‘Bachelor will make up a bed for you,’ she tells Cosmo. Miss Oak gets to her feet, and takes a creaking step towards the cottage front to block the priest. Urgently, she nods her head towards a door opening onto the opposite side of the veranda. ‘Hush now, there’s no need … there’s no need …’ She does not complete her thought. Cosmo accepts it as she hears it: there is no longer any need.
She is too tired for a girl of seventeen. She is weary in an older way. Tidally weary. She gains the small, bright room, closes the door.
Before she sleeps, when she has done with tears, she strips her body of clothing, of hat, boots, stockings, drawers, undershirt, bandage, shirt, stock, waistcoat, coat. She holds them to her face and smells the fear-and-sorrow sweat on them.
She is naked as she closes the curtains, and slips, naked, between the sheets. Her limbs fold like primary leaves, protecting a bud.
Miss Oak presses for an ending. As she waits for the girl to surface, in her mind she pushes Cosmo for resolution of her own fate, as if fate were something that can be known before death. She wants it not for Cosmo, of course, but to appease that maddening tickle in her own mind that cannot bear not to know how it works out. If there is a scene of great denunciation, she wants to be the French party in the corner, Madame Defarge chuckling to herself, laughing to keep an airway open for a throat that is closing with knowing that none escapes blame.
Maude’s outstretched arm, the accusing digit, Cosmo flinching: she sees it now but wants to see it. What might it look like? Does she need to see Cosmo in a dress? She has seen that already, in the children’s playacting, and had to look away, and had to forget her own cruel games with women’s voices. How must Cosmo appear to her, on her veranda or in Bachelor’s gossipy report, for Miss Oak to know she is witnessing resolution? The nearest she can come is to imagine her silent among her speaking sisters. Silent and still, watching her lap, with Berriball giving his opinions. Or perhaps Vine, indulging her with forgiveness, welcoming her back on terms of ancient sway: either would certainly pain Miss Oak enough to mark an ending.
If Cosmo intends to brazen it out as a legitimate boy, well, she wants to see that too.
With its columns of light and columns of curtains, Mrs Chetwyn’s drawing room is lit like a temple when Vine answers her summons two days after her son is born.
She is blurred. She is not crisp. She appears worse for wine, happy. It is surely too soon after the act for him to be so near to her. He has his hat in his hand and does not sit. A warm saltwater scent comes from her, an estuarine perfume. She smiles at him from her chaise and he defends himself with allusion, names her a bacchante. But is not braced for her lazy laughter as she begins in mid-thought, like a drunk indeed or a philosopher, ‘Own it? Yes, I suppose I am required to own it. Maybe not to you, although you’ll do. But you see, Reverend, I own it already.’
And the tired laughter, again.
‘I own it, I confess; I own it, I possess. We’ll have to find the right rite for absolution. Or the right,’ and a sigh sinks her shoulders and she looks away from him, towards the windows, without shame.
She has something to say. ‘All that is asked of you is that you do not know. And indeed you do not know.’
Time passes. Or there is only an instant. He does not speak.
‘A family is a tent. It shelters those who are admitted. And this is the price.’
It is preposterous to ask these indulgences of a priest: willed ignorance, moral self-hobbling. And yet he has already given them.
Vine thinks heretically that they are luckier who are orphans; and he at last can make himself leave, over the protestations of his corporeal self.
6
COSMO IS SOON OBLIGED to exit solitude. Something in her and something beyond obliges it. But reluctance in her (and perhaps beyond, too) makes itself known in this: that the first rule of quitting solitude is disguise. There will be an audience again and therefore she must remember or invent a way to be. All of her will be employed in this: from her thoughts to the swinging of her arms (they must not swing), and they must be hidden as if naturally still (her thoughts).
Cosmo (am I yet ‘Cosmo’?) has left her cot. She is at the window of the small room in Miss Oak’s home. She has found her chemise. A moment ago she took up her trousers and, with a sound in equal parts disgust and fright, put them from her with superstitious haste. They are in a heap on the floor. Her instinct is towards stealth, concealment; the splitting trousers bring her too close to the open world.
But there are skirts by. This morning Bachelor placed on the room’s chair skirts from Miss Oak’s trunk, skirts from decades ago. Cosmo sorts through them and chooses one that has no gleam in the cloth and apparently fewer constructed panels and gatherings.
The skirt is dull blue, a schoolroom ink blue, and dusty. In a corner of the room a cheval glass tilts broadly. It shows Cosmo her feet. She leaves it tilted as she puddles the skirt on the floor, finds the centre and steps into it. She draws the cloth past her long drawers, past the flaccid pouch, the knitted hips too low for her true hips, and finds her long-neglected waist, and there stalls. For securing, the skirt relies on a band into which it is gathered, and a button. There is surely enough of the dull blue stuff to clothe the width of several men standing side by side, but it has been crowded closely and sewn fast to the un-giving band, and the band will not meet around Cosmo. Her insisting elbow knocks back the glass, which settles to reveal a youth with short brown hair, sun-browned skin showing at the open throat and at the rolled-away sleeves of a white chemise, about some perversion of trying on his sister’s clothes. The sight is as repulsive to Cosmo as the idea of trousers had been.
She is about to step out of the skirt when there is a knock so soft that the door merely bumps in its frame and she lifts the cloth back up to her waist and holds it there in a bundle and does not speak. The door opens on Chastity. She and Verity slip through with bundles of their own.
‘We brought—’
‘We thought—’
The glass behind Cosmo shows a gaping waistband below square, chemised shoulders and a bare nape, and the twins swallow for courage.
‘But first—’
‘First—’
Chastity has set her bundle down and turned back its carrying cloth. She lifts from it the ribbed abdomen of some leanly muscled carcase, a great open bract that holds its shape and trails twin ends from the neat hatching of eyes and laces in its middle. It is grey-pink and prodigiously seamed. Along one open edge, steel teeth catch the light; along the marrying edge, steel eyes. It is more fully formed to an empty shape than the military corset had been; that was a mere band; this is a bodice.
They come at her together, slip twin pairs of hands under her chemise, over her drawers, lay the thing against her back. One polices the symmetry behind her, one is in front of Cosmo to marry teeth and eyes. At a grunt from her in front, work halts, and her twin scurries her hands down the battery of laces, loosen, tighten, loosen, and it is larger. Cosmo swings in small arcs, abruptly, at the force of their brisk tugging. Verity must pull the thing to a temporary overtightness to set each hook, and the pulse of the tug and release as each finds its home sets up a weirdly good rhythm. Then the twins pass up to her ribs and as they advance the binding, panic licks up her spine. But it quickly teaches her, and her body finds room above it into which to breathe.
‘If you sleep in it—’
‘If you do not take it off—’
She does as her sisters say and embarks on a week of wearing it and daily drawing it tighter. A headache arises and passes, and for several days longer she is aware of a floating sensation. But after a week of keeping it on even when she sleeps, she fits the skirts they bring her.
Miss Oak asks, ‘How is it, to have had it and to have lost it?’
‘What did I lose, Miss Oak?’ It is only with Miss Oak that she will speak openly.
‘When you were the inheriting son, there was … something? Standing? The ce
rtainty at least of having your will prevail. In property. In law. You have lost that.’
Cosmo (she is resisting being renamed) feels a shrugging impulse of rejection at this, but which part of it?
Cosmo escapes her. She finds a bowl of sugar shaved for tea. She dampens her fingers and dips them into it, and brings them to the back of her brown hand and scrubs her skin with the crystals to soften and lighten it. She waits for anger to arrive. She claims the right to scorch the air with resentment when it comes. But it does not come, not yet. She has so great a cause for grievance that it seems to belong not so much to her as to the crime against her. She is, instead, bewildered, as if by true loss, and turns and turns about. For half a morning she will be sad to the point of grieving, and in the afternoon, up in Elephant’s high copse with the dogs, she will find nothing to remark upon. These are yet her capable hands, this is yet her stride, and there are curls beginning at her nape, or almost.
It comes back – she brings it back – to her body. She thinks, I am practised at amplification. I know the stance, the claiming stance and the chest work and shoulder work of it. But must I amplify still? May I?
Away from his gears, busy with his orchard, digging in his twentieth tree and feeling less pain than he knew with his sixth, Fuze mutters under his breath, trying to compensate with commentary for what he has lost. Repeated actions teach the person doing them a better way, he says, as though the world waits to seize a man as its tool. Fuze invites the work to master him. Work him.
He has been shown that the Fuze-shaped place on Missenden may be filled by almost any man; he sees this in Sim’s lesser regard for him these days. Even Fuze’s prized ability to attract and keep a cane crew while other estates grind with frustration at the wilful independence of the cutters – even this has been diluted by the colonists’ solution: in a barracks near the gorge are new men, who do not speak his language, who raise a thorn fence against him. Any man may direct them if he meets their price; they are too far from Malabar to walk off when the moon is full to visit their wives or their own fields.
The Oomzube district knows a poor trade has been made, the bright heir stolen away from the colony, like so many, by Australia, and in his place on Missenden – or rather not quite in his place, for this new cousin from England with her averted eyes and air of shame lives not in the white house but in the lower cottage – in exchange has come a dull and scrappy sparrow of a girl who hides under a wide hat and hesitates at her own name, at hearing it, at saying it, and seems ready to do battle with the very air.
The closest neighbours know and they do not know. The important thing is what they say. And there is less freedom to proclaim a particular crime when the generality of their fitness must be at all times broadcast into the African sky: one such fraud would bring a taint that spreads, and so he is, she is, swallowed into the common mind and not much spoken of on the Oomzube sugar estates.
Only the lawyer Meager writes to Mrs Chetwyn: ‘I am informed, Madam, that your son has left the Colony for New South Wales. I cannot, I cannot, Madam, fathom that you should so direct him or permit him. He is the heir! You ought to have consulted—’
‘Ought?’ says Mrs Chetwyn, and she sets the letter aside.
Nonetheless, she can see that in due course she must kill him, before he comes of age and complicates matters. There is bound to be a war somewhere that will serve.
COSMO
Cosmo comes breathlessly up the shallow stairs of the cottage. She is in the riding habit she has invented. The crucial half is a skirt as ordained, but she has cut away nine tenths of its volume; it is full enough to allow her to take the saddle astride, but there is no tangling bulk. Nor is there a train, and to fit the skirt to the back of a horse, the cloth divides into deep-cut, disguised pantaloons. As well as suiting riding, it suits her stride and offers no check as she crosses, slim and directed, to Miss Oak’s cot. London would be scandalised, but this is not London. Some of the insouciance of grander people attends colonial circumstances after all: one of the gifts of distance. Here, riding skirts at least may be made anew.
She sits. On her lap is the wide-brimmed hat she uses in preference to a bonnet. She picks at the riband, forcing a finger between it and the straw, snapping the stitches that hold it there. Her colour is high, her breathing audible. Miss Oak, connoisseur of dilemma, waits.
‘We were on the high break just before Elephant.’
‘Python.’
‘Python. Just on Python at the top of the hill.’ Her cheeks mottle. ‘Fuze and I … there is a tree where he fitted rungs when I was a … when I was young. My tree …’
Miss Oak adjusts her head to draw it out.
‘Berriball was there …’
Cosmo and Fuze had halted their mounts amid the high cane and watched, unseen. Berriball, on foot, was circling the tree. He stepped backwards, hands on hips, and took its measure, then approached the trunk and tested a rung by tugging at the wood.
It was stout but was also, alas, not the rung on which he next placed a boot. At first his foot slipped and then, when it had purchase, fell with the rung entire, barking his shin and drawing a furious curse. The broken rung swung by one holding nail (Fuze’s nail, Cosmo thought; hers had been the one that gave). Berriball seized the loose edge and used the plank’s own lever to wrench it free, and hurled it away from him. Then he worked on those above it, grunting and putting boot and sinew into it until the ladder’s lower rungs, its reachable rungs, were gone.
Cosmo and Fuze watched, not saying a word. Eventually Berriball flung the last wrenched rung towards the cane and headed down the hill, irritation still flaring in his fists, his stretching neck. High on the hill, Cosmo and Fuze shifted in their saddles to rouse the horses. As they wheeled them about Cosmo caught Fuze’s eye and raised her head to speak, but read his resistance to her. He sought no alliance against the newer man.
On their way home they proceeded in single file. At each of the several forks in the cane break Cosmo expected either Fuze or herself to turn onto the other path, but they kept their order all the way to the stables behind the white house, Cosmo’s mare behind Fuze’s gelding.
She does not say most of this to Miss Oak. She says only that this morning she and Fuze watched as the new man tore down the ladder that they had built one morning when she was a boy.
Is this how this will go? Is it the case that if this can be brought back to the particular, which is how it has been lived, the great named crime of it will break up and be digested in small losses?
It is some days before she remembers that she will not have forgotten how to build a ladder.
FUZE
She gives him to understand that there will always be work for him in her breeding beds, where she tends now not to discovery but to improvement. And, if he were a much younger or older man, he might accept that this was his place on Missenden, after all, among the slow, careful, changing work.
But Fuze is a man in his burning years. He is hot with energy, and the daily containment of pollen brushes and delicate cuts in the skin of rose plants – and her constant hovering eye – seem to turn this heat inward in a way that does him no good. And he cannot be reminded every day by the sight of Berriball stumping about the lands.
Therefore, on a December afternoon in the year 1878, Fuze packs up his home, and feeds a fire with small leavings – rags, newspapers, a woven sleeping mat that years since has stiffened and cracked and cannot now be opened out.
He is not entirely drawn to what lies ahead, but feels impetus enough in what drives him to leave. He has decided on battle.
In the end, after months of solemn reports that the colony will soon be under attack, it seems the king and his impis are not about to cross into the colony, but there is nonetheless an invasion planned, in the other direction. Soldiers are coming in ships and from the Cape, and at least as many men again from the colony. They will gather on this bank and mark the start of 1879 by crossing the Thukela beside or behind the Britis
h-born.
Fuze, in conversation with himself at his fire, hears: but are we not grown too soft to fight? (We are softened now, but we are yet men.) And are we to go as cowards go, with rifles against spears? (They across the river have the spear, yes, but they have rifles besides, and they study war.) He recalls the strength of his fighting uncles, the unswerving muscle.
In the end, word has reached Fuze that nine of every ten native soldiers will be armed with neither rifle nor spear, but with shovels and cutlasses; the colony’s men will be ditch diggers and land pirates, tempted with lowing plunder and inspired to march by being ordered to it by location chiefs.
This second-rate soldiering is not for Fuze. Mrs Chetwyn has read the accommodations and economies in the colonial plans for a native foot contingent and made over a steady mare to Fuze; she has written to a lieutenant to have him write to a colonel to press the case. There is no question but that Missenden’s man must be guaranteed a place in the elite, the native mounted elite that is mustering out of Edendale.
Fuze will be Missenden’s only Queen’s soldier to fight the king; Berriball, who might have served with the colonial boys, amuses the unsentimental women of Missenden by finding a new reason every day to not fight.
After Christmas the daughters stitch a scarlet puggaree to Fuze’s new soft hat and fill a billy with coffee beans and set him up with running sugar enough for a regiment, with a holiday air, fizzing with relief at something for Fuze to do, something to lift his spirits and get him away from Missenden, at least while Berriball digs in.
Cosmo (she will not answer to Amelia) wants to present Fuze with Father’s sword, but it is no longer hers to give and Sophronia says it will attract offence more than it will be useful in keeping him alive. In the end Fuze straps a pair of cane knives to his saddle furnishings, though he is assured that at least the Swinburn and most probably the Martini-Henry awaits him at Edendale. He has his own rifles in Missenden’s gun rack, but in its present mood the colony should not be tested by the sight of him riding from here to there, armed.
Under Glass Page 21
