by Bruno Noble
‘Look closely,’ he says. ‘Can you see?’ He has in one hand the storkbill forceps with which he handles larvae and he uses them to point to tiny orange and grey orange-tip eggs and the pale green, near-translucent orange-tip larvae, no longer than a fingernail, on the stalks of the cuckooflower. Deborah is momentarily distracted from looking closely by the conjoined end of the forceps that Papa, trembling in his enthusiasm, waves close to her eye. Eleanor, though, is transfixed and leans forward so that her fair hair escapes from behind her shoulders and so that, for her better to see, Papa must raise his hand from the small of her back and with one hooked finger lift her lock of hair from her field of vision and tuck it behind her ear. He lowers his hand and, cupping her bottom, heedful that she not stumble and fall, continues, ‘See? See these caterpillars?’ He indulges my friends by using the more familiar terminology, as he does me by sticking to butterflies’ English names, as his father did with him. ‘These caterpillars came from eggs just like that, and do you know what the first thing they did was when they hatched? They ate the eggs they hatched from.’
Neither Eleanor nor Deborah appear impressed by this, but lift the dolls they carry in each hand so that they too can observe the eggs and caterpillars. ‘Then they eat and eat and eat until they’re about’ – and, here, Papa places the forceps on the trestle table and holds his thumb and forefinger apart as far as he can – ‘about this long and then’ – and, here, he stands and looks about him and leads my friends by the hand to a wooden-framed breeding cage in which, I know, painted lady pupae, inch-long knobbly brown sacs, hang from nettle and thistle stalks – ‘and then they will form a chrysalis much like this! And then,’ says Papa, raising his voice, fearing he’ll lose Eleanor’s and Deborah’s attention in front of the plain, unattractive contents of this particularly dull breeding cage, ‘and then, these, these chrysalises turn into butterflies!’ Papa waves his arms to take in his pavilion, the butterflies in the hanging cages and those without who beat their wings against the bigger glass cage until they either make their escape by means of the roof or side vents or door or fall exhausted to join their predecessors on the beaten earth greenhouse floor. ‘Look,’ he says. ‘Just put your hands out. Let’s see if you can get a butterfly to land on your hand.’
‘I don’t want to,’ says Deborah, both hands and clutched dolls behind her back while she shuffles butterfly corpses with one sandaled foot.
Papa drops to one knee and encircles Eleanor’s waist with one arm while, with his free hand, he holds her arm outstretched, the palm of her open hand up, having forfeited one of her dolls to him. ‘This one’s a large white,’ he says, indicating a mainly white-winged butterfly with black markings that flutters close and then far and, pointing to a pale yellow one that alights on the outer side of a near hanging cage, ‘and this one’s a brimstone.’
But the butterflies appear uninterested, much as bored and unco-operative zoo and circus animals sometimes do, and drift languidly on light breezes that carry them either out of the greenhouse and away, or to the bowls of rotting fruit and vegetable peelings my father leaves out for them to feed on and that fill the greenhouse with a sickly sweet and heady odour. Eleanor lowers her unrewarded hand and what small hold my father had on the girls is lost, but he doesn’t give up without a last try. ‘Look! Look here!’ he cries breathlessly, and his excitement sounds genuine, even to me. ‘This one’s a red admiral and – look! – he’s feeding!’ We peer closely at a dish of rotting rhubarb and other food waste and watch the brown-, orange- and black-winged butterfly unfurl and furl his proboscis in search of sugar. The proboscis resembles an obscene, inverse beckoning finger that summons us closer, closer, until our heads touch. The heat of the greenhouse, the butterfly’s sinister probing procedure and the cloying, fetid smell of the fermenting sugars become all too much.
‘Yuk!’ exclaims Deborah, standing and shaking her head as though to clear it.
We all stand too.
‘Let’s go and play with our dolls!’ suggests Eleanor, and Deborah and I follow her, running into the garden, leaving Papa alone in his pavilion with one of Eleanor’s dolls, looking after us with longing, absent-mindedly brushing the doll’s hair and pleating its skirt with his fingers.
Mie
Keiko, Michi and I go on our tsuugakuro, our walk to and from school together, along a strictly established and well-rehearsed route, with me in the middle. I think that Keiko and Michi conspire, whether subconsciously or consciously, to have us walk this way because their walking side by side would only emphasise the unusual skinniness of the one and the dumpiness of the other. Such is the pressure to conform – in body shape as in everything – that I can’t help but think that they resent me for my not so much perfect as average figure. In the mornings, we school children form tributaries: at the end of our street, Keiko, Michi and I become seven, then fifteen at the next crossroads until we converge on school in waves of identikit, uniform school children.
On one occasion, I catch sight of us in the glass floor-to-ceiling windows of the modern school hall and can’t find myself among the hundreds of sunlit children reflected in its mirrored surface. No matter how hard I look, I am nowhere; the harder I look, I am everywhere. Girls in green pleated skirts and white blouses with green collars and big red Girl Guides’ knots below the throat. Girls with white socks and brown polished leather shoes, with school bags over their shoulders – straps over both shoulders, never just one – and with two red bows in two ponytails. I have disappeared, drowned in a sea of uniformity, and sit down to my first class of the day with red eyes and barely dry cheeks.
I share the horror of the morning with my mother in whom I recognise a fellow spirit. She had studied French and even lived in Paris before, and was heavily influenced by Europe’s spirit of revolution and individualism that blossomed in the 1960s, exercising her independence of mind by marrying for love and so, incidentally, to the shocked fury of my maternal grandparents, marrying beneath her.
‘She broke the traces of convention and hurdled the fences of class divide only to prepare basashi,’ quipped my father, who forewent the university education he so much wanted in order to assume the family business and to follow his father’s exhortation that he must know and keep his place.
‘If I had loved you less selfishly I wouldn’t have married you,’ I hear him say to my mother, as the distance between her and her parents grows and the silences between them extend to months. Where other parents press their children to conform to norms and consider any expression of individualism a terrifying eccentricity, mine revel in personality. They invest me with purpose and reinforce my sense of uniqueness while being careful to instruct me to conceal its manifestation outside of the home. My mother ties one ponytail with a blue ribbon the following morning in a calculated risk.
‘That was my idea,’ states my father proudly as he unlocks the shop door to let me out and the day’s early deliveries in. ‘Now, you need only look for the blue-ribboned girl in the reflection!’
*
Keiko and Michi disclose what that their parents say over dinner in what seems to me to be an assumption that the bonds between friends are greater than family ties. I’m surprised to hear from Michi that her parents consider my father a poor businessman – he extends credit too frequently and is too ready to make a gift of a rasher or offal to regular customers. I guess that at the heart of their criticism of my father lies his carefree and careless approach to the card game bridge that my mother learnt while a student in Paris, and that Michi’s and my parents play together once a month. Occasionally, when one parent is temporarily indisposed, I am asked to make up a four, but I bridle at the thought of being the dummy, and Michi’s parents struggle to hide their irritation and contempt when my father or mother – for whom bridge is just that, an aspirational bridge to the West – laughing and impervious to any ill feeling, look at my cards in order to assist me and still manage to lose. I can just picture Michi’s parents shaking their heads ov
er their soup as they express a fear that my father may not be in business long. This criticism is couched in terms of concern. Michi asked them, if my parents could ever no longer afford to keep me, if I could live with them; to which they’d replied that of course I could. However kind the sentiment, it irks me. I imagine myself in Michi’s bedroom looking across into mine and seeing the new girl who has moved in who, to my mind’s eye, looks just like me. Impossible! I shake my head to clear the picture. Keiko’s parents apparently consider my mother aloof. Both Keiko’s and Michi’s parents consider mine irresponsible for not having fixed bars across my bedroom window, as they have across their daughters’.
Keiko and Michi, unable to lean out of their windows, communicate over the fence that separates their yards or by means of taps on their adjoining bedroom wall, for which they have developed a code. Occasionally, on a walk to or from school, they’ll use it – ever so briefly out of consideration to me, I’m sure; but I feel excluded nevertheless. ‘Tap. Tap, tap, tap,’ one will say and both will giggle, and I set my face in a smile and refuse to ask them to share their code with me and they never offer to. Of course, on warm and sunny days they can talk from open window to open window, but without seeing each other until it occurs to them to borrow their mothers’ vanity mirrors. Arms extended through the bars, they angle the mirrors to look at each other and up and down the street. I wave and look upon their intimacy enviously.
On one occasion, Keiko and Michi conspire to angle their mirrors so the sun is reflected directly onto me, onto my face and into my eyes. It’s truly blinding and I am beaten back from my window. We don’t mention this on our way to school the following day, but my pride is such that I allow a small rift to form between my friends and me that takes a term and its following holiday to heal.
Isabella
‘Bridget,’ says Papa, who likes to arrive early at church, ‘hurry up. We risk being late.’ He never calls Mama by her proper, German name but by its English form. Church, for us, is St Michael and All Angels. I sit on a pew with Mama to my left and Eleanor and Deborah to my right and we kneel, stand, sit and sing as instructed. The service over, Eleanor, Deborah and I play in the church gardens while Mama and Mrs Baldock talk. Mrs Baldock is probably my mother’s best friend. I consider her forgiving and non-judgemental, as she never raises her voice and she addresses her children and me equably. Forgetting himself on occasion, Papa dismisses Mrs Baldock as, ‘Too alternative. She’s a hippy.’ He does a passable imitation of her breathy manner of speaking. ‘“Hi. I’m Samantha but you can call me Sammy.” The way she dresses! And what she’s doing bringing up those girls on her own, I don’t know. God knows what she’s doing in church.’
To this, Mama’s reply is, ‘He probably does.’
Papa’s look of irritation is brief as he stops himself in time from saying something irrevocably divisive and says instead, ‘Of course, of course. Live and let live and all that. And the girls are such good friends to Isabella. No, keep it up, keep it up. Don’t stop them coming around, whatever you do.’
While Mama chats and I play, Papa ingratiates himself with the vicar and the rest of the church community who have heard all about Papa’s theology degree and his father’s sermons and who cannot fail to be happy to count this Oxford don as one of theirs. The vicar struggles to hide his irritation when my father, taking a stand by the church door, greets or bids farewell to members of the vicar’s congregation as though they were his.
We walk home along pavements just wide enough to accommodate Mrs Baldock, Mama and Papa side by side and, some distance behind, Eleanor, Deborah and me. Mama and I are in the middle of our respective rows of Sunday strollers. I cease hearing how Eleanor and Deborah intend to spend their afternoon and focus, instead, involuntarily, on Mama’s bottom and waist, struck, first, by the grace of her movement and the natural, pleasing rhythm of her gait and, second, by her size. Next to Mrs Baldock, whose height and slendour – she is indeed splendid and slender – are emphasised by a caftan both elegant and brightly coloured, and next to Papa, whose stature and slim build is accentuated by a brown corduroy suit that is too small for him – the green of his shirt cuffs flashing (as he swings his arms) and the red of his socks blazing (as he raises a heel in preparation for the coming long step) contradictory signals of encouragement and warning – next to them, Mama appears fat. My immediate thought that I would like to see Mama dance is followed by the fear that Eleanor and Deborah might have made the same observation about her girth to themselves and then, all of a sudden, with a rush, as though hurtling at great speed, I am pulled away from myself and back to where I walked only ten seconds earlier and I experience the giddying ability to see myself from behind, sandwiched between my friends, both of whom clutch dolls and one of whom, Deborah, has me by the arm. I am so taken by the extraordinary novelty of this sensation, of this precipitous, unforeseen power, that I note only dispassionately that I am indeed wider around the waist than my friends (and, in partial compensation, a head taller) but take excessive pleasure from the symmetry of our two consecutive rows and of the spatial and temporal reverberation I form of my mother. I acquire a sense of my history for the first time, one so strong I can taste it, like a Zwetschgenkuchen that fills the mouth with plums, cinnamon, sugar and cream while sparking the mind and sickening the heart; a sense of ownership of my past, one that is mine and yet transcends my body, persisting as it does through my antecessors; a belief that I also have a future that, while I have first use of it, will belong to my progeny too; and, strongest of all, a sense of the present, the undeniable being of it, its perpetual death and renewal, that, somehow, however temporarily, I am a spectator of and not a participant in. I have a heightened awareness of the quality of light and of birdsong, of passing traffic and of domestic noises that waft from open windows and doors but am deaf to Eleanor’s and Deborah’s chatter. Eleanor nudges me in the side and, with that, I am instantly propelled forward and into myself and back in the moment, formulating my embarrassed apology to Eleanor who has stated petulantly and rightly, ‘You’re not listening!’
I attempted to follow the sisters’ conversation but was distracted most by, of all the thoughts I had succumbed to in that short walk home, my first conscious self-image, by the fact that I had had it and by what it was. I deduced I must have had a subconscious one previously because this new, unbidden one, this image of a large girl, didn’t fit with whatever image had preceded it. While not so much displeasing as unexpected, I had to admit the picture was more distasteful to me than appetising and I decided to put it to the back of my mind like a sherbet lemon sweet to the back of my mouth, for later exploration and consumption. It occurred to me for the first time that I could eat less cake and fewer sweets and this idea, the idea that I could quite literally shape myself should I want to, coming as it did on top of the day’s other revelations, was too rich with potential for me. I slipped my free arm through Eleanor’s, skipped so as to get in step with the sisters, and asked them what we were going to play that afternoon.
*
Mrs Baldock and Mama had pulled the kitchen chairs out onto the patio and sat on them heavily, as though weighed down by the heat, their dresses pulled up to their thighs and Mrs Baldock with her caftan’s sleeves pushed up over her elbows. The doors to Mama’s room were open onto the patio and reflected Mrs Baldock and Mama from the side and the back so that, at first glance, the patio seemed crowded with seated figures perceived from different angles and, at a second, brought to mind the Picasso prints in Mama’s room. Butterflies and other flying insects, Eleanor, Deborah and I made our way in and out of the garden, in which our dolls had paused on their walk home from church, and in and out of the room in which cake, lemonade and tea were collected on the coffee table. Papa’s jacket and tie hung over the back of one chair. Mama indicated Papa at the far end of the garden who, in his green shirt and brown trousers, couldn’t have been better camouflaged, and to whom Mrs Baldock had said, ‘If it isn’t Robin Hood!’, m
uch to his ill-concealed annoyance.
‘Would you mind,’ requested Mama, ‘asking Papa if he would like another cup of tea?’ At which all three of us – Eleanor, Deborah and I – raced to the end of the garden, each in the hope of getting there first but each attempting to run nonchalantly so as to make it appear, if arriving second or last, that one hadn’t been racing at all.
‘I won,’ said Eleanor, flashing Papa a knowing, cocky smile.
I asked, ‘Would you like some more tea?’ first, to which Papa didn’t reply but beckoned us follow him into the greenhouse and to the flowerpot cage he had shown us the last time the sisters had been visiting. Papa crouched to bring his eyes level with it, and Eleanor, Deborah and I stooped, hands on knees, our faces just inches from the cage’s fine mesh. The cuckooflower flowers had been consumed and the stalks formed an abstract geometric pattern interrupted at multiple places in organic convulsions by the purple-tip larvae that had indeed, as Papa had said they would, grown into long, lithe, green-hued caterpillars. The four of us observed them in silence a moment, but then I noticed that Papa’s attention had switched to Eleanor and I watched him watching her. It was hotter in the greenhouse than out, despite the open vents and door. The beads of perspiration on Papa’s upper lip resembled caterpillars’ abdominal and thoracic segments. They vanished with each slight smile as they met and merged and broke with surface tension and as sweat trickled from Papa’s forehead and down his nose and cheeks. With a folded handkerchief, he mopped his brow and eyebrows that he himself had once described as poplar grey larvae-like. Rings of perspiration formed around his armpits and spread to his chest and shoulders and to his shirt collar, where butterflies alighted, attracted by the serendipitous salt deposits. The caterpillars in the flower pot cage propelled their anal and rear abdominal segments forward and their front abdominal segments up by means of their stubby prolegs and then their thoracic segments forward and their front abdominal segments down by means of finer true legs, contracting and extending like organic accordions.
