Night of Fire

by Colin Thubron

  Towards his wife the stout, irascible businessman showed a protective tenderness. ‘You mustn’t tire your mother’ was a cardinal rule of the house. Sometimes, when her mother relapsed from some infection, the girls whispered and tiptoed about the passages or were ordered out into the garden. This afflicted Louisa with foreboding, Stephanie with bewilderment. Their mother herself seemed lost to them. She appeared to be fading inward, as though she were in constant, quiet mourning. They could not realise that the bereavement she anticipated was her own, and occasionally, when they were boisterous, an exasperated bitterness would escape her. But sometimes, too, a lilting peal of laughter surfaced, as if from somebody else, somebody young. Although this grew less and less.

  Dimly Stephanie sensed that there was a whole imaginative world preoccupying her mother’s head: memories, meditations, perhaps longings, to which Stephanie could have no access. Adults dreamed differently, of course. Her mother read novels with enigmatic titles, and played LPs of Mahler and Wolf songs, which her father called ‘that gloomy German stuff’. Once too, her mother read to her from a long poem, a passage she thought would please her, and her hand arrived lightly on Stephanie’s arm, alarming in its unexpectedness.

  ‘Do ye not comprehend that we are worms

  Born to bring forth the angelic butterfly . . .’

  After a while her mother began breathing strangely, and closed the book, and her hand trembled back to her breast.

  In a story told to Stephanie by Cousin Arthur, a Chinese philosopher dreamed he was a butterfly, then wondered, awake, if he might not be a butterfly dreaming itself a man. This at first perplexed, then engrossed her. She imagined identities shared and persons interchangeable. One day she might break out of a chrysalis, or wake up to find she was Louisa.

  Years later, as a young woman, she wondered about her own abstractedness – her childhood seemed to have been dreamed away – and about the neural censor that dictated what she remembered and what she forgot. Hurtful events were too easily retained, of course, but why should she so minutely remember climbing into a hollow tree – she must have been five years old – and pretending to be an owl? Recollection shed a curious lustre on ordinary experiences. The scent of hollowed tree bark and the roof of sunlit leaves seemed invested now with a thick, impenetrable meaning.

  There were memories that left her sad or bitter for reasons she only later understood. On holiday in Cornwall, after wading with Louisa into a shallow sea, she had swum far out of her depth, then panicked. She heard her own shriek of alarm, and saw her parents stand up on the shore. Louisa called out: ‘Take my hand!’ and guided her back to where her father had waded in to the waist, fully clothed.

  Stumbling against him, she longed for his relief, any sign of affection. But he was only furious. ‘Your mother was beside herself!’ She felt anger shaking his whole body. ‘You stupid little girl!’ She could not pretend even now that this was displaced tenderness. She was merely the agent of her mother’s distress.

  She stood up to her father once, blurting carelessly. Her primary school music teacher – a formidable woman – visited their home to discuss Louisa’s progress, and suggested they buy an upright piano. Finally she asked: ‘And what about you, Stephanie, wouldn’t you like to play?’

  Her father said at once: ‘Stephanie’s not interested.’

  Then she heard herself: ‘I am. I am interested. I like the piano.’

  She saw his face dumbfounded. He said: ‘She thinks she can play without practising.’

  But she went recklessly on: ‘I don’t think that. No I don’t. I know what I think.’

  Her father turned away. He said to the teacher: ‘We’ll consider buying a piano’, in a tone that said he wouldn’t, and Stephanie recalled with satisfaction his fury after the woman left.

  Another memory: her first grown-up dance, aged thirteen. It was given by the daughter of a family friend, in a rather grand house. Stephanie is wearing her birthday earrings. They are tiny golden butterflies. She waits in the hall for Louisa to descend, Louisa with her long-planned party dress, and looks forward to dancing with her. But Louisa does not come down. Her mother grows impatient, then alarmed. Her father pushes upstairs. There are noises then, sounds of sobbing.

  Stephanie cannot remember the dance at all: only Louisa’s faltering footsteps as she descends at last, and her father muttering to Stephanie’s astonishment: ‘Louisa needs encouragement. Keep her company, Stephanie, won’t you? And dance with her.’

  And another, stranger recollection. She hears an unknown man talking in her mother’s bedroom, and peers hesitantly in. Her mother’s back is turned to her. She is listening to an old Grundig tape recorder, and her shoulders are shaking. The man’s voice on the tape is slow and intimate. Stephanie cannot catch his words. It is her mother’s reaction to her that strikes her now. Her face, when she glances round, looks paler than usual, suddenly agitated, and she quickly turns away. The tape reel slurs to a halt. Her mother’s voice sounds like someone else’s. ‘Please leave me.’

  Stephanie did not want to lead this life. She imagined another one. Her best friend Sally thought they should open a hairdressing salon when they left school, but Stephanie wasn’t interested in people’s hair. That summer immense clouds of Painted Lady butterflies streamed over the Channel to England. They drifted through the orchards like falling leaves, and set the roadsides on fire with the massed shimmering of their wings. To Stephanie this was like a visitation. They were more intricate than any flowers – even their folded underwings translucent with eyes and veins – and the Peacocks and Red Admirals mingled in with them. Her fantasy intensified that butterflies overflowed into ordinary life from somewhere more resplendent and meaningful. Yet the sheer multitude of Painted Ladies carried a frisson of alarm. Something was going on in the parallel world from which they came: some organic disturbance she could not imagine. Their hordes seemed faintly threatening, even verminous. But within a week they had vanished – or left their tragic bodies in the grass – and she ached for their return. They had come from – and had disappeared to – nowhere she could conceive. She might have dreamt them.

  The disclosure of their mystery in Cousin Arthur’s book only deepened her wonder. In early spring the parents of her Painted Ladies had set off from North Africa and alighted to breed in southern Europe. Two months later their offspring in turn had taken to the air – moving north on a mysteriously set compass – reaching even Iceland. There might be twenty million of them. Then, as the summer cooled, they would instinctively turn back south, flying invisibly high – but too far and late to survive – and pass out of human knowledge.

  The swarming that Stephanie had witnessed was common a century ago, she read, when the Victorian skies would be darkened by unpredictable migrations. Multitudes of invading whites might cover the night-time trees like snowflakes, before taking off at dawn, eclipsing the sun. Clouded Yellows crossed the unmown fields in a golden mist, and Great Southern Whites still flowed along the coasts of Florida in aerial rivers forty-five feet wide.

  There were lone migrants too, which she longed one day to see: the Camberwell Beauty and the Queen of Spain Fritillary. How did they navigate across the seas? (There were different answers.) Why did some butterflies have eyes on their wings? Why did others fly by night? And what was the Morpho caterpillar up to, as it combed and washed its hair?

  That September she found three speckled caterpillars in the next-door cauliflower patch, and placed them with their stolen leaves in a perforated jam jar. Feverishly she imagined what they might hatch into. Her father said she was obsessive, and it sounded like a disease. Even Louisa thought she was too old for such a hobby. But Stephanie fed the worms with shamed excitement. They ate voraciously. Their purpose, she knew, was to become butterflies. They grew plump and sometimes shed their skins. They looked pathetically vulnerable. She pored through The World of Butterflies to discover how caterpillars protected themselves. The bright-hued ones like hers, it seemed, mi
ght be poisonous to predators. Other caterpillars exuded acid or spurted venom. Still others, she read – and this was a wonder of the creature – took on near-perfect camouflage. They aligned their bodies with the veins of leaves, replicating even mould and leaf decay. Some looked like twigs or bird droppings. The American Tiger Swallowtail dissembled as a noxious tree frog, with bright eyes and gaping mouth. Their cunning was inexhaustible. There were caterpillars that escaped enemy insects by dangling from a self-spun thread (although hungry wasps might reel them in).

  Within a week her caterpillars were hanging from their cauliflower stems in silk-swathed chrysalids. All that winter they hung apparently inert, transformed from green to beige. She read that even naked caterpillars and butterflies hibernated. Walking with Louisa at Christmas over the snow-bound heath beyond the house, she could hardly picture this. While Louisa was talking about a boy she fancied at school – did Stephanie think him good-looking? Had he said anything about her? – Stephanie’s eyes roamed over the hardened ground and leafless hedges. Concealed in this frozen landscape, sheltering in their silken tents and leaf huts, disguised as tree bark or dead foliage, millions of sleeping insects were awaiting spring.

  In January, to her dismay, two of her tame chrysalises turned black and dropped from their stems. But a month afterwards she thought she saw the final chrysalis twitch on its perch. She stared harder. Now she was certain. Imperceptibly its casing had reshaped around the bulge of wings inside, and the shadow of an abdomen. She hunted through The World of Butterflies again. What was happening was not quite as she had expected – the slow transformation of one organism into another. Rather this heralded a total metamorphosis. Inside its carapace, over the winter, the caterpillar had all but liquefied, and out of this larval sludge would be born a miraculous new creature.

  Early next morning she noticed a rent in the upright end of the chrysalis. As she gazed, it began to pull apart of its own accord. Out of the slit emerged ridges of green hair followed by a staring opaline eye. A minute later a pair of bent green legs unsheathed themselves and started to prise their body out. Two antennae unfurled and overswept the hair, and wings of greenish white shook themselves out like bedsheets. It was not an Admiral or a Peacock, still less a Painted Lady, but the common Small Cabbage White. She watched it, hypnotised. Its compound eyes gazed back at her. Now six exquisitely thin legs were gaining purchase on the overhanging stalk and levering the butterfly into the light. The shaken wings looked bridal white to her. It was beautiful. The whole process had taken barely five minutes. She and Louisa had often watched the evolution of tadpoles in a neighbour’s pond: a slow, visible transition. But the butterfly’s resurrection was different: the winged angel risen from a worm. Its cerements were left behind in the jam jar to prove it, like Jesus’s shroud, she thought. It showed that anything could become anything. Yet it was somehow heartbreaking. She only had to look at those science-fiction eyes to realise that the creature was indifferent to her. Perhaps it did not even discern her. She unscrewed the lid of the jar, and watched it shuffle its wings. A day later it had flown away into the sunlight.

  Soon after Stephanie’s fourteenth birthday her mother went into hospital, and never came back. For months beforehand she had remained in a ground-floor bedroom, too weak to climb the stairs. Stephanie’s father told her not to enter the room without permission. Two or three times a week she and Louisa would creep in to tell their mother about school. They never knew how much she listened, although sometimes she let out her tinkle of weak laughter. During these months she seemed little more than a cosseted ghost, so that Stephanie unconsciously disowned her, imagining that she would be there always. Whatever world her mother inhabited did not meaningfully include her. Her mother gave up even reading. Words, she said, tired out her eyes. Later, when Stephanie wondered about her, there often came to mind only her closed door: a heavy-panelled door, scored with the claw marks of a long-dead spaniel, beyond which sounded the faint strain of lieder. Her father told Stephanie always to knock, and to stay away if her mother didn’t respond. More often than not, she and Louisa would stand outside the door for a dutiful two minutes, their raps unheard beneath the music perhaps, then trip away with relief. Later Stephanie imagined that her mother wanted to die to Schubert’s Winterreise.

  For over a year, while her mother ebbed, a boisterous local woman arrived each day to cook and clean. Theresa wore pale blue dungarees that lent her, in Stephanie’s eyes, a comic glamour. In their father’s absence the house filled with the clashing of plates and cutlery, the grumbling dishwasher, the clattering legs of the ironing board. Theresa cooked huge, wholesome meals – beef stews and cottage pies – and carried slivers of these in to their mother. If their father was there, she would emerge from cleaning disused shelves and cupboards with her hands splayed in front of her, and declare: ‘Look! Look at the dirt! Did you ever see such . . .’ announcing her indispensability.

  Louisa took against her. Theresa had designs, she said. She wasn’t all she seemed. Just look at her shrewd, cheerless little eyes. Stephanie disagreed. Theresa treated everyone the same. She told Stephanie she was too thin. ‘Your mother says you should fatten up!’ Stephanie knew that her mother could have said no such thing, but Theresa, in borrowing maternal authority, reanimated her mother at second hand. ‘Your mother says you mustn’t go through the gate on to the heath . . .’ ‘You should cover your mouth when you cough. What would your mother say?’ ‘Your mother thinks . . .’ So Theresa, like a ventriloquist, gave her mother a presence in which Stephanie liked to believe: a clamorous voice, but rudely caring.

  Her father did not allow Stephanie to attend the funeral. She was too young, he said. She spent the afternoon playing Monopoly with Sally, while Theresa cut them lettuce sandwiches and made a sponge cake, singing, ‘A girl is brave as she can be . . .’ But Stephanie was not brave. She felt excluded and resentful. The thought of the coffin frightened her, but she had wanted to be at her own mother’s funeral. Sally treated her with tentative concern, almost respect. She even let her win at Monopoly.

  Stephanie went alone into the garden. It was a soft, bright evening. Beyond the orchard the butterfly bush was not yet in flower, but as she stood there a Small Cabbage White came tumbling out of the trees. Her own Cabbage White would have died long ago, and this one – she could tell by its black spots – was a female. It flopped around the shrubs as if only just woken, and alighted here and there, as the whites do, with closed wings. Stephanie tried to take her eyes from it, but could not. She imagined it was her mother. She even followed it, knowing her own foolishness, and felt angry when it drifted away.

  Louisa returned from the funeral a little smugly. She was feeling adult. The vicar had preached a nice eulogy, and they had sung ‘Abide with Me’ and ‘Lo! He comes with Clouds Descending’, but she had stayed inside the church during the interment. Stephanie, who was suspicious of God, said nothing.

  A week later, they went to their mother’s grave. It was covered in dying wreaths. Stephanie did not understand why the earth was mounded so high above the grave, and did not believe it would ever subside. The smell of rotting lilies remained in her nostrils for days. She said she did not want to come here again, and her father thought this sprang from grief, and humoured it. She was in shock, he said. Stephanie was in shock.

  It was true, there was a kind of numbness; but it did not arise from grief. Sometimes she tried to pinch herself into feeling. My mother is dead, she said aloud. My mother is dead. But the words produced only bewilderment, and a pang of shame. Her mother had died a little long ago. Now she had only taken another step away.

  Stephanie dreaded the visits of family friends. She had to dress more demurely than usual. These visitors were self-consciously sombre, or they laughed too loud, and their words were all predictable.

  ‘She was a wonderful woman.’

  ‘We know you’ll miss her terribly.’

  ‘You’ll be a great comfort to your father . . .’

/>   Louisa was subjected to this too, with an extra plea to look after Stephanie. Sometimes Louisa covertly sighed and rolled her eyes. There was a secret between the sisters now, something they shared but never openly acknowledged. They mutely recognised it in one another: the shame of their indifference. They went through the decorum of mourning.

  Once only, as if something in Stephanie was being wrenched apart, she started to weep. Tangled in the underfelt of the drawing room carpet, one of her mother’s earrings caught her eye. She remembered how her mother, the year before, had lamented its loss. Now she held it in her hands while her tears fell, and she was glad.

  As spring wore on, the house became increasingly oppressive to her, and she took more and more to the garden. Her father had locked the downstairs bedroom, but she sometimes peered in through the outside window, as if her mother might still be there. Inside its darkness the sofa was still heaped with its patchwork cushions, and summer dresses were hanging in a half-open cupboard. She could just discern the bedside record player with its pile of old LPs, and the Grundig on its bow-legged table. But out in the orchard, as the days lengthened, she was expecting the early butterflies – the golden Comma, the Orange-tip and the ethereal Holly Blue – and they came on time, in the bustle of their nectar-hunting, and she photographed them with her Brownie 127.

  Meanwhile Louisa took over the house. She was enjoying a new importance. She returned from school with bags of food shopping, and was learning to cook. On weekends the place resounded not with the clash of cutlery – Theresa had given in her notice – but with the purr of the vacuum cleaner and with Louisa’s newly adult voice announcing her next domestic duty. Her father, in a rare moment of joking, called her his second wife.