by Lucy Atkins
She turned the handle and stepped into the room and for a moment she could not work out what she was looking at. Then she knew: beetles. Hundreds of beetles. Wooden display cases propped against the walls, stacked on a big table, each containing pinned beetle corpses lined up in size order.
There was a desk beneath the window and next to it a table with a hefty microscope, specimen tubes and laboratory equipment. The smell – acrid and musty, of mothballs and naphthalene – took her back to her father’s lab at the university. She could see his broad, bearded face, his blue eyes, his wide torso packed into his lab coat.
She went and peered into the closest display case at the rows of beetles. Some were hefty, lacquered black with fang-like antlers, others as tiny as fleas. She looked at the labels, the doll-sized writing under each specimen, and the word Scarabaeidae caught her eye. She knew that word from her father’s work. It was a family – it meant ‘dung beetles’.
She felt numb as she moved on to the next case. That, too, contained dung beetles, this time with rich copper-coloured shells. Then there was a case of ladybirds, rows of little bright spotted sweets, each one classified, pinned and labelled.
She walked over to the desk by the window. It was stacked with papers, files and books. There was a tub of tweezers, another containing sharp Stanley knives. Some cardboard boxes, about the size of shoeboxes, sat on the floor by the desk. Each contained tubing or specimen jars. Even the equipment felt the same as her father’s. It was like being propelled back thirty years.
There was a shelf by the desk holding rows of small glass jars. She reached out for one and held it up. She was looking at the corpse of an iridescent emerald green beetle, its legs spasmed in a death throe. She put it back on the shelf. A plastic tub by her toes contained brown bottles of chemicals.
This was nonsensical, disorientating. As a child she used to sleepwalk sometimes and wake in the pitch dark somewhere in the house, not knowing what room she was in or how to get out. She remembered the panic of having nothing to navigate by. She felt like that now. All reference points had vanished.
Except from the day in the bakery, ages ago, when Vivian had gone on about scarabs, she had never once mentioned this fascination with beetles.
It could be Lady Burley’s collection, of course. But she knew, in her gut, that it was not.
If Vivian was this interested in beetles, particularly in dung beetles, then she must have heard of her father. Yet she’d shown no recognition of the name Ron Sweetman when Olivia talked about him and his work that night in the Farmhouse.
This felt surreal. She felt as if she might actually be hallucinating.
She went back over to the desk. An in tray contained printouts of papers from scientific journals. She picked the first one up and read the title: ‘Lethal and Sublethal Effects of Ivermectin on Onthophagus landolti (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae)’. It was just the sort of printout she’d have found on her father’s desk.
She steadied herself with both hands. Her mouth felt very dry, her tongue had gone heavy and swollen. No wonder Vivian had always kept her downstairs.
She needed to get out of here. Vivian might shut up the museum and come back. She could not possibly have Vivian find her in here.
As she was turning to leave she spotted the edge of a magazine sticking out of a file, and she recognized her own favourite boots. She pulled the cutting out. It was from the Telegraph Weekend, a piece they’d run about four years ago, around the time of her first BBC show, two full years before she even met Vivian.
The picture had been taken near her office and she’d been pleased with it, she remembered. She looked down at herself, at her black jeans and the tight red shirt, buttoned low. She looked younger, and quite pretty. Her hair was glossy, her cheeks more full. The caption read ‘Professor Olivia Sweetman in Russell Square’. Somehow in this article the subject of her father had come up. She scanned it now for the words Archaeocopris olivia. The piece had been intelligently written, though she’d been flabbergasted by a quote from a male historian and TV presenter who said, ‘Women like Olivia Sweetman are bringing the sexiness back into history’. She’d also objected to the title: ‘Sweet History’.
She shoved the article back into the tray. This was Vivian’s desk, then, Vivian’s room, a coleopterist’s den, a container of obsession.
She needed air. Her head felt packed. She needed to get out of this room and away from this icy, baffling house. She stumbled out the door and back down the corridor. As she turned onto the staircase she caught sight of herself in the gilt mirror at the end of the minstrel’s gallery, spectre-faced and bruise-eyed – and then behind her, at the far end of the corridor, she saw a shape, just a shadow, a flicker of movement at the corner by the attic staircase.
She felt a jolt of adrenalin; she was not alone. She didn’t turn and look, she swung onto the broad staircase, clinging to the banister, and ran down, leaping off the last four stairs onto the wood floor, almost over on her knees, then staggering forwards and off across the great hall, along the back corridor and out through the gunroom window, out into the courtyard, to her car which was waiting by the well.
Olivia
The Farmhouse
It only took a few calls to find out where Lady Burley now lived. Vivian had never mentioned it by name so she Googled local care homes and began phoning round. The friendly woman who answered the phone at Three Elms House put Olivia on hold and tried to transfer the call to Lady Burley’s room. There was no reply. ‘Can I take a message and have her call you back?’
Olivia left her name and mobile number. Perhaps it was political correctness to make it sound as if Lady Burley might be capable of answering her own phone or returning calls. Or perhaps Lady Burley was not as bad as she’d imagined. If there was any chance at all that the elderly lady was lucid, she needed answers.
She felt both drained and wired, as if her blood were crawling with tiny insects. She could not stop thinking about Vivian’s study, not just the study itself, but the fact of it, of Vivian’s interest, and of her thunderous silence.
To kill time she read through the Q&A that a woman’s weekly magazine had sent via her publicist: ‘How do you juggle home and work life?’; ‘Some people have accused you of trading on your looks, is this true?’; ‘Your husband is a bestselling writer: are the two of you competitive?’
She slammed her laptop shut and went to get her boots. She had to get outside, just for a bit. The morning drizzle had not cleared but it didn’t matter. She sat on the bench in the hall. The damp was coming up through the flagstones again, darkening them a shade or two. She should just forget the integrity of the house and have them pulled up and replaced. She yanked on her boots and grabbed the old fleece that used to belong to her father. It hung off her like a blanket.
She stamped across the field behind the Farmhouse, climbed the stile onto the lane, walked up that and crossed the road, and then began to climb the almost vertical chalky track up to the ridge of the Downs. This walk always made her think of her father. He used to come up the path with his shoulders back, his belly and chest pushed out like the prow of a ship. She would look up at the knotty underside of his beard, whining at him to slow down, but he made no concessions to her smaller legs and puffing.
She remembered him taking her to see a goliath beetle in the British Museum once, when she was nine or ten years old. It was the size of a sparrow. She had not known that beetles could be that huge. A Victorian beetle collector had shot it with a rifle in Africa and you could still see the bullet hole. She felt as if her father was a Goliath; it had been intolerable to watch him fall.
Their relationship was just beginning to shift when it happened. He had come to visit her in Cambridge. As an undergraduate in her final year she had begun to form pockets of knowledge that were new to him and he seemed to relish this. She remembered feeling properly recognized by him, at last. She was becoming an adult with things to offer him, rather than a child to be taught.
Then she remembered something Vivian had said at the Farmhouse when they were talking about their fathers, a giveaway, in retrospect, though she had not registered it at the time. Vivian had been talking about her own father’s death. She said he died slowly of dementia rather than quickly, as Olivia’s father had. But she knew she’d never told Vivian how her father died. She didn’t like to talk about that, because even now the memory would shake her.
They had been sitting in the sun outside a pub by the Cam. He’d spilled his pint of beer as he crashed to the floor and it had soaked her dress. As she bent over him all she could smell was hops and even today she couldn’t stand the smell of beer. People rushed over to help. A medical student gave CPR as the ambulance screeched over the bridge. The grit from the paving stones stuck to her beer-soaked dress, made small dark dents in her kneecaps.
Vivian could only have known that his death was fast if she’d heard of him. So she did know about Ron Sweetman.
Olivia paused to catch her breath. She was at the ridge now, but the drizzle blotted everything out. As she moved off again she felt as if she was treading forwards with a grey net over her eyes. Seagulls slid overhead, she heard their high, mournful cries and saw their ghostly shapes above her, passing slowly. Close by, a rabbit hopped towards a hillock; light rain pattered onto her face and hair. Her boots were pallid and sticky with chalk mud.
Vivian must have heard of the Archaeocopris olivia scandal; she would have read about Ballard’s sordid attempt to discredit her father. It was five years ago but Vivian would hardly have missed it; the world of dung-beetle research was hardly riven with scandal and intrigue. It had been all over Nature. Someone told her that there had been a huge fuss on social media too, though in those days she had no social media presence. All that had come with her TV career and she did not enjoy it. She only kept her social media accounts going because Carol and the TV people told her she must.
It was not just weird, but aggressive, for Vivian to withhold her interests in this way. Olivia hadn’t tried to explain about Ballard’s paper that night because she had assumed that it would be too complicated and uninteresting for Vivian. But Vivian had probably even read the original paper, ‘A Case of Mistaken Identification of an Amber Fossil’, and she would certainly have known what went on. She must have been interested. More than that, she must have been fascinated. Yet she’d given nothing away.
It was all about control with Vivian, that was clear. Silence was her weapon of choice and she was using it now, very effectively.
Archaeocopris olivia was more than a scientific discovery. That was why the fraudulent paper had been so distressing. Her father’s fossil was supposed to last forever, safe in its tray at the museum in Oxford, and there was something so comforting about that, as if a small piece of him was immortal. Archaeocopris olivia had survived for millennia and would go on doing so through all the lifetimes of Sweetman descendants to come. Centuries in the future, their descendants would be able to go into the museum – or whatever replaced museums – and ask to see olivia.
The notion that a pathetic, fraudulent academic could try to gain glory by taking that away from them still made her angry. For a while, the episode had shaken her faith in academia. She had written letters to the university and the museum, but she had become so upset by it, so preoccupied and depressed, that David had insisted she cut off from the whole sorry scandal and concentrate instead on getting her own professorship. The last thing she had needed, at that point, was cynicism, distraction or distress.
She had not thought much about this for a couple of years now, but when she did the same fury returned, and the relief that Ballard, that charlatan, had been taken down.
But now Vivian’s beetle-filled study had brought it all back. It shouldn’t still upset her like this, but it did.
There was almost no visibility across the Weald to her right or over the undulating Downs towards the coast. The effect was vertiginous; she felt as if she might step off the edge at any moment, but of course she wouldn’t. She knew exactly where she was going. She’d walked this track all her life and she knew every bump and hillock.
She was climbing over a stile when her mobile rang. The number was local but unfamiliar.
‘Hello? Hello?’ It was a reedy, elderly and distinctly aristocratic voice. ‘Is that Professor Sweetman?’
‘Yes, speaking?’
‘This is Catherine Burley.’
‘Catherine Burley?’
‘I believe you rang and left me a message this morning? I’m returning your call.’
‘Lady Burley?’ Olivia swayed on the stile.
‘That’s right. You’re Vivian’s Professor Sweetman, I assume?’
‘Vivian’s … Yes – yes. I am, that’s me.’ Olivia’s foot slipped on the damp wood. She steadied herself with her free hand.
‘I’ve been wondering when you’d call,’ said Lady Burley. ‘I have so much to tell you.’
Vivian
Ileford Manor
She came in, then, as I knew she would. More lies, more pretending. She was easy to lure and trap. All I had to do was hide my car in the garage and leave the latch on the gunroom window open.
She crossed the courtyard and went over to the window almost immediately, as I knew she would, and when she climbed in she came straight upstairs. She doesn’t actually make a very good intruder, she left the door to Lady Burley’s room closed and the door to my study open.
So. At least she has seen it now. I am oddly relieved.
Many people’s first response when they hear that you are interested in dung beetles is to laugh. I am not sure why this is funny. I suppose people think that dung beetles are not only unglamorous but comical because of their association with excrement. In actual fact, they are busy and beautiful creatures, not as charismatic as ladybirds, but very varied in appearance and behaviour. I love nothing more, even now, than to put on latex gloves, take a specimen jar and a good stout stick and poke around in a field of cow dung for a couple of hours. The pockmarked sludge offers up such treasures. It calms me like nothing else.
The variety of British dung beetles is extraordinary. Some are small and black, others are oaky-hued, copper or verdigris or even blue-jewelled and iridescent. Some are as tiny as a newborn’s fingernail, others as big and black as coat buttons. They are everywhere in Britain, yet few people notice them, let alone understand the crucial role they play in agriculture and our economy; how essential they are to the food we produce and consume, to our ecosystem, to our countryside.
As a child I might not have had many friends, other than my dog, of course, but I did have beetles. I would poke around for hours in the meadow, squatting to observe them at work. Their world always seemed so complete: useful and purposeful. While watching them tunnel and burrow, fetch and carry, I was able to forget how complicated, chaotic and confusing everything else was. They are such neat and efficient little souls.
With beetles to watch and my beloved dog by my side I felt that I was not alone on this planet. Of course, I didn’t know until I studied these creatures as an undergraduate that they are so vital in fertilizing and clearing the land. They are immensely thorough; there is even a dung beetle that feeds on the excrement of dung beetles. If they vanish – and they might if we keep poisoning them with worming powders and other chemicals – then our farmland and by extension our economy will be plunged into crisis. We will also be knee-deep in animal excrement. No more picturesque country walks.
It was chance that I happened to grow up in Sussex and that my biology teacher recognized my intellectual capabilities and persuaded my father to let me study the subject at university. It was also chance that one of the world’s leading beetle experts should happen to be based at the University of Sussex.
This morning when I heard Olivia’s voice on the phone I was almost seduced again by her charm and by that word she used, ‘friends’. She really is her father’s daughter. But then the memory of Bertie’s bloated body crawle
d back into my head, and her lies. I hung up and waited to see what she would do.
I forced myself to read the finished copy of Annabel last night. I actually felt quite numb as I did so. By obligingly breaking into the house and snooping round my study, she has made finishing this whole business much easier for me.
I found a missing hyphen within the first five paragraphs of the introduction. She should have got me to proofread. In my experience most proofreaders are incompetent; they have absolutely no eye for detail. Few people really do. I would dearly like to email her a list of corrections but that would be pointless since this week it enters the bookshelves of the nation.
The diary entries are reproduced in full at strategic intervals throughout the story. There are photographs of the diary too, in the central glossy section. I cannot help re-reading them. The final, and frankly audacious, diary entry is particularly colourful. I do admire our Annabel.
Late last night I was roused from my bed by a violent and deranged battering at the front door and a vulpine, high-pitched howling sound. I flung myself out of bed and hurried downstairs with Thoby barking at my heels. Milly and Jane came running, too, whimpering and clinging together in their nightclothes. Thoby threw himself at the door like a brave warrior. Though I could only see a cloaked shape on the front steps, I was convinced that this was a runaway from the lunatic asylum. They are not manacled now and only a month ago a man came through the village half naked.
Belton came down, looking stiff and frail, so I decided that I must act alone. I tore back the bolts and flung open the door, shouting at the top of my voice that they must be gone! The vagabond made off down the driveway and vanished between the elms. Milly insisted on offering a prayer for our deliverance, which I reluctantly permitted. I instructed Belton to escort the girls back up to their room. After a brandy and a slice of bread and butter in the kitchen with Thoby I began to feel positively enlivened by my adventure. I slept like a baby.
