by Jem Poster
‘The piece has a certain power,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t call it beautiful.’
‘The power and the beauty are the same thing. I came across her in a curiosity shop down by the harbour and the minute I saw her I began to shake, my whole body trembling so that I had to lean against the counter to steady myself. There was something about the way she stood, so sure of herself among all that dust and clutter. And something in the set of her face too – look at it – as though she were saying, very simply and firmly: this is what I am. There’s beauty in that, Mr Redbourne – in the thing she’s saying and in the manner of her saying it – and though it’s a kind of beauty I hadn’t met with before, I recognised it at once.’
‘I’m not persuaded,’ I said, running my fingers across the roughly tooled surface, ‘but perhaps I’m missing something.’
‘I’m not trying to persuade you. Either you see it or you don’t. But I want you to understand that, for me, the world changed when I found her.’
I was taken aback by the extravagance of the claim, and my face must have betrayed my feelings.
‘I mean it,’ she said, looking hard at me. ‘Nothing was ever the same again. When I came home that evening I leafed through some of my watercolours, and it seemed to me I was looking at a kind of trickery – all soft tones in those days, washes so delicate they barely tinged the paper – and seeing clean through it. I couldn’t stop thinking about what I’d found. And it wasn’t just regret at having had to leave her in the shop—’
‘So you didn’t buy the piece there and then?’
‘I couldn’t. The asking price was two guineas.’
‘Not a vast sum.’
‘An impossible sum at the time. My father keeps a tight grip on my allowance – wants me to account for everything I spend. Every so often the odd shilling might stick to my palm, but two guineas called for extreme measures. I waited my chance and filched a couple of sovereigns from his purse one evening after dinner.’
It was her matter-of-fact tone as much as the disclosure itself that shocked me. ‘Surely you knew that was wrong,’ I said.
‘He owes me more than that.’ She was repacking the books, but her hands fell suddenly still and she lifted her eyes to mine. ‘You’ve promised, remember. You’re to tell him nothing.’
I nodded. She leaned over the little totem and placed her hand gently against the curve of the brow, the way a mother might touch her child in greeting or fond goodnight; then she swaddled it again and carefully returned it to the chest.
9
I had deliberately put Bullen from my mind, but when I returned to the house for lunch he was there on the veranda, lounging in the shade with a glass in his hand. He rose to his feet as I approached and strolled down to greet me. He was a little more relaxed in his manner than on the previous evening, and considerably more casual in his attire, his shirt collarless and partially unbuttoned beneath a loosefitting canvas jacket.
‘I thought you might be game for an afternoon’s shooting,’ he said. ‘If we set off directly after lunch we can ride down to the swamp, bag a few choice specimens and be back here in time for dinner.’
As I considered my reply, I saw Vane emerge through the french windows and step to the edge of the veranda. He raised his hand in salutation and rested his elbows on the rail, smiling in our direction. It seemed, in the circumstances, almost impossible to decline Bullen’s invitation: the itinerary had clearly been arranged between the two of them, and a refusal might well be interpreted as doubly insulting, as much a gesture of disrespect towards my host as towards Bullen himself. I gave as warm a smile as I could summon up.
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I should be glad to join you.’
I was not particularly hungry and Bullen, though apparently ravenous, showed no desire to linger over his lunch, so that by the time the groom appeared in the drive with our mounts we were ready to leave. Vane had provided me with a chestnut pony, rather short in the leg for a man of my height but sturdy and sure-footed, and we kept a steady pace for an hour or so, side by side at first and then, as the track narrowed, with Bullen leading the way. Eventually, as the track became too rocky for them to negotiate, we tethered the ponies and continued on foot.
It was hard going, and became even harder as we struck off at an oblique angle to the ridge and began to pick our way down the slope between the sandstone outcrops. The eucalypts here were stunted grotesques, their limbs twisted and their red boles pocked and rippled like diseased flesh.
‘There,’ said Bullen after a few moments. ‘Do you see?’ I caught the glint of sunlit water between the trees and eagerly quickened my pace, but Bullen reached out and grasped my sleeve, holding me back. ‘Easy now,’ he said. ‘Easy and quiet.’ I slowed obediently and we moved cautiously forwards until we stood on the edge of a worn lip of stone, gazing out over the swamp.
What was it, the sick tremor that afflicted me at that moment? In part, I suppose, it was a product of the heat, beating down remorselessly from the open sky but at the same time fanning upward from the hot rock like the blast from an opened furnace. There was the smell too, a soft odour of ooze and rot; and as I stood there, the shrilling of the cicadas seemed to swell around me and resonate through the bones of my skull with an insinuating force that made me think of madness. But above all, I think, I was disturbed by something in the look of the landscape – not pitilessness exactly, since the term implies the possibility of pity, but a blank imperviousness to our presence. In the gleaming foliage of the waterline mangroves, in the lazy flow of the inlet and the flat shine of its silted banks, I read nothing that seemed intended for my eyes, or for those of any intruder in that heartless, unblemished wilderness.
I heard the click of Bullen’s safety-bolt and turned to see him braced against a eucalyptus bole, his rifle trained on the swamp below. I followed the slant of the barrel but could see nothing for the shine and dazzle of silt and water.
‘What is it?’ I whispered.
‘You’ll see.’
A pale form lifted from the water’s edge, rising on broad wings in the instant before the shot sang out. I had a fleeting sense – seeing the wings at full stretch, the long legs just beginning to tread air – of explosive energy; then the bird crumpled and dropped back into the slime.
‘Yes,’ breathed Bullen, his face flushed, his eyes fixed on the spot. But the bird wasn’t finished. It struggled to its feet and made for firmer ground, head and neck held low, its left wing trailing. Bullen slung his rifle back over his shoulder and began to scramble down the slope, his boots throwing up showers of dust and leaves. I followed at a slower pace.
I thought our quarry might have eluded us but its painful progress was clearly inscribed on the soft silt, and by the time I drew level with him Bullen was on his knees where scrub and swampland met, reaching into a thick clump of brushwood. He was breathless, agitated, his eyes glazed in an ecstasy of vicious excitement as he fumbled among the crackling stems.
‘It’s in here. Cover the other side in case it makes a break for it.’
I moved round obediently. He set down his rifle and kicked vigorously at the clump, breaking down the scrub and trampling it beneath his boot soles. Something stirred in the shadows. I caught sight of a glittering eye, a long, heavy bill; then Bullen lunged forward.
‘Hah!’ His cry of triumph was so wild and strident that I took it at first to have been uttered by the bird. There was a flapping and scrabbling, the snapping of dry brushwood.
‘Over here, Redbourne. He’ll not run now.’
Rejoining him, I found that he had one leg of the bird – which I now saw to be a squat, thickset heron – clamped in his right hand, and was groping with the other for a firmer hold on his prize. The heron was frantically resisting the manoeuvre, weaving its head from side to side and gripping the brushwood tightly with its free foot. I knelt to help, but as I did so, Bullen drew in his breath with a sharp hiss and jerked back his left arm.
‘What’s the matt
er?’
‘Damn the brute,’ he said. He extended his hand towards me, palm upward, and I saw the blood welling from a broad gash just below the ball of the thumb. ‘Damn it to hell.’ He yanked roughly at the bird’s leg, bringing its breast hard against the enclosing lattice of twigs. It cried out, a single grating note.
‘Careful, Bullen. The creature’s in pain.’
He tugged again. The head lunged towards us, a string of mucus trailing from the corner of the bill. A stink of fish; the air electric with cruelty and terror. A spasm of revulsion went through me, and I rose to my feet and unslung my rifle.
‘Stand aside, Bullen. I’ll finish it off.’
He stared up at me, his eyes flashing. ‘Damned if I will,’ he said. ‘This skin’s almost unmarked. D’you think I’m going to indulge your finer feelings by standing back and letting you blast it to shreds?’
‘It’s the bird’s feelings I have in mind.’
‘It amounts to the same thing. Listen, Redbourne, these creatures don’t suffer the way you or I would. Science tells us as much. A creature with a brain the size of a walnut – look, just cut this stem here, would you?
Here, below the foot. We’ll have the brute out in half a minute.’
It was clearly not the moment for debate. I set down my rifle, took the clasp-knife from my pocket and began to saw at the woody stem, the dull blade squeaking as I worked.
Bullen gave a snort of impatience. ‘Take mine.’ He indicated with a glance the bone-handled hunting-knife hanging at his belt. I slipped it from its sheath and set to again. The steel was sharp and clean, and I worked with greater ease now, cutting away until something gave and Bullen hauled the bird clear of the tangled brush. He moved awkwardly, his bleeding hand held well away from the delicate plumage. The bird lunged again.
‘The neck, man – get hold of its neck.’
I leaned forward and seized the extended throat, feeling with a subtle shock the hard, sinewy strength of the thing. Bullen breathed heavily at my ear. ‘Flip it over,’ he said.
Once the bird was on its back, it stopped struggling, though its eyes continued to move wildly in its angular head. Bullen edged forward, pinning the belly beneath his leg before setting the heel of his right hand firmly against the base of the throat and bearing down with the full weight of his shoulders. The bird quivered violently and beat the earth with its good wing in a pitiful travesty of flight; then it lay still.
Bullen rose stiffly to his feet, swinging the carcass up by the neck so that I saw the pinkish flush of the mudstained breast-feathers, the slack line of the throat. ‘This one’s mine,’ he said, his voice harsh and a little aggressive, as though I had laid claim to the bird. He picked up his rifle and we retreated to the shade of the eucalyptus trees.
We had a good afternoon of it, all told, bagging between us several duck, a species of rail, an elegant blue and white kingfisher and a pair of small doves, modestly coloured but strikingly marked. I should have been delighted but my mood, as we rode back, was sombre. The stink of silt and fish hung heavily about us and my mind reverted continually to the same disquieting cluster of images: the sun hammering down mercilessly from the wide blue sky, light glinting off slime and water, the heron on its back in the dirt, and the two of us leaning above the bewildered creature like the fiends I once saw in a painting of the last judgement, meting out their dark, incomprehensible punishment to one of the damned.
10
Bullen returned to the villa several times during the following week, on each occasion taking me out for a day or half-day of shooting. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I was warming towards the man but I was learning to tolerate his company, and our excursions were proving so productive that I was increasingly inclined to overlook his intellectual shortcomings. Indeed, we were so successful that I was having difficulty in coping with the influx of specimens: by the end of the week such time as was not taken up with hunting the birds was almost entirely given over to preparing their skins.
‘How many honey-eaters do you need?’ asked Eleanor one morning, coming up behind me and surveying the heap of little corpses at the edge of my table.
I set down my scalpel, not entirely sorry to be interrupted. ‘It’s not a question of the number,’ I explained. ‘The thing is that slight variations between individuals – variations that might be overlooked in the field – could turn out to be important from a scientific viewpoint. At best, close examination might show one of these birds to be a new species. At the very least the group provides a valuable record, a basis for future research.’
‘Give me one,’ she said. ‘That one, there.’
‘What do you want with it?’
‘I’m going to paint it.’
I handed her the bird. She held it in the cupped palm of her hand, scrutinising it intently before returning with it to her table. ‘I want to paint it the way it is,’ she said. ‘Stiff and still.’
I caught the note of reproach in her voice and responded with a touch of irritation. ‘Listen, Eleanor, you mustn’t imagine—’
‘Nell. I’d like you to call me Nell. Everyone does, except him.’
‘Your father?’
‘Yes. We argue about it. It isn’t appropriate, he says.’
‘He may have a point. It’s not unreasonable for a father to want his daughter’s name to reflect her station in life.’
‘I have no station in life,’ she said, spitting my own phrase back at me as though it disgusted her, ‘but I have a right to be called by the name I choose.’ She returned to her seat, laid the bird on the table in front of her and began to pin a fresh sheet of paper to her drawing-board. ‘And you, Mr Redbourne,’ she continued: ‘What name do you want me to call you by?’
There was a hint of insolence in the question, but a kind of bashfulness too: I saw the colour rise to her cheeks as she fumbled with the pin. ‘If you wish,’ I said, ‘you may call me Charles.’And then, after a moment, regretting the stiffness of my initial response: ‘I should like that, Nell.’ She glanced up with a quick, brittle smile and reached for her paintbrush.
We worked for some considerable time without speaking, separately absorbed in our tasks. I had made a good job of the specimen in hand, and was just cutting the neck free at the base of the skull when I heard Eleanor sigh and set down her drawing-board. ‘What do you think happens to them?’ she asked.
‘Wait a moment,’ I said, working my scalpel-blade upward from beneath the vertebrae. ‘There.’ I lifted the body clear and dropped it to the floor beside my chair. ‘Happens to what?’
‘The birds. Once they’re dead. Do you suppose they have any kind of after-life?’
I smiled at the fancy. ‘A heaven for birds?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know about heaven. Perhaps they just go on with their lives in some other form. Or in the same form but more shadowy, so we can’t quite make them out.’
‘Perhaps,’ I said noncommittally. I turned back to my specimen and began to chip gently at the underside of the skull. When she spoke again, it was with an odd, compelling urgency that made me look up at once.
‘Would you stop for a while?’ she asked. ‘Stop working, I mean. Just for a few minutes. I want to tell you about my brother.’
I laid down my scalpel and swung my chair round so that I faced her directly. ‘Do you have brothers?’ she asked.
‘No,’ I said. ‘No brothers, no sisters.’
‘Did you never feel the lack of company when you were growing up?’
‘Not that I can remember. I’m not at all sure that I should have welcomed an addition to the family.’
‘Well, when I was small I used to pray to be given a brother. And for a while I’d pester my mother about it, in a way that it shames me to think of now. Later, as I grew to understand such things a little more clearly, I began to realise that I was likely to be disappointed, and by the time she broke the news to me, I’d almost given up hoping. I can still remember my feelings – a kind of astonis
hment at first, and then joy, joy taking hold in me like a flame in dry tinder – when she told me she’d been blessed. That was how she phrased it, and I remember the look on her face too, a look of such sweetness that, even now, I find it hard to say that it was anything less than a blessing.
‘We were both certain that the baby was a boy, and we talked of him so often that he became part of the family long before he was due to be born. I knew the places he’d want to go, and all my walks were taken with him in mind. And I’d talk to him as I went, as though he were really there, showing him the things I loved, and loving them all the more for being able to share them with him. I always imagined him slung on my hip, not heavy at all, moving so easily with my own movements that he might have been part of me.’
She stopped abruptly, half turning in her chair, twisting away from the light. Something in her face – some clouding or agitation of her features – made me uneasy. ‘Maybe you should get on with your painting,’ I said. ‘Tell me about your brother some other time.’
‘I’ve finished the picture. And maybe there won’t be another time. Not for this. I want to tell you now.’ She edged her chair clear of the table and leaned towards me, her forearms resting on her knees. ‘He was to be called Edward,’ she said. ‘Like my father. I used to make believe I was looking into his eyes and seeing something of my father reflected there, and I’d tell him how like he was, the very image of his papa. And sometimes I’d call him by his name, very softly, and I’d teach him to say mine, pretending to myself … pretending—’ She broke off again and began to rock gently back and forth, rubbing the palms of her hands against the rough fabric of her skirt.
‘So your brother—’
‘No,’ she said sharply. ‘I want to tell this the way it happened. The way it seemed to happen, anyway. One morning I woke early – I mean I was woken, woken by footsteps clattering through the hall downstairs, someone running helter-skelter, not at all the way the servants would normally have gone about their work. And it wasn’t just that. All the other sounds were different too, as though I’d woken in someone else’s house. And my heart was beating very fast and hard, though at that point I couldn’t really have known—’
