The Butterfly Cabinet (26 page)

Do you remember, Anna, the day you and Conor took me out? July 1959, you wrote me it in your letter. A day of sparkle and glitter, you said. I can see it like it was yesterday. I was on the Cliff Walk, watching you swim, and you slipped through the water like an eel, hardly breaking the surface. You had your arms by your sides, your two knees together, and under the green gauze of the sea your body dipped and gathered. You could have been a current, a strand of weed.

Then you came back, the pair of you, dripping with seawater, and lay down on the grass to dry. And you said: “When was the last time
you
felt the sea on you, Nanny Madd?” and your gray eyes twinkled, and I smiled back, and you jumped up and shouted to Conor, and the two of you took me by the hands, laughing, down to the shore. You slipped off my shoes, peeled down my stockings. At the water’s edge you took me by one elbow, Conor took me by the other, and between the two of you, you oxtered me in
over the rippled sand until the water licked my ankles. I leaned on you, arched my feet, rose up on my toes, and I couldn’t help but laugh as the cold slapped my shins and soaked the hem of my good summer skirt and took the breath from me. You walked me in further. “Tell us when to stop, Nanny Madd,” said Conor, and a wave caught on my knee and then on my thigh and the shock of it made me laugh even more and I didn’t tell you to stop. You kept your eyes on my face the whole time, “Further, Nanny? Are you sure?” and I swallowed my fear and I said, “Yes, the whole way in!”

To be weightless was what I needed. To lose the burden of creaking joints and bulging veins, to float. You kept walking until we were waist-deep in water, then an Atlantic wave that had begun to gather itself a mile out, beyond Crab Rock, came roaring in and hit me in the kidneys and knocked me sideways. You held me tight, took me right in, until the water buoyed me up, and I felt light and thin and faint and I thought—I really believed—that lying on my back with the whole ocean under me and the whole sky above, that I might just drift away, like that could be a way of ending.

“Don’t tell the matron,” I said to you afterward. “She’ll say we’ve lost the run of ourselves. She’ll never let us out again.” And Conor laughed and said maybe we should make it an annual outing—celebrate the twelfth in the sea every year—but we didn’t do it again. You and Conor went to England not long after that. And I didn’t know if I’d see you again and I tried to tell you the story of what happened but you didn’t want to know at that time. It was too hard a thing to hear. “It’ll keep,” you said, “Nanny, it’ll keep.” So I kept it. And now I can let it go.

What can I tell you about your mother that you don’t know? She loved skies; she used to collect them. Everywhere she went she fell in love with one and she would bring it back and tell it to me. In the yellow house where you were born, she used to stand by the window with you in her arms and look out over the sea and
tell you what the day was doing; she used to sing you the sea and the sky.

What was it Peig used to say? “A boat leaves no record when it passes through water.” Well, your mother left you something. She left you all the love she could, and now I’m leaving you something too. It’ll not be long now till your baby’s in the world and I haven’t told you everything yet. But it’s a strange and a hard thing to tell, Anna, and I don’t come out of it well, and I don’t relish the telling of it. It’s not something I’ve ever talked about, not to another living soul. The knowledge of it pulls at me the way the sea tugged that day at the hem of my skirt, twisting it around my wet legs, hobbling me. It won’t let me go on and it won’t let me go back. It won’t let me go.

Monday 23 January 1893

Edward writes to say that we now have oil streetlighting on the Coleraine Road, a sight to behold. So now we will be able to see the full extent of the gloom.

Julia has come regardless, in the most astonishing gown, a fine gray silk, respectfully buttoned up to the throat, terrified, no doubt, of picking up some germ. The shape, however, was anything but respectful: loosely cut, smocked at the waist, puffed at the sleeve. It was the oddest combination, somewhere between Greek peasant and rector’s wife. I do not believe she was wearing a corset, but I suspect her of using a “gay deceiver”; she really is terribly vain. I remember eyeing her once, just before we left for the Dawsons’ (her bosom was distinctly conical under her magenta silk), and she colored right up to her ears, and then dashed out of the room on the pretense of having forgotten her shawl. We were not the kind of sisters who could have a conversation about undergarments; that was not the way Mother raised us.

As a special privilege (I have been uncommonly well behaved, it seems) they allowed us to meet across a rough wooden table, with a warder standing a little distance away. It was a relief to talk
in such a way. Irony does not travel well when shouted through a grid.

“Good God!” I cried when I saw her. “Is that what ladies are wearing?”

“It is what I am wearing,” she said. “There is no need to be so rude, Harriet!”

Not a good start. I was thinking (but did not say) that there may be some advantages to being here if that is what passes for fashion on the outside.

“How are you?” she said.

“As you would expect,” I answered.

“You look thin.”

“It is not the Savoy.”

“How are they treating you, Harriet?”

“The same as everyone else, a little worse perhaps.”

She fidgeted with her purse, an abomination in matching smocked gray silk. “Do you have a room, a cell, to yourself?”

“Oh, yes,” I said. I was almost enjoying this little exchange. “They are keen on privacy here.”

“Well, that is something. I mean, there are many things you can bear, Harriet, but encroachment is not one of them.”

I stared at her. “What do you want, Julia?”

“What do you mean?” she said.

“Why are you here?”

“To see you, Harriet.”

“After all this time? Why now?”

“I have been thinking about you. I did mean to come sooner, but I have been busy…”

“Busy?” I believe I laughed. “How? At lectures? Demonstrations? Invitations to musical soirées?”

“There have not been many invitations.”

“No,” I conceded, “I suppose not. Still, I would have thought your interesting suffragist friends would have been supportive. They are forever threatening prison. Do not they approve of me?”

“It is not the same, Harriet.”

“No?”

“No.”

“No, I suppose it is not.”

We sat looking at our hands, neither of us knowing what to say.

“How is Florence?” I asked her.

“Oh, she is bonny,” she said. “Such a contented child, Harriet. She hardly ever cries. And so long, not at all fine boned, and quite dark now. She is going to be like you.”

There was a pause while we both reflected on this.

Then: “Do you get the papers?” she asked suddenly.

“No,” I said. “Such privileges must be earned. Besides, I have tired of reading about myself.”

“Mr. Gladstone has reintroduced the Home Rule Bill. Edward will be pleased. With any luck, you could be released to a new Ireland.”

I believe I snorted.

“Is it the truth, Harriet, what the papers have reported? Is that what truly happened?”

“What do you care?”

“Harriet …”

“Why do you want to know?”

“I have always felt your treatment of the children to be harsh but I would have defended you to the last. I believe you punished them so they would learn responsibility, however misguided that was. I could never have thought you capable of cruelty for its own sake, no matter what you did. And yet what you did to Charlotte … I feel that I no longer know who you are.”

“Why should that be important to you, to know who I am?”

“So I will know if there is anything of you in me.”

I burst into laughter. I could not help myself. “Oh, Julia. You are not the same. You could never be like me, no matter how hard you tried.”

“Then there is something to be celebrated,” she said.

“I do not know why you have bothered to come.”

She looked at me for a moment and then she said, “Why do you make it so difficult for people to help you, Harriet?”

“I do not need your help,” I said.

“I went to look for the key,” she said. “I found the apron in the usual place, but the key was not in the pocket. Why do you bait me so? Is it worth it to you now?”

I did not speak.

She picked up her gloves. “Mama knew you better than you thought. She said you would never look for affection, but that did not mean you did not need it every bit as much as the rest of us, or possibly more. You will never thank me for it, I know, but you will always be my sister, Harriet, and despite everything, I love you.” Then she did the most extraordinary thing. She leaned across the table, placed her hand on my arm and kissed me on the cheek, and as she did so, I felt her slide a paper into my sleeve. And then she left.

My mother must have felt entirely unfooted by the secret she had kept hidden her entire life, the secret revealed by the paper Julia gave me. It was a letter addressed to my mother, and it simply read: “Do not go through with this marriage, Olivia, I beg of you. We can have a future together. Do not choose him because of his position. I would never publicly disgrace you, you must know that, but I beg you not to use that knowledge against me. I would be a father to our child. I would be a husband. I love you.” The letter was unsigned but it was dated 18 April 1861: a few days before my parents’ wedding; seven and a half months before I was born.

My dream comes back to me, the one in which my mother tried to tell me something. Was that what she was trying to say? That I am not my father’s daughter? Is it possible to dream something that you did not already know? Is that what was missing when they looked at me? Is that what was there for them
both when they saw Julia? I will never know the truth. When I think of my mother now, the look I see in her eyes is one of distrust. She must have thought me capable of betraying her to the world, but how could I have done that, when I did not know myself what I might betray? What a blunt and useless instrument is the truth when divorced from knowledge and from opportunity.

It makes sense of Julia and me, the differences between us, although if I had been asked to name which parent we shared I would not have chosen Mother. I have nothing of hers that I can detect and Julia is so much her daughter. Julia has never appreciated the hunt, the thrill of the chase. She is heading steadfastly toward Mr. Salt and the Humanitarian League. I would not have been surprised had she appeared with her hair cut like Lady Dixie and wearing a knee-length tartan. Once at breakfast, when Edward and I were preparing to go out to meet the Route, she lifted her head out of a volume of Mr. Blake’s to deliver one of her well-rehearsed “statements.”

“So,” she said, “you are off now to hunt down and savagely kill an innocent animal that you and your fellow hunters have taken pains to conserve and protect for months for the express purpose of being able to hunt it now.” She did not pause for breath.

“How very succinctly put,” said Edward, smiling. “Harriet darling, are you ready for the blooding?”

And off we went, Edward in his red coat, leaving Julia frowning over her kedgeree. When I went into the morning room on my return, I found her book of poetry on my writing table, left open at “Auguries of Innocence.” “The caterpillar on the leaf / Repeats to thee thy mother’s grief. / Kill not the moth nor butterfly, / For the Last Judgement draweth nigh.” I actually laughed aloud. Then I looked up Tennyson for her and left the page open at “
In Memoriam
,” on top of her Blake so she could read: “The seasons bring the flower again, / And bring the firstling to
the flock; / And in the dusk of thee the clock / Beats out the little lives of men.” The next morning, Blake was gone, and nothing more was said. Ridiculous sentimentality, to pine for nature. There is no human mother more cruel nor more resilient than she.

How strange and yet believable to find that I have been part of an elaborate masquerade since birth. Mr. Darwin says that in the natural world, the mocking abandon their own dress for the dress of those they imitate; that the imitators are rare; that the mocked abound in swarms. He says that the two invariably inhabit the same region. (For what would be the point in pretending to be something else if you then put yourself where none of those things were?) I have no ability for counterfeit; that has been my weakness. I have failed in turn to act the dutiful daughter, the quiet wife, the adoring mother. I thought I could play all these parts and still retain something of myself, but I was wrong. Perhaps if that realization had come sooner, I would have fared better. It is impossible to say.

If Mr. Darwin is right, if species of animals and plants do become modified over time, might it be true that such a change could come upon a person in the course of one lifetime? If I find myself at variance with the opinions of all those around me, if I find the position I am expected to occupy in the world too narrow a place, if I am inappropriate, would I do well then to change? Could I alter my appearance so as to blend in? I am neither behind nor ahead of my time but, somehow, at odds with it, an anomaly. I suppose I could smile and nod and coo as required; I could say I prefer needlework to the hunt; I could learn to quill, could bring myself to contemplate a flower arrangement and banish my customary look of boredom. I could adapt to survive, be green among foliage and yellow next to pollen. In a plant, in an animal, mimicry is considered evolutionary; nature selects for survival those individuals that have the capacity to adjust. But only imagine the state of such a person’s soul.

Have I ever felt the need for another person? Mother, Edward,
the children, Julia, they all needed me. I have been content to listen in on their lives, but have I been a part of them? It would be an act of kindness to release Edward. It is not such a hardship for me to be alone. The real endurance is to be trapped in a room with other people. I am happiest when I am by myself, with the cabinet that houses my little scraps of sky.