Authors: Martha Lea
Edward snuffed out the light with spit on his fingers and, having no blotting paper, waited for the ink to dry in the dark, listening, for the first time, to Gwen’s
breathing as she slept.
Apart from a limited and limiting wardrobe, Gwen had brought with her two sets of watercolour paints, several good brushes of different sizes, leather-bound journals of good
paper to paint in bought by Edward in London, as well as her smaller sketchbooks, and her most treasured possession, her microscope. Edward was convinced that the end result would bring some
reward. There were already some studies: good likenesses of Edward reading on the boat—on the rare occasions when he had not felt ill, and there were a couple of impressions of Pará,
done before the lighter had been ready to take them.
However, she felt no inclination to begin work right away. The idea of kudos did not greatly concern or excite her. She was perplexed by her own reaction to having arrived, which was so
different to Edward’s. She was aware of a vagueness, as if she saw everything through a mist. I am suffering from apathy, she thought. It puzzled her.
Mr Grindlock had found them a
casinha
, a little wooden house in the suburbs. Finally inside it, with her things around her again, Gwen wanted immediately to lie down. It had been a very
strange experience, that first night in the Grindlock guest-room, where being suspended was forsaken in favour of more solid furniture. The enormous bed had allowed her to sleep, eventually,
without having to touch Edward. In the dark of the room with only a light coverlet over their bodies, she’d sensed Edward’s heartbeat: it had reverberated softly through the mattress.
Being flat on her back had not dispelled the sensation that her body was still at sea. As he’d fallen asleep Edward had begun to snore. Gwen had sighed loudly and plumped her pillows
vigorously, banishing all thoughts of eerily articulated and oversized arachnids roaming free of restraining tethers. Even so, she hadn’t slept well after the first night. Bad dreams had
woken her, the details hazy but still disturbing as they persisted, festering in the hot, damp space between Edward’s body and hers in the foreign bed. She had seemed to keep her sister
company all night.
A verandah encircled the whole building of four rooms under wide eaves. Here, as the cookhouse was not yet ready for use, Gwen found Maria. She was already boiling water for
tea on a small stove.
Gwen thought she would like this woman. She was glad that Maria had none of the deferential habits of Susan in Cornwall. If anything she had been relieved to get away from the “Yes,
ma’am” and the bobbing Susan insisted on, even though she had been told not to.
Bearing the tea tray in front of her Maria said, “There are people in the town who could build a bed quickly.”
“I’m not sure if our budget extends to large pieces of furniture,” said Gwen; a proper bed was too much of an extravagance, and she didn’t know whether she preferred the
idea of big spiders hiding under her bed-covers or not.
Maria poured the tea and flicked the leaves from the strainer out over the verandah palings. “Wouldn’t cost much.” She poured two more cups of tea, drinking one before Edward
left his unpacking and came out to join Gwen.
“Mrs Scales,” she said, before Edward was within earshot, “I know how you Europeans like to have your babies.”
Gwen laughed. “We are certainly not planning to start a family here, Maria. We have work to do. And, in any case, a bed would take up far too much space.”
Maria looked her up and down, and said nothing.
No, Gwen definitely didn’t want to share a bed with Edward. A bed was far too much like a statement of subservience, somehow. Gwen still felt uneasy about her status. She felt that she had
to find her own way of existing in this set-up. It was a game, after all, what they were doing. Some of the rules had been foisted upon her, but the rest were unwritten, unspoken, unknown. She
could pretend that she was his wife, but she didn’t think it was necessary to have her sleep disturbed at quite such close range.
In the night, Gwen was woken by a thump from Edward’s study and a faint trickle as he relieved himself over the edge of the verandah. She listened to geckos moving across the walls, and
tucked her muslin net in about her more securely. The strange lizards were a delight to her; it was the large hairy spiders, whose nests she had seen under the eaves, which bothered her. Knowing
that the ones living under the eaves were now secured in labelled specimen jars did not help. Edward, still unfailingly exuberant, had enthused about the proximity of nature in all its variation.
And where a vacancy existed, she had reasoned, it would immediately be filled.
“Such a small creature,” he had said, and laughed.
“I would say it was anything but small.”
“It’s smaller than you. It isn’t poisonous . . . All the best houses in town have them, you know. Think of the Grindlock children.”
“I would rather not.”
“Well, this one is dead now. You can come out of the mosquito net. Besides, if it fancied biting you its fangs would go right through that muslin. Sorry, that’s not at all
funny.”
“If it wasn’t poisonous, then why did you use a pencil to poke it, and not your finger?”
Gwen’s skin crawled; she was embarrassed for Edward because he didn’t quite know how to behave with her. Standing next to him, looking at the revolting spider, and listening to the
rising pitch of his voice, she wondered if he had ever really known how to behave with her. Before settling down to sleep again, Gwen made sure that there was no part of the muslin which touched
her; she had already lined the rest of the hammock with a thick blanket. Dear God, she thought, but the rest of her plea was wordless.
Alone and naked in the dark, Edward listened to the sounds of the night. He shifted inside his hammock, aggravated by the image earlier that evening of Gwen with that thing at her neck. It was
already very grubby. Like a sickly fetish. She touched it, fiddled with it, could not seem to leave it alone for a minute. Though the temperature had dropped considerably, it was still too hot for
his blanket.
He could not help but recall the effect of a similar pressing heat. For much of that indelibly marked, and unseasonably hot week in May 1858, the closed stuffiness of the little rooms kept by
Natalia had produced in him a state of lazy and surprising contentment.
God damn that woman. But even as he thought it he retracted it. He could neither resent nor condemn her, only his own stupidity. He got out of the hammock clumsily and went to relieve
himself.
Carrick House. October 17, 1860.
Euphemia woke at six in the morning and sat up remembering where she had stuffed one of Gwen’s letters in a hurry the winter before. Its place in the library was too
tantalising to ignore, and in the dark she reached for her dressing gown. While Euphemia lit the lamp in the hall, she heard the barely perceptible clatter of Susan riddling the grate in the
kitchen. Holding the light to the bookshelves Euphemia let her fingers run along the spines until they came to the place. She pulled out the thick volume, made very slightly thicker by the papers
she had hidden there. Her fingertips lingered for a moment over the broken seal before she pulled the letter from the envelope.
November 13, 1859.
My Dear Gwen,
I have made, already, several different drafts of this letter, which have all found their way to the fire. I feel that I owe it to myself, and, of course, to you, to write this letter to
you, and to send it. Please, when you receive it, do not keep it. After you have read it as many times as you need to, please destroy it in the fire. I could not bear to think that the words I
am about to put down on this paper should lie in a drawer as a testament to my failings.
I know that I have not behaved properly with you. I know that I have not been the gentleman that I would have wished to have been with you. You were absolutely right to be angry with me.
But can you believe me when I say that I am more angry at myself than you could ever be? In time, I hope that I may be proper and chivalrous towards you, as you deserve nothing less. You are
the most extraordinary person I have ever met, and I would like you to know that in being my friend and my secret companion you have saved me from a certain kind of madness. Gwen, when I am
with you I am whole and unmarked by my past.
You have been so very patient with me and most extraordinarily kind in every way imaginable. You have accommodated me in your splendid grounds without complaint. And the few nights that
I have spent with you, when we have come together in the most secret of places, I have been beside myself with joy. I know that it is impossible for you to take pleasure in these particular
meetings, but I wish you to know that I am most humbly grateful for them and that I will never embarrass you, as you have requested, by ever mentioning them to you again. They remain, those
nights, our most secret and most blessed times.
But I must now speak of my past and indeed of my present. I am husband to a woman called Isobel
—
but husband in name only, as the marriage is not, has never been,
consummated. It is for this reason that I have tormented myself over our friendship. I have omitted to reveal myself in my true colours, and for this I remain deeply ashamed. If you can bear to
read it, let me tell you now that preceding our first meeting, I was entangled with another person. A female whose personal attributes I cannot bring myself to describe but for whom I was
nevertheless bent on destroying myself. Please be assured that she was nothing compared to you and that my wife is nothing compared to you.
Truly, I feel that I have been saved by you and that you are the one person, the only person whom I should ever be able to call my own. You, and only you, have shown me what it means to
be a whole man, unfettered by the ridiculous, stringent constrictions of our society.
If you still feel, after reading this letter, that you are able to allow me to continue to see you, then you must do no more than behave as if you have never received this letter. I hope
that you will still accept me, as you have done so far, without judgement. If you will still allow it, let us meet, in darkness, as we have done before when no words have been needed except
those which feed my all-consuming desire for you.
I seal this in haste, lest I should again waver over my conviction that I may remain, for ever,
Your Own Edward.
With a shiver of intense and exquisite satisfaction, Euphemia slid the letter back between the pages of the almanac.
Each time he went out with his insect net, Edward seemed to come back with his collecting tin full of specimens he had already collected. For he would take not just a male and
female specimen of every possible species, but several, arranging them in rows to show off minute variations in pattern and colour. And then there were those which did not make it into the
collection but were discarded for slight lack of lustre or a small section of wing which had been broken off. There was a midden heap under the house outside his room. In varying stages of rapid
decomposition, butterflies, spiders, beetles and other small fauna Edward did not wish to transport back to England soon became indistinguishable in a friable mass.
But her painting things stayed untouched; she worried vaguely that the humidity might be bad for them but she did nothing about it. The scents from the flowers in the garden and the undertones
of decay were quite overwhelming; in part she blamed it for her inactivity. Sometimes, she would realise that she had been reading the same sentence over and over in a loop which made no sense, the
magazine almost dropping from her hand. She felt herself sweating into her clothes and waiting for Edward to come back with his tired but joyous step and full of it all. What is wrong with me? she
thought. She got up later than usual one morning, and was cross. It is absurd, she thought, that I should be here and not see for myself the walks he tells me about. She spent the rest of the day
with the sticky shadow of an ill temper and hardly spoke to Maria.
When Edward came back she jumped up. “At last,” she said.
Edward frowned, and then smiled. He put down his heavy bags. Bottles inside it clinked. He blew his nose through his fingers onto the ground and then after wiping his fingers on his trousers, he
looked at her, holding her out at arm’s length by the shoulders. She felt uncomfortable in his gaze, imagining herself as him, coming up to herself through his eyes to see that he
hadn’t thought of her all day. He never thought of her during any of his rambles. Since they had stepped off the boat he had been on the edge of something approaching ecstatic rapture. Gwen
was aware that her eyes were staring and wide, and she bit her lip. Edward put his hand to her chin, and he squinted at her mouth where mango fibres were trapped between her top front teeth.
“Has something happened?”
“No, no, nothing, nothing at all.” She disengaged her chin from his fingers. “I should really like to come out with you tomorrow.”
“What about your feet? Hmn? I thought we agreed that you should keep those ankles up.”
She shrugged off his hands but she recovered her attitude, slipping her arm through his. “I’m not suggesting that I should be out with you all day. Perhaps a short walk.” Do
not treat me like an imbecile, she thought.
“Well, I had rather imagined that you would like to make a start on some of the specimens I have collected so far. But I can see that you are restless. It’s understandable, of
course. Nothing too taxing.”
Gwen struggled to hammer down her frustration and fury as they went into the house.
Edward chatted for the entire ramble the next day. They had agreed that they would go out early, before breakfast. This is not what I had meant, she thought, as she listened to
his incessant commentary. From the humidity (which she was already familiar with), to the height of the trees (which she could see for herself), to the insects in the leaf litter under their feet.
Edward filled the air with his voice. They stopped once or twice, and she dutifully craned her neck to admire the height of the canopy. Edward took out his pocket knife and gouged into the side of
a fallen tree to show her a beetle grub.