Sound of Butterflies, The (11 page)

He thought back over the past days’ events, about how much he had told Sophie and what was left unsaid. There were many ladies on the steamer, bound for Manaus, and most of them were unaccompanied. They seemed to be travelling in a tight-knit group, pooling together in the evening and playing loud rounds of whist. Their voices were shrill, like macaws, and drifted across the room in clouds, along with the smoke from their cigarettes.

These women, though elegantly dressed, were of questionable virtue, he knew. One had even tried to solicit his attentions. She was a fine-looking woman, no doubt, and there was something in her countenance that reminded him of Sophie — her height, perhaps; her strong shoulders. But her hair was red, not blonde, coiffed into an elaborate nest on top of her head. Sophie would never take such pains for her appearance. As he had sat alone, reading, he was alerted to her approach by the rustle of her skirts. His polite smile became forced when she sat down beside him and laid one gloved hand on his bare wrist.

‘I am Lillie,’ she said with a strong French accent. ‘As in Langtry. That is, my name is not Langtry, but I have the same name as that famous English beauty. You are English, no?’

Thomas removed his arm from her reach and attempted to turn his shoulder to her without appearing too rude.

‘English, yes. My name is Edgar, miss. Thomas Edgar.’

‘Well, Monsieur Ed-gar.’ She drew out the final syllable of his name and rolled the ‘r’ deep in her throat. ‘What do you think of the Amazon so far?’ She leaned towards him with her elbows on the table, exposing more of her cleavage than necessary. The action caused her breast to plump up even more, and it was a wonder the woman could breathe at all, her stays must have been so tight. A smattering of freckles dusted her décolletage. The edge of one aureole, an edge of the palest pink shell, drew his eye and held it. For a moment he felt his jaw slacken, a physiological reaction, he knew, to the hidden beauties of the female flesh laid bare for his own witness. Her breast suddenly rose, as if she had been holding her breath and was taking a difficult gasp of air, and Thomas’s eyes slid to the table. He felt himself begin to colour. She had asked him a question. God would give him the strength to answer it.

‘Yes. Yes, quite interesting, thank you, Miss …’

‘Lillie.’

‘Miss Lillie, yes. I only wish my wife were here to share it.’ There, he had said it. Surely this would give the young lady the idea. But she only laughed softly.

‘Yes, I’m sure your wife would have a fine time here, Monsieur Edgar. There is much for a girl to see and do in Manaus, I am told.’ And with that she stood, and with a sideways nod of head, which flexed her white neck, she floated back to the other side of the room to her friends. They leaned forwards hungrily as Lillie sat. She had said no more than a couple of words before the table erupted in more shrieking laughter and glances were slung his way.

Humiliated, Thomas turned his back on the spectacle and tried to focus on his book.

After a few minutes, the giggling stopped, and Thomas, assuming the women had gone, turned to check. Ernie Harris stood at the table, making elaborate sweeps with his hands. Several of the women’s mouths hung open or their hands were clasped to their chests. Then Ernie gave a slight bow and crooked his arm. Lillie stood and took it.

Thomas realised with a lurch that they were walking towards him and he turned back to his book, but the words were just a line of furry caterpillars on the page.

‘Ah, Thomas,’ said Ernie. ‘Lillie and I are just taking a turn about the deck. Then I’ll come and join you for a drink.’ He winked. Lillie’s eyes met Thomas’s for a moment and looked away as she arranged her lips in a pout that she no doubt thought alluring.

The pair exited the games room and Thomas fixed his eye on the porthole, expecting them to pass by at any moment. The lamps were lit outside, draped in a cloud of insects. A large moth hurled itself at the porthole in a frenzy. How tenacious they were. He stared outside for some time, but Lillie and Ernie did not pass by, so he continued with his reading.

After about twenty minutes, Ernie re-entered the games room alone. He adjusted his collar by hooking his finger in it and stretching his neck forward like a starling as he walked. He dropped heavily into the seat next to Thomas with a sigh. His cheeks were quite flushed and his lips were moist. Despite this, his tongue kept darting out from beneath his neat moustache to wet them further. He let a sound, a sort of ‘hooeey’, and patted his chest.

‘And where is Miss Lillie?’ inquired Thomas.

‘Oh, she wasn’t feeling very well, so I accompanied her back to her cabin where she could lie down. She was attacked by mosquitoes outside; they went berserk over all that tender young flesh so ripely exposed! I told her the new theory about mosquitoes causing malaria and she went quite faint. She’s resting comfortably now, though.’

‘I see,’ said Thomas. He felt a stab of something and realised with horror it was jealousy. That Ernie could do as he pleased, and held little regard for the consequences, either in this world or the next.

‘As for me …’ Ernie rubbed his hands together, ‘I’m quite done in, old man. Think I’ll hit the hay.’

Now on firm soil in Santarém, Thomas ground the end of his cigarette into the dirt with his heel and took a peppermint from his pocket. He felt the cool vapours rise up through his sinuses and the pleasant tickle of a distant sneeze. It built and built until he let a gigantic explosion bend him over double. It was one of the side-effects of his peppermints that he was not at all averse to.

‘Bless you!’ He heard the voice from inside the house, from the direction of Ernie and George’s room, and he chuckled.

There were relatively few mosquitoes in Santarém, and if Ernie’s new theory proved correct, he had found another reason to avoid them beyond the intense irritation and discomfort they caused with their incessant whining in his ear and their sharp bites, which left his arms red and raw. There were still gnats and sandflies and ticks to worry about, of course. Thomas pictured himself lying naked in the shallows of the river, as the boys had been that day, with their penises floating and waving in the current like minnows. He had omitted the fact of their nudity in his letter to Sophie, but he had become quite used to the sights of the human body in Brazil, mostly of the small children and the odd older native woman with pendulous breasts exposed. George, whom Thomas expected to be the most tenacious with his prudery, spent a long time standing by the boys in the water, practising his Portuguese on them, and seemed quite disappointed when their mothers called them out of the river.

John was about to get into his hammock when Thomas returned to his room. The ropes gave a moan as he put his substantial weight on them, but the hooks held fast. Thomas said nothing but smiled a little at the other man before crossing to his own hammock.

‘Thomas,’ said John. He looked as if he had something important to tell him; he was sitting up as much as the hammock would allow, with a look of earnest concentration on his face.

Thomas began to remove his boots. ‘Yes, John?’

‘Only that … about what we talked about before …’ He sighed, and the hammock creaked again. ‘Only, could you not mention it to the others, about how I got started in this business? About the mines.’

‘Of course I won’t, John. Not if you don’t want me to.’

John seemed satisfied with this answer, and lay back down. But with his eyes on the ceiling, he spoke again. ‘It’s only that they already treat me as their inferior. I don’t want to give them any more reason to do so.’

Thomas paused.
Did
Ernie and George treat John badly? He tried to remember any interaction he had witnessed, and recalled their first morning in Belém, when Ernie had made some comment about his background and John had left the room. None of them had spoken much to John, but Thomas had thought this was because the man was so dark and quiet, not through some conscious choice to snub him. Did this mean Thomas had also exercised some superiority over him, an unconscious recognition of their class difference? He couldn’t remember. But surely John’s willingness to share his past with Thomas meant he was an ally, not a threat.

‘Of course,’ he said again. ‘I’m sorry.’ He didn’t know why he was apologising, but John didn’t answer, and by the light of the one lamp that was left, Thomas could see that his eyes were closed. Thomas was pleased to be sharing a room with John, if only for the fact he didn’t snore the way Ernie did. The new pairing was much more harmonious — Ernie had little consideration for others. Thomas had even woken one night to the sound of Ernie pleasuring himself. He was sure John would not be so indiscreet.

He removed the rest of his clothes and put on his nightshirt before kneeling on the mat by his hammock to pray. As he finished, he again remembered the scene on the ship when Lillie had leaned forward. He caught his breath at the vivid detail of her aureole, as soft as a moth’s wing. He shuddered.

And please, God
, he finished,
grant me the strength of my convictions
. The closer they moved to Manaus and the more Thomas learned about the city, the more uneasy he was becoming.

In the week that followed, the four men explored together, rising at six to cloudless days, their breakfast prepared by the cook in the little hut that served as a scullery while they readied their equipment. Then they set off with Paulo and an Indian guide, once again arranged by Antonio, along seldom-used paths that took them across the bare campos, peppered with rocks and low shrubs, and into pockets of forest. Some days they wandered for miles along the riverbanks, where there was no shortage of lepidoptera. George’s hunt for beetles continued, but he found plenty of other varieties of insects to keep him occupied as well — wasps and mason bees of a kind; crickets and ants. He had also taken it upon himself to further his collection of snakes and lizards, finally using the gun he carried everywhere with him in shooting a jacuarú, a fat lizard that ran with little grace and much noise. Thomas didn’t fancy its chances of making it out of Brazil expertly stuffed, and he drew some satisfaction from the idea. George still barked orders at him if he thought Thomas was doing something wrong, if he thought he was being too rough with a butterfly, or too timid.

Often they would split up and go in different directions, then meet up for lunch in some shady wood, where they would sit out the hottest hours, smoking cigarettes and lying on their backs, while the creatures of the rainforest lived out their lives overhead. Blue and black morphos, some as big as blackbirds, patrolled the canopy, and Thomas was satisfied to lie on his back and watch them dipping and gliding, with no itch in his feet to try to chase them or lure them down. He had a prize to keep him satisfied for days — a rare
Callithea sapphira
, with a dusting of black spots on its grey lower wings, and brilliant orange bands on its upper. He had already captured a female, which flew lower than the male, but the male had required him to climb a tree, dodging stinging insects. With his makeshift pole net, he had managed to snare the beautiful creature, after waiting for nearly an hour for it to come into reach. If he didn’t catch another butterfly the whole time he was in Santarém he would still be happy.

Birds called to each other: glossy black anús, bright trogons of varying species. A toucan came dangerously close. Thomas marvelled at its heavy curved beak and was dismayed when Ernie picked up his gun and shot it. It wavered a moment, and Thomas swore that it looked at him just before it tipped back and lost its grip on the branch. A dreadful sadness slopped in his belly, spreading through his insides like ink on a tablecloth. The bird was dead when it hit the ground and Ernie bounded over to claim his prize. Thomas knew he was being hypocritical — after all, the first thing he did when he saw a beautiful specimen of lepidoptera was to catch it and kill it — but he felt that the process of setting the butterfly meant that it would live forever. There was something dreadfully forlorn about Ernie’s stuffed birds. He had opened up one of his drawers to have a look one day and the birds were lined up, stuffed, lying like bullets, their bodies fixed as if they were diving: wings tucked in, eyes closed, feet back. He remembered feeling shock at how
dead
they looked, not unlike his beautiful lepidoptera: cadavers, lying in a row, waiting to be studied. Which, he supposed, they were.