Sound of Butterflies, The (9 page)

As they stroll up The Terrace, towards the park entrance, Sophie becomes aware of another problem; one she hadn’t even thought of before now. People nod at them as they pass. Some of them avert their eyes. She dreads meeting somebody they really know: not just polite strangers, or those who have heard about the strange, silent young man who has returned from the Amazon, but people from church. She’s glad they live in a reasonably big town, not a tiny village. She can sometimes go days without seeing people she knows, and in the weekends, the place is full of Londoners, so she can further sink into the background.

They make it to the park without seeing a familiar face. Thomas’s gait is slow at first, a shuffling amble, as she imagines a sloth might move. As they pass through the gate, walking without touching, Sophie feels a cool breeze on her face. It reaches inside her and lifts her spirits. She feels it like a finger tracing circles in her abdomen. She leads him up the path towards the shady wood, where Thomas used to collect beetles and where she knows they are less likely to come across any people.

Thomas has picked up his pace, and she feels her muscles stretch as she keeps in step with him. She misses her own walks. She doesn’t like to leave him for too long, in case he needs her, or in case he decides to speak and there is nobody there but Mary to hear him. She spends only a few minutes in the church, early each morning, before he wakes up. Mary is under instructions to come and get her if he shows any change, but so far her visits have gone undisturbed.

I need to talk to him, she thinks. What can I talk about?

‘Do you remember, Thomas, the first time I went beetling with you?’ She doesn’t wait for an answer. ‘And how bitterly I complained! You promised me a picnic that day, but you got so excited about finding that one — what was it, a stag? — that you forgot to eat, and you left me sitting there in the shade getting cold! But I soon learned, didn’t I; I brought a book the next time.’

They pass the fork in the path that winds around an oak tree and leads to the hidden hollow where Thomas once tried to make love to her. She places her hand on his arm again and lightly steers him down the path. Twigs crack and the sponge of rotten leaves springs under their feet. Sophie reaches out a hand and trails it over the brittle bark of the oak. Her fingers find tiny gorges and riverbeds in its texture, a landscape for a thousand insects. She pulls him to a stop in their secret spot. With the sound of their feet on the forest floor withdrawn, the silence rises up to meet them. Thomas closes his eyes, seeming to breathe it in through his pores as a frog might. The air is cool in the shade, the pillars of the forest trees robust and strong. Sophie realises they have achieved absolute quiet. Always there is something that produces noise in their lives — whether the clipping of a horse and carriage, or the animal roar of a motor. Even in the sedate paths by the river, the water sluices the banks, licking at itself or the edge of a pier.

She kisses his cheek. It reminds her of when she was a girl and would kiss her father goodnight. There is a slackness to the skin, and yet the flesh is unyielding, and doesn’t press itself to her lips as she has learned that a lover’s would, or even a friend’s. Nanny would bring her into her father’s study every evening — the only contact she had with him all day. She stood by his chair and told him what she had learned that day, before leaning forward with her warm breath and planting her offering on his waiting cheek. He would turn his back on her then and it was time for Nanny to take her hand and lead her away. She would look back, hoping that her father would turn, just once, and give her a secret smile to hold on to and to carry to her bed. But all she saw was the cold mountain of his back bent over his desk, his hand scribbling madly, his daughter forgotten.

Thomas has not shaved for some time; a few red bristles poke through his skin, but his face is mostly covered with a fine down. It is the closest to a beard she has seen on him. When she pulls back from the kiss on his cheek, he will not meet her eyes; he is the same new frog-Thomas, not a prince. But he blushes a little and for a moment reverts back to the shy young man she first met at the fête on the river. There was a tea dance at the Star and Garter, where he stood on her foot, twice, during the waltz. Later that evening, the riverside was lit up with lights and he asked to see her again. The lights were reflected in the ambling river. When he laid his hand over hers she felt as weightless as the Chinese lanterns lifting and turning in the summer breeze.

She decides to leave him for a moment and wanders over to the clearing in the trees, which give her a view down the valley. She stood in this very spot once when she was a little girl and Nanny brought her to Richmond for the day. She accidentally got ‘lost’ and found herself here as the sun sank behind Windsor Castle. She looked out at it, knowing that she was destined for great things — to marry a prince and live in the castle, perhaps. The Thames was a silver ribbon winding towards her. Now it is a river again, with rowboats dotted on its surface. She can make out the chimney of the Sunbury Waterworks and Eel Pie Island, where Nanny told her all the eel pies in England are made. To the left of the view, the smoke of Kingston-on-Thames, where she grew up, mingles with the blue haze of the distant Surrey Hills.

And now her father is coming to visit. She doesn’t want him to find Thomas like this; she knows her father will be disappointed in her and see her once again as a burden. Her father has never taken much interest in her husband; he was anxious to marry her off early but hoped she would marry Thomas’s older brother Cameron, who was the heir to their father’s fortune. As the second son of a semi-wealthy man, Thomas was provided with an allowance that was more than enough for them to live on, but modest. Sophie knew that her father thought the only way to be rid of all responsibility for her was to have her marry a man whose money would allow her to be surrounded by servants, and to have her every fancy catered for.

She turns and finds Thomas where she left him; he has sat himself down and is leaning against a tree with his eyes closed. She realises as she walks towards him that for the first time his face appears to be relaxed. There is even a contented curl at the edges of his mouth. He is cured, she thinks. This is all he needed — a stroll in his beloved park.

She rushes to him and the rustle of her skirts and the crack of twigs beneath her feet make his eyes jerk open. He glares at her. It stops her in her tracks. Surely he isn’t angry with her? She feels a stab of guilt that she has disturbed his peace. She has trampled on his domain. Sophie stands up straight and puts on a bright voice.

‘Are we feeling better?’ She immediately regrets her patronising choice of words. ‘Are
you
feeling better, Thomas?’

She expects him to look away, despite her hopes. Instead, he stares up at her for a moment, and the glare softens. Then, she’s not sure, but she
thinks
he gives a small nod.

‘Darling!’ She falls beside him and puts her arms around his neck. She expects him to mould to her shape. His cheek against hers is burning; she has forgotten the fire held in the body of another human being. But he remains stiff and Sophie realises too late that she made a mistake. She draws back. He is blushing and his hand grasps a handful of bark and dirt from the ground. He says nothing.

But it is a start, she tells herself. Isn’t it a start?

Two days later, Sophie opens the door to her father. Charles Winterstone stands stiffly on the doorstep and, despite the warm day, wears a coat over his pale suit, and gloves. He pulls off his hat and nods.

‘Sophie.’

‘Father. Please come in.’ She stands aside and he passes into the hallway. She catches a whiff of soap as he passes, is close enough to see a fresh shaving cut beneath his neatly trimmed beard.

‘And where is Thomas?’ asks her father as he deposits his hat onto the stand. ‘And that girl of yours?’

‘Mary,’ says Sophie. ‘She has the morning off. The tea’s all made.’ She could have set her clock by her father’s arrival at eleven; she has never known him to be either late or early for any appointment. She had no fear of the tea getting cold while she waited for him.

In the drawing room, she finally answers his question.

‘I’m afraid I have some bad news, Father. Thomas has been called away on urgent business. A telegram came for him this morning and he has had to go up to London to see somebody at the Natural History Museum.’

‘Oh, that is a pity,’ he says. ‘I don’t think I can be back here for a number of weeks.’

His voice seems light but his eyes accuse her. She shifts in her seat. A few weeks. She has bought some time, then.

‘And Agatha’s father? How is he?’

‘Yes, good, I think.’

‘Did you thank him for letting you stay with him for so long? Perhaps I should thank him myself.’

‘That won’t be necessary. The family knows I had a lovely time with them.’

This is not a complete lie. She has spent plenty of time at their house, and Christmas was one of the most pleasurable holidays she can remember. There is a warmth in that house: a bond between Agatha, her parents, and her younger brother and sister. Agatha teases the young ones mercilessly, and the house is filled with their shrieks and shouts, and inevitably Mr Dunne yelling after them to be quieter, but there is never anger in his voice. They never expected Agatha, once she was out and had courting prospects, to lose her wild ways. Sophie knows that many people in the neighbourhood disapprove of Mr Dunne and his half-gypsy wife and their band of raucous children, but they are too tight-lipped to do anything but accept them.

Mr Winterstone has to make do with asking Sophie about her husband’s travels. Sophie, as best she can, makes up stories, based on the early letters she received from him.

‘And did he find his butterfly? The one that would make him famous?’ He leans forward eagerly. Hungrily, she thinks.

‘No, he didn’t.’

‘I see,’ says her father, and he leans back in his chair. His hunger appears sated. Sophie realises with a plunging heart that this is what he wanted her to say; he has been waiting for her husband to fail in some way.

‘At least,’ she blurts, ‘not that he has told me about. But I feel that the business he is attending to in London may be somehow related. He is quite secretive about it. Perhaps he is on the verge of an announcement and has had to keep it quiet.’

‘Perhaps.’ Her father strokes his beard and will not meet her eyes.

She remembers cold days in their house in Kingston, when they would tiptoe around each other, the hard hand of Nanny pulling her away from his study door. She always wondered how a woman so sinewy could have such a soft demeanour. She had no bosom to speak of, but when she pulled Sophie into an embrace, she fit as snugly as a key in a lock.

They finish their tea in near silence. Her father faces the fireplace and his gaze flicks up at the only photograph Sophie has of her mother. The woman has the look of one whose favourite rose bush has just been cut down; she is biting her narrow lip to will herself not to cry, but her eyes are defiant, planning revenge. The only memory Sophie has of her mother is a word; she can remember the feeling of ‘Mama’ on her lips as a toddler, but she had nothing to apply it to. Eventually it lost all meaning and faded from her vocabulary.

Sophie tries to chat, but her father sits fortified behind his tiny cup. It is an inadequate defence, but somehow he uses it as the largest and strongest shield. On no account must any of her warmth penetrate him. She has an urge to laugh, but she stifles it and stands.

‘Well, thank you for visiting, Father.’ She registers the relief in his face.

‘Yes, yes,’ he says as he stands also. ‘I do have some business to attend to.’

The business of brandy, she expects, up at the Star and Garter. She releases him from his misery. No — she releases them both.

After he has gone, she moves slowly up the stairs, a cup of tea in one hand, the other dragging itself on the banister. Thomas is asleep in the dim room. She pulls the curtains open and sets the tea down beside him.

‘He’s gone,’ says Sophie. ‘Thank you for being so quiet.’