Authors: Martha Lea
The Specimen (15 page)
“Grindlock,” he said. “Consignee of the
Opal
.” Mr Grindlock grasped her hand as if she were a man and pumped her arm. Grinning like a lunatic, he let go of her.
Oh, God, let him not be a lunatic, she thought.
“Mr Scales!” Mr Grindlock lurched towards Edward and clapped him on the back. Edward flinched in pain.
Gwen said, “Mr Grindlock, I was about to buy some oranges, I wonder—”
“No need to waste your money, good lady. There are fruit trees aplenty at my humble abode. You may pluck as many oranges as you fancy.” He ushered them away from the quayside up to
his townhouse, talking all the time about how wonderful it was to see them. “My home is, of course, at your disposal. Consider yourselves most welcome whilst we look for something suitable in
the suburbs—it being more convenient, I’m sure you’ll come to agree, for your collectings. Do you have a particular area of interest, Mr Scales?”
They followed Mr Grindlock and tried to keep pace with his banter. She felt her underwear becoming soaked with sweat and then, by degrees, the rest of her clothes. Struggling to keep up, she
bumped her parasol against several people; one of them was a priest.
“I beg your pardon, Father.” Drips from her forehead ran down between her eyes and off her nose.
“
Senhora
.” The priest barely turned. He touched his wide black hat and disappeared.
By the time she entered Mr Grindlock’s cool house, every part of her body was running. Her clothes clung and dragged, and she felt as if she was drowning. Edward and Mr Grindlock were both
drenched. Their host wiped his square, fattish face vigorously with a large handkerchief and kept the soggy material in his hand. Several children shouting, “
Pai! Pai!
” ran up
to Mr Grindlock as they walked in.
“Hettie,” Mr Grindlock called into the gloom of the house, over his children’s heads, “I have brought two fine young people to keep us entertained.”
One of the smaller children tugged on Gwen’s sleeve and spoke to her in Portuguese.
“Remember to speak English to our guests, Pippi. It is polite. Now, here is my good wife. Hettie, I have brought Mr Scales, a naturalist, and his lovely wife. Mr Scales wanted to oversee
the unloading of all his boxes of equipment, but I’ve put one or two of my men to the job.”
“Another scientist!” Hettie clasped her hands in front of her large bosom. “Mrs Scales, you are the first lady I have heard of to accompany her husband. And I don’t blame
you. If Mr Grindlock had to travel again, we should all have to go with him.”
Hettie’s skin was mottled with a blue tint and quite dry. Gwen was conscious that her tendency to stoop was becoming more pronounced. She was a good head taller than Hettie.
“But Mrs Scales is an
artist
, my dear.” Grindlock’s words echoed off the cold walls. “Very sensible of Mr Scales to bring her along. Keep it all in the family,
much the best way. Now, let’s see about something to drink. We almost lost Mrs Scales in the market for the sake of an orange but what about some cold tea?”
“Don’t worry, Mrs Scales,” Hettie said. “It’s not as bad as it sounds. We have it weak, with a slice of lemon. I have never acquired the habit of coffee. Mr
Grindlock is partial to a cup in the morning, but I find it compounds the heat somewhat.”
Hettie took Gwen by the arm and guided her through the hall and into the drawing room. Pippi was still hanging onto Gwen’s other sleeve. The house and its people were swallowing her; this
unconditional acceptance and the solid ground made her dizzy. Gwen could not catch what Pippi was saying; the child was asking her something. She smiled down at her, and the girl scampered off.
“Very cooling, you’ll find, Mrs Scales,” Mr Grindlock said. “Come and make use of the coolest air, over here.” Gwen looked up at the ceiling where she saw the
contraption. She followed its cords away into a corner where a man sat working rope pedals with his feet.
The children were all over the place; on and off the chairs and up and down off their parents’ laps. Mrs Grindlock was doing her best to be firm.
“Mrs Scales will not appreciate it. Take it away.”
“But, Mama, I have it on a string.”
“A monkey?” Edward asked.
“A spider. They are taking it away. Aren’t you?”
“A spider monkey, now that is something I should like to see,” Edward said.
“No, no, Mr Scales,” Hettie said. “A spider.”
“Well, I am interested in all creatures.” He walked across to peer over the huddle of children’s heads. “Ah, goodness me, quite a monster.”
“I think, for the sake of Mrs Scales, these little revelations must come by degrees. Children, I really am going to become quite stern with you. That is better.”
But Gwen’s attention was still drawn to the fan working away above them all. The man, half obscured by a screen, silently pedalled, as if none of them were in the room with him. Gwen
tilted her face upwards and closed her eyes, feeling the currents of air stroking her neck.
Later, while everyone in the house dozed, Gwen was alone in the room where she and Edward were to sleep. Edward was below her in the citrus courtyard, writing. She stepped away
from the window. She’d been spying on the way he hunched over the papers perched on his knees, his ink positioned precariously on the tray at his side. She couldn’t see anything of his
face; he was wearing a straw hat with a wide brim. She could make out the faint, feverish scratching of his pen mingled against the peculiar and penetrating scrapings of insects. The noise of them
got into her head and stayed there. Grasshoppers and hearth crickets would be as whisperers now.
There had been a package waiting for her on the cane chair beside the wash-stand. Earlier, when Edward had been in the room very briefly, she’d made a point of not acknowledging it.
“Better than you thought. The arrangements suit us.”
She’d gaped as he turned his back and left her alone in the room. She eased off the string and paper.
It was a small, half-bound volume of tan calf and marbled paper with a swirling amber and bronze design flecked with touches of black. Gwen turned it over in her hands, reading the gold
lettering on the spine. She ran her finger over the words indented slightly into the surface of the leather:
Eternal Blazon
. She frowned; it wasn’t a romantic novel, was it? Sent by
her sister as some kind of pathetic joke. It would suit her sense of humour; the carefully blocked name on the packet label which was only half her own, with merely, “Pará,
Brazil” as the address. Gwen flicked the pages casually and found them unslit. Holding it away from her body, she read the frontispiece: “Eternal Blazon, or, Confessions of a
Nondescript”. So, not one of her sister’s books after all. Who else? She blanched at the thought of Edward giving her a book with such a title. Whenever he’d given her a book,
he’d given it into her hands and watched her face intently for whatever it was that he hoped to see.
Two-thirds of the way down the page there was a line which read “Printed and Bound for the Author, London 1859”. Rather strangely, there was no mention of who had provided this
service. Gwen’s stomach fipped, and she snapped the book shut. She worried at a tiny flap of sore flesh inside her mouth until she tasted her blood.
Eternal Blazon
—Eternal
Truth. She knew it from somewhere, but her wrung-out brain wouldn’t let her place it. It’ll come, she thought.
Sunlight slashed the room in half, and a small, brown lizard spread its body against the wall and sunned itself. Gwen watched its barely perceptible breaths and dropped the book silently onto
the bed to fetch her drawing things. She worked several sketches over the page, making enlarged details of its mottled, nubbly skin, its head and its feet. The lizard moved every now and then,
allowing her to make studies of it from different angles. And then, it was gone. Shooting out of her sight, along the wall and over the edge of the window frame as quick as a bird. Gwen tidied up
the sketches, adding areas of shading, giving more weight and substance to the creature. She put her things away and stretched. Hearing someone’s footfall outside the room Gwen shoved
Eternal Blazon
along with its packaging into her sketching bag.
The girl with the pet spider—Pippi, was it? —came into the room, and Gwen scanned the floor around the girl’s feet in case the spider had come in with her.
“Shouldn’t you be resting?” Gwen didn’t feel comfortable alone with the girl; she didn’t really know how to speak to her, or what to say. The girl shrugged her
shoulders and jumped onto the bed. Gwen watched as Pippi sprawled on the covers, rumpling them, and then pulled herself to the edge, hung her head over, arms falling down by her ears.
“I lost Hercules. He likes to hide in dark places.” She raised herself up with a solemn look on her face, but then broke into a grin. “Your face is a picture.” She
laughed. “You’re scared of spiders. Most people from home are scared of spiders.”
“But you have an affinity with them.”
“What’s that?”
“You like them, as a friend.”
“Almost.”
Gwen relaxed a bit and sat down on the cane chair. “Almost. Then why do you keep the spider?”
“To watch it.”
“And how do you watch it?”
The girl narrowed her eyes and frowned. “Like this.” She put her elbows on the bed and supported her chin in her hands and opened her eyes wide.
“I see. I like to watch things, too. In fact, I was watching a little brown lizard a few moments ago. Here.” Gwen pulled the sketchbook out of her bag and flicked the pages to the
right place. She held the book out for the girl to see.
“Gecko.”
“Is that its name?”
“Yes. You shouldn’t keep your things in bags like that. Hercules might crawl in. It needs to have a tight string or lots of buttons. Hercules can do this . . .” She made her
hand into a tarantula and lifted the edge of the bed clothes before making her hand crawl under the sheet.
Gwen’s body jerked quickly, in a shudder of revulsion. “And what would be your advice, if I should meet Hercules, or one of his kind inside my bag?”
“Don’t squash him.”
“And after I haven’t squashed him?”
The girl rolled over and stared hard at Gwen. “Find someone who isn’t scared of spiders.”
Edward wrote in his small pocket diary by the light of a single candle, so as not to disturb Gwen’s sleep.
The relief of being finally on dry land again, for both of us, is unquestionable. This evening I felt it as a palpable entity. The landing of all my equipment will take
a few days at least, as the ship is anchored some distance from the port due to the fast currents and the silting bottom of the river. The landing stages seem hardly fit for the purpose they
were made, but I must trust to those with greater knowledge and experience in these matters for the time being. Meanwhile, we are commodiously accommodated by Grindlock, merchant of cocoa and
other such goods. His family and house being large and almost as riotous as the auditory assault emitted constantly from a plethora of faunae so new and alien to us. That is, the house does
seem to have its own character, if that is possible. Everything about the place excites me. My brain is overloaded with senses, questions, possibilities, desires. I wish I could say the same
for my
concubina
companion. I would not have imagined her to be so beset by an apparent misery. Perhaps it is merely the heat and
humidity—it can be a shock if one has never experienced it before. However, a niggling doubt creeps, and I suspect that it is more deep-seated than that. On arrival, we were introduced to
the entire retinue of the Grindlock household including giant forest spiders, and a small monkey which bit Grindlock on the hand (he made very light of it saying that the creature has never
liked him). Also the servants. I did wonder that the lady of the house did not discreetly offer my companion a chance to freshen herself. We were fairly dripping with sweat from head to foot.
We drank some cold tea, which I gathered was offered quite genuinely in place of a bowl of water and towel. Gwen hardly touched her tea. She kept looking up at the ceiling fan with quite an
addled expression and stared at the negro fellow operating it for so long that I thought she would draw attention to herself. I made a buffoon of myself with the children, and so Gwen was for
the most part left alone. There was an absolute downpour after a light lunch of cold ham. Some of the children ran out during the rain into the courtyard where there are growing several
different kinds of citrus. The Grindlocks indulge their progeny somewhat. Gwen ate two oranges and a few other fruits which we do not see in England, their skins quite deformed with uneven
knobbles, their colour quite unappetising. Her mood was lightened a little, I think, watching the children getting drenched, and she was more the person I left England with for those few
moments. But on our ramble about the town (escaping the Grindlocks’ offers of attendance with good grace), the mood darkened again. I did my utmost to cheer her spirits. I fear I annoyed
her a little, or perhaps a lot. It is so difficult to know how to behave with her.
Sometimes I think perhaps I made a mistake.
There are
certain fundamental aspects of her character
which I know nothing about.
The attraction of this state of affairs is no longer a sufficient
basis for our project here. Coaxing her along the crowded streets was almost akin to cajoling a reluctant and grumpy child. It occurred to me this afternoon that I have no firm idea of how old
she is. This thought kept me preoccupied for such a length of time that I did not notice when she fainted at my feet on a street none too salubrious, to say the least. Some of the natives
living in the hovels there procured a cart and we arrived back at the Grindlocks’ abode amidst much fuss (to the apparent amusement of all the small Grindlocks). Thank God, none but
servants were there to greet us. We have managed to pass it off as an adventure, citing sore feet, which, I believe was not untrue. When she took off her boots, Gwen’s feet did seem to be
in a hideous state, and I have put cushions underneath them as she sleeps to drain the fluid. It would seem to work.
Now, I am concerned for her. Gwen has never been the type to faint; she even said so herself. She tried to dismiss it as a reaction to the heat, but the heat had passed; the air was much
fresher after the rain.
Swollen feet and fainting do not bode well though; am I to have to search for another assistant before we have even begun? Perhaps it will not come to that.