The Specimen (35 page)

Initially, he had been struck by her appearance. How like Gwen she was, in that first instant, despite the obvious difference between the sisters. He could see how Edward would have fallen at
once into tying himself to this woman, rather than striving to extricate himself—and then forever regretting it.

Gus felt the tension creep down his back as Euphemia said, “You never did say, Ted, how the two of you met.”

Edward’s reply was a little too studious. “We have an acquaintance in common. A Midlander, now living in London—”

“What? Mr Coyne is Cornish—and he certainly isn’t—”

Edward’s cutlery clattered onto his plate. He placed his hands flat on the table. Gus had his fork midway between his plate and his mouth; pink fish flesh dropped with an almost silent
splat back onto his plate. He looked from Scales to Scales’ wife and back again.

Euphemia said, “What I mean to say, is—”

“Take the boys, why don’t you, Euphemia, to the kitchen, where I am sure Susan will be only too happy to give them their milk pudding,” Edward said quietly.

“But the thing is, obviously—”

“Take them, Euphemia.”

Both men were quiet after the corralling had been accomplished.

Gus said, “Would I be right in assuming that your wife’s comment just now came as much of a surprise to you, as it did to me?”

“If she had made that comment before I’d had your news, I would have wanted to know what she meant by it immediately. As it is, I can wait. And I am even more convinced that your
news should be withheld from Euphemia, for the time being at least. She has not been very calm these past few days. Her chirpy facade seems egg-shell thin.”

The next morning Gus held Gwen’s notebooks in his lap. Looking into them by the open window of his room, he’d expected to see her watercolours and sketches laid out
on the page in much the same way as the specimens themselves. Ordered by class, neatly labelled, a border of white paper between each regimented subject. No. Her pages were, to the uninitiated eye,
a jumbled, mixed-up mess. A morass of things, jostling for space. Her written notes meandered around her work: lines, arrows, and dates seemingly confused, overlapping; nothing was chronological.
These were her private thoughts and impressions layered year on year. Gus supposed that her intention had been to sort through and make fair copies of the best of it. It was obvious that she had
never intended these notebooks to be used by anyone but herself. With this in mind, he looked more carefully. He got up and went downstairs to the library to find a magnifying glass. He could not
read her tiny handwriting without one. The house seemed deserted. Edward, out for his morning ramble. No evidence of Euphemia and the children: perhaps they, too, had gone out. Gus stopped to crane
his head at the landing window and studied the sky. If Euphemia had ventured out like her husband, she would get wet very soon. The pallid grey of the early hours had begun to transform into
something much more forbidding, though the air was still. On the cusp of something, thought Gus, waiting for the telltale sign, and the rush of wind in the treetops. Always expecting something
grander than British weather could produce; he hoped that Cornish weather might prove a little different.

He went on down the stairs and to the library. He took a moment on the threshold. He had not noticed much about it the day before. It had been so terribly hot out, and he’d been so tired,
so glad to be in a cool place, and only thinking of how he might tell Edward about Gwen and Augusta.

Edward had wasted no time in giving the heap of Gwen’s sketchbooks to Gus.

The room seemed to say that its owner had gone out of his way to make it utterly unextraordinary, bland.

Gus found a magnifying glass on the desk and putting it into his jacket pocket made to leave the room. Susan was standing just inside the door with her hands behind her back, as though she had
just shut herself quietly in with the guest.

“Good morning, Susan. I’m just stealing a magnifying glass. I’ll not get in your way.”

“It’s all right, sir, I don’t do this room today.”

Later, he picked up the sketchbooks again and opened a page at random. A portrait of a girl wearing black and red face paint, bordered by a trail of crimson passion-flowers and
studies of Heliconid butterflies and their larvae, as Gwen called them; not caterpillars. The sight of the girl brought a knot into his stomach. She was smiling, her gaze turned away from Gwen,
unlike so many portraits of indigenous peoples of far-off places. Gwen’s portrait of the girl had caught her in a moment. It was perhaps as contrived as any other portrait; no one could paint
that quickly. Gus could sense that, to the girl, this had not been the most important part of her day. Something more engaging had caught her attention, and the viewer was not allowed to look into
her eyes. On the same page, Gwen had painted the leaves of the tree from which the red dye had been extracted. There was an unfinished study of a minis-cule yellow and black tree-frog. Gwen’s
tiny script edged around it all, and Gus peered through the magnifying glass at her pencilled in words: “. . . each variant would seem to support its own kind of insect. A curious thing, for
these relationships to be so specialised. On each plant stem there are tiny nodules, different on each variant, positioned half an inch or so below the leaf and sometimes around the edges of the
leaf itself. The nodules vary in size from the almost invisible to the size of a pimpernel flower-bud. These nodules, I have come to realise, are almost exact representations of the ova belonging
to the particular Heliconids which rely on the plant as its food source. It is unclear in my mind whether these nodules serve to act as some kind of attractant, or a dissuasive measure. Is the
plant attempting to repel the butterflies by announcing that there is already a crop of ova about to hatch and thereafter devour the food ahead of the new additions. Or is it a reminder to the
butterfly to lay her eggs? Either way it is a remarkable example of a plant imitating its parasite. I cannot help but speculate that in some cases at least, nature is indeed perhaps as C.D.
suggests, working independently of its Originator . . .”

Gus smiled to himself at Gwen’s younger self and her tentative words. She was much more direct now, and unwavering in her conviction. The open window brought in a rush of cooler air and
the first raindrops began to spatter the glass. With his gaze fixed in the middle distance through the gathering rain, he thought of her speculating, her imagination ignited by such tiny things as
the almost invisible bump on a passion-flower stem. Gus spent the remaining hours of the morning lost in the pages of her work.

Eventually, he heard nearby the commotion of Euphemia coaxing the children, filthy by the sound of it, from exploring the midden heap, into being scrubbed before Susan took them off to have
their lunch in the kitchen. Gus heard the resonant clang of an enamel bowl put down on the flagstones and a cloth being dipped and wrung, punctuated by aggrieved noises from both parties.

Two days after Pemberton’s stay had come to an end, Euphemia was high-pitched and overly loquacious. There was a worrying shimmer in her eyes.

A darkening bruise spread out on the horizon casting a dull beginning to the day. As the sky turned a deeper hue of slate, the sea became pale and luminous under it. The wind frigged with
Edward’s clothes, and he decided to turn back before he was blown off the path. The house, which only a few days before had been open at every window, was now battened down, and seemed to be
as hunched as he was as he came in the back door. He kicked off his boots and shoved them under a chair, fully expecting Susan to appear from somewhere and tell him off. She didn’t. Edward
poked around for something to eat, and finding nothing that wasn’t rising or steaming in the deserted kitchen, went along, still wearing his outdoor things, to the library. He kept dry
biscuits there. It wasn’t exactly an appetising thought, and he was just considering the possible ramifications of ringing for Susan when he saw his wife.

She didn’t see him; Euphemia was standing with her back to the door. She was busy searching for something to read. Edward waited for her to sense him there. She was leafing through a book;
he could tell from her posture and from the tune that she hummed that she was unlikely to realise he was there unless he made a noise. He stayed perfectly still for a moment, enjoying seeing her
absorbed in something so simple. The tune that she hummed was one that she had been practising on the piano very recently. The mistakes that she made over and over again on the keys had corrupted
her memory of the piece so that she was humming it wrong. The wind hit the house in a smack of squall, rattling the windows. Edward took his cue and moved into the room, making a noise as he
went.

Euphemia turned and let out a yelp like a puppy being trodden on, her eyes widening in alarm. Almost immediately, but not quite soon enough, she said, “Ted, you quite startled me.
Goodness, a storm.”

Edward waited patiently as she fiddled, putting the book back into the case. His wife slammed the doors shut over the books, standing defensively—protectively? Edward couldn’t
decide—with her back to them, her arms splayed out at her sides.

“What a silly goose I am. Are you wet? I think I can hear one of the boys; he’s calling me.” She walked across the room briskly, intending to go past Edward without another
word. Edward stepped in her way, and she bumped up against him, recoiling fractionally. Hardly at all, Edward thought, but it was there all the same. Now, he thought, whilst I don’t mind
about it. “There is something I have been meaning to speak with you about.”

“Well, I shall look forward to it over dinner, Ted.”

“It is a private matter. A matter of great importance, which—”

“I must get on, Ted. We can speak later.” She pushed him aside, and he let her go. As she left him, she gave him a parting kiss as an afterthought, her top lip beaded with moisture.
There was a tang of ripe underarm heat in the space she left behind.

Edward swore under his breath and locked the door after her. Since the arrival of the twins—no, since the very beginning of her bearing them—she hadn’t needed any medicine. The
glitter of her eyes, in the first days of his taking her on, as he had come to think of it, had vanished. Her demeanour had changed. She was lighter; hadn’t cared about his insistence on her
not taking clients in, for those evenings to cease altogether. That part of her seemed to have been smoothed right away.

Edward couldn’t be sure when this edginess had come back. It was not easy to pinpoint. He thought that perhaps he was being too hard on her. But then there was the comment she’d made
about Vincent Coyne; she’d avoided answering his questions, despite his attempts. He didn’t want to think about its possible implications. There were far too many little things that he
wanted to avoid dwelling on.

He rummaged for his dry biscuits; cramming one into his mouth, he sloped over to the bookcase Euphemia had been rifling through. He didn’t mind, on principle. The books there were as
wallpaper to him. Certainly, he’d never read anything from those cases. Never even considered it. Euphemia had transferred her edginess; she’d left it in the room and it hovered right
there at the bookcase. Don’t be a stupid ass, Edward told himself, as he scanned the shelves. He made himself assume an idleness and was about to shut the doors again when he saw it. A book
not aligned with its neighbours or the shelf, its lower edge hovering. Edward slid his middle finger into the inch of darkness and grasped the top of the spine with his other hand. The book was
wedged tight and when it came out it spewed papers, which drifted in all directions to the floor.

Edward instinctively dropped to his knees to gather them up. It was as well that he was so near to the floor when he saw whose handwriting covered the papers. He read them hungrily, feverishly,
spreading them all out on the carpet, sorting them into columns finding the chronological order, finding the extent of Euphemia’s game.