Miss Benson's Beetle
PRAISE FOR
Miss Benson’s Beetle
“I fell in love with these characters—as unforgettable and unlikely a pair as Thelma and Louise. Their devotion to each other as they trek up and down mountains halfway around the world is a hysterical delight. This novel made me realize how hungry I am for stories about women loving each other into being their best selves. Many thanks to Rachel Joyce for writing one.”
—ANN NAPOLITANO, New York Times bestselling author of Dear Edward
“A beautifully written, extraordinary quest in which two ordinary, overlooked women embark on an unlikely scientific expedition to the South Seas. A gripping tale of adventure and friendship, told from the subversive and often hilarious female view.”
—HELEN SIMONSON, New York Times bestselling author of Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand
“Miss Benson’s Beetle is a pure joyride. Sweet, witty, poignant, filled with intrigue and unlikely friendship, it’s a perfect escape. I loved it.”
—LISA WINGATE, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Before We Were Yours
“For Eleanor Oliphant fans, Miss Benson’s Beetle is pure gold—full of complex, memorable women, plot twists, and a deft balance of hilarity and emotion, it’s a book you’ll stay up late to finish.”
—J. RYAN STRADAL, bestselling author of The Lager Queen of Minnesota
“Whatever you may look for in a novel—adventure, fully realized characters, humor, poignancy, a chance to learn something new—is all here in Miss Benson’s Beetle. What’s also here is the particular grace and humanity that Rachel Joyce brings to her work. She reminds us that we all are broken in one way or another, but that we are capable—oftentimes in unexpected ways—of helping to make ourselves and others whole. This beautifully written novel is an absolute delight.”
—ELIZABETH BERG, New York Times bestselling author of The Story of Arthur Truluv
“So fast-paced and fun it’ll make you remember why you loved reading in the first place. Miss Benson’s Beetle has everything: adventure, mystery, and the greatest, most unlikely friendship, all rendered in some of the most beautiful, enchanting prose you’ll ever read. It’s full of humor, pathos, and insight, extolling the virtues of love, acceptance, and hard-won self-discovery—all that gleams about the human spirit. It’ll capture you right at the beginning and hold you tight the whole way through. This book is a pure and serious joy.”
—PAULA SAUNDERS, author of The Distance Home
“Exciting, moving and full of unexpected turns…[This is] Rachel Joyce’s best novel yet.”
—The Times (UK)
“A joy of a novel, with real insight into the lives of women, the value of friendship and the lasting effects of war.”
—The Guardian
“Joyce’s characters are so charmingly eccentric that they could have leapt straight from the pages of a Dickens novel. Enid is a comedic masterpiece, effervescent and brimming with life. This exhilarating story will scoop you up and carry you along to a dizzying crescendo. But it is also a story of an unlikely friendship and of women who refuse to be defined by the labels cast upon them….Funny, wise, and utterly life-affirming.”
—Daily Express
“Rachel Joyce created an unforgettable character in Harold Fry and she’s done it again with Margery Benson….Hilarious.”
—Good Housekeeping
“A hilarious jaunt into the wilderness of women’s friendship and the triumph of outrageous dreams.”
—Kirkus Reviews
Miss Benson’s Beetle is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2020 by Rachel Joyce
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by The Dial Press, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
Originally published in hardcover in the United Kingdom by Doubleday, an imprint of Transworld Publishers, a division of Penguin Random House UK, in 2020.
THE DIAL PRESS is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Joyce, Rachel, author.
Title: Miss Benson’s beetle / Rachel Joyce.
Description: New York: Dial Press, [2020]
Identifiers: LCCN 2020006856 (print) | LCCN 2020006857 (ebook) | ISBN 9780812996708 (paperback) | ISBN 9780812996715 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PR6110.O98 M57 2020 (print) | LCC PR6110.O98 (ebook) | DDC 823/.92—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020006856
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020006857
Ebook ISBN 9780812996715
randomhousebooks.com
Book design by Caroline Cunningham, adapted for ebook
Title-page and part-title ornament: border with palm leaves: iStock/Andrea_Hill
Map by Neil Gower
Photograph on this page © Society of Antiquaries of London (Kelmscott Manor)
Cover art and design: Kimberly Glyder
ep_prh_5.6.0_c0_r0
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Map
Chapter 1: The Golden Beetle of New Caledonia, 1914
Adventure!
Chapter 2: What Are You Doing with My New Boots?
Chapter 3: A Really Stupid Woman
Chapter 4: Just Get Rid of It!
Chapter 5: A Small Crushing Feeling Somewhere Beneath the Rib Cage
Chapter 6: A Bit of Fun
Chapter 7: Where Is Enid Pretty?
Chapter 8: Getting There Is Half the Fun!
Chapter 9: Stowaway
Chapter 10: So Much Vomit
Chapter 11: Something Fishy
Chapter 12: The Truth About Enid Pretty
Chapter 13: Father Spotting and the Natural History Museum
Chapter 14: No Place for a Lady Like You
Chapter 15: Closer
Chapter 16: London, November 1950
Chapter 17: Two Pairs of Wings
Search!
Chapter 18: This Beautiful Isle
Chapter 19: The Trouble Is That You Think You Have Time
Chapter 20: Brisbane
Chapter 21: Time to Head North
Chapter 22: London, December 1950
Chapter 23: You Have Very Good Legs
Chapter 24: Back on Track
Chapter 25: The Last Place
Chapter 26: Killing the Thing You Love
Chapter 27: Mist, No Mist
Chapter 28: A Gun Is Not an Option
Chapter 29: Cutting Paper Shapes and Stars
Chapter 30: Every Day We Keep Climbing
Chapter 31: Terrible Business
Chapter 32: London, December 1950
Chapter 33: Merry Christmas, Margery Benson
Chapter 34: January 6, the Three Kings Party
Chapter 35: We Will Die Here!
Chapter 36: Easy
Chapter 37: A Change
of Plan
Chapter 38: Shoes with a Buckle
Chapter 39: Funeral Stones
Chapter 40: An Unexpected Development
Chapter 41: The Connecting Line
Chapter 42: Enid’s Red Valise
Hunted!
Chapter 43: Victoria, You Are Getting Carried Away
Chapter 44: Who Knew There Was So Much Blood?
Chapter 45: Snakes
Chapter 46: Tiny Thing of Wonder
Chapter 47: Beetles and Eyes
Chapter 48: Sanctuary
Chapter 49: Mrs. Pope
Chapter 50: No, I Am Not Traveling by Mule
Chapter 51: London, February 1951
Chapter 52: Living Jewels
Chapter 53: Almost There
Freya
Chapter 54: The Golden Beetle of New Caledonia, 1983
Dedication
Acknowledgments
A Reader’s Guide
By Rachel Joyce
About the Author
Seek and you will find. What is unsought will go undetected.
SOPHOCLES
Somehow, in the process of trying to deny that things are always changing, we lose our sense of the sacredness of life. We tend to forget that we are part of the natural scheme of things.
PEMA CHÖDRÖN
When Margery was ten, she fell in love with a beetle.
It was a bright summer’s day, and all the windows of the rectory were open. She had an idea about sailing her wooden animals across the floor, two by two, but the set had belonged to her brothers once, and most of them were either colored in or broken. Some were even missing altogether. She was wondering if, under the circumstances, you could pair a three-legged camel and a bird with spots when her father came out of his study.
“Do you have a moment, old girl?” he said. “There’s something I want to show you.”
So she put down the camel and the bird, and she followed him. She would have stood on her head if he’d asked.
Her father went to his desk. He sat there, nodding and smiling. She could tell he didn’t have a proper reason for calling her: he just wanted her to be with him for a while. Since her four brothers had left for war, he often called her. Or she’d find him loitering at the foot of the stairs, searching for something without seeming to know what it was. His eyes were the kindest in the world, and the bald top of his head gave him a naked look.
“I think I have something that might interest you, old girl,” he said. “Nothing much, but maybe you will like it.”
At this point he would normally produce something he’d found in the garden, but instead he opened a book called Incredible Creatures. It looked important, like the Bible or an encyclopedia, and there was a general smell of old things, but that could well have been him. Margery stood at his side, trying hard not to fidget.
The first page was a painted illustration of a man. He had a normal face and normal arms but, where his legs should have been, a green mermaid tail. She was amazed. The next picture was just as strange. A squirrel like one in the garden, but this had wings. And it went on, page after page, one incredible creature after another.
“Well, well, look,” her father kept saying. “Well, now, goodness me. Look at this chap, Margery.”
“Are they real?”
“They might be.”
“Are they in a zoo?”
“Oh, no, dear heart. If these creatures live, they’ve not been found. There are people who believe they exist, but they haven’t caught them yet so they can’t prove it.”
She had no idea what he was talking about. Until that moment she’d assumed everything in the world was already found. It had never occurred to her things might happen in reverse. That you could see a picture of something in a book—that you could as good as imagine it—and then go off and look.
Her father showed her the Himalayan yeti, the Loch Ness Monster, the Patagonian giant sloth. There was the Irish elk with antlers as big as wings. The South African quagga, which started as a zebra until it ran out of stripes and became a horse. The great auk, the lion-tailed monkey, the Queensland tiger. So many incredible extra creatures in the world, and nobody had found a single one of them.
“Do you think they’re real?” she said.
Her father nodded. “I have begun to feel comforted,” he said, “by the thought of all we do not know, which is nearly everything.” With that upside-down piece of wisdom, he turned another page. “Ah!”
He pointed at a speck. A beetle.
Well, how nothing this was. How small and ordinary. She couldn’t see what it was doing in a book of Incredible Creatures, never mind whether it was not yet found. It was the sort of thing she would tread on and not notice.
He told her the head of a beetle was called the head, the middle was the thorax, and the bottom half was the abdomen. Beetles had two pairs of wings—did she know that? One delicate set that did the actual flying, and another hardened pair to protect the first. There were more kinds of beetle on God’s Earth than any other species, and they were each unique in remarkable ways.
“It looks a bit plain,” she said. Margery had heard her aunts call her plain. Not her brothers, though. They were as handsome as horses.
“Ah! But look!”
He turned to the next page, and her insides gave a lurch.
Here the beetle was again, magnified about twenty times. And she had been wrong. She had been so wrong, she could hardly believe her eyes. Close up, that small plain thing was not plain, not one bit. Oval in shape and gold all over, it was incandescent. Gold head, gold thorax, gold abdomen. Even its tiny legs were gold, as if Nature had taken a bit of jewelry and made an insect instead. It was infinitely more glorious than a man with a tail.
“The golden beetle of New Caledonia,” said her father. “Imagine how it would be to find this one and bring it home.”
Before she could ask more, there was a ring on the outside bell and he eased himself to his feet. He closed the door gently behind him, as if it had feelings, and left her alone with the beetle. She reached out her finger to touch it.
“All?” she heard him say from the hall. “What? All?”
Until now, Margery hadn’t shared her father’s love of insects—he was often in the garden with a sweep net, but it was more the sort of thing he would have done with her brothers. Yet, as her finger met the golden beetle, something happened: a spark seemed to fly out and her future opened. She went hot and cold. She would find the beetle. It was that simple. She would go to wherever New Caledonia was, and bring it home. She actually felt struck, as if the top of her head had been knocked off. Already she could see herself leading the way on a mule while an assistant carried her bags at the rear.
But when the Reverend Tobias Benson returned, he didn’t seem to remember anything about the beetle, let alone Margery. He walked slowly to the desk and riffled through papers, picking them up and putting them down, as if none of them were the things they should have been. He lifted a paperweight, then a pen, and afterward he stowed the paperweight back where the pen had been, while the pen he seemed to have no clue about. It was possible he had completely forgotten what a pen was for. He just stared, while tears fell from his eyes like string.
“All of them?” he said. “What? All?”
He took something from the drawer and stepped through the French windows, and before Margery realized what had happened, he’d shot himself.
Miss Benson had begun to notice that a funny note was going around her classroom. It had started at the back and was now heading toward the middle.
The laughter had been quiet at first, but now it was all the more obvious for being stifled: one girl had hiccups and a
nother was practically purple. But she didn’t stop her lesson. She dealt with the note the way she always dealt with them, and that was by pretending it wasn’t there. If anything, she spoke louder. The girls carried on, passing the note from one to the next, and she carried on telling them how to make a cake in wartime.
In fact, the Second World War was over—it had been over for five years—but rationing wasn’t. Meat was rationed, butter was rationed; so were lard and margarine. Sugar was rationed. Tea was rationed. Cheese, coal, soap, sweets. All still rationed. The cuffs of her jacket were worn to thread, and her only pair of shoes was so old they squelched in rain. If she took them to be mended, she’d have no choice but to sit there in her stockings, waiting for them to be ready, so she just kept wearing them and they kept falling apart. Streets were lined with broken buildings—rooms with whole walls gone, sometimes a lightbulb left hanging or even a lavatory chain—and gardens were still turned over to useful British vegetables. Old newspapers were piled in bomb sites. Men hung around on street corners in demob suits that had once belonged to someone else, while women queued for hours to get a fatty bit of bacon. You could go miles on the bus and not see a flower. Or blue sky. What she wouldn’t give for blue sky—even that seemed rationed. People kept saying this was a new beginning, but every day was more of the same. Queues. Cold. Smog. Sometimes she felt she’d lived her entire life on scraps.