Miss Benson's Beetle Read online

  By now the note had reached the second row. Splutters. Titters. Much shaking of shoulders. She was explaining how to line a cake tin when someone nudged a girl in the front row, and the note was pushed into the hands of Wendy Thompson. Wendy was a sickly girl who had the constant look of someone expecting the worst—even if you were nice to her, she still looked terrified—so it came as a shock when she opened the note and honked. That was it. The girls were off, and this time they weren’t even trying not to. If they carried on, the whole school would hear.

  Margery put down her chalk. The laughter fell away, bit by bit, as they realized she was watching. It was sink or swim, she’d been told once. Don’t try to be their friend. These girls are not your friends. There was an art teacher who’d given up after a week. “They hum,” she’d wept in the staff room, “and when I ask who is humming, they look straight at me and say, ‘No one is humming, Miss.’ You have to be half dead to work here.”

  Margery stepped down from the wooden platform. She held out her hand. “Give me the note, please, Wendy.”

  Wendy sat with her head bowed, like a frightened rabbit. Girls in the back row exchanged a glance. Other than that, no one moved.

  “I just want to know what is so funny, Wendy. Maybe we can all enjoy the joke.”

  At this point Margery had no intention of reading the note. She certainly had no intention of enjoying the joke. She was just going to open it, drop it into the bin, and after that she was going to clamber back onto the platform and finish her lesson. It was almost break time. There would be hot tea in the staff room, and a selection of biscuits.

  “The note?” she said.

  Wendy handed it over so slowly it would have been quicker to send it by post. “Oh, I wouldn’t, Miss,” she said quietly.

  Margery took the paper. She opened it. Silence unspooled itself like ribbon.

  What she had in her hand was not the usual. It wasn’t a joke. It wasn’t even a few words about how dull the lesson was. It was a sketch. It was a carefully executed cartoon sketch of a lumpy old woman, and this lumpy old woman was clearly Margery. The baggy suit was hers, and there was no mistaking the shoes. They were planks on the ends of two large legs—you could even see a toe poking out. Her nose the girls had done as a potato, while her hair was a mad bird’s nest. The girls had also given her a mustache—and not a stylish mustache but a short, stubby one like Hitler’s. At the top, someone had written, “The Virgin Margery!”

  Margery’s breathing reversed itself. There seemed not to be enough room for the mix of hurt and anger swelling inside her. She wanted to say, she actually wanted to shout, “How dare you? I am not this woman. I am not.” But she couldn’t. Instead she kept very still, hoping for one irrational moment that the whole business would go away and never come back, if she just stayed where she was, doing absolutely nothing. Then someone giggled. Another coughed.

  “Who did this?” she said. In her distress, her voice came out oddly thin. It was difficult to shape air into those exact sounds.

  No reply.

  But she was in this now. She threatened the class with extra homework. She said they’d miss afternoon break. She even warned she’d fetch the deputy, and everyone was terrified of the woman. One of the few times she’d ever been seen to laugh was when Margery had once shut her own skirt in the door, and got stuck. (“I’ve never seen anything so hilarious,” the deputy said afterward. “You looked like a bear in a trap.”) None of it worked. The girls sat there, resolutely silent, eyes lowered, a bit pink in the face, as the bell went for afternoon break and outside the corridors began to swell, like a river, with feet and noise. And the fact they refused to apologize or name who was responsible—not even Wendy Thompson buckled—left Margery feeling even more alone, and even more absurd. She dropped the note into the bin but it was still there. It seemed to be part of the air itself.

  “This lesson is over,” she said, in what she hoped was a dignified tone. Then she picked up her handbag and left.

  She was barely on the other side of the door when the laughter came. “Wendy, you champion!” the girls roared. Margery made her way past the physics lab and the history department, and she didn’t even know where she was going anymore. She just had to breathe. Girls crowded her path, barking like gulls. All she could hear was laughter. She tried the exit to the playing field but it was locked, and she couldn’t use the main door because that was for visitors only, strictly not to be used by staff. The assembly hall? No. It was filled with girls in vests and knickers, doing a wafty sort of dance with flags. She was beginning to fear she’d be stuck there forever. She passed the display of school trophies, bumped into a box of sports bibs, and almost went flying over a fire extinguisher. The staff room, she said to herself. I will be safe in the staff room.

  Margery was a big woman. She knew that. And she’d let herself go over the years. She knew that, too. She’d been tall and thin when she was a girl, just like her brothers, and she also had their bright blue eyes. She’d even worn their hand-me-downs. It had been a source of pain—not so much the hand-me-downs, but definitely the height—and she’d learned to stoop at an early age. But being big, actually A Big Person, had only happened when her monthlies stopped. The weight piled on, the same as her mother, causing a pain in her hip that took her by surprise sometimes and made her limp. What she hadn’t realized was that she’d become the school joke.

  The staff room was too hot and smelled of gravy and old cardigans. No one said hello or smiled as she entered; they were mostly snoring. The deputy stood in the corner, a wry, spry woman in a pleated skirt, with a box of drawing pins in her hand as she checked the staff notice board. Margery couldn’t get round the feeling that everyone knew about the sketch and that they, too, were laughing—even in their sleep. She poured a cup of not quite warm tea from the urn, took what was left of the biscuits, and made her way to a chair. Someone had left a pair of new lacrosse boots on the seat, so she put them on the floor and flumped down.

  “Those boots are mine,” called the deputy, not looking over.

  Outside, the fog made smudges of the trees, sucking them to nothing; the grass was more brown than green. Twenty years she’d lost, doing this job, and she didn’t even like cookery. She’d applied as a last resort. “Single women only,” the advertisement had said. She thought again of the cartoon sketch. The care the girls had taken to poke fun at her terrible hair, her broken shoes, her threadbare old suit. It hurt. And the reason it hurt so much was that they were right. The girls were right. Even to herself, most of all to herself, Margery was a joke.

  After school she would go home to her flat, which—despite her aunts’ heavy furniture—was empty and cold. She would wait for the cage elevator that never came because people were always forgetting to close the door properly and, in the end, she would plod up the stairs to the fourth floor. She would make a meal with whatever she could find, she would wash up and put things away, then later take an aspirin and read herself to sleep, and no one would know. That was the truth—she could skip a few chapters, or eat everything in her flat in one sitting—and not only would no one notice, but it would make no difference to the world if they did. Weekends and school holidays were even worse. Whole days could pass with barely a word spoken to another human being. She spread out her chores, but there was a limit to how many times you could change a library book without beginning to look homeless. A picture came to her of a beetle in a killing jar, dying slowly.

  Margery’s hand reached to the floor. It put down the teacup and was round the deputy’s lacrosse boots before her head knew anything about it. They were large and black. Solid, too. With thick ridges on the sole for extra grip. She got up.

  “Miss Benson,” called the deputy. “Excuse me? What are you doing with my new boots?”

  It was a fair question, and Margery had no idea of the answer. Her body seemed to have taken charge. She walked p
ast the deputy and the tea urn and the other members of staff—who, she knew even without turning round, had all stirred from sleep and were watching, bewildered, open-mouthed—and she left the staff room with the boots under one arm and her handbag under the other. She pushed her way through a crowd of girls, and found herself hurrying toward the main vestibule.

  “Miss Benson?” she heard. “Miss Benson?”

  But what was she doing now? It was bad enough to pick up someone else’s boots and walk off, but her hands had decided to take things a whole stage further. As if to compensate for the deadliness she felt inside, they were grabbing items indiscriminately. A silver trophy, the bundle of sports bibs, even the fire extinguisher. She was in something terrible, and instead of saying sorry and putting it all back, she was making the whole business a thousand times worse. She passed the headmistress’s study. The locked door to the playing field. She marched right into the main vestibule—which she knew—everybody knew—was strictly not to be used by staff and was hung with portraits of old headmistresses, all of whom were definitely virgins.

  The deputy was on her trail and getting closer by the second. “Miss Benson? Miss Benson!”

  It took three goes to open the main door, and she could barely keep hold of everything. The fire extinguisher, for instance, was far heavier than she’d expected. Like carting off a small child.

  “Miss Benson. How dare you?”

  Swinging back the door, she lumbered through in time to turn and glimpse the deputy’s face, white and rigid, so close the woman could have grabbed Margery by the hair. She slammed the door. The deputy screamed. She had a terrible feeling she’d hurt the deputy’s hand. She also had a feeling it would be good to accelerate, but her body had done enough already and wanted to lie down. Worse, there were more people on her heels. A few teachers, even a cluster of excited girls. She had no choice but to keep running. Her lungs were burning, her legs felt wonky, her hip was beginning to throb. As she staggered past the tennis courts, she found the world had begun to revolve. She ditched the fire extinguisher, netball trophy, and sports bibs, and got to the main gate. As the number seven rose smoothly over the brow of the hill, she hobbled toward the bus stop as fast as her great big legs would carry her, the boots clamped beneath her arm like an unwilling pet.

  “Don’t think you’ll get away with this!” she heard. The bus stopped ahead of Margery. Freedom was in sight.

  But just at the moment she should have launched herself to safety, shock set in and her body froze. Nothing would work. The conductor rang the bell, the bus began to roll away and would have left her behind, were it not for the quick thinking of two passengers who grabbed her by the lapels and yanked upward. Margery clung to the pole, unable to speak, barely able to see, as the bus carried her away from the school. She had never done a wrong thing in her life. She’d never stolen anything, apart from—once—a man’s handkerchief. And yet her head was buzzing, her heart was kicking, and the hairs were standing up on the back of her neck. All she could think of was a place called New Caledonia.

  The next morning, she placed an ad in The Times: “Wanted. French-speaking assistant for expedition to other side of the world. All expenses paid.”

  Something had happened to Margery the day her father showed her his book of incredible creatures. She didn’t even know how to explain. It was like being given something to carry that she was never able to put down. One day, she had said to herself, I will find the golden beetle of New Caledonia and bring it home. And somehow also with this promise came another—far more oblique—that her father would be so happy and pleased that he, too, would come home. If not physically, then at least metaphorically.

  But New Caledonia was a French archipelago in the South Pacific. Between Britain and New Caledonia, there were over ten thousand miles, and most of them sea. It would take five weeks by ship to Australia, another six hours on a flying boat; that was just getting there. The main island was long and thin: roughly 250 miles in length and only 25 wide, shaped like a rolling pin, with a mountain chain running from top to bottom. She would need to get to the far north and rent a bungalow as base camp. After that, there would be weeks of climbing. Cutting a path through rainforest, searching on hands and knees. Sleeping in a hammock, lugging her gear on her back, not to mention the bites and the heat. You might as well say you were off to the moon.

  Years ago, Margery had collected things that reminded her of what she loved, and kept her true. A beetle necklace, a map of New Caledonia, an illustrated pocket guide to the islands by the Reverend Horace Blake. She’d made important discoveries about the beetle: its possible size, shape, and habitat. She’d made plans. But suddenly she’d stopped. Or, rather, life had. Life had stopped. And even though she occasionally found her eye caught by something that, at a distance, looked like a piece of gold and turned out to be trash, she had abandoned all hope of getting to New Caledonia. So this time she would do it. She would go in search of the beetle that had not yet been found—either before someone else went and found it first, or before she was too old to get onto a boat. Next year she would be forty-seven. And while that didn’t make her old, it made her more old than young. Certainly too old to have a child. Her own mother had died at forty-six, while her brothers hadn’t made it to their midtwenties. Already she felt her time was running out.

  No one, of course, would think it was a good idea. Margery wasn’t even a proper collector for a start. She knew how to kill a beetle and pin it, but she’d never worked in a museum. She didn’t have a passport. She couldn’t speak a word of French. And who would go all that way for a tiny insect that might not be there? Margery wrote to the Royal Entomological Society, asking if they would kindly fund her trip, and they kindly wrote back and said they wouldn’t. Her doctor said an expedition to the other side of the world might kill her, while her bank manager warned she didn’t have enough funds. Also, she was a lady.

  “Thank you,” said Margery. It was possibly the nicest thing anyone had said to her in years.

  * * *

  —

  Four people replied to her ad: a widow, a retired teacher, a demobbed soldier, and a woman called Enid Pretty. Enid Pretty had spilled tea over her letter—it wasn’t really a letter, more of a shopping list—while her spelling verged on distressing. Enid said she wanted to “Liv life and see the worlb!” After that she’d put carrots, and a few other things she needed, including powbered egg and string. Margery wrote to all of them except Enid Pretty, explaining briefly about the beetle and inviting them for tea at Lyons Corner House, where she would be dressed in brown and holding her pocket guide to New Caledonia. She suggested midafternoon in the hope she wouldn’t have to fork out for a full meal, and Wednesday because it was cheaper midweek. She was on a tight budget.

  There was also a letter from the school. The headmistress skipped lightly over the matter of the fire extinguisher and the sports bibs but requested the immediate return of the deputy’s lacrosse boots. Now that Margery was in the business of taking other people’s footwear, she was no longer required to teach domestic science.

  The wildness Margery had felt that afternoon was gone, and all she felt now was wobbly panic. What had possessed her to steal a pair of boots? She hadn’t just walked out of her job; she’d walked out and made it impossible to go back. As soon as she’d got home, she’d stuffed the boots beneath the mattress where she couldn’t see them, but it isn’t easy hiding something from yourself—ideally you need to be out of the room when you do it—and she could as easily forget the boots as her own two feet. She had spent several days barely daring to move. She thought, That’s it. I’ll get rid of them. I’ll send them back on my way to Lyons. But the postmistress insisted on knowing what was inside the parcel, and Margery lost her nerve. Then, as she was walking away, the heavens opened and one of her old brown shoes split apart. In effect, she was wearing a flap on her foot. Oh, to hell with this, she thought.
/>   She put on the boots.

  * * *

  —

  New problem. Lyons Corner House was busier than she’d expected, even on a Wednesday afternoon. Every single woman in London had come out for tea, and they had all decided to wear brown. She had a table by the window, along with her guidebook and a list of questions, but her mouth was as dry as a flannel. She could barely speak.

  “Miss Benson?”

  She jumped. Her first applicant was already at her side. She hadn’t even noticed him approach. He was tall, like her, but without an ounce of flesh on him, and his head was shaved so close she could see the white of his skin. His demob suit hung loose.

  “Mr. Mundic,” he said.

  Margery had never been what people called a man’s woman, but then again, she hadn’t been much of a woman’s woman, either. She put out her hand, only she paused, and Mundic ducked to sit so that—like a dance that had already gone wrong—by the time her hand reached him he was halfway to his chair and instead of greeting him like any normal person, she poked him rather forcefully in the ear.

  “Do you like to travel, Mr. Mundic?” she asked, consulting a notebook for her first question.

  He said he did. He’d been posted in Burma. Prisoner of war. He pulled out his passport.

  It was shocking. The photograph was of a great big man in his late twenties with a beard and wavy hair, and the one opposite was more of a walking corpse. His eyes were too big for his face, and his bones seemed ready to burst out of him. He was nervous, too: he couldn’t meet her eyes, his hands were shaking. In fact, his hands were the only part of him that seemed to belong to the man in the photograph. They were the size of paddles.

  Politely, Margery steered the conversation to the beetle. She took out her map of New Caledonia, so old the folds were transparent. She pointed to the biggest of the islands—long and thin, the shape of a rolling pin. “Grande Terre,” she said, speaking very clearly because something about Mr. Mundic suggested he was struggling to understand. She marked the northern tip of the island with a cross. “I believe the beetle will be here.”