Miss Benson's Beetle Page 3

  She hoped he might display some enthusiasm. Just a smile would have been nice. Instead, he rubbed his hands. “There will be snakes,” he said.

  Did Margery laugh? She didn’t mean to. It came out by accident: she was as nervous as he was. But Mr. Mundic didn’t laugh. He flashed a look of defiance at her and then dropped his gaze back to the table, where he kept twisting his fingers and pulling at them as if he wanted to take them off.

  Margery explained you didn’t get snakes in New Caledonia. And while they were on the subject of animals you didn’t get, there were no crocodiles, poisonous spiders, or vultures. There were some quite big lizards and cockroaches, and a not-very-nice sea snake, but that was about it.

  No one, she said, had ever caught a gold soft-winged flower beetle. Most people didn’t believe they were real. There were gold scarabs, and carabids, but no collection contained a gold flower beetle. To find one would be really something. It would be small, about the size of a ladybug, but slimmer in shape. Lowering her voice, she leaned close. Since making up her mind to find it, she was convinced everyone else was looking, too, even those people currently enjoying tea and meat pies in Lyons Corner House. Besides, there were private collectors who would pay a small fortune for a beetle that had not yet been found.

  She followed with her evidence. First, a letter from Charles Darwin to his friend Alfred Russel Wallace, in which he (Darwin!) mentioned a rumor about a beetle like a gilded raindrop. Then there was a missionary, who described in his journal a mountain with the shape of a blunt wisdom tooth where he’d come across a beetle so small and gold, he’d fallen to his knees and prayed. There had even been a near miss for an orchid collector searching at high altitude: he’d seen a flash of gold but couldn’t get to his sweep net in time. All of them referred to the island Grande Terre in New Caledonia, but if the missionary was right, and the orchid collector was right, the beetle had to be in the north. Besides, collectors in the past had always stayed south, or on the coast, where the terrain was less dangerous and they felt safest.

  As far as science was concerned, the beetle didn’t yet exist because nothing existed until it had been presented to the Natural History Museum, described, and given its Latin name. So she would need to bring home three pairs of specimens, correctly pinned, and if they were damaged in any way, they’d be useless. She would also need detailed drawings and notebooks. “I would like the beetle to be named after my father. Benson’s Beetle. Dicranolaius bensoni,” she said.

  But Mr. Mundic didn’t seem bothered by what anyone called it. He didn’t seem that bothered about the beetle. He skipped right from the bit where she told him about the job to the bit where he accepted, without the vital bit in the middle where she made the offer. Yes, he would lead Margery’s expedition. He would carry a gun to defend her from savages, and kill wild pig for her to cook on the campfire. He asked what date they would be leaving.

  Margery swallowed. Mr. Mundic clearly had a screw loose. She reminded him she was looking for a beetle. This was 1950: there was no need for guns, and New Caledonia was not an island of savages. Fifty thousand American troops had been safely posted there during the war. As well as French cafés and shops, you could now find hamburger restaurants and milkshake bars. According to the Reverend Horace Blake—and she lifted her guidebook as if it were the Bible—the only things Margery needed were gifts like confectionary and zippers, and as for food, she’d be taking her own British supplies in packets and tins.

  “Are you telling me I’m not man enough to lead this expedition?” Mr. Mundic slammed his fist on the table, narrowly missing the salt and pepper. “Are you saying you can do it without me?”

  Suddenly he was on his feet. It was as though a switch had flicked inside him. She had no idea what she’d done. He was shouting, and little balls of spittle were shooting from his mouth. He was telling Margery she was a stupid woman. He was telling her she’d get lost in the rainforest and die in a hole.

  Mr. Mundic grabbed his passport and left. Despite his height, he looked small, with his hair too short and his suit too big, his bony hands balled into fists; he was pushing past the waitresses in their little white hats and the diners politely waiting to be seated as if he hated every one of them.

  He was a casualty of war, and Margery had no idea how to help.

  * * *

  —

  Her second applicant, the widow, was early, which was good, and wanted only a glass of water—even better. But she thought Margery meant Caledonia, as in Scotland. No, said Margery. She meant New Caledonia, as in the Other Side of the World.

  That was the end of the interview.

  * * *

  —

  By now Margery was struggling to keep her nerve. Of her four original applicants, the first, Enid Pretty, had eliminated herself before she’d even started; Mr. Mundic needed help; the third had left after three minutes. She was beginning to think the expedition of her lifetime was already over when the retired teacher arrived. Miss Hamilton strode through the teahouse wearing a raincoat that could happily have doubled as a curtain, while her skirt was elasticated at the waist and a practical shade of gravy brown to hide all stains. She also had a beard—not a substantial one, but more than a few sprouty hairs. Margery liked her immediately. She waved to Miss Hamilton, and Miss Hamilton waved back.

  Margery had barely told her about the beetle before Miss Hamilton whipped out a notebook and began her own set of questions, some of which she spoke in French. Was Margery interested in butterflies? (No. Only beetles. She hoped to bring home many specimens.) How long would the expedition take? (Five and a half months, including travel.) Had she rented a hut as base camp? (Not yet.) The interview was entirely upside-down. Nevertheless, Margery was thrilled. It was like meeting a new and improved version of herself, without the nerves and also in a foreign language. Only when Miss Hamilton asked about her job did Margery panic. She gave the name of the school and changed the subject. She even shoved her feet under her chair—not that Miss Hamilton would have known about the boots, but guilt is not logical.

  “You don’t need one of these blond hussies as your assistant,” said Miss Hamilton, just as a blond hussy conveniently clip-clopped past the window. “What did any of those young women do for the war effort but lie on their backs with their legs open? Family?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “What is your background?”

  “I was brought up by two aunts.”

  “Siblings?”

  “My four brothers were killed on the same day at Mons.”

  “Your parents?”

  “Also gone.”

  Margery had to pause. The truth about her father was a crater with KEEP OUT! signs all round it. She never went close. Her mother’s death had been different. Maybe because it came while she’d been dozing in her chair, and even though Margery had found her, it hadn’t been a shock. Her mother alive and her mother deceased had looked comfortingly similar. As for her brothers, she’d lost them so long ago, she thought of herself as an only child. She was the last tin in the Benson factory. The end of the line.

  Miss Hamilton said, “Two world wars have created a nation of single women. We must not hide our light under a bushel.” She hitched her handbag over her arm, as if it had tried to escape before now and she wasn’t taking any chances. “Goodbye, Miss Benson. What a marvelous adventure. Consider me in.”

  “You mean you want to come?”

  “I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

  * * *

  —

  It would be a lie to say Margery skipped all the way home. She hadn’t skipped since she was a child. Besides it was dark and raining—the smog was thick—and the lacrosse boots were rubbing at the heel. But as she walked/limped, everything she passed—the filthy broken buildings, pitted with shrapnel scars, the women queuing for food, the men in civvies that didn’t fit—seemed prec
ious, as if she’d already left it behind. Briefly she thought she heard footsteps, but when she turned there was no one: with smog, people came and went, like ink in water. She had spoken about the gold beetle with three strangers and, while it was true that two had left in a hurry, the beetle had become even more real in her mind and even more findable. Margery opened her handbag for her key and wondered what she’d done with her map, but there was no time to worry because an envelope lay beneath the door, from the headmistress.

  I regret to inform you that after your failure to return the stolen boots, the matter has been passed into the hands of the police.

  Margery’s stomach fell, as if she were in an elevator and someone had cut its suspension. She hid the letter under the bed and pulled out her suitcase.

  For years, Margery did not know what had happened to her father. After he walked through the French windows, she’d heard the gunshot and seen a spray of blood against the glass, and it had terrified her so much that she’d remained exactly where she was. Then came other sounds—a hundred birds, her mother’s scream—and the rectory had seemed to fill with new voices. She didn’t know anymore what was safe and what wasn’t. All she could see was the red on the window, all she wanted was her father, until eventually someone thought to look for her and found her wedged beneath the bookcase. This person—she had never seen him before but, then again, he was lying at a sideways angle in order to coax her out—said her father had met with an accident and she would need to be a very good little girl, and not cause trouble or hide under any more furniture.

  Over the next few weeks, everything disappeared from the rectory. Not just Cook and the housemaid, but even the contents. Margery watched as things that had made up her life to date—the table she had run into when she was four, the wardrobe where she had once hidden a whole afternoon, her brothers’ cricket bats, her father’s books—were loaded into carts and driven away. Then she and her mother left, too, her mother in dark crêpe, Margery wearing an old pair of trousers and a scratchy boater. One suitcase was all they had.

  They took the train to her aunts’ in London. Her mother sat wedged in the corner of the carriage, sinking toward sleep, while Margery counted every station and spoke the names out loud. Her mother was a big woman, but there was nothing soft about her. Nothing gave when you tried to hug her. If anything, it became more solid.

  “I will never be happy again,” she said, as if grief was something you put on, like a hat.

  And Margery—who hadn’t a clue what she was talking about—leaned joyfully out of the window and announced she could see the River Thames.

  * * *

  —

  Aunt Hazel and Aunt Lorna were her father’s twin sisters, and they were very religious. They wore black, even on a good day, and prayed before and after every meal, sometimes in the middle. They didn’t make conversation as such but gave edifying pronouncements, like “We rejoice in our suffering, knowing that suffering produces endurance,” and “We are never sent more than we can bear.” The kind of thing other women stitched on samplers. They did all that spinsters of a certain class were allowed to do—dusting, of which they did an awful lot, counting the laundry but not actually washing it, and polishing silver until it shone like the sun. Everything else they left to the live-in maid, Barbara, a terrifying woman who wore her hair in a topknot and took all instruction as a personal affront. The aunts owned a mansion flat in Kensington with a hundred steps. As for the garden, there wasn’t one: it was just a communal square.

  After the suitcase had been brought in, Aunt Hazel poked up the fire and Aunt Lorna pulled the curtains, while her mother landed in a chair by the window, like a toy that had lost its stuffing. The parlor was filled with vast furniture that made no concession to the smallness of the room, so everyone was a bit cramped. Her aunts observed in horrified tones that Margery was big for a girl, and also dressed like a boy. Her mother yawned and explained the problem was that she kept growing. “May I play, please?” said Margery. Her aunts said she could play in the square so long as she didn’t shout or bend the flowers. But when she asked, “Is my father coming soon?” all three women closed their eyes. For a moment Margery thought a prayer was coming on.

  Then:

  “Tea?” said Aunt Hazel.

  “Ring for Barbara,” said Aunt Lorna.

  “I’m so tired,” yawned her mother.

  And that was how it went for the next few months. Margery roamed the square and tried her best not to shout or to bend flowers, but when she asked for news of her father or when she would go home—even if she asked about her brothers—her aunts rang the bell, her mother closed her eyes, as if overcome with a fairy-tale kind of tiredness that might last centuries, while Barbara crashed into the parlor, furious, bearing an overpacked tea tray. No one meant to hurt her. In fact, they meant the opposite—they meant to spare her from shame—but it was like passing through a bewitched land, a place without signposts or boundaries where everyone was asleep but her. Panic set in. She wet the bed. She cried over nothing. For a while, she spent her days checking that the men in bandages and wheelchairs outside were not her father. Finally, her brain made a decision: it was better not to keep things that clearly were not meant to be kept, and a hole opened. Everything from her life before the aunts disappeared. The war came to an end, and her brothers and father belonged to a part of her life that seemed incredibly far away, like looking at something distantly across a lake, so that even though she missed them, she didn’t feel it. It didn’t hurt. And, after all, there was nothing strange about an all-female household: a generation of men had been wiped out.

  Life carried on. Her aunts replaced her brothers’ hand-me-downs with plain frocks, and so long as Margery didn’t run or make a noise, they failed to notice her. A school was found to which she seldom went, and when she did, she kept herself apart. Meanwhile, her mother continued to sit in one place and grow heavier, not just in her body but in her eyes and voice, and still no one said anything about her father. Margery forgot his book of incredible creatures.

  Then, coming into the parlor one afternoon, she found four women balanced on the furniture. Even the maid, Barbara, was up there, and so was her mother—it was the most agile thing Margery had seen her do in years.

  “Just get rid of it!” shrieked Barbara, sounding not like a maid. All four women pointed at the window.

  Attached to the curtain like a little black brooch, Margery found a beetle. “Hello,” she said. Feeling she had its confidence, she eased it into her hand and opened the window. She felt giant with the responsibility. She certainly wasn’t afraid.

  But when she tried to set the beetle free, it wouldn’t move. Had she killed it? She gave the smallest shake of her arm—she even prayed—and, to her delight, its back suddenly lifted and split into two hard wings. Beneath them a second miraculous pair fanned out, as delicate as sweet wrappers, and began to pulse. I know this, she thought. I know about this. The beetle paused for a moment, as if to check everything was in good working order, then lifted upward, heading straight for the wall before swinging out its tiny legs and righting itself in the nick of time. It made such a busy noise and, for the first time, she felt she understood something about the perilous mechanics of flight. A beetle might be small, and on the chunky side, but its will to travel was spectacular. She began to laugh.

  And when the beetle returned a few days later—or another that looked exactly the same—she caught it in her hands and took it to her room. She kept it hidden in a small box that she filled with leaves and other things it might like, including dirt and also water. She gave it a name, Tobias Benson, because that was her father’s, and she drew so many pictures that she ran out of notebook. It lived for two weeks without anyone finding it, and the day it died, she cried so much her aunts thought she was coming down with something and said extra prayers.

  But it marked the beginning of her passion fo
r beetles. She went out looking all the time, and it was amazing, once you started, how easy they were to find. No matter what she was doing, beetles were always in her thoughts. She drew pictures, she made notes, she borrowed books from the library. She learned that within the beetle kingdom there were more than 170 families—including the carabids, weevils, scarabs, blister beetles, and stag—and that within each family there were thousands of variations. She learned their common names: dung beetle, June bug, cockchafer, green tortoise beetle, devil’s coachhorse. She knew where they lived, what they fed on, where they laid their eggs, how to tell them apart. She kept her specimens in homemade houses and jars, and filled notebook after notebook with her drawings and descriptions.

  Beetles she understood. It was people who had become strange.

  “bear miss denson, Is the jod still avaladle?”

  “bear miss denson, bib you get my letters? I want to be your asisstent!”

  “Milk, Epsom slats, caddage.”

  Over the next few days, three more barely decipherable letters came from Enid Pretty, though one was, strictly speaking, a shopping list and meant for the grocer.

  There was no time to reply. There was barely time to think. Chance favors those who are prepared, and Margery had her own lists and budgets everywhere she looked. Corned beef, stockings, ethanol, search permits. Now that Miss Hamilton was her assistant, the expedition had gained a life of its own. Miss Hamilton wanted to be home in good time for the Festival of Britain the following May. If they left in three weeks’ time, in mid-October, that would allow six for travel, three months’ trekking, with a departure from New Caledonia in February. Three weeks was nothing. It was actually insane. It also meant being there for the hottest season, when the Reverend Horace Blake warned of cyclones. But she was in this now. She’d given up once before, and if she did so again, she knew that would be it. Her dream would be over.