Night of Fire Page 15

  But his funny stories petered out now, or they did not begin. Stephanie never knew what he was thinking. At table there were long, frightening silences. Sometimes he would say: ‘Well, girls . . .’ but his sentence never finished.

  Louisa told Stephanie darkly: ‘He’s drinking, you know.’ His moroseness with Stephanie seemed to deepen, while he had fits of anger even with Louisa. ‘His house agency business isn’t going well.’

  ‘I didn’t know.’ Stephanie felt a twinge of alarm: might they have to leave the garden?

  ‘You don’t notice anything, Stef’ – this was Louisa’s new maternal voice. ‘You live in wonderland.’

  ‘So what? It’s better than here.’

  Sometimes she felt she was suffocating. There were moments at night when she had to breathe very calmly, very slowly, because the air in the room seemed too thin to sustain her.

  Louisa was laughing, and kissed her. ‘Don’t worry. We’re going to be all right . . .’

  Louisa, she thought, was her mother now. Perhaps she always had been. At school Louisa’s popularity protected Stephanie from bullying. But both girls now were surrounded with awe and a whispering distance. ‘Their mother is dead.’ Stephanie’s teacher was newly solicitous, and she secretly cherished this. She had become, for the first time, somebody special. Nobody else had no mother. Sally gained reflected prestige, imagining she had privileged access to Stephanie’s mourning. She was always taking Stephanie’s arm and whispering intimacies, and she relayed to her the sympathy or puzzlement of the others. ‘They wonder what you’re feeling . . .’ Stephanie sensed that if she expressed anything openly, or even cried, some spell would be broken. Bereavement had become her identity.

  That autumn Stephanie’s class was to study biology and physics. Louisa said the science laboratory was like a disused toolshed, and the teacher – a French woman hard to understand – set too much homework. But then Louisa was more interested in going to dances with a moody youth in the class above hers, sporting her suede pirate boots and a denim jacket bought on sale behind her father’s back.

  Stephanie, meanwhile, became fascinated by biology, by the make-up and behaviour of different creatures. One afternoon she wandered alone into the laboratory, and while toying with its dusty filter unit, cluttered with bleary test tubes and pipettes, she came by chance upon the microscope.

  The science mistress had described this as the doorway into another world, but had then forgotten it in favour of teaching the laws of linear motion. Stephanie had no idea how to operate it, but some faded instructions hung on the wall nearby. There was a book showing magnified insects and flowers, inscribed in the science teacher’s hand with the words of Victor Hugo: ‘Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. A nebula is an anthill of stars.’ She listened for footsteps in the passage outside, but there were none. Most of the others were in the dining hall. Tentatively she took a sliver of lettuce from her lunch box and pressed a fragment of it on to a slide. Peering into the eyepiece, she at first saw only the white moon of the aperture below. The lines that wavered there were merely those that trembled under her closed eyelids in sunlight. Slowly, hesitantly, she turned the focusing knob. She expected to see a fan of fragile green veins, but instead found herself gazing astonished at what might have been the pencil sketch of an enormous tree: a colourless thicket of interlacing branches, intricate and strange. Next she tried sugar, then salt. The sun came out, flooding the laboratory table as she focused the sugar crystals, and they lit up like a scatter of icebergs, every one different. When the sun went in, they turned to opaque metal, while the salt grains shone in near-uniform cubes, each one edged with black, like tiny blank-faced televisions.

  As she continued, rifling her lunch for specimens, nothing was as she expected. This was paradoxically comforting. Her own saliva resembled a city map complete with roads and side streets. Apple peel became a skyburst of turquoise-fronded flowers. The blood pricked from her thumb was a broken necklace of orange. Even the single cotton thread that she pulled from her blouse splintered into a complicated vine.

  She finished her lunch delicately, in the laboratory silence, wondering what precisely she was eating. All matter was moving, the biology teacher had told them, trying to explain elementary particles: stasis was an illusion. To Stephanie everything seemed interchangeable, and could blur into something else. Sprinkle sugar and you might create an ice floe. When an ant scuttled across the table, she shocked herself by squeezing it between her fingers. Under the lens it looked armoured in polished bronze. She could make out its tangle of crushed legs, and a bowed head.

  As she walked back to the bus station that afternoon, the brick walls and tarmac streets seemed to be creating only a deceptive solidness, while all the time shuddering with inner life. She had the idea that if she concentrated enough on anything – a fallen petal, say, or a paving stone – she might enter this other, microscopic universe, the real universe, the elements from which the illusion of everyday was built.

  Sally joined her, eager to talk about her collie having puppies, and wondering if Stephanie would like one. Her father would not allow it, Stephanie said, and realised with secret sadness that Sally would never understand her. ‘They’ll be adorable,’ Sally said, then glanced behind her at the pudgy youth following them. ‘Did you know,’ she added, ‘that Thomas has a crush on you?’

  Sally must be mistaken.

  ‘Haven’t you noticed?’ Sally gave her conspiratorial smile. She had full, woman’s lips. ‘He can’t take his eyes off you.’

  ‘He’s probably feeling sorry for me.’

  ‘No he’s not. People forget. And they aren’t that nice.’ She glanced behind again. ‘He even asked me where you live.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I told him you lived in a world of your own.’ Sally laughed. ‘It’s true. You do. Nobody knows what you’re thinking. Thomas may think you’re dreaming about him.’

  The idea confused Stephanie. Why would anyone have a crush on her? Maybe Thomas was following Sally. Sally had outgrown Stephanie by three inches, and had taken to wearing tasselled cowboy jackets. Stephanie had not grown for a year. Sometimes she imagined that Sally’s friendship for her was waning, and this frightened her. She loved Sally’s self-assurance, her humour, even the way she moved. As for herself, she could see in the mirror that she was delicate, prettier than she used to be, in a starved-looking way. She would never have Louisa’s voluptuous bloom. Perhaps she did not want to become a woman at all. But her periods had started five months ago, and later she learnt that the map-like pattern of her saliva under the microscope was a monthly sign of ovulation.

  But boys were another tribe to her. Half of her school contemporaries seemed like men already, in their coarse jokes and swagger. Even Thomas, with his gangling mouth and hedgehog hair, sported a vestigial moustache, although his trousers always crumpled endearingly round his shoes, as if they were falling.

  Next lunchtime Stephanie found him lingering round her classroom, but she slipped away to the laboratory. Her lunch box included two envelopes of butterfly wings. She had picked up the Red Admiral, dead but still pristine, in her father’s garage. Its wings had covered her fingers in a rainbow dust. The Comma’s wings she had found side by side on the front lawn, the body eaten by a bird.

  She edged the fragment of Red Admiral’s wing on to a slide and focused its orange-black divide. She saw that what appeared seamless was in fact the impingement of thousands of scales, overlapping like the successive pelmets of a curtain, their colours melting from midnight blue into coral, then into blue again. And the underwing was stranger still: a russet tapestry – its weave was clearly visible – scattered with snow-white flecks. As she gazed, Cousin Arthur surfaced in her mind. How strangely wonderful his world must be! In some butterflies, he had said all those years ago, the wing scales were raised or angled, creating an iridescence that lit up the rainforests. Her microscope, she knew, was too weak to discern these, even if the
y were there. But on the underwing of the Comma she located, with a tingle of discovery, the white hook that gave the creature its name, curled in the hairy fabric as in a cornfield.

  She closed the laboratory door carefully behind her, as on somewhere forbidden, and ran straight into Thomas. He was hovering in the corridor. ‘I was waiting for you,’ he said.

  Her ‘Oh!’ hung in the passageway: hapless, dead.

  ‘I was wondering if you’d go out with me.’ His face had a puppyish ardour. ‘Robert is giving a party . . .’

  She stared back dumbly at him. She had been to several of these parties, with Sally. Indulgent parents went out for the evening while everyone gyrated through ‘I’m Coming Out’ and ‘You’re the One for Me’. Some of her schoolmates, conscious of the envy of the others, would be snogging on the sofas. She supposed they were being grown up. A few others – and this was mysterious to her – would retreat to some darker room, and she would see them passionately kissing, lost in the fascinated dream of one another. At some of the more daring parties there was a whiff of cannabis (Sally could detect it) and cans of lager appeared. As for Stephanie, she was happy that the music drowned all chance of conversation, since she had nothing to say, and felt abashed and solitary.

  Now she repeated: ‘A party?’ The word became bleak as she spoke it. ‘My father wouldn’t like it.’ But even to her this sounded idiotic.

  ‘But you’re fifteen, Stephanie.’ He was looking at her bright-eyed, pleading.

  ‘I’m sorry . . .’

  Thomas was running his hands through his hedgehog hair, as if something might be out of place there. ‘I’m splitting up with Vicky, you know.’

  Vicky was in Stephanie’s form: one of the spiteful ones. Stephanie realised she might hurt Vicky. For a moment she imagined herself in that subworld of jealousies and charades that whispered round the school and that she found at once frightening and ridiculous. Thomas followed her to the end of the corridor. In the sudden sunlight she noticed he had covered his pimples with women’s blusher.

  ‘So you have somebody already. Of course you do . . .’ He was starting to look wretched. ‘Is it Jim?’

  ‘Who on earth’s Jim?’ But she remembered a tall boy in Thomas’s class, an athlete. She said: ‘No, I don’t have anybody. I don’t want anybody.’ This became clear as she said it. ‘You can ask anyone in my form. They’ll tell you. They probably think I’m retarded.’

  ‘You’re not retarded. You’re bright. You win prizes . . .’

  Now she tried to squeeze past him through the doorway, but it was narrow and he didn’t budge. She could feel his chest brushing against her breasts, then his hands lifted helplessly to her face and he tried to kiss her.

  She felt a spasm of alarm. ‘No!’ She pushed him back, but already the look of wounded pathos had resurfaced on his face.

  He murmured: ‘Maybe another time.’ He walked backwards through the doorway, still gazing at her, and out into the sun. ‘Another time . . .’

  Angrily she brushed down her blouse, and noticed on her fingers, already glazed with the Comma’s wing dust, the pink make-up from his neck. She leant against the wall, trying to catch her breath, deflecting the sense of suffocation. She closed her eyes, waiting until he had gone. In a day or two he would probably be telling everyone she was a prude.

  Suddenly she wanted to cry. What was she meant to do? What was she supposed to feel?

  The ultraviolet light that may flash from the wings of butterflies is invisible to vertebrates, including humans. There is a species of Swallowtail whose female variations, confusing to the human eye, vanish and converge in the ultraviolet forms that butterflies see. Although their kaleidoscopic wings are part of their sex appeal, the mating of every butterfly genus is complex and different.

  Stephanie now read these things in books other than Cousin Arthur’s. The courtship of the butterfly, she thought, was often beautiful. The male would envelop the female’s antennae with his forewings and dust her with odours exuded by hair-pencils in his body. These scents were infinitely varied – so strong that even humans could detect them – and a pair of primitive secondary eyes on the genitals could tell the male when to close on her. In some species the pair would ascend together in nuptial flight, one seeming to carry the other. They would remain clasped for hours or even days, and occasionally, if their organs stayed locked, they would stay together in coital embrace until they died.

  Louisa, in the year she learnt to drive, often dropped Stephanie off on the way to a rendezvous of her own, and returned to meet her on the edge of some promising wood or marshland. For Stephanie these brief hours held a solitary intoxication. Sometimes, if the sky was overcast, she would see no butterflies at all. Their seasons were short and variable. But she began to understand their habitats – how the Black Hairstreak barely wandered from its hatching place, or its purple cousin sailed in the treetops – and recognise their different flight patterns.

  But they always brought with them a touch of melancholy. Their lives were poignantly short. Most would be on the wing for only two weeks before they died, some for less than three days. Compared to the months they spent as eggs, caterpillars and chrysalids, their transfiguration seemed tragically brief. The Purple Emperor might take a whole year to mature, then live for barely fifteen days in its glory. More than half the butterfly species were endangered, she read, and she grew to love the less flashy kinds: the Small Blues and the tiny skippers that fluttered in the grassland like dappled leaves. Once, while walking on chalk downland, she watched a host of little Brown Arguses descend on to a patch of rock roses, alighting so close that she could see the drumming of their legs by which they tasted the plant, and the twirl of the antennae that smelt it.

  And there were moments of miracle. She realised she had fallen into the collector’s habit of cherishing what was rare, whatever its appearance. Once, in a flowering meadow, while looking out for a quite different species, she glimpsed a Wood White, close to extinction: a tiny, weak ghost of an insect, floundering along so erratically that she thought it already the last of its kind. Once too, on a July afternoon, while she was ambling back to her meeting point with Louisa, a White Admiral glided into her path. Serene, implacable, it sailed down the glade ahead of her before lifting with unearthly grace into the woodland canopy.

  Then she understood how a famous naturalist had suffered all day from an ecstatic headache on seeing Queen Alexandra’s Birdwing, the largest butterfly in the world, and how, despite the heartbreak of their transience, another naturalist described butterflies as a solace for the pain of living.

  She cannot now remember where it was, or even the precise year: a hotel room somewhere, while travelling with her father and sister. The night air was warm and salty. There was a sound of far-off thunder. She lay restlessly under her sheet, as though there was something she must do.

  Her body felt febrile, with a hot self-awareness. She wondered if her period was starting. She imagined her skin flushed. Her hands travelled down herself tentatively, in nascent exploration, holding the small, new breasts a little wonderingly, as if estranged from her own flesh. She was starting to sweat, and eased off her nightdress. The wind blew soft from the open window across her body. She felt the heat and tingling of her skin under its breath. She kneaded her thighs, touched her nipples. Submissively she spread out her arms, still feeling the salt air, and the emergence of her own beauty, beautiful not because some other felt her so, but from a sensation more intimate, as if she had become her own lover.

  Later she thought of this night as her young epiphany, her becoming a woman, although she could not say exactly why; but it seemed nearer to her than her first kiss – with a kind, gauche youth she did not like to disappoint – or her virginity lost at eighteen, when she felt nothing beyond fear and the need to catch up with Louisa and Sally, and dabbed off the blood – there was surprisingly little – and refused to see the man again.

  When Sally left their school at the age of seven
teen, Stephanie felt bereft. Louisa had left two years before and was working for a London advertising agency, returning on occasional weekends to confide the mysteries of brand awareness and guerrilla marketing, and a switchback of emotional dramas. For another two terms at school Stephanie was the clever, friendless outsider, who might have gone to university; but her father said she would have to pay her own way. Besides, university seemed too much a prolongation of school, while she longed instead for an imagined freedom.

  She replied to an advertisement for a ‘customer relations officer’ at a wildlife trust in the neighbouring town, and to her surprise she was accepted. At first she found herself answering the telephone and booking travel arrangements, but she was soon entrusted with the reception of donors and volunteers, and became aware of a quiet respect in the office. Yet her weekends, if Louisa was not home, were becoming unbearable. She only realised later why her father, at the age of barely fifty, was losing energy. Whole mealtimes passed in which he said nothing. His skin had taken on a greenish pallor. She noticed trembling in his hands. His dislike of her had mellowed into indifference now. He had no use for her – Theresa had returned to manage the house – and in the evenings he was continuing to drink.

  That summer she took refuge in work for a wildlife conservation charity, recording the changes in a transect of chalky downland. Every Saturday she walked its two miles and noted down the species she recognised, reporting back their prevalence or scarcity. The path meandered over a grassland thick with knapweed and harebells. The scent of crushed thyme rose under her feet. On sunlit days a pale dust of butterflies drifted everywhere.

  It was during a visit to the local conservation headquarters that she heard a familiar name. Somebody was quoting from an article by Cousin Arthur. She had imagined him old, perhaps dead. But no, she was told, he was still writing about endangered butterfly species. She found his address, and wrote him a humorous message that produced an invitation to visit him in Sussex.