Night of Fire Page 17

  When she asked him about this, he replied, uniquely, that he could not remember it at all. Soon afterwards he had gone down with malaria, and later read his notes with astonishment, written as though by someone else, in his own hand.

  ‘Cordillera de Vilcanota, dep. Cuzco, Peru. Can no longer fix position by grid. Elev. c. 8,500ft. Date: 17 July 1966. The farmers say I mustn’t go on. Armed men are on the track below. I circumvent them at dusk, and camp in cloud forest. Why am I risking this for Pedaliodes niveonota? But only one specimen, to my knowledge, ever collected. It is chocolate brown, lustrous. I may die for it. The ventral surface of the forewings is suffused with magenta: this stretches from its costa to vein M2. It grows rarer and more luminous in my head. Perhaps I am going mad . . .’

  But he had never found Pedaliodes niveonota, he said, and even now the memory chafed. She squeezed his cold hand. In these weeks of her typing, she had grown at ease with him. He had collected enough, she laughed. He could leave the rest to others. He smiled down at her. She loved him, as she had when a child. She could safely clasp his hand, or embrace him in parting, because he seemed barely to notice. If she teased him, he would answer with his affectionate smile, and occasionally patted her hand, as if in conciliation, and murmured in his far-off voice: ‘You’re very dear.’ If he sensed her subtle release of feeling, he withheld any showing of it. And when he said near the end, ‘You’ve made me happy’, she knew his meaning: that his field notes were now legible before his death.

  Towards her last Saturday with him, he mentioned that he had a place on a butterfly expedition in Normandy – he wanted to walk along those forest rides again – but he did not feel up to it now. Would she like to go instead? She suspected this was a covert gift, and longed to accept. But she said: ‘I can see my father’s declining. The chemotherapy didn’t work. It’s only a matter of time.’

  Arthur said: ‘This group won’t leave until July.’ It was February now.

  ‘I see. Yes.’ She didn’t meet his eyes ‘I’d love to go.’

  She sensed that behind his distant smile and buried voice, Arthur was concerned about her. Perhaps he felt he was standing in for her father, or even, obscurely, giving something to her mother (but she was guessing). She could tell he thought her vulnerable, too soft. She mustn’t idealise the world of butterflies, he said. They were, in many ways, creatures like us. And sometimes, when she waxed too enthusiastic, he would sound a warning note of science. In their least attractive habits, he said, lay their survival. Their beauty was a gorgeous irrelevance. Much of their brief lives was spent at war. In many species the males patrolled and battled remorselessly for their territory, often perching high in a position of command. They could even attack humans, as he knew. As larvae they might eat their own siblings. One fascinating genus changed from herbivore to carnivore overnight.

  He asked her: ‘Did you read about the larva of the Large Blue? It attracts meadow ants by secreting a sweet liquid. They carry it into their nest, where they come to believe it’s their queen. It even sings softly to them. They feed on its honeydew, while the caterpillar feeds on their grubs. Basically it’s eating their children. Then its chrysalis hibernates among them underground, until the butterfly starts to emerge months later. By now the ants are angry. But as they attack it, it sprays out a sticky fluid which clogs their feet and feelers, so it has time to dry its wings and fly away. It is a repellent and yet rather wonderful story . . .’

  Quite useless to anthropomorphise insects, Arthur said. This was simply the way continuance was organised. Even butterflies’ mating, sometimes so delicate, could be furiously rivalrous and violent. Sex was the chief purpose of the male’s brief span. Few females remained virgin beyond their first morning. Many carried the scars of needle-sharp penises that misdirected. In some Heliconids the males gathered around the female chrysalis and impregnated her even before she emerged. Occasionally this killed her. In a small proportion of species, they sealed their ownership by plugging their mate’s vagina with a monstrous sphragis, which she carried to the end of her life. Rivals might try to unhook it with ingeniously developed augers, and the females themselves had evolved increasingly external genitalia in defiance. The Russian writer Nabokov, a passionate lepidopterist, imagined these chastity belts as almost beautiful, shaped like helical shells or tiny lyres. As for pupal rape, Arthur said, the female was exuding sexual scents even in her chrysalis.

  When he, with a quaint paternalism, said that the outside world could be very cruel, Stephanie imagined, for some reason, that he was regretting something in his past, as well as trying to shield her. When he parted from her that evening, his touch on her shoulder was more tentative than usual, and she kissed a cheek that was almost turned away.

  Stephanie’s father went into hospital to die. Neither she nor Theresa had been able to lift him on and off the surgical bed installed in the sitting-room, and morphine was turning him confused, so that his anger drained away. He now took Stephanie’s hand. He was barely recognisable to her. His skin was putty grey and his hair scattered to strange blond curls by chemotherapy. His old concerns had disappeared, his business forgotten, its sale still incomplete. Whenever he surfaced from delirium, his eyes wandered the room in bafflement. He seemed to be hunting for some visual reference point. Sometimes he fixed on his wife’s photo on the table beside him and scrutinised it in perplexity a while, before calming. And sometimes his gaze alighted on Stephanie seated beside him. Each time, she dreaded seeing his features contort in distaste, but instead he would only nod faintly, as though reassured.

  She took it in turns with Louisa to watch him. At first she wanted to feel something, anything. She thought it might be easier to warm to this gaunt, balding stranger than to the memory of her father. His fingers were stick-like in hers. She was distantly appalled by herself. She wanted him to hurry up and die. She wanted to go to Normandy and find butterflies. Louisa was more distressed than she: but it was the distress of somebody long ago released from him. Louisa wore smart business suits even in the hospital, and her blonde locks were tied back with a crystal hairpin. Stephanie, waiting in the bedside chair, listening to her father’s fitful breathing, let her thoughts stray into a different future. Now she would go to university, become someone else.

  Behind her, in the hushed privacy of the corridor, an old man started to weep, shedding the tears that they could not.

  Towards the end, while Stephanie sat half asleep beside her father, he jerked awake and murmured: ‘You’ve been a wonderful daughter.’ She stared back at his white, unrecognisable profile. She thought: Why do you tell me now? She felt furious. Why only now?

  After his death, she asked Louisa if he had had any last words for her, but there was nothing. She thought: Have I then imagined his favouritism? (Louisa says I have.) Am I so sensitive and self-deprecating? (She says I am.) If he had cared for either of them, Louisa said, it was too late to tell. ‘You know, he wanted sons.’

  7 July. Saint-Aubin-sur-Mer. The sea is calm, steel blue. There is a faint mist. The cliffs and islands scatter to the north. Will the seagulls follow us to Cherbourg? Below deck, you might think we were not moving, it is so still. But I write this near the prow, in the sun. Nobody else here at all. Louisa says only schoolgirls keep diaries. Poor Louisa. She drives me to the dockside and bursts into tears as I leave. She in her business suit. And I’ll only be gone five days. Then I start to cry too. What’s wrong with us? We’re alone now, she says. But it’s better alone, I tell her. We were alone anyway. We dab each other’s tears. Our laughter sounds hysterical.

  My group assembles at the arrivals depot in Cherbourg. Feel nervous. There are nine of us. A middle-aged couple from Yorkshire; two stout elderly ladies; a tall woman in her early thirties, I’d guess, a bit aloof; another married couple, he huge and crippled-looking; and our French leader, a delicate young man, fidgeting, wonderfully like a butterfly.

  Our minibus carries us for an hour over country I don’t know. Villages of black-ti
led roofs above stuccoed walls and shuttered windows. Apple orchards and fields of sunflowers. Our hotel is on the edge of Saint-Aubin above the sea, and my balcony looks along the cliffs. This thrill of isolation. Nobody I know here. No one for miles. Only wild butterflies, tomorrow.

  At supper we eat ‘Normandy cuisine’, but I don’t know precisely what this is. The fish tastes sweet. Opposite me a bouncy woman asks: ‘And who are you, then?’

  For a moment I long to be anyone else. Samantha, perhaps (she’s the tall one), or Mrs Gilbert (married to the giant) or Fiona somebody. But of course I answer: ‘I’m Stephanie’, and my voice emerges so bleak and girlish it makes me angry. The name sounds stupid too.

  But the woman nods and smiles in a protective way, and the Gilberts smile too, and it occurs to me that I’m happier with older people. Yet I don’t feel I exist as these others do. They seem so solid, so comfortable. They have gardens and grown-up children back at home. They pay extra for the local wine. Jean-Paul, our leader, shares his demi-bouteille with me. He talks in agitated bursts, in English more mellifluous than ours. His hands flutter. When he asks about my parents, my answer sends him into convulsions of embarrassment and regret. He even clasps my hand. Oh dear.

  It is night now. From my balcony the waves fall in near-silence. The sky is awash with stars. They make me feel faint, because their peace and order are an illusion. I’ve read all about that. Up there is a graveyard of black holes and dead galaxies. Plus millions of planets flung out of their gravitational field, or whatever it’s called, wandering in emptiness. The sky is full of them, apparently, frozen and alone. It’s easy to believe. It reminds me of something I saw under a microscope – was it a butterfly’s eye? – a mass of roving particles. And the whole universe dispersing into nowhere after the Big Bang. Everything thinning into the dark, like a ghastly mistake: a final refutation of God. Maybe the beams that fall on me now went out from stars that died long ago. All the same, I can write this diary by their light. What a fluke that I’m alive at this moment, out of all the other moments before and after! Impossible to think about tonight. My brain goes blank. These hotel walls are so flimsy I can hear Mr Gilbert snoring. Unless it’s Mrs Gilbert.

  I must sleep now.

  8 July. The foothills of Les Monts d’Eraines are covered by chalky meadows. Alongside crops of dying rape the grass is thick with mallow and poppies. There is wild thyme, and basil too, and pink vervain. Butterfly heaven. We fan out with our cameras and binoculars. Only Jean-Paul carries a net, but this is to capture creatures for our momentary inspection, he says, before he lets them fly again. Only scientific expeditions keep specimens now.

  A tingle of excitement. Tiny moths shift about our feet. A honey buzzard cruises overhead. From time to time one of us – usually Jean-Paul – calls out a species sighted: Marbled White, Brown Argus, Dark Green Fritillary. We all unite to concentrate on these tiny things in the grass and shrubs. The world that goes unnoticed. The Yorkshire couple identify birdsong, and one of the older women is engrossed by chalkland wild flowers, and presses specimens into her notebook. If arguments break out, they only concern the audibility of the bush cricket or how far the White-legged Damselfly strays from its riverine habitat. Everyone moves quietly, even though butterflies are deaf. Perhaps people in later age revert to caring for the small, wild things they loved as children. I wonder if I will.

  But the butterflies obsess us. There are hosts of tiny, flashing blues that settle to show gorgeous underwings. How restful it is! Just a little pulse of anticipation as we wade forward through the grass. There are species here unknown to England. I am the first to sight a rare Pearly Heath, and to notice the long, wavering flutter of the Berger’s Clouded Yellow.

  At noon we settle for a picnic where the hillside overlooks misty fields. Jean-Paul unwraps local fruit and cheeses from his backpack. I sit between the married couples. Mr Gilbert squats like a giant crab beside his small, dreamy wife. His pate sprouts ginger tufts. He has bought us all bottles of Normandy cider. The Yorkshires (I’ve forgotten their real name) share the photos in their expensive cameras. Everyone is indulgent to me, and playfully respectful since my sighting of the Berger’s Yellow. (But I wish they wouldn’t call me ‘our young friend’.) They treat me as a kind of mascot. As for Jean-Paul, he keeps plying me with chunks of baguette and different cheeses: Camembert, Pont-l’Évêque . . . His eyes flicker on and off me. I think he may feel sorry for me.

  Only Samantha sits apart, reading a journal. I have a feeling she despises us all. She is a handsome woman, with fiercely arched eyebrows. A bit scary. When I get up to pour myself cider, she comes and stands beside me, and I feel absurdly flattered. She is a university biologist. I find myself babbling about butterflies and host plants that I’ve never seen.

  I must have sounded naively idealistic, because she reminds me that plants and caterpillars are engaged in an everlasting war. Perhaps she teaches in these graphic images: how the leaves of every forest are armoured in protective spines and saw-toothed rims. Some plants, she says, tempt butterflies to lay their eggs on outlying fronds, which are then discarded. The sacs and veins of innocent-looking foliage are brimming with protective poison, and sometimes unpalatable juices are rushed straight to the site of the caterpillars’ munching. She tells me this in a voice of detached amusement, and smiles faintly. Her lips remind me of Sally’s.

  She is the only scientist among us, I think, and I’m not sure why she’s here. Perhaps to complement some specialist research. I have no time to ask. Our picnic is packed away, and we are off. But nobody like her or my cousin, I realise, would be invited on such an amateur trip. It is simply Arthur’s sly way of giving me a holiday.

  I’m sitting in the hotel lounge after supper, just now, and a voice says: ‘Stephanie.’ It is Jean-Paul. He sits beside me with a look so sweet and tentative that I want to ask him what’s wrong.

  Then he says that his own father is dying, too young, like mine. Am I a Christian? ‘How is it possible to believe, when . . .’ But his mother is pious. He has to comfort her. He amuses her by talking about butterflies. How people from ancient Greece to Japan imagined them the spirits of the departed. How an early Irish law forbade the killing of white butterflies because they were the souls of children. Sometimes he breaks into soft, self-deprecating laughter. He is full of quaint lore and stories. Several times he strokes my hand. Perhaps I have drunk too much Calvados, but I don’t recoil. He is so quick and funny. Like an elf. Before I go upstairs he tells me that butterflies bring night dreams. But I’d rather know what makes us dream by day. Such silliness.

  9 July. This morning a light rain falls. We arrive at the forest of Cerisy. Broad avenues move among beech. When the rain lifts we find Weaver’s Fritillary, Large Tortoiseshell (vanished from Britain), various skippers. But Jean-Paul is dissatisfied, and we drive on to somewhere I lose on the map. Here a waist-high meadow is ablaze with poppies and ox-eye daisies. We have a first sighting of the Large Chequered Skipper.

  Two small boys emerge from the woods to stare at us. I think how outlandish we must seem as we comb the verges in our waterproofs and clumping boots, clutching tripods and trekking poles. I too, in my baggy trousers and floppy hat, with a rucksack full of suncream and useless things. The cry goes up: ‘An Ilex Hairstreak!’ and the boys follow us open-mouthed as we converge with cameras and binoculars on an oak leaf where a tiny brown insect sits. Even to me, we sometimes seem absurd. Familiar beauties flap by – Peacocks and Red Admirals – and we ignore them for this chip of brown. It is all about rarity, of course, collector’s mania. I feel it myself. I tick off the Ilex Hairstreak in my mind, and it may never be so exciting again.

  But for the moment the creature sits for our cameras, until only Samantha and I are left. I am fumbling to focus it with my Leica when she takes out a hand lens and holds it to my eye. The insect is transformed. Now the closed brown wings are suffused with pale orange, splashed by apricot spots and fringed with white like a carpet. Its head
and thorax are furred in blue. Facing us, and very strange, two polished ebony eyes are angled back over the entire head. It seems to be assessing me.

  ‘Does it know we’re here?’ I say.

  ‘Of course. But it doesn’t want to fly yet. It’s nectaring.’ At last it flies. ‘They’re not stupid. They have good memories. There’s even some evidence that butterflies remember what they learnt as caterpillars.’

  ‘I thought they turned to sludge in the chrysalis.’

  ‘It seems that something survives.’

  So memory, I begin – why does she make me babble? – may not lie in the hippo-whatsit, but is swishing about everywhere.

  She laughs and doesn’t answer. When she looks at me, I have the same sensation as if I were gazing at the butterfly. I wonder why I have not noticed this before. Her eyes are dark and slanted far back into the shadow of her sunhat. Beautiful in their way. A little frightening. I blurt out that she looks like the Ilex Hairstreak.

  She answers: ‘And you’re the Arctic Clouded Yellow’, which momentarily pleases me (it’s the prettiest of the yellows). But now I wonder what she meant.

  This diary is growing silly.

  This evening Jean-Paul tells me he’ll drive some of us into Arromanches, twelve kilometres to the west. But when I climb into the minibus, there’s only him and me. He talks all the way, and gazes at me too often for safe steering. He is playful and effervescent. Do I know the sounds and odours of butterflies? Their chrysalids rasp and squeak in need or warning, their caterpillars sing. The Peacock butterfly hisses like a snake. And yes, they give out sexual perfumes: musk, verbena, vanilla, stale Gauloises . . . His hands dance on the steering wheel. His father is dying. In an old people’s home in Cherbourg, among people twice his age. His grandfather was wounded in the Normandy landings, at a place where we are going. His eyes flash on and off me in expectation. His laughter sounds a little manic. But he is sweet and fragile, I know. I try to smile. His voice is touched with pleading.