entire time listening and distracted, uncharacteristically preoccupied with a growing need to know what’s going on.
They stay upstairs for a while, and from my listening post at the bottom of the back stairs I can hear them doing what I suppose is putting the bed together, muffled voices talking and, at intervals, laughing. I can’t quite catch what is being said, but I feel strangely compelled to stay and listen until well after I hear the men leaving in their van.
“Ginny, darling, there you are,” Vivien announces as she strolls into the library a while later. “I fell asleep earlier. Utterly zonked,” she says. “It must be the country air.” She’s behaving as if she doesn’t realize she’s stood me up for tea. Perhaps she doesn’t? I’ve forgotten how exhausting I find it to predict other people’s frame of mind or to assess their general humor.
After my moment of thought, I say, “It’s probably this house. I’m always falling asleep during the day.”
“Well, we’re up now. What do you say we make pizza? I’ve bought some bases and lots of different things to go on top….” She fades as she walks back into the kitchen with me following. Should I have thought of what we’d have for supper tonight, her first night? How did she know I hadn’t?
I’ve never made pizza before. In fact, I don’t recall eating it either, although something holds me back from telling Vivien that. Her furniture outburst was such a surprise, I’m not so certain now how she might react. Privately, I’m thrilled we’re having pizza. I’ve seen it so often on the leaflets that come and I’ve always wanted to try it. We spend as fun an evening as I can remember, deciding whether olives go best with ham or with mushrooms—or both—and how much cheese is needed. We also discuss our hands—she’s got arthritis too, but not yet as severely as me—curious to inspect each other’s, almost competitive to claim the harder time of them, and we exhaust the comparisons of pain and pain relief with which we’ve learned to live. We agree that we can’t do buttons and that zippers are so much easier, and what we really need is a shoe horn with a really long handle so we don’t have to bend over when putting on our shoes. She tells me she takes an aspirin every day, which her doctor told her keeps the knuckles symmetrical, and she promises to give me some anti-inflammatories she’s been prescribed.
So we fuss and fiddle about hands, feet and pizza, all very pleasantly, and then we eat pizza, pleasantly too, sitting in lazy chairs in the small study behind the kitchen, warmed by a fire we’ve lit in the hearth and by the company we’re offering each other. But now here’s something surprising—neither of us refers to the missing furniture, or asks each other any of the more searching questions we know there’s plenty of time to ask later. For instance, why it is now, after all these years, that she’s decided to come home?
Chapter 5
Two days after my sixth birthday I found a monster of a caterpillar among some dead leaves on the second terrace of our south gardens. He was extraordinary: as fat as a shrew and twice the length of my finger, mostly an apple green but splattered with blotches of white, purple and yellow, with a shiny black, sharply hooked tail. I watched him for a while, as I thought Clive would do. He looked gorged, fit to burst, taut in some places but flabby in others, and even then, at six, I realized he had the most unusual manner.
I’d seen the way caterpillars behaved normally on open ground. Prime and juicy targets for birds, they race purposefully along, stopping only sometimes to rear up on their hind legs as if to peer about, surveying the area for the direction of their next meal. My caterpillar, however, was sluggish, heaving himself across the ground oddly, first in one direction, then another, and when he tried to rear he’d get halfway up before his great, torpid body would come slapping down to the ground, exhausted by the effort. He was going nowhere and finally I scooped him up, together with the leaves he was on, and put him into the front of my jumper, which I’d shaped into a pouch. Holding the jumper with both hands, I ran back to the house to show my father.
Just as I got to his study door I stopped, so entranced was I to see that the creature was rearing up at me in a display, stretching itself to its full five inches and waving its legs, dancing in a sudden fit of writhing energy. Then, even as I stared at it—you’re going to have to believe me—I began to see bulbous warts rising up along the length of its back, swelling and bubbling like thick boiling treacle, and within a minute I counted eight. Then the warts began to seep.
I’ve never been more afraid, before or since, and I was still riveted to the spot, holding my jumper stretched out in front of me, when Clive came out of his study. He saw me staring down, my face pale with horror, as if I were watching my insides spill out of my stomach. He peered over me. “Where did you find him?” he asked, neither alarmed by its appearance nor delighted.
“Underneath the lilac,” I whispered, not taking my eyes off it lest the revolting creature start to shimmy up my jumper. Clive straightened and, rather than help by taking the damn thing off me, he started into one of his lectures.
“It’s a Privet Hawk-moth caterpillar,” he said. “They also like lilac. And ash. It wants to pupate and that’s why you found it on the ground, rather than on the bush—”
“No, it’s not,” I interrupted sternly, astonished that an expert like Clive was unable to see the difference. “I’ve seen lots of Privet Hawks,” I said, stretching my jumper to get it as far away as possible. Clive had even bred some in the attic last year. “And they’re green with purple, white and yellow stripes,” I said, “not blotches. And they’re smooth, not lumpy.”
“Well, that’s why this one’s so interesting,” he said as, at last, he gently retrieved it from my jumper in a silver serving spoon. “He’s shivering, he’s sweating, and look”—Clive unfixed a needle from where he kept it in his lapel and pointed with it at some slime by the creature’s anus—“he’s got diarrhea,” he said, smiling at me. He took it into his study and I hoped he might throw it in the fire, but instead he returned a moment later, carrying it in a biscuit tin lined with moss and covered with glass. He sat me on the stairs outside his study and put the tin on my lap so I could watch the caterpillar through the glass.
“If you want to see something interesting, don’t take your eyes off it,” he instructed.
I sat on the stairs outside Clive’s office with the tin on my lap, entranced for the next two hours. The caterpillar gradually darkened and soon I watched it spontaneously rip itself apart, starting behind its head and continuing to split itself open, right down between its eyes, the skin on both sides falling away to reveal the shiny mahogany pupa underneath. As the skin continued to fall off, pairs of legs, a moment ago walking, became instantly inanimate, hanging down limply, a discarded costume. There was nothing unusual about that—I’d seen caterpillars pupate many times before—but it was midway through when I began to see something new. The caterpillar’s shiny new underskin started to burst all over in tiny little uprisings, one at a time, a gash here, a gash there, and then all over, and out of the holes popped the writhing, tapered heads of a totally different creature’s larvae, tiny translucent maggots hungrily eating their way out of the caterpillar, devouring the body alive, from within. I continued to watch, transfixed by the most sordid feast you could imagine, as these small larvae not only gorged themselves on caterpillar but also ferociously cannibalized one another whenever they met.
Before long those larvae, in turn, had pupated and the biscuit tin was swarming with flies under the glass, the huge body of the once Privet Hawk caterpillar half devoured by the flies’ forgotten forebears. Later Clive told me they were ichneumon flies, that their mother had stabbed the skin of the caterpillar and laid her eggs within it, so that when they hatched they wouldn’t be short of food. The caterpillar had become a living hamper.
Well, that momentous event at six years old thrilled and disgusted me so much that I have been fascinated by these creatures ever since. The moths didn’t interest Vivi so it was always me, rather than her, who volunteered to help Clive during the busiest times of the year and it was me, rather than Vivi, who followed him into the profession. Clive often told me that I’d make a great lepidopterist. “It’s in your veins,” he would say. “Nobody can take that away from you.”
It turned out he was right. But it wasn’t until a few years later, at Maud’s annual harvest drinks party, that I understood it was my vocation. I’ve always been taciturn and have never liked parties, so Maud, as usual, set me up offering people nuts from a tall glass dish and there I was, satelliting the room, hoping to be ignored. Even then I found eye contact with anyone outside of my family almost unbearable so, as I stuck out the dish for each little group of guests, I stared at the hands coming in to appropriate the nuts as if I was monitoring their takings.
