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.”
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 precious, 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.