Eleanor and Deborah live two doors from us. Deborah is my age and Eleanor two years older. They look like twins even though Eleanor is fair and Deborah dark; they are of the same height and build, Deborah being that little bit tall and Eleanor short for their respective ages. They love visiting the ‘butterfly house’, as they call it; it’s the only thing that can compete with their dolls for their attention. I am proud to show it to them, along with my father at his best: interested and interesting, kind and attentive, patient and tolerant in a way that Mama and I rarely witness. Mama is so anxious about saying the wrong thing – of confusing insect orders and butterfly species with families, of muddling larvae and caterpillars with pupae and chrysalises – that she no longer visits the pavilion.
Papa drops to his knees in an eerily precise visual echo of Uncle James’ genuflections and places his arms caringly around Eleanor’s and Deborah’s shoulders, their three pairs of eyes immediately level with the two rows of wooden-framed breeding cages, flower pot cages and flower pots that run the length of the greenhouse on trestle tables. Above them, black netting cylindrical cages hang along the middle of the greenhouse. Butterfly nets and bait traps, collecting boxes, tubes and other types of container, an assortment of magnifying lenses in their steel and brass swivelling cases, store boxes and display cases, killing jars and setting boards are ordered tidily in the shed end, in which garden tools are consigned to the one, dark corner. An old bathroom cabinet, long relegated from the house, contains boxes of pins, field reference books and bottles of ethyl acetate, isopropyl alcohol, ethylene glycol, relaxing fluid and wing repair cement. The door that permits access to the shed from the conservatory is kept open by one leg of a pine armchair that belongs to the set in the kitchen and that Papa sits on when consulting his books or admiring his butterflies or – on those occasions when I mistakenly stray to the far end of the garden, emulating Mama, poorly – bouncing me up and down on a lean lap in an activity that, I am certain, gives him more pleasure than it does me.
Still squatting, Papa directs Eleanor’s and Deborah’s attention to a flowerpot cage crowded with pale pink flowers on slender, upright stems that shove against the fine nylon netting that forms the cage.
‘Look closely,’ he says. ‘Can you see?’ He has in one hand the storkbill forceps with which he handles larvae and he uses them to point to tiny orange and grey orange-tip eggs and the pale green, near-translucent orange-tip larvae, no longer than a fingernail, on the stalks of the cuckooflower. Deborah is momentarily distracted from looking closely by the conjoined end of the forceps that Papa, trembling in his enthusiasm, waves close to her eye. Eleanor, though, is transfixed and leans forward so that her fair hair escapes from behind her shoulders and so that, for her better to see, Papa must raise his hand from the small of her back and with one hooked finger lift her lock of hair from her field of vision and tuck it behind her ear. He lowers his hand and, cupping her bottom, heedful that she not stumble and fall, continues, ‘See? See these caterpillars?’ He indulges my friends by using the more familiar terminology, as he does me by sticking to butterflies’ English names, as his father did with him. ‘These caterpillars came from eggs just like that, and do you know what the first thing they did was when they hatched? They ate the eggs they hatched from.’
Neither Eleanor nor Deborah appear impressed by this, but lift the dolls they carry in each hand so that they too can observe the eggs and caterpillars. ‘Then they eat and eat and eat until they’re about’ – and, here, Papa places the forceps on the trestle table and holds his thumb and forefinger apart as far as he can – ‘about this long and then’ – and, here, he stands and looks about him and leads my friends by the hand to a wooden-framed breeding cage in which, I know, painted lady pupae, inch-long knobbly brown sacs, hang from nettle and thistle stalks – ‘and then they will form a chrysalis much like this! And then,’ says Papa, raising his voice, fearing he’ll lose Eleanor’s and Deborah’s attention in front of the plain, unattractive contents of this particularly dull breeding cage, ‘and then, these, these chrysalises turn into butterflies!’ Papa waves his arms to take in his pavilion, the butterflies in the hanging cages and those without who beat their wings against the bigger glass cage until they either make their escape by means of the roof or side vents or door or fall exhausted to join their predecessors on the beaten earth greenhouse floor. ‘Look,’ he says. ‘Just put your hands out. Let’s see if you can get a butterfly to land on your hand.’
‘I don’t want to,’ says Deborah, both hands and clutched dolls behind her back while she shuffles butterfly corpses with one sandaled foot.
Papa drops to one knee and encircles Eleanor’s waist with one arm while, with his free hand, he holds her arm outstretched, the palm of her open hand up, having forfeited one of her dolls to him. ‘This one’s a large white,’ he says, indicating a mainly white-winged butterfly with black markings that flutters close and then far and, pointing to a pale yellow one that alights on the outer side of a near hanging cage, ‘and this one’s a brimstone.’
But the butterflies appear uninterested, much as bored and unco-operative zoo and circus animals sometimes do, and drift languidly on light breezes that carry them either out of the greenhouse and away, or to the bowls of rotting fruit and vegetable peelings my father leaves out for them to feed on and that fill the greenhouse with a sickly sweet and heady odour. Eleanor lowers her unrewarded hand and what small hold my father had on the girls is lost, but he doesn’t give up without a last try. ‘Look! Look here!’ he cries breathlessly, and his excitement sounds genuine, even to me. ‘This one’s a red admiral and – look! – he’s feeding!’ We peer closely at a dish of rotting rhubarb and other food waste and watch the brown-, orange- and black-winged butterfly unfurl and furl his proboscis in search of sugar. The proboscis resembles an obscene, inverse beckoning finger that summons us closer, closer, until our heads touch. The heat of the greenhouse, the butterfly’s sinister probing procedure and the cloying, fetid smell of the fermenting sugars become all too much.
‘Yuk!’ exclaims Deborah, standing and shaking her head as though to clear it.
We all stand too.
‘Let’s go and play with our dolls!’ suggests Eleanor, and Deborah and I follow her, running into the garden, leaving Papa alone in his pavilion with one of Eleanor’s dolls, looking after us with longing, absent-mindedly brushing the doll’s hair and pleating its skirt with his fingers.