Papa considered it necessary to say sternly to me of Cosmo, though whether in jest or all seriousness I couldn’t tell, ‘He’s not a doll, you know.’ Of course I knew that. Dolls’ eyes are dead while Cosmo’s were alive with love, laughter and mischief, blue moons to his grandfather’s dead stars in the photograph on the mantelpiece, with pupils like dark pools that exerted a pull on me as I cooed and cuddled him; it was so much more amusing for me to play with him than with my unresponsive, spiritless pretend people. True, I enjoyed lying Cosmo on our deep kitchen sofa and lining my dolls up on either side of him in order of size and addressing him as though he were one of them, or them as though they were many of him, but Cosmo knew that it was just a game of make-believe, as did Mama whose sloshes and plashes at the kitchen sink composed an alto accompaniment to the treble of Cosmo’s gurgles of pleasure. In a matter of months, Cosmo ascended the doll hierarchy to become larger than them all, by which time he had inserted all their toes and fingers into his mouth as well as his own and whatever else he could lay his pudgy clutches on. After Cosmo had achieved his first roll, Mama, for fear that he would roll off the sofa, took to placing him on a play mat on the kitchen rug where Eleanor, Deborah and I would lie on our backs too and amuse him, Mama and ourselves by imitating him – toe-sucking, giggles, goo noises and all.
Eleanor and Deborah were besotted with Cosmo and would look on in envy as he burbled and squealed with joy when I held his hand and traced my finger around his palm before running it up his arm and tickling him, reciting, ‘Around and around the garden, like a teddy bear. One step, two steps and a tickly under there!’ They would shriek louder than Cosmo in request for their turn to tickle him, and would beg their mother for a baby boy of their own.
‘Fat chance,’ would say Mrs Baldock, sitting on a kitchen chair by the back door so she could blow her cigarette smoke outside; and she and Mama would exchange looks and then Mama and I would look down at Cosmo with pride.
I looked on in controlled jealousy as Mama fed Cosmo her breasts, first one and then the other, marvelling at the extent to which they had grown in motherhood. Cosmo ate my mother with a ferocity that would have been frightening had it not been so comic. I never heard him cry other than to summon food or to signal that his nappy needed changing; his cries were more informative than plaintive, expressive of an inclination to communicate rather than complain.
I wondered, did Cosmo have a butterfly in him too? I pressed my ear to his chest to hear a flutter behind the heartbeat, and Mama had to help me prise his fisted fingers from my hair. I looked as closely in his mouth as he’d allow without his sucking the tip of my nose, and saw only the snowy white crests of the milk teeth that lined the ridges of his gums. I peered into his eyes but could only see the adoration that he had for me and, reflected in them, that I had for him.
My butterfly fascinated me. Its species was a mystery to me. Its reflections eluded me; no mirror, no pond reflected it and so I couldn’t see myself, my colouring, my wing shape. I was a clumsy flier, unable to master my wingbeats to fight drafts of air and to hover. I couldn’t quite make it – or her or me – appear at will but could become it when I sought an escape of sorts, when Papa visited me at night on those rare occasions that he could now that Mama was home all the time, or when older, bigger pupils at my school bullied me for no reason other than because they were older and bigger, or when my peer group at school teased me because my breasts had begun to show before theirs. Sticks and stones can break my bones but words will never hurt me. When I was a butterfly, no one could touch me.
In the space of a couple of years, all our relatives had come to see ‘the new baby’ with the exception of Papa’s parents whom, it occurred to me, I never saw once outside the boundaries of their vicarage and garden. We drove Cosmo to them in a second-hand car that Papa had acquired and that served as the excuse for his torrid temper, on account of the fact that he had overpaid for it.
My grandfather cast his grandson a cursory look without so much as inclining his head to better see him and said to me, ‘Golly, you’ve grown.’ His face expressed no surprise but bore a smirk directed at my father, as though in search of plaudits for having so knowingly pronounced a platitude. This was typical of the conversations my father had with his father – exchanges, of a sort, in which all critical information lay between the lines, in which so much was left unsaid; communication comprised of hidden semaphore that only the male members of the family were privy to.
By contrast, like a negative to its print, my mother and her mother-in-law had, whether wilfully or otherwise, a dance in which their eyes never met for fear of what they might reveal; instead, they spoke in code of children, weather, tea and cakes. My grandmother, as usual failing to meet my eyes, said to me, ‘Bless you, my child,’ and of Cosmo, ‘Well, he certainly looks like you,’ but never made it clear whom she was addressing.
My grandparents’ was a house of animate human cadavers and of inanimate lepidopteral ones, a house in which there were always gauntlets of butterfly corpses to be run, in which the temperature was always lower in than out, a house of secrets and of unspoken pain, of clenched buttocks and gritted teeth. It was to me, on that visit, as though the pinned butterflies in the display cases that lined the internal, chill walls of the house had been ripped from former and future generations of Bicourts, and as though my grandfather, despite himself and in spite of his occupation, lived his life in denial of our being so much more than our physical forms.
We sat in the conservatory on rattan furniture and sun-faded cushions, each partially obscured from the others by the fronds of potted palms and other plants. I sipped a sour lemonade grown warm while the grown-ups toyed with fine china cups of milky tea gone cold. Cosmo slept on Mama’s lap. I cradled his feet in my hands.
‘Don’t we all have a soul, Grandpa?’ I asked my grandfather, turning from Cosmo to him abruptly.
‘Of course,’ he replied, surprised a little at my addressing him so directly. Regaining his composure, he went on, ‘And of course you know that the ancient Greek word for the soul and for a butterfly are the same, don’t you?’
‘No!’ I was delighted by this, having not wanted to say soul, but having feared being misunderstood if I had said butterfly. ‘And do you inhabit your soul in the same way that you inhabit your body?’
‘It’s psyche,’ said Papa, smiling around him at us.
‘I’m glad to see you taking an interest in matters spiritual,’ said Grandpa wryly to me.
‘Surely, it’s the soul that inhabits the body,’ suggested Papa.
‘So, really, you are your soul. Your soul is you,’ I thought to add helpfully.
‘Well, I think so,’ replied Grandpa.
‘So, if someone hurts you, hits you, then they’re not really hurting you, they’re not wanting to hurt you at all, just your body?’
‘What a strange girl,’ observed Grandpa.
‘Strange?’ said Mama defensively, more loudly than she had intended, and Cosmo started in his sleep.
I felt indignant at not being taken seriously. ‘What I mean is, are we two or are we one?’
‘An interesting question,’ noted Grandpa, appearing a little perplexed.
‘Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Matthew, chapter 10, verse 28,’ offered Papa, placatory and pompous.
‘You shall love the Lord your father with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind,’ countered Grandpapa. ‘Matthew, chapter 22, verse –’
‘Thirty-seven. Yes, I know, I know,’ interrupted Papa quickly, as though already regretting what he had started. ‘And it’s God, not father.’
I could feel Cosmo’s pulse on the inner side of the ankle, a determined rise and fall below two of my fingers, an affirmation of the body while the mind slept, and I thought to try again. ‘So does that mean that the mind is different from the soul and that we have not just bodies and minds but souls too? And if, as we said earlier, we are our souls, then – oh, I find it so confusing! Does our mind die with our body?’
‘Really!’ exclaimed Grandpapa.
‘What I mean is,’ I said, in an attempt at clarification, ‘are we mind or body? Or…’ – as an afterthought – ‘mind and body? Are we two or are we one?’
‘I suppose this is all your doing,’ said my grandfather to my father resignedly. ‘This is what happens when a theologian has a son who considers himself a philosopher.’ He snorted the last word.
My grandmother, unmoving, hands on her lap and eyes staring into the garden’s middle distance, said, so quietly so that I was unsure whether she was talking to us or to herself, ‘The son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father, nor the father suffer for the iniquity of the son. Ezekiel, chapter 18, verse 20.’
My father and grandfather bowed their heads in consideration of this command-turned-aphorism for a moment until my father rose, slowly, pushed a leafy branch aside and stepped out of the conservatory and into the garden where he went for a turn, hands behind his back, stopping occasionally to admire a flower or to reflect. My grandfather followed him out and the two of them ambled along their respective paths, never together and never crossing the other, not once exchanging a word, my grandfather watching my father all the time and my father never once meeting his father’s gaze.
The telephone rang. Mama answered it. It was Oma. Opa was in hospital. Mama had to leave for Paderborn at once.
Mama replaced the telephone in its cradle and stood by it, looking around the kitchen with unseeing eyes at Papa, at me, at Cosmo who, exulting in being allowed in the garden in poor weather on condition he were appropriately dressed, had just run in from it, his galoshes’ muddy footsteps following him in, like a trail of clues that led conclusively to a criminal. He stood beneath his yellow, sopping sou’wester that doubled as a sun hat in the summer and in its matching slicker from which rainwater dripped onto the kitchen floor, twigs in one muddy hand and half an old doll in the other, and showed surprise if not disappointment at not having received his usual reprimand.
‘Of course, you have to go,’ said Papa.
‘Of course,’ said Mama, looking sick.
‘Don’t worry about them,’ said Papa. ‘Don’t worry about us,’ he added with forced jollity. ‘We’ll be all right, won’t we?’
Cosmo burbled in reply and presented Mama with the muddy, mutilated doll, which she received distastefully with her fingertips. Cosmo’s burbles troubled Mama; she was increasingly concerned about his inability to articulate basic words – to produce little, vocally, besides pops and whistles. His vocabulary wasn’t simply behind that of an average two year old; it was non-existent. And yet he had walked before the age of one and demonstrated the understanding of a four year old when Mama had had him seen by a speech and language therapist. She dropped the plastic torso in the kitchen sink, ran water over it and washed her hands. Having dried them, she leant back against the sink and, in an unthinking gesture that I had last seen nearly three years ago, placed one hand above and the other below her slightly swelling belly. I understood then that she was pregnant again and impulsively went to her and hugged her – her and my foetal sibling.
‘You’ll be all right to fly,’ said Papa to Mama.
‘I’m sorry your opa isn’t well,’ said Mama to me, running her lemon soap-smelling hands through my hair, stopping to work her fingers gently through its knots.
She flew to Germany the following day, after she had made arrangements for Cosmo and me to spend two days and nights with Mrs Baldock.
‘That’s not necessary,’ Papa had objected.
‘If you’re too busy to come to my dying father’s bedside, you’re too busy to have the children under your feet,’ she had replied.
Mrs Baldock spoilt Cosmo and me while Eleanor and Deborah spoilt Cosmo, competing, to his evident glee and pleasure, to dress, feed, play with and generally fuss over him to the point that Mrs Baldock exclaimed, ‘For God’s sake, girls! There happens to be a real person inside there! He’s not a toy!’
‘You should come more often!’ cried Eleanor at dinner. ‘We don’t usually get apple crumble on weekdays!’
‘And cake for tea!’ added Deborah.
When Mrs Baldock escorted Cosmo and me home on the third day of my mother’s absence, she stopped by the front garden gate; from where she said to Papa, who stood by our open front door, ‘So, how is she? Is she back yet?’
‘Soon. Soon,’ said Papa, crouching low to pick his son up by the armpits.
The Oxford don and the hippy eyed each other with a profound antipathy.
‘But you are expecting Brigitte back today, this evening?’ asked the hippy.
‘Oh yes, this evening. Bridget should be home this evening,’ replied the don, the father, the philosopher, the man who held me by the hand and who itched – I could sense it – to be rid of the hippy and to be with his children.
‘Well, goodbye, kids,’ said Mrs Baldock reluctantly.
‘Say goodbye and thank you,’ instructed Papa.
‘Goodbye, Mrs Baldock, and thank you very much,’ I said.
‘Goo,’ said Cosmo, waving.
Mama called in the late afternoon. She was still in Paderborn. Opa was not expected to last the night. She spoke to us in turn, Papa appropriately sympathetic, Cosmo marvelling at his mother’s voice emanating from a Bakelite handset that he gripped with both hands until I took it gently from him, me unable to concentrate on what she was saying, uncertain whether I felt sorry more for my mother for the loss of a father, or for myself for the loss of a grandfather – or for Cosmo and me for the absence of our mother. I handed the telephone back to Papa who concluded the call with, ‘No. Of course not. Not at all. It’s quite all right. Absolutely not. I’m quite capable of looking after my own children.’ I heard him say the same to Mrs Baldock when she knocked on our door ten minutes later, adding, ‘We really can’t exploit your extensive kindness any further,’ and then, as if capitulating, ‘Well, if you really don’t mind, if Bridget decides to stay on after the funeral – I may have to be out of town for a conference so I’ll bring them to you then.’
That early evening, Papa busied himself with some excitement for the arrivals of Professor Rennet and Drs Dearman and Faben. He tidied his desk and drew the study curtains tight and allowed Cosmo and me to set glasses and beer bottles out on trays and to pour crisps into bowls, withholding any protest when Cosmo ate more crisps than he decanted from the large paper bags they came in, and thrilling him by blowing the bags up and popping them with a slap of his hand. While Papa built the fire, I changed Cosmo into his pyjamas and changed into my nightie, accepting Papa’s rationale that, as I would no longer need to change, I could stay up later than if I remained dressed. The introduction of Cosmo to Papa’s gatherings elevated my status somewhat. An old hand, I bossed my younger brother about to the extent that I could. He and I straightened the oriental rug and the smaller hearth rug and shook the embroidered cushions on the two wicker chairs by the desk, Cosmo copying my every move as precisely as a mirror image. Papa cleared the mantelpiece of mail, keys, rubber bands and other deposits. From his armchair in his garden, Grandpapa admired our work with satisfaction, leaning forward as though hoping to peer round the corner of the picture frame that held him or anticipating a play that was moments from beginning. Henry Moore’s king and queen looked on impassively. Just-married Mama and Papa looked into the future with hope, although not necessarily for the same things. Having lit the fire, Papa placed the fireguard in front of it. Cosmo stood by it, mesmerised by the kindling flames that licked the larger logs. I twirled in my nightie, fanning the fire. The doorbell rang.
Professor Rennet and Dr Faben squeezed into the study one after the other, the latter saying, ‘Hello, hello, who do we have here?’ as he considered Cosmo and me through his thick, black-framed spectacles that almost met his moustache on either side of his nostrils, and the former pulling at his goatee with one hand and at his waistcoat with the other. Cosmo, having absorbed my instruction to offer the crisps rather than eat them, stepped forward, a full bowl in each hand.
To this, Dr Faben said, ‘Hold on! Give a fellow a chance to sit down!’
Professor Rennet, seeing the disappointment in Cosmo’s eyes, helped himself to a crisp, saying, ‘Thank you very much, young man!’ He adopted his usual station by the fireplace only to find that, the fire lit, he had to move to one end of it, much to the satisfaction of Grandpapa whose view, from the photograph, would remain unimpeded.
The second peel of the doorbell announced the arrivals of Dr Dearman and, much to my surprise and Cosmo’s delight, a girl who, although a little shorter and thinner than me, looked to be about my age, and who was introduced to us as Dr Dearman’s niece Kimberley. There were similarities between the two of them but where he was bullish, she was bovine; where he seemed sinister, she appeared benevolent, coming across as simple and pliant, as though never having possessed an intense emotion or a will of her own. Dr Dearman helped her out of a coat that was too big to be hers beneath which she, too, wore a nightie. She wore not shoes but slippers that she removed and placed by the bookcase where she stood, quite nonchalantly – composed despite her unfamiliar surroundings, registering nothing when Cosmo went to her and held her hand. He offered her a crisp that she accepted with neither reluctance nor enthusiasm, and then another that she also took with equanimity. For a moment, the only sounds were of Kimberley crunching crisps and the crackle of the fire, and then the grown-ups all talked at once.
‘Very nice,’ observed Professor Rennet, pince-nez in hand. ‘Very nice.’
‘I hope you two will be good friends,’ said Dr Dearman to Kimberley and me.
‘A man could die of thirst here!’ exclaimed Dr Faben exaggeratedly.
‘Say hello to Dr Dearman, Cosmo,’ said Papa.
Cosmo lifted his hands to Dr Dearman’s belt buckle that sparkled in the light of the fire.
‘Steady on,’ said Dr Dearman, pulling back and grinning sheepishly around the room.
‘Only continental Europeans wear belts with suits,’ stated Professor Rennet.
‘Continental Europeans and Dr Dearman,’ corrected Dr Faben and then, addressing me, ‘What about our drinks, young lady?’
‘Drinks!’ cried Papa, clapping his hands.
I filled four glasses on the tray on Papa’s desk and handed them around to the grown-ups.
‘Have one yourself,’ said Dr Faben pleasantly to me, an eye on my father.
‘Me? No!’ I looked at Papa too. Sometimes, his friends were very funny.
Papa, standing with his legs crossed and a drink in one hand while supporting himself with the other on the mantelpiece, was the epitome of nonchalance. He raised his eyebrows and shrugged. ‘Why not? Just once in a while won’t hurt.’
I couldn’t believe my ears.
Cosmo had followed Papa’s and my exchange with interest.
‘Go on. Have a sip,’ encouraged Papa.
‘Kimberley will have one. Won’t you, Kimberley?’ Dr Dearman sought corroboration.
Kimberley nodded. She had yet to speak. I found myself wondering what she would sound like.
‘Here,’ said Papa covering the hearthrug in two strides and holding his glass to my lips. ‘Have a sip of mine.’
Papa’s beer tasted warm, flat, bitter, dull, belying the first, faint fragrance of fruits and sweet vegetal matter I’d smelt when he’d held his glass below my nose.
‘What do you think?’ enquired Papa.
I reached for another sip.
‘Right,’ said Papa definitively, decanting a bottle of the pale brown liquid into the remaining glasses on the tray and handing the fuller ones to Kimberley and me and the third to Cosmo. ‘Cheers!’
‘Cheers!’
‘Gee!’
‘Down the hatch!’
‘Down in one!’
‘Let’s have another!’
Papa’s study grew hot. Cosmo amused us by spinning around wildly and laughing grotesquely before bursting into tears; at times his inability to communicate became impossibly frustrating for him. Dr Faben held his arms out to him and, to my astonishment, Cosmo went to them and crawled into the space on the sofa between the two doctors, where he appeared to fall into fitful sleep, his face in Dr Faben’s lap, his bottom and legs on Dr Dearman’s. I observed that Kimberley swayed in time to a music only she was hearing, until it occurred to me that I was swaying or, perhaps, that we both were, the realisation that the one didn’t preclude the other tipping me into a fit of giggles. The fire demanded my attention, it dictated my moves and thoughts, it was the conductor, Papa’s study the stage and we the instruments. There was a universal symmetry that I was a part of, reflected in Papa’s study either side of the sun in the grate: the picture frames at the two ends of the mantelpiece, the two men – Papa and Professor Rennet – at either end of the mantelpiece in identical postures; the two high, wingback chairs in front of which Kimberley and I stood barefoot and in nighties; Drs Faben and Dearman reclining deep in the sofa’s remote corners, a blowing and grunting, tossing and turning Cosmo between them completing the circle. Above them, Papa’s butterflies in their hundreds fluttered their wings in the flickering firelight as though in warning or to escape their glass cages. Grandpapa sat forward in his wicker chair in the garden in the photograph, looking on intently, approvingly. In the light cast by the agitating fire, the clouds behind Moore’s king and queen ran across their sky. I found everything portentous one minute and uproariously comical the next, especially Papa’s adding more logs to the already roaring, well-stoked fire, without being able to put my finger on why exactly.
‘What are you trying to do? Roast us?’ asked Professor Rennet rhetorically; intending to mop his brow with his handkerchief, he had dislodged his pince-nez that, hitting the fireguard, had fallen the right side of it and onto the hearthrug – to his evident relief.
Dr Faben moaned. The heat must have got to him. He rested a hand on Cosmo’s head; his eyes were shut, his head lolling to one side.
‘It is indeed hot,’ stated Dr Dearman, patting Cosmo’s bottom through his fine cotton pyjamas.
‘I know – why don’t we take our jackets off?’ suggested Professor Rennet.
‘That’s a good idea, but what about those of us who don’t have jackets to remove?’ asked Dr Dearman, looking around him.
‘It might be fairer if we each remove one item of clothing,’ conceded Professor Rennet.
‘I’m afraid it is indeed very hot,’ said Papa apologetically. ‘And when it’s hot, one must drink.’ He filled Kimberley’s and my glasses for the third time and encouraged us with, ‘Drink it down! Drink it down!’
Dr Dearman leant forward and held up a stubby finger, as though struck by a thought, and looked from Kimberley to me. ‘But, hold on a moment, if we remove our jackets, what will you remove?’
I handed my empty glass back to Papa and exclaimed, ‘But we’ve only got our nighties on!’ Really, Dr Dearman was so funny! The entire room balanced on the tip of his finger. The floor of the room rocked. Its walls wobbled. By fixing my eyes on the upheld finger and sitting on the wicker chair nearest me, I could keep myself from falling.
‘Well, off they go,’ dictated Dr Dearman, extricating himself from Cosmo’s legs, the depths of the sofa and, finally, his jacket.
‘Off it goes,’ concurred Professor Rennet, removing his jacket and hanging it over the back of Papa’s desk chair.
Papa removed his jacket wordlessly, looking at me complicitly as though to say, What a lark!
‘And you two!’ exclaimed Dr Dearman, in what I considered mock seriousness. ‘Play the game! Maintain your end of the bargain!’
Kimberley crossed her arms and leant forward to catch her nightie by its hem. She pulled it off slowly and gracefully, naturally. She stood still, held it in her hand a moment and let it fall by her side in a pastel puddle of cotton on the Oriental rug. Her shoulder-length hair rested on her shoulders, just. Her fringe courted her eyelashes. The firelight that played on her slender form lent her the illusion of movement. Our admiring looks clothed her naked form in adoration and approbation. I felt it imperative that I join her and stood and divested myself of my nightie too, though with less dignity and more haste, reluctant as I was to not be excluded from this wonderful game for a moment longer than I could help.
Papa clapped his hands again. ‘More drinks!’
Dr Dearman looked at Cosmo by his side and said, ‘Poor Cosmo. It’s so unfair. He still has his pyjamas on.’
Dr Faben’s eyes swam in his glasses. He pushed them up, off the wart on which they had rested, and searched in his pocket for a handkerchief that he used to wipe the spittle Cosmo had deposited in his sleep, and then his own mouth and moustache.
‘Down in one,’ commanded Papa to Kimberley and me.
The beer was warmer now than at the first time of my drinking it, and headier.
‘Now dance,’ said Professor Rennet who had removed his waistcoat as well as his jacket and loosened his tie.
Papa’s study floor rocked like the deck of a ship in a squall, the Oriental rug rising and receding like a fine, frothy wave. Kimberley’s and my shadows cast by the fire raced up the butterfly-festooned walls and onto the ceiling and back. And up again and back, to and fro, up and down. Professor Rennet clapped his hands. Dr Dearman sang a ditty. Papa looked on, a grin fixed above his hand-cupped chin. Dr Faben helped Cosmo out of his pyjamas and to his feet. Cosmo stood, a little unsteady, and swayed and waved his arms in imitation of Kimberley and me. I, too, was copying Kimberley, unsure of the extent to which I was succeeding in actually dancing like her as opposed to just staying on my feet and not keeling over. The room shrank in the heat. Dr Dearman’s teeth and Dr Faben’s moustache grew larger. Dr Dearman’s breath was warm and smelled of salt and vinegar and cheese and onion crisps; Dr Faben’s of beer and cigarettes. Their tongues, rasping and wet, tickled me where they touched me and their fingers and palms, clammy but firm, supported me when I risked falling. The shudder and slip of Dr Dearman’s teeth on my skin and the cooling of his saliva trail on my legs gave me goose bumps. I wanted to divest myself of my surface membrane like a worm casts its cuticle, to climb out of myself like a butterfly out of its chrysalis. Papa and Professor Rennet assisted Kimberley, attentively, closely, lovingly. Cosmo fell asleep where he had slumped, curled like a cocoon with his head on the Oriental rug and his back against the sofa. I found myself on the rug, too, my arm reaching to pat his. Dr Faben’s ministrations as he moved from the small to the top of my back were those of a cleaning lady, the broom of his moustache preceding the mop of his mouth. Somewhere near my left ear, I could hear the professor panting. I noted the soles of Kimberley’s feet in the firelight and the tips of her toes aligned with the sweetness and perfection of ducklings behind their mother. I wished Dr Dearman would keep his fingers still. He rolled me over. He had reverted to his larval stage and was using his fingers like prolegs and true legs, feeling and fiddling, prodding and probing, pushing and shoving. Momentarily, I thought we were in Papa’s butterfly pavilion, the flicker of the fire’s flames lending the pinned butterflies on the study wall the illusion of flutter and flight. The caterpillars chomped and chewed, bumped and butted. The caterpillars are hungry tonight. The butterflies had disrobed and displayed their proboscises with a hungry bravura. Kiss the proboscis. Kiss, kiss, kiss, push, push, push. We were playing caterpillars and butterflies but, this time, I was being consumed at both ends simultaneously and my butterfly’s route out was blocked and I panicked and gagged and bit and spat and my butterfly finally flew. Dr Faben remonstrated. I rested on the fireguard where I dried my wings for a moment, my wings’ shadows on the ceiling above me on the rug pulsing like angels’ wings and then becoming smaller when I drifted up on the fire’s hot air, across the glass cages of my fellow, imprisoned Lepidoptera, across the spines of Papa’s many books until they, my wings and their shadows, met, up against the distant ceiling.
I flew up and out, up above the city that throbbed with the heartbeats of its inhabitants, that resonated with the steady drum of their footsteps, the city that, sonorously, below it all, as though deep underground, vibrated with its own life-supporting and -enhancing pulse. Concert halls, pubs and cinemas were emptying. Heartbeats and footsteps, laughter and chatter, bus and car engines formed the city’s constant hum. People were walking and cycling, talking and listening, joking and arguing, pushing and shoving, slipping and slapping, juddering and blowing, panting and ceasing. People and caterpillars finished their dinners. Men dressed in the warm light of a dying fire and children were bathed and put to bed. It’s better to give than it is to receive. Somewhere, far below me now, I had made a gift of myself to Papa and his friends. No, not of myself, but of my body. Take, eat; this is my body, which is given for you. You can touch my body but you can’t touch me. I was out of reach. I couldn’t be bought with warm beer, crisps and late nights. One day, I would want my body back. I fluttered high above the Brüderkrankenhaus St. Josef Paderborn where Opa was leaving his, vacating his body with elegance and humility, where red-eyed Mama and Oma, heads bowed and seated either side of a grey-painted hospital bed, each held one of Opa’s hands, Paderborn’s drumming heart the undercurrent to Mama’s sporadic sobs and Oma’s ardent weeping.
And then, three months going by in a flutter of sorties. Months in which I lived more as a butterfly than as a schoolgirl, daughter and sister, given Mama’s long absences in Germany where, despite her pregnancy and her neglected children’s vulnerability to their predatory father, she assisted Oma in the immediate aftermath of the loss of her husband.
And then one more month, the sixth of her pregnancy, at the end of which I was flying above Horton General Hospital and looking down upon two mortuary attendants who contemplated Mama’s swollen body in silence. They pulled back the sheet it lay under to reveal its blotched purple necklace and its swollen pale blue lips. I alighted and gave my mother’s lips one last kiss. I wept butterfly tears then, globules of salt water as big as my eye segments that trickled down my thorax and abdomen before falling as rain on Oxford’s gardens, droplets that weighed me down as they gathered and threatened to take me down with them before they broke and detached from me, after which I rose suddenly; tears that lent to my flying an odd, bobbing, fitful motion. Exhausted, I eventually fell to earth.
To my shame, I resented Mama’s sudden departure, her abandonment of us, as though she were complicit with Papa, and I was fascinated by Oma’s grief that had a terrifying, vicious quality to it, as though she too knew Papa to be the reason behind her daughter’s violent, inexplicable death. Oma offered to take Cosmo and me to Paderborn but Papa, as I would have expected, and the other Bicourts, to my surprise, would have none of it.
‘They’ll be quite all right here,’ said Papa, running his fingers through my hair, raking my scalp and bunching my hair up at the ends so that, holding it in one hand, he could tug it down, raise my head in so doing and, looking down into my eyes, ask me for confirmation. ‘Won’t you, Isabella?’ Where others saw a gesture that denoted affection, a play of fondness between father and daughter, I knew it to be shorthand for his molestation and control of me, made all the worse by its public nature. ‘Hasn’t Isabella nice hair?’ he asked the collection of Bicourts before releasing me slowly. I wanted to cut it and even to shave it off in order to spite him but, aware that were I to do so I would effectively be ceding absolute control to Papa in that he would have been the cause of my radical act, I didn’t.
Grandmother was the only one to reply. ‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘just like her father’s when he was a child, until he insisted he had it cut.’ She cast her husband an indifferent glance, by now too weary and jaded to add venom to the look.
There had been a disagreement between Papa and Grandfather about whether or not my grandfather should minister at the funeral service, though whether he wanted to and Papa didn’t or he didn’t and Papa did, I didn’t know. Following Grandmother’s instruction, I had taken tea to them in Papa’s study, where Grandfather had said, ‘Our days are like the grass. We flourish like a flower of the field; when the wind goes over it, it is gone and its place will know it no more.’ Although he had been looking at me, I felt he had been making a point to Papa who had requested, by way of equally obscure reply, that I place the tray on his desk. Grandfather, looking knowingly at Papa, had tapped the family photograph on the mantelpiece with a fingernail.
‘It will be time for you to go soon,’ said Papa to his father, attempting to look at his wristwatch without spilling his tea.
My paternal grandparents gave the impression of having drifted into Mama’s and my sister’s funeral and wake by mistake, and accepted the condolences offered them for the deaths of their daughter-in-law and granddaughter with the requisite melancholy and humility, as though in modest denial of the great affliction the loss was to them. They resembled actors who had stumbled onto the wrong stage but who had the good fortune to know the lines of the play they found themselves in and to have prior knowledge of the extras. Aunts Linda and Mary made sympathetic clucking noises; Aunt Patricia wrung her hands and, when not doing so, kept them clutched around her quite visible pregnancy. Clearly, the nature of Mama’s sudden death was particularly disconcerting for her; she wouldn’t let Uncle Neville from her side for a moment. Uncle James ruffled my hair and kissed my forehead and, leaning that little further, did the same to Cosmo. Such overt demonstrations of affection were unusual in the Bicourt family; reason enough, I sensed, for Uncle James to undertake them. He sat us either side of him during the wake while family, neighbours and Mama’s former friends and colleagues drifted in and out of her room, the kitchen and the garden, and he said, ‘Anything, anything at all,’ and looked as though he might weep at any moment.
‘Ging, ging,’ said Cosmo and jumped down from his chair to follow Deborah to a kitchen table laden with cakes and sandwiches.
‘What is the matter with him?’ asked Uncle James, following Cosmo with his eyes.
‘We don’t know,’ I said. ‘Papa doesn’t seem too concerned. He says that Cosmo will learn to talk when it suits him. When he wants something badly enough.’
‘Does he now?’ asked Uncle James.
‘How are you, Uncle James?’ I wasn’t aping grown-ups. I actually wanted to know. He seemed sad to me, as though wrestling with someone else’s guilt.
Uncle James sat with his elbows on his knees. ‘I used to be a soldier. I learnt to fight.’ He threw a playful punch at me and cocked his thumb in imitation of a pistol. ‘Now all I can do is fight back the tears.’ He hung his head again and, to my surprise, I found myself comforting him, patting him on the back as Mama had patted me.
‘We’re all sad, Uncle James,’ I said.
‘So you’re Uncle James,’ said a husky voice. Mrs Baldock sat down next to him and, as if in afterthought, extended her hand to him. She looked older, dressed all in black. Her style was the same, a caftan, a headpiece that resembled an elegant turban and a necklace of dark, polished wood. ‘I’ve heard a lot about you.’
Uncle James shook her hand and looked from her to me.
‘Well, not all about you. Just that you’re Isabella’s favourite.’ Mrs Baldock spoke loudly, indifferent as to who might hear.
‘Oh, and she’s mine,’ said Uncle James.
‘How many nieces have you got?’
‘Just the one.’
‘That makes it easier, doesn’t it? Have you got a cigarette?’
Uncle James shook one free from a packet, held it to her and lit it for her.
‘You need to eat something, sweetie,’ said Mrs Baldock, blowing smoke in the direction of the tea that had been laid out. ‘Eleanor, take Isabella to get something to eat.’
I felt not a little guilty at the pleasure I felt at the attention I was getting, and placed my hand in Eleanor’s outstretched one. We left Uncle James and Mrs Baldock together and headed to the kitchen. Papa and Grandfather were in the butterfly pavilion now, I could see, though at opposing ends of it. Aunt Patricia and Uncle Neville were seated and going on about the importance of her eating for two to a group of Mama’s former colleagues. Grandmother was overseeing Cosmo picking up the cake he’d dropped from his plate. Aunts Linda and Mary stood arm in arm, exuding an air of anguish, either out of mortification that no one was speaking to them or out of fear that someone might.
Mama was dead and we were having a tea party.
There was no longer any place to hide. Mama’s lap, bosom, apron strings, her embrace, her sweet voice were no longer there. The kitchen, her sitting room, the house were no longer the same. Her posters and paintings had faded. Any illusion that things would turn out all right was no longer possible to maintain. If Mama’s wilful blindness to her husband’s nocturnal transgressions had been a betrayal of her children of sorts, her death was a perfect perfidy, an absolute breach of her children’s trust and of the security, love and comfort Cosmo and I had had every right to expect from her. Resenting her absence as much as missing the one person whose love had been deepest and unconditional was doubly upsetting for me.
I missed Mama most suddenly when my periods began: the time of my metamorphosis from pupa to butterfly, from child to young adult. I had thought I had known what to expect; Eleanor and older girls at school spoke freely about menstruation. But all the same it came as a shock, and I felt the absence of the one person to whom I would have turned for guidance and comfort sorely. My periods rooted me more in my body; I considered them abhorrent and fought futilely against that sentiment. Bloody tendrils, keeping me earthbound. Finding me bleeding, earthy, soiled, my butterfly would stay away in an undesired rebuttal of the physical me, of the woman I had become. But then, so would Papa, Drs Dearman and Feben and Professor Rennet and, realising this, I came to look upon my periods no longer as an affliction to be endured but as a benevolent force field. The men lost interest in me – not just while I had my periods, but in between them too; they had no appetite for a woman.
At a remove, in bed and yet aware of the activities in Papa’s study, I considered that I was failing Cosmo. Not finding his Mama, he had turned to me. Assuming responsibility for what was happening to him was too much for me to bear.
Mrs McKey became Mrs Baldock’s best friend. She was Irish – she sang when she talked. She had long fine hair and elegant, tapered fingers that were either pushing her hair behind her ears or lifting cigarettes to and from her lips. She and Mrs Baldock sat by the kitchen window, smoking, while Deborah and Sarah McKey tackled colouring-in and puzzle books and Cosmo and Sarah’s brother, James, sulked because they had been forbidden from playing football in the rain. They slouched, hands in pockets, by the closed French doors to the patio, Cosmo copying the older James in his posture and attitude.
Mrs Baldock leant forward and laughed. ‘Sarah! Just like Isabella!’
‘What?’ I looked up from my book.
Mrs Baldock addressed Mrs McKey. ‘Isabella always did that. She did that as a very young child. Colouring in outside the lines. Look at your people,’ she said to Sarah. ‘They sort of bleed outside of the contours of their bodies. It’s like they’re emanating something.’
‘It’s like their bodies can’t contain them,’ concurred Mrs McKey, adding, to comfort Sarah and, perhaps, me too, ‘It’s nice. It’s very modern.’ She blew smoke out of the open window. ‘I once had a red coat – bright red – God I loved that coat – and got caught in a thunderstorm some way from the car. By the time I got back to it, I was soaked right through, soaked to my skin. Anyway, we got in, drove home and, when we got out, we saw the colour had run into the upholstery – beige, it was, or cream – and the red had run into it, all over. I had left an almost perfect, scarlet imprint of myself on the passenger seat. Richard was furious.’
‘Richard is never furious,’ stated Mrs Baldock. She put out her cigarette.
‘Well, he couldn’t stay furious for long. He’d bought me the coat. Afterwards he said he liked it. The red smudge that was my shape. He said it was as though I was always with him, wherever he went in the car. The ghost of me.’ She raised her voice. ‘Do you remember the red stain in the car, James?’
‘Yes,’ said James, in a fed-up kind of voice.
‘James and Sarah never liked it. They said it spooked them or some such nonsense.’
‘Car,’ repeated Cosmo.
If I had asked Cosmo and James to play with Eleanor’s and Deborah’s dolls, they would have considered my proposal with horror and snorted contemptuously – at least, James would have done so and Cosmo would have copied him. Which isn’t to say that I disliked James; I liked him, particularly for ignoring Cosmo’s speech impediment and for standing by him when other boys teased him about it. The two of them gave me an insight into what older male friendships could be: manly camaraderie in which little conversation was necessary and an understanding was possible despite the lack of a shared spoken vocabulary. I removed a number of dolls from the box they were in and began playing with them on the carpet near where the boys stood, attempting to create, admittedly a little clumsily, a comic domestic scenario.
‘“Let’s play football,” said Daddy doll,’ I said in my gruffest voice.
‘“Okay,” said Jimmy. “Golly, this is a strange ball!”’ I said in a voice pitched just higher than mine. I had only a smaller doll’s head as a ball.
‘“Ouch! Don’t kick me! Kick the ball! Ouch! Do that again and I’ll punish you!”’ I said in the gruffer voice.
I created goal posts as best I could and then Cosmo squatted and, holding a doll in one hand, swung its leg with the other at the severed doll’s head.
‘How dare you kick Daddy!’ said the Daddy doll.
James knelt to play and I ceded the game to him and Cosmo.
Deborah and Sarah stopped colouring and looked on, smiling. The room had quietened as the drumming of the rain on the patio doors had lessened. Mrs Baldock rocked back in her chair and Mrs McKey bunched her long hair in one hand and tossed it over her shoulder. Eleanor appeared in the doorway to the kitchen and said, ‘Hello, everyone.’
Cosmo and James entered their private worlds as I looked on expectantly. Deborah and Sarah resumed colouring. Eleanor gave her mother a hug and stayed still a moment, her arms and dark hair a multi-hued muffler around Mrs Baldock.
‘Oh, my God!’ said Mrs McKey quietly.
‘Oh, my God!’ said Mrs Baldock that little bit louder, the front legs of her chair hitting the kitchen floor with a clack.
Cosmo looked up. He looked at me, seeking reassurance that he had done nothing wrong. He had had the dolls kick the doll’s head around for a while and then adopted another game that may have started as the punishment of one doll by another, before becoming yet another, revealing game in which he, however temporarily, had acquired the exercise of power and control over another – or, at least, its illusion. He had undressed the dolls and, bending the knees of the smaller one, had it kneel before the other, had it bury its head in the other, while he made slobbering and grunting noises. He had then turned and laid the two dolls down, the bigger on the smaller one, pushing and shoving, pushing and shoving.
I cried noiselessly as I met Mrs Baldock’s look: tears of confirmation for her that her fears were true. She stood and went to Cosmo, knelt by him and beckoned me to join them in a hug, the first time I had received such a warm, loving, non-judgemental embrace since Mama’s death. We all cried – each, I presume, for different reasons; Eleanor, Deborah, Sarah and James crying hardest because they did not know why their mothers and I were crying.