Sound of Butterflies, The (2 page)

She turns to help him from the carriage, as if he is an invalid, but he ignores her hand and springs down. He lifts his face to the front of the house, which is part of a long row of tidy two-storey dwellings, and his eyes sweep over the windows and doors, over the trellis that supports the climbing rose. His gaze falls on the window of her bedroom and his Adam’s apple bobs as he swallows. They step through the gate while the driver humps the first of the crates onto his shoulder and follows. Thomas’s hands reach out to the lavender hedge that lines the path to the door; his hand flinches and his fingers curl inwards for a moment before flattening out, becoming bolder. He keeps his hand over the lavender as he walks, and each stalk curves slightly under it, shivering as he passes. When he gets to the end, he grips one flower head and breaks it off. He crushes it between his fingers and brings it to his nose. He closes his eyes as he inhales. Sophie can’t read his expression; perhaps he’s merely reacquainting himself with the smells of England. But there is something violent in the action, and the decapitated lavender stalk looks obscene, like a broken bone.

After directing the driver to Thomas’s study, where he packs the crates into a tight formation in the corner, Sophie pays him and then she is alone with her husband. She deliberately says nothing, waiting for him to fill the silence. He stands at the bottom of the stairs, one hand on the banister. His other holds the Gladstone bag. He lifts one foot onto the bottom stair and turns his head to face her.

‘What is it?’

She immediately regrets being the first to speak. He doesn’t answer, of course, just begins the slow ascent. She follows close behind him, the muscles in her arms taut, as if readying herself to catch him if he falls.

She has kept his bedroom exactly as he left it: his clothes hanging in the heavy oak wardrobe, regularly checked for moths; his shoes shiny and dusted every month; his brushes on the squat dressing table. The bed with the nightshirt laid across it and the hot-water bottle waiting to be filled, propped against the pillow. His slippers peek out from under his bed. She had expected him to take many of these comforts with him, but he had insisted on travelling light.

The room engulfs his small frame. Its solid lines and forest-green wallpaper seem to mock him with their strength, their sureness. He puts the bag down and sits on the bed. He pushes with his feet and bounces his mass, which seems as insubstantial as a feather. A smile begins at the corners of his mouth and he sighs. He’s glad to be home, she thinks. Surely he is.

‘Thomas …’ she begins, but she finds herself trailing away and pressing with her dark-coloured clothing into the wall. Anything she says will be wrong, out of place — she knows that.

‘I’ll leave you to rest,’ she says finally. She indicates the washbasin on the sideboard, a fresh towel that she put there herself, and backs out, pulling the door behind her.

When they first met, Thomas impressed her with his knowledge about insects. He helped her cup a butterfly, a red admiral, while telling her about its habitat, the thousands of scales that make up its wings, like the shingles on a roof. He preferred its original name — ‘red admirable’ — for there was much to admire about this little creature. But she barely listened; instead, she felt the warmth of his hand on hers and the summer sun on her closed eyes, the smell of the rainclouds that gathered just out of sight.

When Brazil swallowed him and the letters stopped, she thought she could hear the constant rumble of thunder over the horizon. Lying now in her high white bed, she feels it in her body, unsettling her. How can she feel alone again, and so unstable, with her husband home and in the next room? She has spent all this time with only her maid, Mary, for company in the night, with nobody to get up to investigate the night’s noises but her. Only last week, she heard a clatter from downstairs and went down to find that a fox had somehow got inside, sneaking in from the park and rummaging for food. She tiptoed down so quietly that she surprised it — but she only saw its eyes reflected in her lamp before it skittered away, its claws scraping at the stone floor. The sound disturbed the remnants of her night’s sleep, but it was the musky smell of the fox that stayed with her as she bolted the door and ascended the stairs to her room.

In the darkness it is as if he has never come home, as if she is still dreaming of him in the jungle. Her sheets are just as cold as they always were.

Still, her dried-up heart is becoming more pliable. When their eyes met in his room, there was a softening in her chest, which reminded her that Thomas was not a stranger, after all, even though he treated her as one. He had stayed in his room for the rest of the day and into the night. She had hesitated outside his door before she went to bed, put her hand on the doorknob and her ear to the cool wood. She could hear his breathing in fluttery snores. She supposed that he was overcome with exhaustion; that the bed had swallowed him in luxury after the creaking hammocks or the narrow berths he had endured over the last year.

Outside her window, a gust whooshes through the branches of the plum tree like the low bark of a dog, making her jump. Through a slit in the curtains, she sees movement outside. Earlier, when her lamp was lit, she looked up in fright at the sound of fingers tapping on the window. When she pushed back the curtain a moth hurled itself at the glass as if to break it, whirring in dark furred circles.

Sometimes she wakes at night with the sensation that something is lying on top of her, pushing her back down. Other times, when she drifts off to sleep, she starts to sink into the bed, hot hands pulling at her. Last year it got unbearably warm in September and she spent most nights naked, like Lady Godiva, keeping her curtains open so she could be awoken early by the first snatches of light and put her nightgown back on before Mary came in. Not that Mary would care. But now her stiff nightgown scrapes against her skin, and she can’t take it off; not when she is so cold, and not with Thomas in the next room.

She turns her back to the window and closes her eyes. She falls asleep and dreams she needs to urinate. In the dream, she walks around town, and people offer her chamber-pots, whipping them out from beneath their coats like a conjuring trick, triumphant looks on their faces. To use one, she would have to lift her heavy skirts and squat right there in the street. So she continues her walk, but every bush she comes to leaves her wide open to public view. She becomes so desperate that she takes a pot off a shrewd-faced man with narrowed eyes, who offers it to her with hands that are red and raw. She tries to use it, but the man has called a crowd of witnesses, and Sophie finds that she can’t ease her bladder with an audience, with the man staring at her with his tiny eyes.

The pressure in her abdomen wakes her eventually, and she knows the only way to calm her dreams is to get out of bed. She gropes for the chamber-pot and squats over it. Hot needles pierce her feet as she splashes herself, and she curses. She closes her eyes and relief spreads through her as the moisture on her feet quickly cools. When she opens them again, it is so dark all she can see is the violent purple light that presses against her eyelids. There is a tap at the window and then another, more insistent. She lurches to her feet — the moth won’t leave her alone; it’s taunting her now — and as she does so, her foot catches the pot and there is a moment of terrible silence before the floor is sluiced with her piss.

She gropes around for a towel and starts to cry as she mops up her mess, knowing that the smell will be appalling, that it will seep into the floorboards and stay there long after they have been scrubbed clean. She hears tapping at the window again, but when she throws back the curtain, she sees that it’s not the moth but a small branch of the plum tree that has come loose in the wind and brushes the window lightly, its spring buds kissing the pane.

‘Good morning,’ Sophie says to her husband when he comes into the parlour. He sits down opposite her, in front of the table setting of one boiled egg, a slice of toast and the best silver.

‘Tea?’

She waits for him to answer, but instead he picks up his cup and holds it out to her. He looks directly into her face, expectant.

Sophie picks up the silver teapot and begins to pour. Together they watch the thin arc of liquid as she pumps her wrist down and up and back down again. Not a drop spilled. He bobs his head so slightly that she supposes it must be a nod of gratitude, but he might just as easily be catching an itch in his collar.

She doesn’t know what to do, so she talks: about the weather; about the house repairs she organised while he was away — the back door practically dropped off its hinges one day; about the river and how it rose to swallow the fields last autumn; about who got married in the neighbourhood — you won’t believe who Miss Prym is marrying (only the arrogant Mr Winchester!); about the state of her health — good on the whole. Thomas, meanwhile, slurps his tea and gulps down his egg. He drops his sleeve into the yolk, and cleans it off by bringing it to his mouth and sucking. His little tongue flicks out like a cat’s. He sees her looking when she stops talking, and brings his arm down slowly, suddenly ashamed. He turns quite pink. Once he has finished his breakfast he sits with his hands on his lap, staring at them as if daring them to misbehave. He looks as though he might be listening to her, so concentrated is his gaze on his lap, but she gets no reaction to any of the information she imparts to him. Out of desperation, she tells him about her accident with the chamber-pot. She puts it into the lightest tone she can muster: she will shock him into speaking to her.

‘So, you see, there is still a smell about my room this morning, and I didn’t have the heart to ask Mary to clean up my mess.’

Nothing. He is frozen, cold as a pond in winter. She could strap on her skates and glide across his surface.

She changes tack.

‘Thomas, dear. Please look at me.’

He hears that, at least. He lifts his head. She detects the same look in his eyes that she saw at the train station. Fright.

‘Darling. Won’t you tell me what the matter is?’

He gives an accusatory stare at the salt cellar, lifts his napkin off his lap and puts it down on his plate with a shaking hand. He pushes his chair back and leans forward as if he means to rise.

‘No!’ she says.

He stops and looks at her like a startled deer.

‘Please don’t walk away, Thomas.’ She reaches across the table and grasps his hand. He transfers his desultory stare to her wedding ring.

But what can she say to him? She doesn’t know how to get him to speak, whether asking questions will only make him back away. Why is he making it so difficult for her?

‘Why did you stop writing to me?’

Again, nothing. His hand quivers under hers. Perhaps she should try something easier.

‘Are you glad to be home?’ She hopes that this will elicit, at the very least, a nod; perhaps he will take his other hand and stretch it over hers, and she will see something in his face that she can grasp, something that will give her some hope. But there is nothing.

She picks his hand up a fraction, then drops it again.

Her chair tips onto the floorboards as she jumps up and marches from the room.