The Glass Ocean(14)
• • •
And he does travel: bravely, selfishly, mercilessly, relentlessly—once he has finished his book, he travels. First, briefly, to Spain; then southward, staying longer, down into the Canary Islands, and on to Morocco. Then another trip, to Greece, is extended into Malta, and then on to Tunisia. In between, the stops home, to Paris, and more gifts. An egg from which she is allowed to raise a wild dove that perches on the curtain rods and shits on Madame Girard’s curtains before escaping out the open window. Then a pair of spice finches in a gilt cage—she’ll spend hours watching these, with their brilliant red beaks, pert black eyes, brown-speckled breasts. Their movements are like clockwork, their songs like high notes plucked upon taut wires. She feeds them bits of apple and orange, trains them to perch on the heel of her hand, to let her spread out, with her small fingers, their small fragile wings. She is enamored; but in a few weeks the spice finches are forgotten, and Felix Girard is leaving once again. He is departing for Sfax; his cases are packed, they are in the entry hall. Papa does not love me! If he loved me he would take me with him to Sfax—
Ah, Tildy! Sfax is no place for a little girl. It’s a hot, rough, nasty place. They eat goats’ eyes for dinner in Sfax. Would you like to eat goats’ eyes, Tildy? Of course not. Nor anybody else’s eyes neither. You shall come with me when you are older, to someplace better than Sfax.
But he does not tell her when, or where; my mother is not fooled, she grabs hold of his beard, pulls fiercely, all the while screaming, Papa does not love his Clotilde! He does not love her at all!
• • •
My grandmother, Marie-Louise Girard, has her own ways of coping with this. She floats off, with a resigned air, among the bright blooms in her father’s conservatory. This is the world she came from, the world she will return to. There, surrounded by the yellow and white winter orchids, with a watering can in her hand, she hums quietly to herself, Mmmm. . . .
• • •
She has surrendered my mother to Felix Girard long since. Clotilde’s first word, pronounced a month after her father returned from Mongolia, was Up, by which she meant to say that she refused to lie for one minute longer in her bassinette. Her second word, after Marie-Louise picked her up out of the bassinette, petted her back, and pressed her affectionately to her breast, was Papa!
Marie-Louise can say only one thing about this daughter who runs wild, ripping all the curling papers out of her hair, crawling in the mud beneath the shrubbery looking for worms, who spends all her time in the garden playing “camels and tigers” with the Mongolian servant, Dash—carried round and round, dizzyingly, on those exotic brown shoulders:
Qu’est-ce qu’un sauvage!
What else can she say? It’s true: my mother is a savage. And she is lost to Marie-Louise: sometimes it is impossible to get back that which has been taken. It recedes, is ever out of reach, a blossom on a branch that bends infinitely away, a bird retreating to a higher and higher perch; pursue it too sharply, and it will fly.
• • •
But Clotilde has her wish now. At last she will travel with her Papa.
They met at sea, they were at sea, they parted by sea. Launched now, on a roundelay all their own.
This, though, is separate from the launching of the Narcissus. Weeks yet before that will sail. Not until autumn. Cold winds will blow. For now: there she lies, at anchor on the Thames. A small, seaworthy vessel, restless perhaps, listing slightly at the bows. Preparations come first. Where or what she has been before, unknown; nor does it matter. Felix Girard will fit her to his own specifications, using Harry Ellis’s money. She will be stripped down, recaulked, refitted. Two scientific laboratories and a naturalist’s workroom are installed on board. It will all be there all right, everything they need—the benches and stools, the nets, specimen jars, calipers, scalpels, hammers, brushes, vials, tweezers, magnifying glasses, microscopes, beakers of formaldehyde, jars of ether—the entire clanking, juddering, swaying machinery of science, all this is provided at the museum’s expense, and an accountant, too, pale-mustached MacDowell, with his Ah yes, just so, just so, indeed, the lone and constant companion of their departure—see him noting it all in his book of accounts, a book as thick with papers and as carefully kept as the devil’s own? Ah yes, just so. The museum is concerned for its property: concerned, but not interested. MacDowell’s shrug will be sufficient to see them off; then they’ll know themselves truly disowned.