‘—It’s much easier now to move the Blues across borders. Don’t you see? At this point, when the Blues are at the tipping point between extinction and comeback, we’re in the best possible place.’
We?
‘It’s an absolute gold mine. Hundred per cent profit. No poachers, no middleman, they’re caught by us, verified by us, straight from the field to the collectors.’
‘From farm to table.’
He stares at me. I stare back, until the truth is bare and trembling before us: I don’t condone this, I want nothing to do with this. His eyes soften, I think I see triumph there and pride, my refusal to be corrupted a tribute to the man he’s pretended to be, because he starts to backtrack. ‘It’s just until I get back on my feet.’
‘Stop.’ I’m suddenly so tired. I hold up his notebook. ‘I read this. I saw the dates. You’ve been doing it for years. What were you selling back then? Museum specimens? Scientific samples? All those fancy dates you used to take Mama on, your house, the money for Wyatt, it’s so obvious now. You would never have got that kind of money from being a lepidopterist. No way.’
He blinks back tears, I think he will plead with me, promise to be different, but the tension in the air seems to peak, then fade. He doesn’t move. He stays at the doorway, looking down at me in the fallen light. ‘I guess it was time.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It means you’re not fourteen anymore.’ His voice is harsh now, harsher than I’ve ever heard it. ‘Now you know what all this takes.’ He gestures at the cottage around us. ‘You said it yourself. There’s no money in biology.’
I shut my eyes. Remember how, in a makeshift study very much like this, I dropped Blues into killing jars, watched the slow drain of their power, the final beat of their wings. I spread them on boards. I pinned them. For him.
‘You were a god to me,’ I whisper. ‘A scientist. A conservationist. You were my hero.’
His eyes pass slowly over me. My bare legs. The towel round my swollen middle. The tangle of my hair, dark with sea water. ‘I guess we’re both not who we once were.’
61
Field
Now
At dinner, he pretends nothing’s wrong. Or maybe he’s relieved. My discovery of his secret is a burst dam, everything rushing out, he doesn’t stop talking about how much he’s sold the last pair for, the swarms in the field, how out of practice he feels. ‘I used to net seventy butterflies in one day, do you remember?’ I watch his lips move and remember all the times he spoke about the moral corruption of John Sloane, the habitats cleared for palm oil, how he always encouraged me to be a naturalist, a botanist, a conservationist. I think,Who are you?
He kisses me on the forehead the next morning before he heads out with his nets. I watch him disappear into the woods and then, when he is out of sight, I sink to the floor. I take in the room – the square window, the cotton weave of the corner sofa, the log burner – I let my gaze fall over each object very slowly because I know, as soon as I stand up, I will have to confront the wreckage of a single question: if Daniel’s lied to me about this, what else is he lying about?
My fourteen-year-old thoughts rush in – I could ransack his bedroom, hack his laptop – but I know I won’t find anything. Or, I could smash those killing jars, I could make a bonfire, there’s wood outside, I want a conflagration with glassine envelopes, dead blue wings, neatly stapled lepidoptery articles, watch that disgusting notebook turn to ember. But what use would that be? What I need to do is cut through his bone, read in the gory mess of his brain, his torn-out heart, all the things he’s done. But that’s impossible.
I stand up. Pull on my trainers. Blood pounds in my head, so loud, I can’t hear my soles crunching up pine cones or the crash of the waves. I will do the adult thing, the hard thing, I will confront him. I will tell him face to face that I can’t bear any more lies, I will ask him, as the person who’s been in love with him most of her life, what the fuck is going on.
I see the Blues as soon as the wood opens out to the thyme, secret location, what secret location, there should be a land marshal, security, they’re so obvious to anyone who might be searching for them. Flashes of blue and brown flit in and out of the herbs, swooping low, before shooting out with stuttered, sudden flight. I lean against the turnstile, watching them. Breathtaking. If it weren’t for Daniel, I’d never be able to appreciate this. But he is also wiping them out. Selling extinction. How can there be so much good among the bad?
He doesn’t net with as much vigour as I remember but there’s still an agility in his movements, an absolute stillness where he calculates when to twist his wrist, when to swoop down. He always knew where to put his body.
I watch him for hours.
Then, he turns. Not towards me. But behind him. Over the thyme.
It’s a girl. She is walking towards him, dark, shiny hair skimming her waist, ripped jeans, trainers, wrists stacked with rainbow friendship bracelets, a slogan T-shirt, ‘1970’ emblazoned in black. Serious. Beautiful. No more than fourteen.
He stops as she approaches. Puts down his net. Turns his absolute stillness onto her. A sound comes from me like a freshly slit throat, because that look, those eyes – starred navy, freckled cobalt – are what I left my daughter, my husband for – in that look is everything he promised me,You’re utterly rare, astonishing.But he doesn’t hear me. Because he isn’t looking at me. He is looking at her.
He doesn’t hug her. He knows to take it slow. She gives him a small, self-conscious wave. He smiles like he used to smile at me in the museum. Like this is normal, this is nothing.
He is chatting with her, I can’t hear what they’re saying, though I can imagine it, he is asking her more questions about her interests, no hard topics, everything easy. Her phone buzzes, she slips her hand in the pocket of her jeans to retrieve it and her hair falls over her face. She cannot see him but I can.
His lips part.
He almost had me. He almost convinced me that I was the one for him, I was all he thought about, all that held him together in prison when it had broken so many others, nothing else mattered, not age or consent, how could any of that matter in the face of our seismic, earth-shattering collision? He made me think it was my fault. If I’d just trusted him, waited for him, nothing bad would have happened, not the abortion or being a bad wife, a bad mother, because we would have been together.
We would not have been together.