I shake my head.
‘You could buy whatever you wanted, clothes, a new flower press even, your mother wouldn’t say no.’
‘They wouldn’t replace my butterflies. Aren’t some things valuable just because?’ I look away, confused at my outburst, ashamed at my disloyalty.
He is silent. He swipes a key card on the side of a door, holds it open.
The room is completely different from the rest of the museum. Gone are the honey-hued bricks, the intricate columns, the soaring arches. The floor is a practical grey linoleum and the temperature has dropped, the backs of my hands are suddenly cool. Before me are rows and rows of cabinets, most of which are pale grey and uniform and labelled, but to the left are cabinets that look antique – polished wood, leonine legs, ebonised knobs.
‘Welcome to Lepidoptery. Take a look.’
I slide open the drawer closest to me. The sheer number of butterflies is shocking – I am accustomed to seeing just two but before me are eight rows of eight, sixty-four brown butterflies with white markings.
I crouch down, the ends of my hair skimming the glass. The differences are slight, some are greyer, redder, more dusty than brown, but that is the extent of my observation. How insufficient the human eye is. I know what ‘lepidoptera’ means,lepidoscales,pterawings, but I am hungry for a different kind of knowledge, I want to feast on them with sight, I want to see the scales in microscopic detail – their shape, their edges, the exact point the rust changes white.
‘Let me show you another.’ He pushes the drawer back, heads to the middle of the room, turns down a row. The drawer pulls out completely. This time, there are only eight butterflies behind the glass because they are breathtakingly large, each the span of my waist.
‘What are they?’
‘Queen Alexandra’s Birdwings from Papua New Guinea. Walter Rothschild discovered the first but he didn’t net her. He blasted her out of the sky with a gun.’
‘Her’. Never ‘it’.Always masculine and feminine, male and female.
‘She’s here somewhere, the holotype.’
‘Holotype?’
‘The very first specimen.’
Is this natural history? Not out there, under the grand arches of the museum, behind glass display cabinets smudged with a thousand fingerprints, but here, in this unimpressive labyrinth of corridors and rooms, here where species are being discovered. Beyond the mammoth, the colossal, the easy crowd-pleasers, history is quietly being made.
‘Are they extinct?’
‘Almost. They’re endangered.’ He shakes his head. ‘Their habitat is forty square miles of coastal rainforest. But New Guinea is also the ideal climate for palm oil production so their forests have been cleared.’
‘Palm oil?’
‘It’s in half the items you’ll find in the supermarket – toothpaste, chocolate, cleaning products. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species has banned international trade in butterflies like Queen Alexandra’s Birdwings but, frankly, it’s not collectors bringing them to the edge of extinction, it’s consumers.’ There is a tremor in his voice, I watch him push it down. ‘Sorry. I try not to get so riled up about this.’
‘Please.’ My mouth is dry but I don’t want him to stop. He makes me feel new things all at once – sheltered, rebellious, rageful. ‘Don’t say sorry.’
‘I might make a lepidopterist out of you yet. But this isn’t what I want to show you.’
Beyond the cabinets is another room. It is a kind of lab, laptops, microscopes, equipment that looks like enormous printers set on long desks and, everywhere, there are trays of wings. Amongthem is an enormous volume covered in heavy green leather, the spine embossed with gold. It looks like a volume of fairy tales.
‘You got this for me?’ I say, not daring to touch it.
‘It’s a Hans Sloane herbarium - Sloane travelled to the West Indies in 1687, collected thousands of botanical specimens, so, it’s pretty old. Here, take these.’ He hands me a pair of gloves. I slip them on. Opening the cover, I feel like I’m touching something sacred.
The pages are aged, browned at the edges, undulated like they’ve been dropped in water but, even so, the plants and illustrations are still intact. I leaf through it too quickly and then go back to the beginning, start again. I stop at a spray of crisp brown leaves still on their stem, a broken shard of husk, a bean. I try to decipher the tight, faded calligraphy but cannot.
‘It’s from a cacao tree,’ he says.
I didn’t realise he was looking over my shoulder.
‘Here, look at this.’ He brings up a photo of the leaves and the cacao pod on his laptop, twists it to face me.
I check the leaves. He’s right. ‘I didn’t know you knew plants.’