“Babies! Don’t get me started on babies!”
“No,” said Margery, not wanting to get her started on anything at all.
Too late: Enid was already off.
“I love babies. Maybe it’s cos I had no family. I had a twin but she died at birth. My husband said that’s the reason I talk so much—”
“Excuse me. You’re married?” The question burst from Margery several moments later, but Enid was going so fast she appeared to be speaking in tongues.
“Didn’t I say that in my letter?”
“About a husband? No. You said nothing about that.”
Enid stalled. She paled. She actually looked struck. “Well, it doesn’t matter. He’s away.”
“Where has he gone?”
“Beg pardon?”
“Has he gone away for work?”
To Margery’s confusion, tears now filled Enid’s eyes, making the gold flecks even fleckier. “That’s right!” she said. “For work!”
After that she was off again, telling a horrific story about a dog she’d seen chained to a wall and eating its own paw. Nothing, it seemed, could happen to Enid without her needing to recount it in tortuously small detail to someone else. Outside, rain stuck to the window in beads that shattered and stippled. Beyond that, row after row of gloomy houses. Desolate allotments, where bits of underwear hung on lines, and privies were patched together. Margery had no idea how she would survive five weeks on a ship with Enid Pretty, let alone climb a mountain. By the time they reached Tilbury, she felt murderous. If she could have killed her, quietly and without anyone noticing, she would have.
A huge crowd crammed the departures hall. It was hard to believe they would all fit into Australia, let alone on the RMS Orion. The liner stood waiting out in the dock—the very opposite of the chaos inside: solid and massive, with a custard-yellow hull and a single funnel. Its porthole windows were lit like a city, even though it was broad daylight.
Enid threw a glance over her shoulder, as if checking for someone she knew. “So let me get this straight.” She had to shout to be heard. “We’re crossing the world to look for a beetle that isn’t there?”
“No one has found it yet. They’ve only seen it.”
“Isn’t that the same thing?”
“No, Mrs. Pretty. A thing doesn’t exist until it has been caught and presented to the Natural History Museum. Once the Natural History Museum has accepted the beetle, and read my descriptions and notes, and found that it is genuinely a new specimen, it will be given a name. And then it will exist.”
“Even though we’ll already have found it?”
“Yes.”
“So we’re going to find a beetle that isn’t there?” They were back at the beginning. Fortunately, a customs official appeared and Enid got distracted. “You do think he’ll let us on the ship, don’t you?”
Margery smiled. It wasn’t that she had begun to like Enid. It was more that in that moment she had experienced the rare pleasure of liking herself. Crossing to the other side of the world to find a beetle suddenly seemed such a simple and beautiful thing.
“Of course. All you need is your passport, Mrs. Pretty.”
But Enid went the color of cold porridge. “Beg pardon?” she said.
It was one thing almost to miss the train to Tilbury: it was on a whole new level almost to miss the liner to the other side of the world.
Margery did not intend to wait for Enid Pretty. She fully intended to board the ship without her: fortune, it seemed, had come to her aid. But as Enid was led off to a private interview room, Margery paused to explain to the customs official in a helpful way that she had only just met this woman and they weren’t even friends. The customs official folded his arms and asked why they were traveling together if they didn’t know one another.
Which was how Margery found herself being led off to her very own private interview room.
“Why are there two women in your photograph?” asked the customs official, checking her passport. The room was no bigger than a newspaper stand. Also, he was wall-eyed: she wanted to be polite but had no idea which one to look at. “Is the other woman the blonde?”
“No. She is not.”
“She looks like her.”
“She looks nothing like her. The woman in the photograph has brown hair. I’d never met her before. She just charged into the booth.”
“Another woman you’d never met before? Is this a habit?”
He then asked if she would like to remove her watch, her hat, and her boots. Margery wisely interpreted that none of these were actually questions, but she had tied the laces in a double knot for safety reasons and it was difficult to get her feet out. “They’re not even mine,” she said, stalling for time.
“Oh?” he said. “Are they stolen?”
This, she realized afterward, was his idea of a joke, but not until she’d turned hot as fire and denied it so many times she sounded like Peter after the Last Supper.
Two policemen entered the room and, without even saying hello, began an inspection of her bag of collecting equipment. When they almost dropped the ethanol, she yelped, not because it was her only bottle but because, in a room that size, a smashed bottle of preserving fluid would be enough to floor all four of them. “You seem nervous,” one said. Sweat prickled her hairline; her heart was running uphill. “Anyone would think I had done something wrong!” She laughed. “Anyone would think I had committed murder!” Only comedy had never been her strong point and she now sounded like a woman who had done both those things. “Next you’ll be putting the noose round my neck!” At which point everyone stopped examining her killing jars, and point-blank stared, even the first customs official, though he had one eye on her head, the other on her feet.
Then from the next room she heard Enid’s wild laugh. The door opened and yet another man squeezed into the room—sardines had more space in a tin—and began whispering something that made the others grin. “Your friend’s a card,” the new arrival said. She was about to remind them that Enid was not her friend but thought better of it. “Off you go,” he said. They handed back the boots, her watch, and her helmet, and repacked her Gladstone bag with such care she could have wept. And that was the swift and miraculous end of Margery’s first-ever police interview.
By the time the door to the adjoining room opened and Enid flew out, fixing her buttons, her cheeks like red dots, there was only time—yet again—to run. “Quick!” she shouted. “Follow me!”