The staff room was too hot and smelled of gravy and old cardigans. No one said hello or smiled as she entered; they were mostly snoring. The deputy stood in the corner, a wry, spry woman in a pleated skirt, with a box of drawing pins in her hand as she checked the staff notice board. Margery couldn’t get round the feeling that everyone knew about the sketch and that they, too, were laughing—even in their sleep. She poured a cup of not quite warm tea from the urn, took what was left of the biscuits, and made her way to a chair. Someone had left a pair of new lacrosse boots on the seat, so she put them on the floor and flumped down.
“Those boots are mine,” called the deputy, not looking over.
Outside, the fog made smudges of the trees, sucking them to nothing; the grass was more brown than green. Twenty years she’d lost, doing this job, and she didn’t even like cookery. She’d applied as a last resort. “Single women only,” the advertisement had said. She thought again of the cartoon sketch. The care the girls had taken to poke fun at her terrible hair, her broken shoes, her threadbare old suit. It hurt. And the reason it hurt so much was that they were right. The girls were right. Even to herself, most of all to herself, Margery was a joke.
After school she would go home to her flat, which—despite her aunts’ heavy furniture—was empty and cold. She would wait for the cage elevator that never came because people were always forgetting to close the door properly and, in the end, she would plod up the stairs to the fourth floor. She would make a meal with whatever she could find, she would wash up and put things away, then later take an aspirin and read herself to sleep, and no one would know. That was the truth—she could skip a few chapters, or eat everything in her flat in one sitting—and not only would no one notice, but it would make no difference to the world if they did. Weekends and school holidays were even worse. Whole days could pass with barely a word spoken to another human being. She spread out her chores, but there was a limit to how many times you could change a library book without beginning to look homeless. A picture came to her of a beetle in a killing jar, dying slowly.
Margery’s hand reached to the floor. It put down the teacup and was round the deputy’s lacrosse boots before her head knew anything about it. They were large and black. Solid, too. With thick ridges on the sole for extra grip. She got up.
“Miss Benson,” called the deputy. “Excuse me? What are you doing with my new boots?”
It was a fair question, and Margery had no idea of the answer. Her body seemed to have taken charge. She walked past the deputy and the tea urn and the other members of staff—who, she knew even without turning round, had all stirred from sleep and were watching, bewildered, open-mouthed—and she left the staff room with the boots under one arm and her handbag under the other. She pushed her way through a crowd of girls, and found herself hurrying toward the main vestibule.
“Miss Benson?” she heard. “Miss Benson?”
But what was she doing now? It was bad enough to pick up someone else’s boots and walk off, but her hands had decided to take things a whole stage further. As if to compensate for the deadliness she felt inside, they were grabbing items indiscriminately. A silver trophy, the bundle of sports bibs, even the fire extinguisher. She was in something terrible, and instead of saying sorry and putting it all back, she was making the whole business a thousand times worse. She passed the headmistress’s study. The locked door to the playing field. She marched right into the main vestibule—which she knew—everybody knew—was strictly not to be used by staff and was hung with portraits of old headmistresses, all of whom were definitely virgins.
The deputy was on her trail and getting closer by the second. “Miss Benson? Miss Benson!”
It took three goes to open the main door, and she could barely keep hold of everything. The fire extinguisher, for instance, was far heavier than she’d expected. Like carting off a small child.
“Miss Benson. How dare you?”
Swinging back the door, she lumbered through in time to turn and glimpse the deputy’s face, white and rigid, so close the woman could have grabbed Margery by the hair. She slammed the door. The deputy screamed. She had a terrible feeling she’d hurt the deputy’s hand. She also had a feeling it would be good to accelerate, but her body had done enough already and wanted to lie down. Worse, there were more people on her heels. A few teachers, even a cluster of excited girls. She had no choice but to keep running. Her lungs were burning, her legs felt wonky, her hip was beginning to throb. As she staggered past the tennis courts, she found the world had begun to revolve. She ditched the fire extinguisher, netball trophy, and sports bibs, and got to the main gate. As the number seven rose smoothly over the brow of the hill, she hobbled toward the bus stop as fast as her great big legs would carry her, the boots clamped beneath her arm like an unwilling pet.
“Don’t think you’ll get away with this!” she heard. The bus stopped ahead of Margery. Freedom was in sight.
But just at the moment she should have launched herself to safety, shock set in and her body froze. Nothing would work. The conductor rang the bell, the bus began to roll away and would have left her behind, were it not for the quick thinking of two passengers who grabbed her by the lapels and yanked upward. Margery clung to the pole, unable to speak, barely able to see, as the bus carried her away from the school. She had never done a wrong thing in her life. She’d never stolen anything, apart from—once—a man’s handkerchief. And yet her head was buzzing, her heart was kicking, and the hairs were standing up on the back of her neck. All she could think of was a place called New Caledonia.
The next morning, she placed an ad in The Times: “Wanted. French-speaking assistant for expedition to other side of the world. All expenses paid.”
Something had happened to Margery the day her father showed her his book of incredible creatures. She didn’t even know how to explain. It was like being given something to carry that she was never able to put down. One day, she had said to herself, I will find the golden beetle of New Caledonia and bring it home. And somehow also with this promise came another—far more oblique—that her father would be so happy and pleased that he, too, would come home. If not physically, then at least metaphorically.
But New Caledonia was a French archipelago in the South Pacific. Between Britain and New Caledonia, there were over ten thousand miles, and most of them sea. It would take five weeks by ship to Australia, another six hours on a flying boat; that was just getting there. The main island was long and thin: roughly 250 miles in length and only 25 wide, shaped like a rolling pin, with a mountain chain running from top to bottom. She would need to get to the far north and rent a bungalow as base camp. After that, there would be weeks of climbing. Cutting a path through rainforest, searching on hands and knees. Sleeping in a hammock, lugging her gear on her back, not to mention the bites and the heat. You might as well say you were off to the moon.