Years ago, Margery had collected things that reminded her of what she loved, and kept her true. A beetle necklace, a map of New Caledonia, an illustrated pocket guide to the islands by the Reverend Horace Blake. She’d made important discoveries about the beetle: its possible size, shape, and habitat. She’d made plans. But suddenly she’d stopped. Or, rather, life had. Life had stopped. And even though she occasionally found her eye caught by something that, at a distance, looked like a piece of gold and turned out to be trash, she had abandoned all hope of getting to New Caledonia. So this time she would do it. She would go in search of the beetle that had not yet been found—either before someone else went and found it first, or before she was too old to get onto a boat. Next year she would be forty-seven. And while that didn’t make her old, it made her more old than young. Certainly too old to have a child. Her own mother had died at forty-six, while her brothers hadn’t made it to their midtwenties. Already she felt her time was running out.
No one, of course, would think it was a good idea. Margery wasn’t even a proper collector for a start. She knew how to kill a beetle and pin it, but she’d never worked in a museum. She didn’t have a passport. She couldn’t speak a word of French. And who would go all that way for a tiny insect that might not be there? Margery wrote to the Royal Entomological Society, asking if they would kindly fund her trip, and they kindly wrote back and said they wouldn’t. Her doctor said an expedition to the other side of the world might kill her, while her bank manager warned she didn’t have enough funds. Also, she was a lady.
“Thank you,” said Margery. It was possibly the nicest thing anyone had said to her in years.
* * *
—
Four people replied to her ad: a widow, a retired teacher, a demobbed soldier, and a woman called Enid Pretty. Enid Pretty had spilled tea over her letter—it wasn’t really a letter, more of a shopping list—while her spelling verged on distressing. Enid said she wanted to “Liv life and see the worlb!” After that she’d put carrots, and a few other things she needed, including powbered egg and string. Margery wrote to all of them except Enid Pretty, explaining briefly about the beetle and inviting them for tea at Lyons Corner House, where she would be dressed in brown and holding her pocket guide to New Caledonia. She suggested midafternoon in the hope she wouldn’t have to fork out for a full meal, and Wednesday because it was cheaper midweek. She was on a tight budget.
There was also a letter from the school. The headmistress skipped lightly over the matter of the fire extinguisher and the sports bibs but requested the immediate return of the deputy’s lacrosse boots. Now that Margery was in the business of taking other people’s footwear, she was no longer required to teach domestic science.
The wildness Margery had felt that afternoon was gone, and all she felt now was wobbly panic. What had possessed her to steal a pair of boots? She hadn’t just walked out of her job; she’d walked out and made it impossible to go back. As soon as she’d got home, she’d stuffed the boots beneath the mattress where she couldn’t see them, but it isn’t easy hiding something from yourself—ideally you need to be out of the room when you do it—and she could as easily forget the boots as her own two feet. She had spent several days barely daring to move. She thought, That’s it. I’ll get rid of them. I’ll send them back on my way to Lyons. But the postmistress insisted on knowing what was inside the parcel, and Margery lost her nerve. Then, as she was walking away, the heavens opened and one of her old brown shoes split apart. In effect, she was wearing a flap on her foot. Oh, to hell with this, she thought.
She put on the boots.
* * *
—
New problem. Lyons Corner House was busier than she’d expected, even on a Wednesday afternoon. Every single woman in London had come out for tea, and they had all decided to wear brown. She had a table by the window, along with her guidebook and a list of questions, but her mouth was as dry as a flannel. She could barely speak.
“Miss Benson?”
She jumped. Her first applicant was already at her side. She hadn’t even noticed him approach. He was tall, like her, but without an ounce of flesh on him, and his head was shaved so close she could see the white of his skin. His demob suit hung loose.
“Mr. Mundic,” he said.
Margery had never been what people called a man’s woman, but then again, she hadn’t been much of a woman’s woman, either. She put out her hand, only she paused, and Mundic ducked to sit so that—like a dance that had already gone wrong—by the time her hand reached him he was halfway to his chair and instead of greeting him like any normal person, she poked him rather forcefully in the ear.
“Do you like to travel, Mr. Mundic?” she asked, consulting a notebook for her first question.
He said he did. He’d been posted in Burma. Prisoner of war. He pulled out his passport.
It was shocking. The photograph was of a great big man in his late twenties with a beard and wavy hair, and the one opposite was more of a walking corpse. His eyes were too big for his face, and his bones seemed ready to burst out of him. He was nervous, too: he couldn’t meet her eyes, his hands were shaking. In fact, his hands were the only part of him that seemed to belong to the man in the photograph. They were the size of paddles.
Politely, Margery steered the conversation to the beetle. She took out her map of New Caledonia, so old the folds were transparent. She pointed to the biggest of the islands—long and thin, the shape of a rolling pin. “Grande Terre,” she said, speaking very clearly because something about Mr. Mundic suggested he was struggling to understand. She marked the northern tip of the island with a cross. “I believe the beetle will be here.”
She hoped he might display some enthusiasm. Just a smile would have been nice. Instead, he rubbed his hands. “There will be snakes,” he said.
Did Margery laugh? She didn’t mean to. It came out by accident: she was as nervous as he was. But Mr. Mundic didn’t laugh. He flashed a look of defiance at her and then dropped his gaze back to the table, where he kept twisting his fingers and pulling at them as if he wanted to take them off.
Margery explained you didn’t get snakes in New Caledonia. And while they were on the subject of animals you didn’t get, there were no crocodiles, poisonous spiders, or vultures. There were some quite big lizards and cockroaches, and a not-very-nice sea snake, but that was about it.
No one, she said, had ever caught a gold soft-winged flower beetle. Most people didn’t believe they were real. There were gold scarabs, and carabids, but no collection contained a gold flower beetle. To find one would be really something. It would be small, about the size of a ladybug, but slimmer in shape. Lowering her voice, she leaned close. Since making up her mind to find it, she was convinced everyone else was looking, too, even those people currently enjoying tea and meat pies in Lyons Corner House. Besides, there were private collectors who would pay a small fortune for a beetle that had not yet been found.