And when the beetle returned a few days later—or another that looked exactly the same—she caught it in her hands and took it to her room. She kept it hidden in a small box that she filled with leaves and other things it might like, including dirt and also water. She gave it a name, Tobias Benson, because that was her father’s, and she drew so many pictures that she ran out of notebook. It lived for two weeks without anyone finding it, and the day it died, she cried so much her aunts thought she was coming down with something and said extra prayers.
But it marked the beginning of her passion for beetles. She went out looking all the time, and it was amazing, once you started, how easy they were to find. No matter what she was doing, beetles were always in her thoughts. She drew pictures, she made notes, she borrowed books from the library. She learned that within the beetle kingdom there were more than 170 families—including the carabids, weevils, scarabs, blister beetles, and stag—and that within each family there were thousands of variations. She learned their common names: dung beetle, June bug, cockchafer, green tortoise beetle, devil’s coachhorse. She knew where they lived, what they fed on, where they laid their eggs, how to tell them apart. She kept her specimens in homemade houses and jars, and filled notebook after notebook with her drawings and descriptions.
Beetles she understood. It was people who had become strange.
“bear miss denson, Is the jod still avaladle?”
“bear miss denson, bib you get my letters? I want to be your asisstent!”
“Milk, Epsom slats, caddage.”
Over the next few days, three more barely decipherable letters came from Enid Pretty, though one was, strictly speaking, a shopping list and meant for the grocer.
There was no time to reply. There was barely time to think. Chance favors those who are prepared, and Margery had her own lists and budgets everywhere she looked. Corned beef, stockings, ethanol, search permits. Now that Miss Hamilton was her assistant, the expedition had gained a life of its own. Miss Hamilton wanted to be home in good time for the Festival of Britain the following May. If they left in three weeks’ time, in mid-October, that would allow six for travel, three months’ trekking, with a departure from New Caledonia in February. Three weeks was nothing. It was actually insane. It also meant being there for the hottest season, when the Reverend Horace Blake warned of cyclones. But she was in this now. She’d given up once before, and if she did so again, she knew that would be it. Her dream would be over.
Time to get a passport.
* * *
—
The young man behind the desk said it took a month to process an application and, in any case, hers was not valid. He was very thin, verging on spindly, and his lashes were so pale his eyes looked shaved. “But I only have three weeks,” said Margery. “And what exactly is wrong with my application?”
“You haven’t provided a photograph. And you can’t describe your face like that.”
“Why not?”
“You can describe your face as round. Or thin.”
“That’s it? That’s the only way I can describe my face?”
She had been queuing at the passport office for two hours. She’d had to wait in front of a woman with a cold, whose germs were hopping all over the place. She had filled in her form correctly, and when it asked for a description of her face she’d written “Intelligent.” If she hadn’t provided a photograph, it was because she didn’t have one.
“Any photograph will do,” said the passport official, handing her a new application form, “so long as you’re not wearing a hat. You must have an old photograph?”
But, no, Margery didn’t. She didn’t have a new one and she didn’t have an old one, with or without the hat. As a young woman she had once cut her face out of all the photographs of herself that she could find—and now it had become habit. She didn’t even know why she did it anymore. She just felt happier if she wasn’t in them. But the woman with the cold was beginning to sound bronchial, the passport official was staring at Margery as if she were some kind of ancient fossil, and none of that made any difference to the fact she had no photograph. “Unless you would like to accept one without my head?”
The passport official said he wouldn’t. The head, he said, was the whole point. He sent her in the direction of a special coin-operated photo booth.
* * *
—
Margery was an intelligent woman, as she’d put on her passport application, but the special coin-operated booth seemed to have come from another planet. The sign on the front advertised PHOTOS WHILE YOU WAIT!, raising the question of how you could possibly have your photo taken while you went off and did something else, but there was no time to take this up with the passport official because another person—Woman with Cold—had already come to have hers done, too. So Margery went inside the booth. She inserted her coins, she took off her hat, and was just bending forward to double-check the instructions when the flash went and missed her completely. She stepped out of the booth, queued again, then went back in and inserted more coins until she realized she didn’t have enough. By the time she returned with a fresh supply, a couple were already in the booth, using her coins, and also the booth, for something livelier than a photograph. Afterward she felt a need to wipe the seat, just in a hygienic way, so that a tutting queue began to form and, in her distress, she made it too high. Consequently, her second strip of photos were of her head but only the lower half. She looked barely human. More coins, more queuing. Her third set would have been perfect were it not for a helpful stranger who thought Margery might be having difficulties and opened the curtain as the flash fired: even though there was a full portrait of Margery, there was also one of a dark-haired woman she had never met, looking surprised and terribly apologetic. By now it was midafternoon.
As she approached the passport official, he did his best to duck. (“I can still see you,” said Margery.) Quickly he stamped her application and said it would have to do. He would mark it as urgent.
19 stockings (not in pairs)
1 gray skirt
1 gray cardigan
2 girdles
Illustrated Guide to Beetles of the World
Insects, Their Ways and Means of Living by Snodgrass
1 guide to rare orchids
1 brown frock (belt missing)
1 French dictionary
30 packets of oatmeal
1 pair of lacrosse boots
Pocket Guide to New Caledonia by the Reverend Horace Blake
* * *
—