Angels and Insects Read Free

is.’
    ‘You do not like suspense?’
    ‘No. No, I don’t. I like to know where I am. I am afraid of surprises.’
    ‘Then I must remember never to surprise you,’ he said, and thought he sounded foolish, and was not surprised when she did not answer. There was a little crimson stain, the size of a medium ant, where her round breasts met, or parted from, each other, where the violet shadow began. There were blue veins here and there in the creamy surface, just under the skin. His body pulled at him again, and he felt dirty and dangerous. He said, ‘I feel privileged to be allowed to be a temporary part of your happy family, Miss Alabaster.’
    She looked up at him, on this, and opened the large, blue eyes. They were washed with what looked like unshed tears.
    ‘I love my family, Mr Adamson. We are very happy together. We love each other very much.’
    ‘You are fortunate.’
    ‘Oh yes. We are. I know that. We are very fortunate.’
    Since his ten years in the Amazon, and even more since his delirious days afloat in a lifeboat in the Atlantic, William had come to see clean, soft English beds as the heart of some earthly Bower of Bliss. Although it was well after midnight when he retired to his room, there was a thin, silent housemaid waiting to bring him hot water, and to warm his sheets, whisking past him with downturned eyes on noiseless feet. His bedroom had a small carved bay window, with a stained glass roundel depicting two white lilies. There were modern comforts within its Gothic walls—a mahogany bed, intricately carved with ivy leaves and holly berries, spread with goosefeather mattress, soft woollen blankets, and a snowy bedspread embroidered with Tudor roses. He did not, however, climb immediately between the sheets, but carried his candle to his desk and got out his journal.
    He had always kept a journal. When he was a young man, in a village outside Rotherham in Yorkshire, he had written a daily examination of his conscience. His father was a successful butcher and a devout Methodist, who had sent his sons to a good local school, where they had learned Greek and Latin and some elementary Mathematics, and had required them to go to chapel. Butchers, William had observed, categorising even then, tend to be well-fleshed men, outward-looking and with strong opinions. Martin Adamson, like his son, had a mane of dark, shining hair, a long, solid nose, and sharp blue eyes under straight brows. He took pleasure in his craft, in anatomising the slain, in delicate knifework and artistry with sausages and pies, and he was dreadfully afraid of Hell Fire, whose flames flickered at the edge of his daily imagination and consumed his dreaming nights. He provided prime beef for mill owners and mine owners in their places, and scrag end and faggots for miners and factory workers in theirs. He was ambitious for William, but without specificity. He wanted him to have a good trade, with possibilities of expansion.
    William trained his eye in the farmyard and amongst the bloody sawdust of the slaughterhouse. In the life he finally chose, his father’s skills were of inestimable value in skinning, and mounting, and preserving specimens of birds and beasts and insects. He anatomised ant-eaters and grasshoppers and ants with his father’s exactness reduced to microscopic scales. In the days of the butchery, his journal was full of his desire to be a great man, and his self-castigation for the sins of pride, of lack of humility, of self-regard, of sloth, of hesitation in pursuing greatness. He tried schoolmastering and supervising wool-carders, and wrote in his journal of his distress at his success in these tasks—he was a good Latin teacher, he saw what his students did not see, he was a good supervisor, he could detect laziness and ameliorate real grievances—but he was not using his unique gifts, whatever they were, he was
going
nowhere, and he meant to go far. He could not read those circular andpainful journals now,