Plume Redux by Jim Toal

As I walk along Bankside on my way to the Tate Modern, on the evening of what is certain— given the prognosis outlined by my oncologist—to be my last private view, I recall how it began one August morning, more than half a lifetime ago.

I answered the door, a bare-chested and raw-shouldered twelve-year-old boy, to a small, jovial man, who despite the already rising temperature wore a heavy tweed jacket and cap. Mother stayed upstairs. In my mind’s eye, I saw her twitching the curtain. A blackbird whistled from a buddleia. The man cocked his head. ‘Such beauty,’ he sighed. The buddleia shimmered with butterflies. ‘Now let’s see… ah, yes, an abundance of Aglais io, the lovely Peacock, and…yes… a smattering of Red Admiral, Vanessa atalanta. Their bright colours will keep them safe from Mr Blackbird.’

It was the school holidays. Though the hottest months had been May and June, a smell of melting tar still squatted in the empty street. Even this early, the sun’s heat nuzzled the peeling skin on my shoulders. Stickers from countries I’d never heard of covered the man’s suitcase: Chad, Sierra Leone, Bhutan.

‘My wife and I travelled a great deal,’ he explained and curled a hand to his mouth, coughing lightly, three times, as if clearing his throat. ‘I recommend it to you, young man. Ideal for expanding the mind.’

He removed his cap with a flourish, and his wiry hair glowed orange. ‘Kenneth Wilding. Is the lady of the house at home?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m Andrew, her son.’

His handshake felt warm and rubbery. I ran upstairs to Mother, who remained at her bedroom window, back braced to me.

‘Mother, there’s a man at the door. The lodger.’

Mother had come up with the idea of a lodger during one of her busy periods. Her eyes beamed as she danced through the house morning till night, so I hadn’t been sure if she meant it. She handed me a compact parcel of paper, folded hard as a knuckle, and shooed me away. I put it in my pocket.

I explained that Mother had one of her headaches and showed Mr Wilding to the living room. He walked with a limp. I returned with tea and a plate of bourbon creams.

‘Have you travelled far?’ I asked, pouring him a cup of tea.

‘You could say that.’

Mr Wilding spent the next few minutes telling me about his career as an entomologist, concerned with the conservation of insects around the world. ‘Insects,’ he announced, ‘are the nursery, engine room and funeral parlour of the planet. We neglect them at our peril.’

While he talked, I noticed a sour smell on his breath. Broken capillaries laced his cheeks. I crammed in a whole bourbon cream, allowing it to disintegrate and clag to the roof of my mouth. He faltered when mentioning the death of his wife but quickly recovered. He was to take up a job in the Natural History department of the City Museum. He blew into his tea and took a sip. ‘Not exactly fieldwork, I’ll admit, but among friends, among friends.’

I took the nugget of paper from my pocket and unravelled it.

‘What have we here?’ he asked.

Like the many others scattered around the house or slipped into my hand, it was a one-word note, jagged as broken glass and impossible to read. I could never decide if the writing was in English, or one entirely invented. They never required a response, nor were they ever referred to again. I scrunched the note into a ball and tossed it into the empty fire grate.

‘Oh, nothing,’ I replied. ‘Would you like to see your room?’

Next day, at breakfast, Mother appeared briefly in her dressing gown and slippers. Head bowed, she worried her cuticles, pausing only when Mr Wilding revealed his wife had been murdered. Unlike my father’s death—a forklift accident when I was two years old—Mr Wilding’s disclosure possessed a naked, shocking glamour. His eyelids fluttered over the bulbs of his eyes, and then his eyes popped open and stared, disconcertingly. He told us that he and his wife had been working on a conservation project in Africa when bandits ambushed them, dragged his wife into the bush, leaving him for dead and helpless to protect her.

‘You’ve noticed the limp?’

I nodded.

‘Machete.’ He chopped the air with a hand. ‘Severed achilles.’ He shook his head and looked away. ‘You never really recover.’ Sunlight slanted through the kitchen blinds, striping his face. ‘Odd,’ he said, reviving, ‘to recount it all to complete strangers.’ He nibbled a piece of toast. ‘Soon to be dear friends, I hope.’

Mother mumbled something inaudible.

He coughed again—a nervous habit I’d already assigned to his terrible ordeal in Africa—and turned to me and then Mother, smiling, ‘But that’s a wonderful boy you’ve got there, Mrs Bell. He must be a great comfort, I’m sure.’

As the summer progressed, and the blanket of heat lifted a fraction, Mother improved. Improved inasmuch as her black moods seemed to lighten, and her manic periods slowed down. Like rain on a desert flower, Mr Wilding provided the necessary conditions for her to bloom. If only briefly.

She would greet him in the hall when he returned from the museum, regardless of how late it was, taking his briefcase to its place at the bottom of the stairs and ordering me to hang his cap and jacket in the broom cupboard.

‘Be careful not to look in the pockets, mind you,’ he said with a wink one evening as he handed me his jacket. He chuckled and offered me a Fisherman’s Friend, which I declined, detesting their fiery menthol taste that lanced my nostrils and made my eyes water. A button the shape of a mushroom secured the pocket in the silky mustard-yellow lining. I unfastened it, delved inside the pocket, and withdrew a small, rectangular package. A slip of white paper fluttered to the floor. A cut-out, folded in a V, which I assumed—wrongly, as it turned out—to be a butterfly.

I went into the kitchen, placed the butterfly on the table, and ran my fingers over the turquoise tissue covering the package.

‘What have you got there?’ Mr Wilding asked.

I shrugged.

‘Open it then, silly,’ Mother said and fondled the nape of her neck.

I peeled the tape away and parted the tissue. The title of the small book read: The Observer’s Book of Larger Moths. The cover depicted a black and white moth, a black spot on each grey wing. The jacket was grimy along the spine, the odd page dotted with brown stains.

‘It’s old,’ I said.

‘Don’t be ungrateful, Andrew,’ Mother said.

‘A first edition,’ said Mr Wilding. ‘Drove a hard bargain at the charity shop.’

Not long after, he invited us to the City Museum. It was a Saturday morning, before opening time. We bypassed the main entrance and cornered the building. Mr Wilding ushered us to a side door and rang the bell to alert the caretaker to let us in.

The museum’s collection covered three floors with natural history on the ground floor, furniture and ceramics on the first, and painting and sculpture on the second. Other than the caretaker and a few cleaners, we were the only people there. Our voices chimed in the lofty interior, our footsteps clapping over the polished stone floor. Mr Wilding led us down a small flight of stairs to the entomology rooms.

‘Here,’ he declared, sliding out a dark wooden drawer, ‘begin the British Lepidoptera.’

He suggested a game. I would choose a moth from the Observer’s book he’d insisted I’d brought with me, and he would try to find it. To each challenge, he would feign bafflement, cough, and then pull out a drawer.

There it would be. A gift to the eyes. A hawk or an underwing, a rustic or a pug. At odds with the pinned and mounted specimens, I felt oddly liberated. Though given free rein later that morning to explore the art galleries alone—encountering art works in the flesh for the first time—it was in the cool sanctuary of the entomology rooms that an indelible appreciation of beauty became imprinted on my consciousness. Mother’s eyes more alive than I care to remember. A trail of darkness and light.

Mr Wilding came home later that day burdened with egg trays, a lamp, a small Perspex sheet, and pieces of hardboard and helped me to construct my first actinic moth trap. First, we assembled the hardboard into a rudimentary box and then painted it with white emulsion. After dinner, when it had dried, we lined the sides with the egg trays, providing a cratered surface for the moths to hide and settle. Next, we inserted the Perspex, angled so the moths wouldn’t escape. Finally, after housing the lamp, we placed the trap on a white sheet and ran a cable into the garden through the kitchen window. With the lamp lit, the structure glowed in the summer dusk like a spaceship.

Then, we waited. Mr Wilding, sucking on a Fisherman’s Friend, trembled like a plucked string. Mother joined us, bringing glasses of cool lemonade into the warm evening, a red ball of sun dousing in a sea of rooftops. It was one of the rare times I saw her smile.

They emerged out of nowhere and fluttered in the radiant halo of the lamp. I stooped with my face bathed in the eerie glow. Inside the trap were flashes of scarlet and lemon, cobalt and gold. Browns and silver-greys of bark rested among the egg cartons. One moth resembled a blunt twig. Another, when stirred, became the brilliant green of a summer leaf.

In the morning I rose early to collect the moths from the trap. Mr Wilding supervised their transfer to plastic pots he’d brought from the museum. A medicated smell lay heavy on his breath and his eye-whites were tinted pink. Though some escaped, quivering in the morning sunshine, we harvested enough to fill the fridge. Mr Wilding had assured me that it was perfectly safe to store them temporarily inside the fridge. That the cold would make them dormant enough to draw and paint.

#

I’m greeted at the doors of the Tate Modern by a security guard, and step from the chill of outside into the warm interior, pausing to wipe my misted glasses with a handkerchief. Hundreds of people are assembled, engaged in conversation or drinking wine or eating canapes. A huge black curtain inscribed with my name and photograph separates those gathered from Turbine Hall, obscuring the main exhibit from view—the centre piece of a series based on childhood memories I’ve been working on for many years.

In the short time it takes for my arrival to be noticed—firstly by my old friend and fellow artist, Linus Quinn, then subsequently by others until a ripple of murmurs turns into sustained applause—I think of the childhood sketchbooks stored away in my Norfolk studio. Filled with naïve renderings in watercolour pencils and soft pastel, I came across them again twenty years ago when clearing out Mother’s house.

I’d been preoccupied by a one-man show at the Serpentine at the time and had thought nothing of it when she didn’t attend another private view. She’d never liked social events anyway, and rarely attended the opening of one of my exhibitions. I hadn’t visited her in months and rolled up one Sunday afternoon, unannounced. No doubt, I expected to tell her all about the success of the show, how it formed a milestone in my career. Instead, I found her hanging from a scarf tied to a light fitting.

The funeral was a quiet affair. Only a handful of mourners made up of three of Mother’s neighbours, and Linus and his partner, Christopher. No sign of Mr Wilding, whom I’d half-hoped would shuffle, unobtrusively, into the rear of the crematorium and be waiting by the doors to offer his condolences. Before the house sale, a local charity collected most of her things, leaving only a few smaller items to sort, including my childhood sketchbooks. After I’d packed the car with the few bits and pieces I wanted to keep, I laid the sketchbooks out on the kitchen lino and turned the yellowed pages. Thirty years had passed since I’d made the drawings but, looking at them again, they were as fresh to my eyes as they were in my memory. Shapes, patterns, and colours, all vibrant and alive. Leafing through the pages my eyes briefly alighted on large emeralds and clouded magpies; flitted over buff-tips, oak eggars, and purple thorns; eventually coming to rest on the moth I remembered most fondly: the White Plume, with its small, feathery, angelic wings that Mr Wilding had told me harboured the souls of loved ones.

Linus, once a bearish figure, now bent with arthritis, herds me through a throng of well-wishers, whose compliments I meet with due graciousness.

‘Splendid evening,’ Linus says with his usual ebullience.

I smile at my old friend, full of admiration for his resilience after losing his longstanding partner, Christopher, so recently to cancer. And I suspect that he may be able to detect the same scent of rot on me. He looks up at my portrait on the curtain. The black and white photograph depicts a much younger man in his thirties; a curated image I barely recognise.

Linus catches my eye. ‘Who’s that handsome chap?’

‘Blessed if I know,’ I say.

‘If only we knew then how beautiful we were, eh, Andrew?’ he adds wistfully.

I gaze up again at my portrait, my thoughts projecting to the other side of the curtain. Other than in computer simulations, I haven’t yet seen the piece fully assembled. ‘And to look at the pair of us now, Linus.’

We laugh, warmly, together, and then Linus says: ‘I was thinking earlier about those strange notes you gave to people back in our Royal College days. Remember them? Spidery affairs on scraps of paper nobody could make head nor tail of.’

‘Vaguely,’ I say after a moment’s pause. ‘Didn’t we all do silly things back then?’ But actually, I remember them vividly: how I secreted hundreds around the buildings, and passed them to tutors and peers, attempting to provoke in their cool, knowing expressions the anxiety and bewilderment of my childhood.

I see in my memory Mr Wilding’s room at the top of the house, directly over mine. Most evenings I heard the uneven fall and slide of his footsteps above pacing up and down. Occasionally, there’d be a crash and the ceiling would judder, and my heart would leap thinking he’d fallen and hurt himself, but soon enough the pacing would resume. One night, too hot to sleep, I got up in the early hours for a drink of water. Returning to my bedroom, I saw Mr Wilding on the landing, hovering outside Mother’s bedroom. I crouched on the stairs so I couldn’t be seen but keeping Mr Wilding in view. He knocked and the door opened. Mother looked at him with a relieved expression as if he’d solved a puzzle she’d been struggling with. She touched his arm. He stroked her hair and pulled her to him. Still kissing, they retreated into her bedroom, and the door clicked shut.

I crept to the top of the stairs, across the landing, and stood outside the door. I cupped an ear to the door and listened. All I could hear was the swirling of my blood. When I burst in, Mr Wilding’s face turned the bright pink of an elephant hawkmoth. He snatched at his trousers, and Mother, on her knees in front of him like she was praying, leapt up, spun round and glared at me. ‘Get out!’ she screamed. ‘Get out, get out!’ I rushed out and ran to my bedroom, slamming the door behind me. Mr Wilding’s attempts to calm her carried to my bedroom. ‘No, no,’ he said, becoming impatient, ‘it simply won’t work.’ I heard him limping back up to his room and, soon after, Mother going downstairs. The whine of the vacuum cleaner started up. I went down to apologise for my intrusion, but she turned her back on me, a haze of aerosol polish trailing in her wake as she waltzed through the house till dawn, as if cleaning would dispel what I’d seen from my memory—perhaps all of our memories—like it had never happened.

After another thirty minutes of meeting and greeting, the director of the Tate Modern, Gwyn Serani, takes to a podium and addresses those assembled. She speaks eloquently and generously about my work and its place in the canon of late twentieth and early twenty-first century art. When she is finished and before the curtain is raised, I am invited up to speak.

Talking quietly into the microphone, my voice echoes in my head, the words twisting in my mouth and slipping back down my dry throat. Convinced that nobody has understood a word, I pour a glass of water from the jug at the side of the podium. And as I pause to take a drink, I recall how the days cooled, yet the prospect of rain remained an improbable, dim illusion. Water ran in a murky trickle from the tap and set the pipes singing. But we were lucky to still have it. In some regions the supply was so low people had to queue irritably at standpipes in the street. A hosepipe ban had been imposed everywhere and a van patrolled our street to enforce it. Lawns toasted, and plants fried. But the buddleia thrived, and butterflies starved of nectar studded its flowers.

‘Wonderful,’ I said, one Friday morning, echoing what I believed to be Mr Wilding’s thoughts.

‘Miraculous,’ he said, sounding unusually lacklustre.

‘Shall we get the moth trap out tonight?’ I asked.

He wiped a film of sweat from his brow with the back of his hand and continued staring at the buddleia. His eyes were unfocussed, distant. ‘If you want,’ he said.

I’d never seen him like this before. Maybe he was thinking of his wife. He must still miss her a great deal, I thought. I tried my best to put what had happened between Mr Wilding and Mother out of my mind.

That night, I set up the trap and waited for him to come back from work. Later, when I was in bed, he staggered upstairs and knocked on my bedroom door.

‘Andrew. Are you asleep?’

I ignored him, but he knocked again and coughed, gently. ‘Andrew.’

‘What?’

‘Did you set up the trap?’

‘Yes, but it doesn’t matter now.’

‘We can look in the morning…Andrew?’

‘I heard you.’

‘I’ll bet there are some beauties.’

‘If you say so.’

‘Oh, there will be, young man. I saw a white plume flapping by the porch light just now. There’ll be hundreds by the morning.’

Mr Wilding had the weekend off work and, despite the state he was in the night before, was up bright and early on Saturday morning. There were several white plumes in the trap. Not hundreds, but I counted well into double figures. Back to what appeared his normal, enthusiastic self, Mr Wilding made breakfast, and I took the tray up to Mother. Afterwards, I spent a couple of happy, quiet hours recording the white plumes in my sketchbook before releasing them to disperse like thistledown into the morning.

We spent a pleasant, uneventful Sunday together. Mr Wilding roasted a chicken and Mother helped with the preparation of the vegetables. In the afternoon, we watched an old black and white film on TV and played cards into the evening.

It seemed that things were returning to normal. There was a sense, I remember, of stillness that weekend. Of tranquillity. The dust would gradually settle to be brushed away by a gentle flurry of Mother’s duster. But then, after leaving for work as usual on Monday morning, Mr Wilding didn’t return in the evening. On Tuesday, we couldn’t help when the museum rang enquiring of his whereabouts. Eventually, he returned Wednesday evening as if nothing had happened. A grazed forehead and a swelling below his left eye passed without comment. Otherwise, he was his usual chipper self.

A few days later, he disappeared for a nearly a week and eventually returned without explanation, his merry greeting sousing me in vinegary breath the Fisherman’s Friends couldn’t mask. His tired eyes betrayed a deep, lingering sadness his veneer of jolliness failed to hide.

There were at least two more episodes when Mr Wilding went missing, each longer than the last. After several curt phone calls from the City Museum, a letter arrived in the post terminating his contract. He left the opened letter on the kitchen table for all to see. Mother read it silently. When she’d finished, she folded it carefully and put it in her dressing gown pocket.

When Mr Wilding finally went for good it had a bad, destabilising effect on Mother. Her cleaning extended to polishing the doors and windows of other houses along the street. She posted notes through their letterboxes, including Mr Wilding’s letter from the City Museum that she’d covered with hieroglyphics. More than once, concerned neighbours found her lurking in their gardens laden with cleaning apparatus and escorted her home. Then, she’d spend days squirreled away in her bedroom.

I tried to convince myself that it wasn’t a surprise about Mr Wilding’s eventual departure. He was a traveller, an explorer, a scientist fuelled by curiosity and restlessness our quiet, provincial life could never satisfy. And, after all, prior to the periods he went missing, hadn’t there been clear enough signs? He’d returned later each evening from work, eyes glazed, flush-faced and slurring. He listed against his injured leg and stumbled. When I took his jacket to hang it up, it reeked of stale tobacco smoke. Though there’d never seemed any conviction to his words, hadn’t he talked about going to London to stay with a cousin several times? I pushed thoughts of his feelings for Mother to the back of my mind, but also consigned the idea of him staying on for my benefit as a silly childish fantasy. Yet when he left it still came as a tremendous shock. It all happened too quickly. It was too rash. Too final.

He paid the rent up to the end of October and left early on a Saturday morning as he’d first arrived. From the top of the stairs, I watched him open the door. A gust of wind scuttled leaves into the hallway. I rushed downstairs and got to the door just in time to see him sidestep the rusting spears of the buddleia bowing to the pavement. People had wandered into the street and were looking up expectantly at the darkening sky. They didn’t notice Mr Wilding limping past. By the time the first plump drops of rain to fall in months hit their dazed faces, he was almost out of sight. I ran into the street as the heavens opened and a communal gasp rose from the crowd. People began cheering, hugging each other. Apart from myself, standing aside in my soaked through pyjamas, everyone else was oblivious to Mr Wilding making his way slowly through the silvery sheet of rain, rounding the bend in our street for the last time, never to be seen again.

#

At the end of my speech, the curtain begins to rise. Applause gathers. I’m asked to lead the way by Gwyn Serani, the crowd funnelling behind into of Turbine Hall.

Plume Redux stands at the centre of the cathedral-like space, a glass cube the size of a house. Light pulses from it into the imposed darkness of the hall, rippling up the towering walls of steel girder, concrete, and glass. With the crowd edging forward, I step away from Linus as if drawn by some invisible force, picturing the moth trap from all those years ago, glowing in the summer dusk of the garden.

A multitude of tiny hearts shiver in my ribcage as I sense a presence beside me. ‘Linus?’ I say, turning, but Linus lags several paces behind and is smiling beatifically.

Moving further into the cavernous interior, with each step towards the cube, the presence becomes more delineated until it takes on the distinct form of a man.

He coughs gently three times into his hand. ‘Such beauty,’ he says, dreamily, cocking his head.

With those words a great burden leaves my body, bestowing an incredible lightness and delicacy of movement. Instinct alone compels me through a twilit world towards the mesmerising light of the cube. I press sticky palms to the glass, resting my forehead against the smooth, impenetrable surface.

Mr Wilding’s rheumy eyes glisten. ‘Wonderful, young man,’ he says. ‘Quite miraculous.’

Standing close, we stare into the cube, enthralled. Encased within, a ten times life-size winged female figure in polished steel, jewelled with sequenced lights, hovers over an actinic trap that glows and ebbs to alternate with the dimming and brightening of the pendant figure.

And between the figure and trap, flutter the moths.

Pterophorus pentadactyla. White Plume.

Thousands upon thousands of them in ceaseless turmoil, cast in a relentless, beautiful dance that won’t rest until the lights are extinguished, the gallery closed, and everybody goes home.

………………..

Jim Toal lives in south Shropshire, UK. His fiction has been published in literary magazines such as Litro, The Mechanics Institute Review, The Forge Literary Magazine, Shooter Literary Magazine, and The Stinging Fly . He is currently working on his first short story collection.

Twitter @jtstories.