One Hundred Names (21 page)

Sally gave Kitty a withered look but Kitty prodded her and they followed him, while Kitty looked around for a way to get to the house next door.

The gallery consisted of dried butterflies exhibited in sealed timber frames with an internal mount and brass plate.

‘These are perfect specimens,’ Eugene explained, and a few customers drew nearer to them to listen to the talk. ‘They haven’t been altered in any way. Specimens last for fifty years but must not be hung in direct sunlight. Many of the butterflies are over one hundred years old and are still as bright as the day they were originally flying.’

He looked at them, his face flushed with the thrill of the idea.

‘Fascinating,’ Kitty said, looking at the wall and wondering how to change the conversation. ‘Is it possible for me to speak with Ambrose today?’

‘I’m afraid Ambrose isn’t working in the museum today.’

‘Is she at home? Could I call to her there?’

‘Oh, I doubt she’s in there on a day like this,’ Eugene chuckled. ‘Ambrose is working on a butterfly conservation garden on her land. She really is extremely dedicated to protecting our butterflies and making sure we don’t do damage to their natural populations or environments.’

Kitty looked out at the picnic area and saw the ‘Private. Staff Only’ gate leading from the premises.

‘She sounds like a wonderful woman,’ Sally said.

‘Oh, yes indeed, she is,’ Eugene became a little flustered and he blushed. ‘She has dedicated her life to conserving butterflies. Ms Logan,’ he lowered his voice so that the people listening to his lecture wouldn’t overhear, ‘Ambrose is … very private, you see. If there’s anything you would like me to ask her for you I promise I will do so and get in immediate contact with you. It’s just that … well, Ambrose is private,’ he repeated and then he resumed his normal tone. ‘This beautiful butterfly here is called the Dark Green Fritillary from the Nymphalidae family, also known as
Mesoacidalia aglaia
. It is a large, powerful, bright orange butterfly, which you often see battling with the breeze on a cliff top, limestone pavement or sand dune. Startlingly visible yet frustratingly evasive, it is a grassland species that breeds on common dog-violet. Both sexes have a greenish underside on the hindwing.’

As more people gathered around to hear Eugene speak, Kitty slowly backed away from the group while he was distracted. She headed straight to the picnic area, and when she noticed Eugene looking in her direction warily, she pointed discreetly to the ladies’ toilet and he nodded and continued his talk. As soon as he looked away Kitty hurried to the gate that said, ‘Private. Staff Only’. She pushed it open and stepped into a wonderland, a long lawn bursting with colour, butterflies fluttering to and fro, skimming her nose as they hurried to get out of her way. At the end of the garden Kitty saw a stooped figure.

‘Excuse me,’ Kitty called.

The figure stood up straight, turned round, then turned her back on Kitty. She pulled her hair down, long wild red hair, like fire, that fell to the small of her back.

‘Stop!’ she called, and her voice was so adamant that Kitty immediately halted.

‘I’m sorry,’ Kitty called. ‘My name is—’

‘You’re not allowed in here,’ the woman shouted.

‘Yes, I know, I’m very sorry, I—’

‘This is private premises. Please go back!’

Her voice was authoritative, but Kitty discerned a note of panic at the periphery of her words, and her posture showed she was afraid.

Kitty took steps back and then changed her mind. She had one chance to do this.

‘My name is Kitty Logan,’ she called. ‘I work for
Etcetera
magazine. I wanted to talk to you about your stunning set-up here. I’m sorry to have frightened you. I just wanted to talk to you.’

‘Eugene deals with press,’ she barked. ‘Out!’ Then she added more gently, ‘Please.’

Kitty backed away but when at the gate she tried one more time. ‘I just need to know one thing. Did Constance Dubois contact you at any stage in the past year?’

She expected to be shouted at again, to find the gardening fork being flung at her head, but instead there was silence.

‘Constance,’ she said suddenly and Kitty’s heart started racing. ‘Constance Dubois,’ she repeated.

Ambrose still wouldn’t turn around.

‘Yes. Do you know her?’ Kitty asked.

‘She called me. One time. She asked about a caterpillar.’

‘She did?’ Kitty asked, in shock, her mind racing. Had these names got to do with her initial interview? ‘An Oleander caterpillar?’

‘That means something to you?’

‘Yes,’ Kitty said breathlessly, trying to take it in and process what this could possibly mean for a story.

Ambrose finally turned round but all Kitty could see was her wild hair. ‘You can wait for me in there.’ She pointed the gardening fork at the open door that led to her house.

Kitty looked at it in surprise. ‘Thank you.’

She stepped inside and found herself in the kitchen. It was a modest home, a charming country cottage that had been updated but kept true to its roots. The Aga took over the room, its heat still emanating from breakfast time. She sat at the kitchen table and watched the woman finish up work, make her way towards the house, head down, all wild red hair covering her, still not meeting Kitty’s eye even as she stepped into the house and asked her if she’d like a cup of tea.

Kitty thought of Sally being lectured on butterflies of Ireland by Eugene and guiltily said yes to the tea. Ambrose did most of her talking with her back turned, and when she finally sat at the rectangular table, which seated eight, she chose to sit not opposite Kitty but at the end of the table, at the corner, looking away. It took a long time and an awkward warming-up conversation for Kitty finally to be able to make eye contact with Ambrose, and when she did she noticed something unusual. Ambrose had eyes of different colours, one a striking green and the other a deep dark brown. And it wasn’t just that: when her thick hair finally did move a centimetre from where it had been strategically placed, Kitty could see the discoloration that spread from the middle of her forehead and went down her nose, over her lips, half her chin, and disappeared beneath her high-collared blouse. The burn, if it was that, looked like a flame licking unevenly at the right side of her face, and as quickly as Kitty had seen it, it disappeared again as the thick veil of red hair was closed, and one bright green eye remained staring out at the kitchen table.

If Kitty had been told that Ambrose had never before spoken to a human being, she would have believed it. She wasn’t rude but she had no real understanding of how a conversation worked. There was no eye contact, or at least only an accidental one, enough for Kitty to see the disfigured face and the varying eye colours. Perhaps Kitty’s reaction had been reflected in her face because Ambrose had chosen not to look at her again. Apart from failing to look her in the eye, where she positioned herself at the end of the table, she could turn her body away from Kitty. Kitty was looking at Ambrose’s right side. At least the hair there had been tucked behind her ear to show pale porcelain skin. She really was the most unusual person Kitty had ever met, not just physically, but characterwise too.

Her conversation was as unsettling as her demeanour. Her voice was quiet but, as if conscious of it, she spoke up on certain words and then forgot again, other words disappearing in whispers. Kitty had to listen hard to hear.

‘She called me. Yes it was. Last year. I remember. Because it was. Unusual.’ She shouted the word ‘unusual’, and then as if she’d given herself a fright she continued in a whisper, ‘She wanted to come to see me. To interview me. Yes, that’s what it was. I told her no. That I don’t. Do interviews.’

‘Did she say what the interview was about?’

‘Eugene. I told her to talk to Eugene about the museum. He deals with the public. Not me. She said it wasn’t about the museum. She didn’t know about the butterflies.’

‘It was about you personally?’

‘That’s what she said. I told her I didn’t want to. The list. She said she would keep me on the list anyway. I don’t know what that means.’

‘The list of people she wanted to interview,’ Kitty explained. ‘She left a list of one hundred names of people she wished to speak to and write about.’

‘She called me again. A few days later. She had a question about a caterpillar.’

‘The Oleander,’ Kitty smiled.

‘Laughing. She was laughing. She thought it was funny. In a nice way. She was nice,’ she said gently, and finally her eyes lifted and flicked to Kitty for a split second and looked away again, as if she knew Constance was gone. ‘She asked if she could visit. To talk to me. To see the museum. I told her she could visit. Not me. The museum. But it was only open for the summer months. Spring. She called me last spring. She never came.’

Kitty didn’t need to look away to hide her tears. Ambrose would not look at her anyway.

‘She got sick,’ Kitty explained and her voice came out as a croak. She cleared it. ‘She was diagnosed with breast cancer last year and she passed away two weeks ago.’

‘Daddy died of cancer.’

It wasn’t the usual sorry but it was full of empathy.

‘Are you here to collect her order?’

Kitty’s tears automatically stopped. ‘What order?’

‘Oh. I thought that was why you were here. I kept it for her. On display. I put it on display and nobody else bought it. A framed one. An Oleander moth. She said it was a gift.’

Ambrose suddenly upped and left the room, her long hair and loose clothing giving her a fluttering butterfly effect, and while Kitty waited, she wiped her flooding tears and smiled.

‘I ran the museum with Daddy,’ Ambrose explained after Kitty had gone into further detail about why it was she was really there. Ambrose, like most people, had been reluctant to talk to her at first, but when Kitty had suggested, quite honestly, that it would also be good for the business, as well as a personal adventure, and promised there would be no photographs of Ambrose, she agreed to start talking and Kitty kept writing as she talked, her mind racing as she tried to piece everything together.

Story Idea: People intrinsically don’t believe that they are interesting.

or

People who believe that they are not interesting, usually are the most interesting of all.

Kitty was aware of the threatening text messages she was receiving from Sally, who was still stuck in a lecture with Eugene and a group of tourists who kept asking too many questions, but Kitty couldn’t let this opportunity pass her by. She still had no idea why Constance had chosen Ambrose for the story, though she knew it was not for the butterfly museum, and she was determined to discover what it was Constance had already found. Kitty was personally and not just professionally interested in hearing this intriguing woman’s story.

‘Mammy and Daddy had opened it together but Mammy died and Daddy took over.’

Ambrose must have been in her forties, but it was difficult to say. She often sounded childlike, and held the shyness of a child, but equally often stooped her body and appeared like an old woman.

‘How did your mother die?’ Kitty asked gently. She expected her to say a fire or something that would help explain Ambrose’s appearance. She couldn’t figure out how to broach that subject. It was fascinating to her and yet it was the one question she felt she probably would never be able to ask and possibly the one issue that would never be broached.

‘Childbirth. Complications. She had me here. In the house. They probably would have saved her if she’d had me in a hospital but it’s not what she wanted. So. ’Twas to be.’

‘I’m sorry.’ Kitty took a slug of her tea. ‘Eugene seems to be a great help and certainly very knowledgeable,’ she said.

Ambrose looked up then and smiled. Not at Kitty but out the open door into the garden, which was alive with butterflies and nature. She seemed to light up. Then she faded again. ‘Eugene loves butterflies. I didn’t think it would be possible to find someone who loved them as much as Daddy did. I couldn’t do this. Not without Eugene.’

‘He says the same. He said that none of this would be here if it wasn’t for you,’ Kitty told Ambrose, who smiled shyly. ‘How did you find him?’

‘His mammy was my tutor. He came to my house with her for my classes. He was always bored stiff. Sometimes he’d sit in on the classes, other times, most times, he wandered around the museum. That’s how he knows so much. He’s been looking at those butterflies in frames for over thirty years.’

‘You were homeschooled?’ Kitty prompted.

‘Yes.’ Ambrose was silent but Kitty waited, sensing more was to come and beginning to understand her way of stop-start communication. ‘Children can say the cruellest of things. Isn’t that what they say? I was, well, I was unconventional.’

That was an understatement.

‘Daddy thought it best I stay here.’

‘Were you happy with that?’

‘Oh, yes,’ she said firmly. ‘This place is all I’ve known.’

‘Do you mind me asking how old you are?’

She looked like she did mind. Shoulders hunched, more face disappeared behind yet more hair to have a long discussion with herself, which Kitty could see taking place. ‘Is it important?’

Kitty thought about it. In some cases it wasn’t, in this it was. ‘If you don’t mind.’

‘Forty-four.’

Kitty’s phone continuously vibrated, four, five, six missed calls in a row. As soon as it would stop it would start again. Sally was mad, and Kitty didn’t want to miss her lift home.

‘Excuse me, do you mind if I use your toilet?’ Kitty asked.

Like being asked about her age, Kitty thought she would mind but Ambrose seemed relieved to have some respite from being questioned. One of Kitty’s favourite things to do was to snoop. She looked into every room she passed, then instead of going right as she was instructed, she took a left. Judging by the other rooms she passed, this must have been Ambrose’s bedroom and it took her breath away. One entire wall of the room, the wall facing the bed, was covered from floor to ceiling with magazine cut-outs of supermodels, actresses, singers, models. Some images were specific – of their hair, their eyes, their noses, their lips – others were of their entire faces. Some faces had been made up entirely of a collage of different women’s features. Just as her museum was covered in framed collections of butterflies, her bedroom was equally such a museum, a celebration of beauty. However, it felt less like a celebration than the museum, one that caused a shudder to run down Kitty’s spine. She quickly left the room.