‘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.
When Kitty Logan finally left, Ambrose felt exhausted. She hadn’t had that much contact with anybody, apart from Eugene, of course, for a very long time, and she felt drained, tired from trying to cover her face, hide her emotions, work hard at appearing normal, sounding sane, all of the things that she was by herself in the comfort of her own home but which she struggled with when she came into contact with anyone who wasn’t inside her trusted circle. Those people consisted of Eugene; Harriet, the cleaner; and Sara, the young lady who worked in the museum. She rarely spoke to any of them, only when she absolutely had to, and it was only with Eugene that she could truly be herself because he was only Eugene, and what did he care? He had seen her all her life. The irony was that with everybody else she let her hair down and he was the only person for whom she could truly tie her hair back and look him in the eye.
She made her way to her bedroom and retrieved the magazine she had been reading that morning. Summertime, apart from the butterflies and her business, wasn’t her favourite time of year. Summer meant revelation, magazines were covered with photos of celebrities and pretty women on beaches in their bikinis, the museum was filled with pretty women who never questioned being able to tie their hair back and wander without self-consciousness through the rooms