The Peppered Moth (17 page)

So Bessie Bawtry took her degree, and she got a Two One in part two of the English Tripos (Part Two, Section A, held under the Old Regulations). She appears to have written, amongst other topics, on Greek Tragedy, Donne,
Paradise Lost,
Swift and Samuel Butler, and to have addressed Samuel Richardson’s sneer ‘that had he not known who Fielding was, he should have believed he was an ostler’. One wonders what she had to say about this. She left Cambridge, armed with references from Miss Wellesford and the great F. R. Leavis himself, but jobs were hard to come by in those days of slump, and she found herself, to her dismay, back in Breaseborough, teaching at her own old school, and living at home again with Ellen and Bert. She had not travelled far. Her Yorkshire accent had perhaps prejudiced interviewers against her. This was not her opinion, for she did not believe herself to have a Yorkshire accent, but this is what others suspected. Miss Heald felt obliged to take her back into the fold. Her protégée, her prodigal, had come home, to the town she had sworn she would leave for ever. It was a defeat, though nobody dared to say so. She came home, as one less favoured member of staff brutally whispered, ‘with her tail between her legs’.

Dora once risked a remark about Breaseborough not being so bad after all, but Bessie ignored it. She did not want to reconcile herself to Breaseborough.

In later years, she was never to speak of this period. She did not speak of it to her children or to her granddaughter. But it was there, on record. Also on record was a prize-winning review she had written for the
Yorkshire Post
of the Sheffield Settlement’s production of
Journey's End.
The
Breaseborough Times
had reproduced it in full, with the headline ‘High Literary Quality: Breaseborough Teacher Wins Award’, and a photograph of pretty twenty-three-year-old Miss Bawtry. Her father was quoted as saying, ‘I thought she would stand a good chance, so I had a little bet with my daughter, and now we have both won something.’

Joe was still at Downing, making up for the two years he had lost, and enjoying himself: he played tennis (quite well), went boating and, unlike Bessie, drank claret (though not much). He escorted young ladies to tea dances at the Dorothy Café, in the approved manner, and to May Balls. He was charming, good-looking and good-hearted. Too good-hearted, perhaps, for he considered himself by now to be morally bound to Bessie Bawtry, despite the fact that she had almost become engaged to a young man from Pembroke. That commitment had been broken off for reasons that were never to become clear, but Joe could have used it as an excuse, had he wished to. He too got an upper second degree and liked to tell the tale of how, bracing himself to read the class lists pinned up at the Senate House, he began at the bottom and, not finding his name in either the thirds or lower seconds, at first concluded he had failed.

Joe embarked on a precarious and initially penurious life as a barrister in Northam, and taught at the WEA in the evenings, partly for the money (though the work was ill paid) and partly through a sense of social duty. He and Bessie were married a couple of years later in Breaseborough Church, which was odd, as they both came from chapel families. This part of the story is full of oddities and lacunae. It is not clear why they married at all. But they did.

If this story were merely a fiction, it would be possible to fill in these gaps with plausible incidents, but the narrator here has to admit to considerable difficulty, indeed to failure. I have tried—and I apologize for that intrusive authorial T, which I have done my best to avoid—I have tried to understand why Joe and Bessie married, and I have tried to invent some plausible dialogue for them that might explain it. They must have had a lot to say to one another while they were courting in the front room, while Dora made herself scarce and made herself a cup of tea out the back. There must have been pleasantness, once, surely. There must, surely, have been a pleasant beginning, before the bitter end. Molly used to say that there was a strong sexual attraction between Joe and Bessie when they were young—and certainly Bessie seems to have had no difficulty in conceiving, although she had other gynaecological difficulties. But perhaps Molly said that to please or appease Bessie’s children, over whom the storm clouds of discontent were to gather. It was not their fault, motherly Molly wanted to say. The children were not to be blamed for the misery of the parents.

Maybe there was love, once. But later bitterness has utterly obscured it. The water is dark with resentment and contempt. Bessie had always been strong on contempt, even as a child, but who could have foreseen that it would have thickened and spread until it stained and darkened and poisoned all things? Joe did not foresee it, or he would not have married her. Nobody warned him.

We are left with the facts, and they are sparse. Joe Barron and Bessie Bawtry married, in St Andrews Church in Breaseborough, with Dora and Ivy as bridesmaids. They set up house in a nice suburb in Northam in a semi-detached purchased for them by Joe’s father. The Barron parents had been neither pleased nor displeased by the match: socially, Bessie was not much of a catch, but she was a polite, well-educated and thoroughly respectable young woman, so she would do. The Barrons were not ambitious. Bessie, of course, gave up her teaching career, as married women were obliged to do in those days. She said she regretted this, but she did not say it with much conviction. She was certainly glad to get out of Breaseborough at last. Perhaps she married Joe to get out of Breaseborough.

Did Joe marry her because he felt he had to play the knight in shining armour and rescue her from the humiliation of her return home, from the shock of being jilted by that cool largetoothed young man from Pembroke? Did he pity her? Or did he love her, had he always loved her? He had no need to marry her. He could have looked elsewhere and married out. He had no need to marry into Hammervale.

We would not be asking these questions had all turned out well for Joe and Bessie. But all did not turn out well. We do not know the details of what went wrong.

Joe and Bessie married, and moved to Northam. Bessie had two miscarriages before being delivered of a healthy son, Robert. Three years later, war broke out.

Bessie’s second child, Christine Flora Barron, was born in the Montagu Maternity Hospital in Northam, at two thirty in the afternoon, towards the end of the phoney war, before the bombs began to fall in earnest upon London and the industrial cities of the north of England. Christine Flora Barron is of more interest to us and to geneticist Dr Hawthorn than her brother Robert, for she is in the direct matrilineal line of descent. Robert is consigned (or will consign himself) to a minor role: almost to a non-speaking part. We shall come back to Chrissie and her childhood shortly, but meanwhile let us return—or rather let us leap forward in time—to Chrissie’s daughter and Bessie’s granddaughter Faro, whom we left, if you remember, in a Nonconformist chapel in Bessie’s birthplace, Breaseborough, in the company of Bessie’s sister, her Great-Aunt Dora.

Faro, as we are reunited with her, is still to be found in Breaseborough, but she and Auntie Dora have left the chapel and the assembled Cudworths, and are now sitting together in Dora’s little house on Swinton Road. This is the house where Dora has lived alone for many decades, so close to the house on Slotton Road where she was born. Faro has driven Dora home, and now they are sitting together over cups of instant coffee: Faro’s coffee is black, and Dora’s is made with old-fashioned full-cream silver-top milk and a dash of hot water. (Faro, who had prepared these beverages to their respective tastes, had not at all liked the look of the contents of Dora’s fridge-freezer.) Dora’s house is small, cramped and stuffed, and it smells of old woman, of Minton the cat and his predecessors, of geranium, of paraffin and of the soot of centuries. The pits are dead, and the air in Breaseborough is purer now, cleansed by the Clean Air Acts of the late 1950s, but the smell of the past lingers and loiters in cushions and soft furnishings, in curtains and cupboards. Faro sniffs, inquisitively, diagnostically. It is an interesting smell, but not to be endured for long. Faro has made it clear that she cannot stay long, as she has to hit the road to London. This is a lie, but it is a white lie. Faro intends to spend the night in the Phoenix Hotel on the Northam bypass. Faro suspects that Dora knows she is lying. Dora is no fool, although she has often been treated as one.

Faro stays for an hour, chatting, hearing the same old stories, and some new ones. Faro is interested in the past, and is intrigued by Dora’s many-layered décor. Dora enjoys talking about what she calls her ‘treasures’. A strange mixture of styles and substances and periods presents itself in Dora’s small front room: its furnishings include a Victorian dresser covered in knickknacks, cross-stitched antimacassars, brass fire-irons in front of a bricked-up fireplace, flooring of patterned linoleum covered by peg rugs and a Turkey carpet runner, and a three-piece suite clothed in worn dark green chintzy loosecovers that had been handed on many years ago from sister Bessie. The scorched plastic lampshades, pleated, fluted and heavily stitched down their ribs, defy all categorization: they are, claims Dora, original Barron pieces, dating back to the twenties or thirties. And that range of table napkin rings displayed on the mantelpiece—rings representing bunny rabbits, pussy cats, doggies and chucky hen—those too, Dora says, are Barron designs. This is news to Faro, and she gets up to inspect them more closely. There is, she finds, something unpleasing in their texture, in the streak and mix of their browns and greens. (Faro, it is to be recalled, is her grandmother’s daughter’s daughter, by directly traceable mitochondrial descent.) The table lamp, in contrast, is a dated futuristic 1951 piece inspired by the Festival of Britain, and nothing to do with Barron design at all: Dora had purchased it on one of her jaunts to Sheffield.

The wallpaper is flowered in autumn tints of orange and brown and yellow, and a frieze of leaves runs below the picture rail. (Do people still have picture rails? Faro thinks not. Seb’s pad has a picture rail, but Seb is not people.) From Dora’s picture rail depend various items—a framed embroidery picture of a bluebell wood, a watercolour of an estuary which Dora says her Grandma Bawtry won at a whist drive, a green Wedgwood plate with a pattern of ivy and a leaning plastic container from which a spider plant, in every stage of death, rebirth and pupping, dangles dreadfully, at an uncomfortable angle, sprouting feebly but as it were perpetually, in papery stripes of yellows and whites and browns and greens. A row of pots, filled with geranium, begonia, cactus, African violet and shrimp plant, stands upon the windowsill: they thrive more pleasantly than the spider plant, despite the fact that Auntie Dora claims they like to be watered from time to time with hot tea. And all this accumulated clutter is dominated by an enormous television set of the very latest model, which has every possible new device attached to it. Dora cannot work them all, but she likes, as she puts it, to be up to the minute. Who knows, she may need Sky or subtitles or digital or sign language any day? She’s not sure what they are, but she wants the option.

‘So Bennett Barron went bankrupt?’ prompted Faro, trying to steer the conversation away from price differentials at Morrison’s, Kwiksave and Mrs Maggs on the corner, and the weight of tins of cat food.

‘More or less,’ said Dora, with the satisfaction that Yorkshire people so often take in the sorrows of others. ‘He ruined the business. He wasn’t declared bankrupt, but he ruined the business. Dragged his brother Alfred into it too. And it didn’t affect your father’(
my grandfather,
silently emended Faro—Dora was always muddling up her generations), ‘no, it didn’t affect your father, he’d got away by then, it was hard on the girls. Mind you, they asked for it. Man-mad, Rowena was. And Ivy was worse, she wasn’t interested in men at all. Yes, a lot of what went wrong with the firm was Bennett’s fault. He was too newfangled. He wasn’t satisfied with glass. He wanted to invest in that stuff made of milk.’

‘What?’

‘That stuff made of milk. You know the stuff—what was it called? They used to make picnic sets of it. And clocks and things. And buttons. What
was
it called? It began with a C. Anyway, Bennett went in for it, but it didn’t work out. Well, it wouldn’t, would it? Bennett wanted to use it for lampshades. But it didn’t work out. Casein, that’s what it was called. Bennett wanted to go in for casein. Nearly ruined the business over casein.’

‘What
is
casein?’ asked Faro nervously, for she was beginning to think that Auntie Dora’s narrow-tracked but hitherto reliable mind was at last wandering. ‘I’ve never even heard of it.’

‘You wouldn’t have, would you? It’s out of fashion now, isn’t it? I don’t know if they still make it. It’s a sort of—product. It’s a product, made of dried milk. They used to make cups and saucers of it. Picnic sets and cigarette boxes and suchlike.’

She
has
gone mad, said Faro to herself. Picnic sets made of milk? And the moon is made of cream cheese.

‘It was all the rage,’ repeated Dora, with retrospective bewilderment at the vagaries of modes. ‘It was all the rage, but it didn’t catch on.’

Faro vowed to herself that she would try to remember this classic Auntie Dora sequence, but knew already that she would forget its wording. Auntie Dora’s speech, although distinctive, was almost impossible to reproduce. Whenever Faro tried to report it, in an attempt to amuse her friends or her mother, she found herself at a loss. It was too idiosyncratic, its patterns too deep to repeat. Even Dora’s accent defied mimicry and mockery. Faro was a good mimic, but she couldn’t ‘do’ Dora, just as she had never been able to ‘do’ her Grandma Barron. They were inimitable. They could not be captured. They should, in theory, have been sitting targets. But no, they always escaped. They escape now, still on the wing, or hiding, protected, in the obscuring undergrowth.

Breaseborough, to young Faro Gaulden from London, was disquieting. Breaseborough jerked one from the banal to the surreal, from the ancient to the postmodern, without warning. A visit to Breaseborough could blow the mind. And this visit, with its Stone Age skulls, its DNA, its iced buns, its casein and Auntie Dora, had been almost too rich. (Can one extract the DNA from the casein of a mock-tortoiseshell cigarette box? And reconstruct from it the South Yorkshire 1920s cow?) Faro had had enough of these teasers. She needed to take cover in the real world of the recognizable.