The Peppered Moth (34 page)

These accusations infuriated Chrissie, though occasionally it did cross her mind that Bessie was talking not like an unreconstructed housewife but like an avant-garde feminist. And although Bessie muddled the chronology and gravity of her complaints, they did not qualify as madness. The charges were clear, and real, and some of them may have had substance. Maybe Joe, in later years, had begun to take an oblique revenge. But if he had, who could have blamed him? And how could one feel sympathy for a woman who spoke with such venom of so kind a husband? Better if she had been mad, for one can forgive the mad.
Forbid me not to weep, he was my father.
A line of blank verse from a forgotten play goes through Chrissie’s head like a dirge as she listens to her mother’s undying rancour.
Forbid me not to weep, he was my father.

No, the state of widowhood had not brought much grace or relief to Bessie Barron’s bitter spirit. Chrissie, staring then at the flickering fire and the flickering screen, and now at the washbowl streaked with the red spittle which indicates the need for yet another trip to the dental hygienist, remembers her father’s last remarks to her as he lay dying. ‘Now, Chrissie,’ he had said, a lifetime’s regret in his voice, his pale blue bloodshot eyes watering with the sadness and waste and failure of it all, ‘now, my pet, you must watch out for your mother when I’m gone. Don’t let her devour you. She’ll try to, you know. Don’t depend on Robert. He won’t help. She’ll stick with you. I’m afraid she’s not the sweetheart that she used to be.’

Had Bessie ever been sweet, in those long-ago years before she married Joe and bore him two children? Again and again, Chrissie has asked herself this question. ‘She’s not the sweetheart that she used to be.’ Whenever she thinks of these words, Chrissie feels her own eyes fill with tears.

Bessie, by the fire, had talked herself out, and fallen asleep, in the deep armchair, her thickened legs and dropsical ankles stuck out before her like a doll’s, her too-short skirt riding up over her protruding belly to reveal petticoat and knicker. She had snored, gently and evenly.

There had been many such evenings.

Had Chrissie married Donald Sinclair to get away from Bessie, as she had married Nick Gaulden? If so, the plan hadn’t quite worked.

Chrissie would willingly have undone her very self in order to undo these wrongs, this pain. Better not to be, better never to have been born, as the ancients said. Not to be born is best. Better the rock, the mineral, the cavern. A curse on the bedrock and coalface of Hammervale and all that came out of it. Many and many a time Chrissie has wished herself unborn or dead. The pain of her mother’s life and of her own continued living appals her. She is old now, and she should have reached a calm shore. But the tide frets and frets, and the tears do not dry. She perishes in the torment of the rocky saltwater shallows, she scrapes and drifts and bleeds.

It is time for Chrissie to go to bed and to enter the world of nightmare, where Nick Gaulden, ever-loving traitor, burns to death. Let her sleep. She is exhausted. She has made great efforts. But she has not tried hard enough.

Her last night thoughts are of Nick’s eldest daughter, Faro. If Chrissie knew how to pray, she would pray for Faro’s survival and for Faro’s happiness. Although she has no faith, and does not know how to pray, she prays for Faro. Maybe prayer will invent itself and its own future.

Faro, ignorant of prayer, is once more dully tethered to the telephone, talking to Seb about Dr Hawthorn, gene pools and the Cook Islands. He is trying to pin her down to another meeting, and she is trying to avoid one. She is straining at the leash, as usual. Seb is her clog and her dependant and she is sick to death of him. He has gone dead, like a spent match, like grey coke, like clinker. He is a dead weight, pulling at her like an old sick dog. And he’s only twenty-nine. But Faro is strong enough for two. She’ll drag him along a bit longer.

She’s always saying this kind of thing to herself.

Faro has seen Sebastian a couple of times since her return from the Cudworth meeting in Breaseborough, and both occasions have been even more draining than usual. She has decided there is something seriously wrong with Seb. He is wasting away. It is true that most people would appear thin in comparison with that solid gathering in the Wesleyan chapel hall, but Seb’s thinness is becoming more and more unhealthy. His skin has taken on a pallid, parchment-like, unnatural texture, a mummified dryness, as though he has been living underground. And indeed he does not go out much in daylight. He prefers the dark. Faro turns naturally to the light, but he prefers the dark. It was a big mistake, getting involved with him in the first place. On the first post-Breaseborough evening she’d gone round to his place and tried to jolly him along, with jokes and stories and a Chinese stir-fry and a bottle of Valpolicella. She’d poured out her energy, but he’d hardly flickered. On the second evening, she’d gone for neutral territory, and that frightful gloomy cavernous smoky pub in Holborn that he favoured. She’d had a couple of drinks and a packet of crispy-bacon-flavoured snacklets, and then she’d run away to the Central Line, saying she’d got to write her ‘Pandora’s Box’ entry for the mag. Which was true, so why did he make her sound as though she were lying?

Now, on the phone, she is doing her best to resist his machinations. His technique is serpentine. Every time she is about to ring off, he introduces another issue to which she is forced or sometimes even tempted to respond, for Sebastian is not a man without interest, or she wouldn’t be talking to him at all, would she? For the moment, she has the initiative. She is telling him about Dr Hawthorn’s mitochondrial-based theories about migrations in the South Seas, which she has just been looking up on the Internet. Dr Hawthorn’s web site carries a high-minded protest about the DNA pirates who are colonizing the remoter parts of the world by buying up the gene pools of isolated tribes for the purpose of commercial experiment and exploitation. Dr Hawthorn’s web site argues that this is unethical. A man should not be allowed to sell his kidneys or his DNA, whatever the going price. Dr Hawthorn claims his own interests are purely scientific, not commercial. What does Seb think?

Nobody, thinks Faro, though she does not say so, would wish to buy the Cudworth-Bawtry genes. Who would wish to purchase inertia, ill-humour and a tendency to run stout in early middle age? With extra chins and jowls and swollen ankles?    .

Seb is not interested in the Cook Islands. They are too exotic and too far away for him. He hears her out, and then strikes up his own subject. He too has been on the Internet, and he wants to tell Faro about
Biston betularia,
the Manchester moth, aka the peppered moth. It’s the kind of thing that ought to grab her. She can write a piece about it, he says. Seb says there is some new stuff on the net about this famous moth. According to a local Linnaean Society up north, it is behaving in a peculiar manner. Its population, which was thought to have been decreasing as a result of the Clean Air Acts, is showing a sudden and unexplained upsurge. It is fluttering and flourishing all over Hammervale. Yes, Hammervale, Seb assures her. She can look it up for herself if she wants. Hammervale is specifically mentioned. And so is Breaseborough. Not many items on the net mention Breaseborough, but this one does.

Damnit, this is, unfortunately, quite interesting. Seb is a wily chap. Has he made all this up? Has he trapped the moth in his death-jar and stuck it with a pin solely in order to trap her and stifle her and stab her?

Seb does not seem to have grasped the evolutionary point about the Manchester moth. He seems to think it grew visibly darker during the nineteenth century, as the soot of the Industrial Revolution poured from the chimneys and furnaces of Manchester and Preston and Liverpool and Leeds, as filth silted the canals and blackened the vegetation.

‘Of course it didn’t grow darker,’ protests Faro, rising to the bait. After all, this is a subject about which she really does know something. ‘It’s just that the darker ones survived amidst the muck and the paler ones shone out like beacons and got eaten by pigeons. It’s a classic illustration of the survival of the fittest.’

‘It grew darker,’ insists Seb, with that querulous edge of righteous mocking pedantry which pricks her so sharply. ‘It was a Lamarckian moth. It willed its own darkness. It acquired several shades of darkness. It clung on by willing its own darkness.’

The man’s barking mad, thinks Faro. She can see a vision of the peppered moth. She had written about it lovingly in her thesis. She sees its dusky wings open against the blackened bark of a city tree. A pollarded, peeling, shabby, robust city tree. Faro can see a plane tree from her own first-floor window. Does a Shepherd’s Bush moth nestle invisibly camouflaged in its crevices even now? A W12 moth, right here in her own artisanal terraced overpriced turn-of-the-century jerry built cul-de-sac? Oh, to get out and stand by a tree, a living tree, instead of standing here trapped on the end of this fucking telephone line talking to a fucking manipulative sadistic leech!

Seb tries to keep the moth-plot going, but Faro knows she will have to break the current now, or she will either go mad or agree to let him come to supper tomorrow.

‘Oh Jesus!’ cries Faro suddenly, with excessive violence. ‘There’s the bell! Sorry, Seb, got to go, it must be Tessa, she said she might pop round.’

Seb knows she is lying, but what can he do? ‘Speak to you soon,’ yells Faro, and rams the phone down hard on its plastic cradle. She is breathing fast. It is hard work, ending a phone call.

She goes to the door, and opens it, as though pretending even to herself that Tessa is about to call. Of course there is no Tessa. Tessa is touring Scandinavia with Opera East, singing in the chorus of
Peter Grimes.
The sight of the empty corridor is reassuring to Faro. She goes back into her flat and pours herself a glass of wine. Shall she boil up some spaghetti? Shall she watch TV? Shall she check her e-mail? Shall she check up on
Bistort betularia
on the Internet? Shall she ring Chrissie? Shall she ring her friend Cath? Shall she try yet again to contact Steve Nieman at the Earth Project?

She really needs to speak to Steve Nieman about his skeleton discovery. She ought to be getting on with her
Prometheus
article about Cotterhall Man, but her editor won’t like it unless she’s got the human angle. Anyway, she’s interested in the human angle. She wants to speak to Steve. She’s got a Northam number for him, and she’s left several messages on his answering machine, but he hasn’t responded. Maybe he doesn’t want to speak to her. Maybe he thinks she’s a meddling journalist. Maybe she is a meddling journalist.

She puts on the spaghetti water and eats a sour grape. Maybe Steve Nieman will know the latest about the peppered moth. Maybe Seb is speaking the truth, and Hammervale is swarming with them. Maybe they are settling even now on Auntie Dora’s window ledges and drying their wings on Great-Grandma Bawtry’s blackened tombstone. Faro had once visited this tombstone, and had stared at it solemnly for about a minute and a half. It had not yielded up any secrets. How stupid she had been, not to spend more time up there after the Cudworth gene convention. She was too impatient. She hadn’t been able to wait to get into her car and drive away, as far as she could, down south, down the motorway, down any old motorway, away from it all.

Faro drains her spaghetti so vigorously that the hot floury water splashes onto her wrist, and snakes of pasta leap out of the colander and into the sink. She puts some butter on the spaghetti, and some Parmesan, and some raw garlic, and sits down to enjoy this modest feast. When she is halfway through it, the phone rings. Will it be Seb again? Shall she let it ring? No, she cannot let it ring. She will have to risk Seb. Her curiosity and her optimism, at this early-evening hour, are too great. It may be something wonderful. She may have won the lottery, or the Nobel Prize, or two free tickets to see the Bother Boys at the Rialto in Northam.

The phone call is from Northam, but it is not offering her the Bother Boys. It is Steve Nieman, returning her call.

Faro, once more, is driving up the Ml to Northam, where she has a date with Steve Nieman. She is looking forward to it. He seems eager to tell her all about his great discovery. Faro and Steve had talked for an hour on the phone, about the cave, about the Earth Project, about English Heritage and lottery money and the millennium, about the Cudworths and the Bawtrys and Dr Hawthorn, about Auntie Dora and Steve Nieman’s Grandma Levy and the freakish behaviour of the Hammervale peppered moth. Steve’s mind is quick and his jokes engaging. He is full of energy. He makes the spirits rise. They had laughed a lot. Faro knows she will like Steve Nieman.

And Steve Nieman, she can tell at the first glance, is a likeable chap. He is waiting for her in the bar of the city-centre hotel into which she has booked herself. She has checked herself in, overcome the irritation of finding the boasted hotel car park permanently full, found a municipal park, unpacked, and taken herself down in the lift to keep her appointment with the Howard Carter of Hammervale. And there he is. There is no mistaking Steve Nieman in this businessman décor. Nobody else could be he. Like Faro herself, he is endowed with a lot of curly hair. It is lighter in colour than hers, a rich brown with a bronzed reddish tinge, but it is as thickly sprouting. He wears jeans and trainers and an open-necked blue-checked shirt over a washing-machine-bruised T-shirt. He is an outdoor, casual, honest-Injun kind of young man, somewhere in his early thirties, and deeply tanned by the South Yorkshire sun. He wears a golden bracelet on one bony wrist and a small earring in one ear.

‘Hi!’ says Steve, bounding at her with outstretched hand. ‘You must be Faro! I’m Steve. Glad to meet you.’

Steve is radiant with good will and welcome. His handshake is friendly and firm, and his skin, unlike Sebastian’s, is warm and vibrant. His smile is open. Faro smiles back. They stand there, looking at one another. Animal magnetism flickers back and forth between them. Faro had known he would look like this, and she knows he is as pleased as she is with what he sees. She is proud of her persistence. She had gone on ringing this man until he rang her back. Good for her.