The Sister (10 page)

Then I remembered how openly he’d despised the idea of a Robinsons. He’d made it quite clear he didn’t want one. I realized of course how much effort Maud would have gone to, tracking down the brothers’ company in Kent and ensuring it arrived in time for our return, and I worried—as Clive casually undid the box and laid out the pieces—that he’d be ungrateful.

But he didn’t reject the present out of hand, as I’d assumed. Instead he examined the parts to see how the structure had been designed and muttered disparagingly about any flaws that were instantly apparent to him. Then he set to piecing the thing together before he’d even consulted the instructions. It wasn’t long before he was completely immersed in the assemblage, studying the dynamics and durability of each little part before fitting it into the structure. I began to realize that, in actual fact, Clive was excited. But even then, as he assembled the device, he swore at the ill-fitting bulb and the tiffany of the surround, cheaper than he himself would have used.

Maud offered to fetch him a glass of bitter lemon but I don’t think he heard her. I remember how he stood back, trap partly assembled, almost suppressing a laugh as he said, without taking his eyes off it, “This really is beautiful, beautiful. Thank you, Maud.” He walked round it, at arm’s length, like a dealer checking first the head and then the flanks of a horse he’d acquired. “Look at this. It’s exquisite. Really stunning.” Maud couldn’t have wished for a more effusive reaction or more obvious gratitude, but she went into the kitchen to serve up the supper as if she’d gone off the whole thing.

I followed her in to see if I could help. It was funny to hear Clive next door, muttering half sentences to himself: “Oh, I
see.
” “Yes, that’s how they did it.” “Interesting…but I can’t believe it stays put.” “The wind’ll whip that.” Sometimes he swore in frustration, I presumed when something wouldn’t fit, and at other times he’d let out a little pitted laugh. The sounds and words came from him unrestrained, as though he were the only person in the world.

Clive was so thrilled with his new Robinsons that, in fact, it turned out to have been a mistake to give it to him before supper. It seemed Maud had worked that out already, the way she called him halfheartedly to the dining table. After we’d sat there for ten minutes it was quite apparent that there was no chance of Clive joining us.

Maud and I sat together and ate. She’d set little posies on the table and dressed it with the family silver as she had years ago. I’d forgotten how good-looking my mother was, even though the dress she wore didn’t suit her age. The neckline was too prim, the waist too pretty and the dainty, lace-trimmed sleeves cut into the baggy skin at the top of her arm, leaving the rest drooping loosely out of it and juddering as she cut up her food. Still, it was easy to see how lovely she’d once been and, even now, I was impressed by how handsome she was with a little effort. She’d given her face some extra color and her eyes were lifted with blue shadowing. She’d pressed her lashes with the lash curler, forcing them upwards, curly and girly. But Maud’s earlier exuberance had subsided. She was quiet and unhungry. She opened a bottle of wine.

E
VERY NIGHT
I’d ever known, Clive had unfailingly set a moth trap, a simple homemade device, on the slate sill outside the drawing-room window before he went to bed. He called it the Night Watch. It wasn’t for serious collecting, just a daily reference to see which moths had visited during the night, to note what sort of weather and temperature had brought them, or even, in some cases, to forecast weather that was on its way.

The evening that Maud gave him his Robinsons, he set it on the drawing-room sill, replacing the one that had kept the Night Watch for more than a decade. During the night, at times of lighter sleep, I was plagued by anticipation of the rare visitors we would find in this new miracle trap, and in the morning I rushed down first thing to have a look. Clive was already there and he was giving it undue attention. True, the jar was reasonably full, but I could tell in the instant I scanned it that there were no great surprises, no jewels. It might seem insignificant now—as it did to me at the time—but that morning Clive did something I found extraordinary.

Most mornings he scanned the Night Watch quickly, jotted down anything of interest, then released the lot. Very occasionally he found a scarce one worth breeding, or one with a pigment he wanted to assay. Then he’d drop a couple of grams of tetrachloroethane into the jar to sedate them all and pick out the ones he wanted. But that morning he chased around in it with his hands like an amateur, wrecking—I was sure—a number of beautiful specimens. Garden Tigers, Underwings, a Bordered Beauty, Scalloped Oak, some Small Black Arches and several species of Pug were disregarded in the wake of his unfathomable mania. I thought he must be after the Light Crimson Underwing for a source of that iridescent pink, but why not anesthetize the jar first? Instead he spent at least a minute rummaging about, crushing some and damaging others until finally he had hold of a small, unremarkable gray micro-moth that I hadn’t even noticed.

There are nearly one thousand species of larger moth in Britain, but more than three times as many small—and sometimes tiny—micro-moths. Far too many for them all to have names, so that when Clive had hold of that one, at the time I didn’t even know what it was. All I could think was, What an odd calculation to damage lots of beautiful large ones in order to catch such a dull, possibly nameless, tiny one. His strange behavior didn’t stop there. He pinched it neatly through the thorax with his thumb and index fingernails, which is a way of killing that usually you’d use only as a last resort—say, when you’re in the field and haven’t brought any killing fluid with you, or if you’re specifically trying to avoid the side effects of some of the poisons, such as the discoloring of ammonia or the stiffening of cyanide. Pinching is bound to mash the body a bit, and it’s certainly not the way I’d have chosen to kill a little moth like that. I’d have pricked it in the belly with a nitric acid needle.

“It’s
Nomophila noctuella,
” Clive announced finally, arranging it in a small pillbox.

I wasn’t to find out for two more years, on the day that Maud died, why he was so unusually interested in it.

CHAPTER
10

Bernard’s Challenge

A
WEEK AFTER
the convention, Clive received a simple telegram. It was from Bernard, who was, by that time, head of biological sciences at a northern university. It read simply:

YOU DO BRIMSTONE STOP

I
’
LL DO SWALLOW
-
TAILED STOP

IT
’
S A RACE STOP

BERNARD STOP

“Silly games,” Clive tutted, tossing the telegram dismissively into the wastepaper basket in the hall. “He’s supposed to be a professor now,” he added, walking through to the kitchen.

I had thought that would be the end of it so at first I didn’t take much notice. But—now here’s the funny thing—it turned out Bernard understood something about my father that I didn’t: that a challenge of this nature had an irresistible lure for him, that even against all rational judgment and time pressures on our mounting deadlines, he would never ignore it.

A moment after he’d dismissed it as frivolous, I saw Clive scribbling calculations on the notepad he carried with him in his jacket pocket for “observations,” but it was only after lunch, when he laid out his entire stratagem for assaying the Brimstone fluorescence, that I realized he was picking up the gauntlet. He still professed irritation at Bernard’s message, so I can’t think why he decided to waste valuable time and energy on it when we were already up to our necks in the grant-backed research.

To make all this perfectly clear, what Bernard was challenging us to was a race to assay the fluorescent compound in the two species of moth—him doing the Swallow-tailed and us the Brimstone. First we’d need to extract the compound, a fairly simple process of emulsifying the animal with a pestle and mortar and putting the resulting slurry through a series of alcoholic distillations. Assaying the compound would be easy too, if a little laborious: it’s a series of strategically devised chemical tests, the results of which would lead, by a process of elimination, like laboratory Cluedo, to the type of compound we were dealing with, if not to its specific empirical formula. There were lots of tests to do: the murexide test for uric acid; litmus test for pH; chromatography for solvency; hydrogenation, distillation, oxidization and acid/alkali reactions.

So what was the difficult bit of the enterprise? The challenge, as Clive put it, was not in the chemistry but in the cooking. It was a problem of quantities: to get enough of the fluorescing compound to do the assay, Clive had worked out that we were going to need to crush more than twenty-five thousand Brimstones.

So that was it. We went headlong into Bernard’s challenge.

Y
OU CAN’T JUST
set up a light trap night after night and hope you’ll catch lots of Brimstones. By the time the hunting season is over you’d have only a few hundred. We needed thousands, and quickly, and for that some cunning was required. Clive devised an ambitious plan. First, we needed virgins.

Moths share our weakness for sweets and alcohol, and the Brimstone is no exception. If you take the time to make their favorite recipe, mix it in a little treacle and smear it on trees or fence posts, they will come from miles around to feast and, at the same time, get stuck to the treacle, ripe for collection. So Clive went into the pantry and, like a witch at a cauldron, set about mixing together a potion of exquisite attractiveness to Brimstones, whose particular tastes are for wine, fermented bananas and rum. In time he reappeared with a sticky, gloopy pot of sour-smelling treacle.

Clive knew when and where the Brimstones would be on the wing and want a little something sweet. Each morning and night, he consulted his barograph and plotted the hygrometer recordings, patiently awaiting the perfect conditions. Moths won’t come to sugar when the air current is northeast or easterly, or if the atmosphere is not to their liking. For the first three weeks the weather was lazy and calm, too clear, too hot or too dry, but in the middle of the fourth there was a sharp rise in the mercury. It was overcast at dusk, and the night became a little thick and heavy, tight and threatening, hot and thundery, not a breath of wind….

“Tonight,” said Clive, like a conjurer, “but the Brimstones won’t fly ’til ten.”

Just prior to the ten o’clock news on the wireless, we slopped the treacle in strips onto six of the lime trees down the drive, and just after the news we returned to collect fourteen fresh yellow Brimstone females, two pregnant and twelve virgins.

It was the virgins we particularly prized. Back inside, I squeezed their bottoms one by one, and out dripped the most powerful aphrodisiac known to nature. Males will seek it out from up to five miles away, even from within a closed smoke-filled room upwind. It was with this powerful potion that we were going to persuade all the male Brimstones in southwest Dorset to flock here to take part in our experiments.

As well as light traps, which we set along the hawthorn hedges, we hung the scent of virgins in lures all over the grounds and began to collect the Brimstone population of the surrounding countryside. They came each night in their hundreds and each day I had the laborious task of anesthetizing them in batches and sampling through them, gassing the males, saving the pregnant females, which we could breed from, and squeezing the virgins for more potion. It was like a military operation, the mass execution of the local Brimstone population, and I sat from dawn to dusk, for days and weeks, during that long deathly summer, separating those who were to be immediately gassed and those who were of more use to us alive.

T
HAT SUMMER
Clive and I were both so involved in our work that we’d break for a quick meal at seven, then work long into the night. The autumn that followed was particularly dreary, bringing days when the mist refused to lift, as if a daylong dusk had come forever to the Bulburrow valley. Looking back, I can see how I got caught up in Clive’s unhealthy obsession with his work but—you must believe me—I’m not about to make excuses for the problems that arose from it.

One early autumn day Clive and I were busy killing and counting the second-generation Brimstones from the night before. It had been the best catch of the season, the trap such a shimmer of iridescent yellow it looked as if we had caught a single celestial being, which writhed in protest in its jar. It was while we were jubilantly counting them, more than two thousand in one trap, that we considered showing the result to Maud. That is when, to my disgrace, I worked out that we hadn’t seen her for two days.

Eventually we found her camped in the library. She had moved in, she said, in high spirits. The room stank. The customary smell of old books and beam oil was now suffused with burnt toast, stale breath and pure alcohol. She was lying on the floor in front of the sofa, her head propped up on her hand, her usually temperate hair loose and angry. Various books, with some issues of
The Ideal Home,
for which she had a subscription, were strewn about. Within her reach there were two plates with crumbs, a yogurt pot and a Kit Kat wrapper. Letters from Vivi were scattered across the floor with an array of varnished gourds usually displayed in a bowl on the window seat. The Hoover was on its side under the window as if it had dashed out of its cupboard in the hall in an independent attempt to help but at the last moment keeled over in horror at the sight of it all. I counted five bottles of Garvey’s sherry at various levels of empty, and seven tumblers. It was just after ten-thirty in the morning.

“Did you discover how to make a moth?” She grinned.

Clive tutted and walked out.

I was shocked. “Not yet, Mummy,” I said, appalled at the state of her and the room and my own selfishness not to have seen what had become of her. A sick thrust of guilt and love and shame and overbearing failure churned through me.

“I’m so sorry, Mummy,” I said, kneeling to hug her. “I’m so,
so
sorry.” I started to cry, taking her in my arms, and I felt her stiffen a little as if the role reversal was too unnatural for her.

“What on earth are you sorry about, darling?” She giggled, her chin digging into my shoulder. “I really don’t give a damn if you haven’t discovered the divine secret of moths,” she slurred. “I never have,” she whispered. “Just don’t tell Daddy that.” Her elbow slipped, her head hit the floor and she laughed at the ceiling in pure enjoyment.

“No,” I said, straightening up. “I’m sorry about
this.
” I gestured to the room around me.

“What?”

“Well, the room. And you lying here like this and—”

“You mean all the crap, darling?” she said, with her arms outstretched as she lay on the floorboards. “Oh, we don’t need to worry about that, my love, just a little dust and a sweep and a…you know, we can do it anytime,” she said, breaking into a sort of singsong.

She’d lost sight of herself. What was the point in trying to convey to her what I saw? What a shock the real Maud would have if I could lead her into the room and show her
this
Maud as I saw her now. Maud, one of the most respectable people in this village. It struck me suddenly that it was partly my fault. The real Maud would have put enough trust in me to ensure it never came to this. I’d failed her, even though she’d always been there for me. I’d let her down because I had been too concerned for too long with my work and my own life to see what needed to be done.

“What’s the time, darling?” she asked, sitting up again.

The shutters were closed and I shouldn’t have thought she knew the time, the day or the year. Maud was not there at all. I checked my watch. “It’s just gone ten-thirty.” I went to open the shutters. “In the morning,” I added.

What happened next came as a bolt from the blue.

“What do you mean by that, Virginia?” Maud barked aggressively at my back. “What do you mean by
in the morning
?”

I turned slowly. I wanted to say that I hadn’t meant anything by it, but when I opened my mouth nothing came out.

“In the morning,” she repeated, imitating an enfeebled voice. “Don’t you dare patronize me, my girl. Hear me. I won’t stand for that behavior from you. Do you understand?” She was shouting now and had pulled herself up to sit with her back against the sofa.

“Look at me,” she ordered, and stared straight into my eyes in the most frighteningly direct way, a look I’d never seen in her before, her eyes keen, wild and vivid. She pointed at me and went on, “You might think you’ve got all big and clever because you’ve joined Daddy in his work, and you might think what you do makes the world go round, but, Ginny”—she stopped shouting, stayed pointing and deepened her voice so low and gravelly that it shook—“you’ve still got a hell of a lot to learn, my girl, and I don’t want to
ever
hear you talking to me like that again. I don’t care what you might think I am, or how remarkable you think you are, but you
will
respect me because I’m your mother. Do you understand? Do—You—Understand?” she repeated, shouting once more.