by Barbara Vine
“We didn’t,” said Hope. “We just didn’t.”
With the air of one just discovering a great truth, Sarah said wonderingly, “Isn’t it a fact that you aren’t much interested in someone who’s very very interested in you? His interest in you takes up all the time, sort of occupies all the space. Dad was fascinated by us and we received his fascination, but we weren’t curious about the … well, the bestower of it.”
“That’s all very fine,” said Fabian, unimpressed, “but it’s being a great nuisance to you now.”
“He wouldn’t have told us,” said Hope, opening the Strega bottle for a refill. “Have you thought,” she said to her sister, “of asking the woman who designed the jacket of Hamadryad if she knows about the black moth? She might. It was on Hamadryad that it was used for the first time.”
“Ask her? I don’t know her. I don’t even know who she is. It must have been—oh, all of eighteen years ago.”
“I know her,” said Hope. “I mean, by sight I do. Her name’s Mellie Pearson and she lives near you. That is, I expect she does, unless she was just visiting someone. I saw her in the street last time I was at your place.”
Sarah wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice. Mellie Pearson, who had designed the jacket for Hamadryad, lived not much farther away than Frederic Cyprian, and she passed the end of her street on the way to Chalk Farm Station. But this time, she would phone first.
“I remember my painting for Hamadryad very clearly. It was my first big job.” She was a soft-voiced, slow-spoken woman who sounded as if she aimed to please. “And then the book was so … well, a best-seller and so talked about.”
“And did you design the black moth, too?”
“The black moth? Oh, the little motif. Well, I suppose I did. I copied it, at any rate. Is it important?”
“It might be,” Sarah said.
“Would you like to come over? You’re not far away, are you?”
On the corner of Rhyl Street, she saw a taxi pull up and Adam Foley get out of it. The sight of him, so unexpected, though she knew he lived somewhere near, caught her up with an inner lurch. It was dark, but the street was well lit. She went on walking toward him, aware of her beating heart. His tall figure made a long, elegant shadow across the pavement. He paid the driver, turned, and saw her, then looked at her with perfect indifference. It wasn’t even the glance of veiled admiration or hopefulness she was used to receiving from men who were strangers, but as if he barely noticed she was there. And she returned it with equal detachment, walking on at the same pace, not looking back.
The next weekend, he was due in Barnstaple and she would go down to Lundy View House. Anticipation ran through her body like a hot gush of steam. She was shut off from the outside world, enclosed in a strong, trembling excitement, so that she walked past Mellie Pearson’s door and had to retrace her steps.
It took her a little while to bring herself out of the fantasy she had entered from the moment she had seen him. It took some deep breathing and hand clenching while she stood on the doorstep. And Mellie Pearson had opened the door before she could ring the bell.
“Couldn’t you make the bell work? It doesn’t always. I was waiting for you, anyway.”
Sarah, restored quite quickly to reality, found herself looking at the original painting, not for the Hamadryad jacket, but for that of A White Webfoot. It had been placed on an easel, a watercolor of a blue, white, gray-purple landscape, the trees gray shadows in the mist, only the wading waterbirds clearly outlined.
“I did designs for four of your father’s books,” Mellie Pearson said. “He bought all the originals except that one. I don’t know why, but he never much liked that one.”
Sarah said, “You said you copied the moth. I don’t know much about these things. Were you given a print of it to get into your drawing, or did you sort of stick it on later?”
Mellie Pearson laughed. “That’s about it. I saw a print of it so that I could avoid its somehow clashing with my design. Do you see what I mean? If I’d done a very dark painting for Hamadryad, for instance, the moth wouldn’t have shown up.”
“What is it called?”
“The moth? I don’t remember. I was given a photocopy of a print from an old book, The Moths of the British Isles, something like that.”
“But you don’t remember the moth’s name?”
“It was eighteen years ago,” said Mellie Pearson. “I do remember one of the moths was called Tanagra, because of Tanagra figurines. That’s why I remember. You know, the terra-cotta figures discovered at Tanagra, in Greece. But it may not have been the one I drew for your father’s book. Still, it doesn’t matter. My not remembering, I mean. I’ve got all my notes and sketches for Hamadryad.”
“You’ve still got them?”
“I may not look it, but I’m really quite a methodical woman.”
Photographs and sketches of waterbirds, avocets and whimbrels, goosanders and widgeons. For a moment, Sarah thought she had been given the wrong folder, and then she remembered the faint shapes of shadowy birds in the jacket painting for A White Webfoot, spindly-legged, gray-plumed. Next, she came upon a preliminary sketch for the jacket. No birds here, only marsh and mist, a blurred horizon.
Sarah thought back, seemed to remember her father rejecting an early design for this jacket as too misty, too vague. And the next attempt had also displeased him. Here it was, duck feet, goose feet, webbed and spread, making a pattern like fallen leaves on the pale opalescent background. Mellie Pearson’s third attempt, with the birds and clouds and limpid water, the mist half-lifted, had been the one chosen. And this time, the moth was there, sooty black against the pastel bluish gray and gold.
It would be used again and again, on every novel Gerald Candless had published since that time, this small emblem placed above Carlyon-Brent’s familiar logo of a winged foot.
Mellie Pearson had made notes for it in her artist’s fine Italian hand from, according to the attached labels, The Moths and Butterflies of Great Britain and Ireland by A. Maitland Emmet, The Moths of the British Isles by Richard South, and Butterflies and Moths of the Countryside by F. Edward Hulme. She had been thorough and painstaking and rather more in love with words than Sarah would have expected. Under the heading “Psychinae,” she had written, “Psyche, the soul, also a butterfly or moth from the analogy between metamorphosis and resurrection. The soul is the spirit of man liberated from the impurities of the flesh. Shrank says the name Psyche casta (chaste soul) may have been prompted by the fact that some members of this family refrain from sexual activity.”
There was evidently more to moths than met the eye. Sarah looked at the line drawings Mellie Pearson had made, exquisite, detailed, fine. Moths with patterned or striped wings and furry bearlike bodies, a coal black moth with splayed antennae, a tiny moth, fuscous, densely scaled. The artist had marked the bigger insect with a cross, the smaller with a question mark.
Sarah turned the page and came to a letter. It was a letter from her father, and the sight of the familiar handwriting in an unexpected place seemed to touch her heart and pluck at it. She had to look away and close her eyes. Then she braced herself and read it. The date was May 6, 1978.
Dear Miss Pearson,
I believe you are expecting to hear from me about the moth. My publishers will have told you I want to use a moth emblem on my books. However, it cannot be just any moth, but must be one of a specific genus: Epichnopterigini.
I have never seen this creature in life, only in pictures. I expect the Natural History Museum would help you to find it. They have an Insect Identification Department, I am told. The moth’s name is Epichnopterix plumella. One more thing—if this does not sound too pedantic and absurd, please don’t confuse it with the larger Odezia atrata. This could easily happen, as you may find when you do your research.
I look forward to seeing your drawing.
Yours sincerely,
Gerald Candless
What on earth did he mean? Wh
at was this business about confusing one Latin name with another? It all sounded so unlike her father, who had had scant interest in natural history and in the garden at Lundy View House hadn’t been able to tell a fuchsia from a geranium. She said aloud, “Tell me the answer, Dad,” and then added, “Tell me who you were.”
A hint, not an answer, came from inside her own head. Atrata meant black, didn’t it? Post equitem atra curia sedet. She remembered that—everyone knew about black care sitting behind the horseman. Her father had thought one black moth might have been confused with another. A big one with a small one? Were those two in Mellie Pearson’s drawings Odezia atrata and Epichnopterix plumella? But why did it matter? What could it matter? And why did he want the smaller moth when the larger would have been more impressive? The small one—in the drawing, at any rate—looked less densely black.
“Tell me why, Dad,” she said. “Tell me what all this is about.”
Mellie Pearson evidently wasn’t going to be able to do so. There were no more notes in the folder, only sketches. One of these, the final version of the black moth, had a piece of paper clipped to it on which she had written, “Approved by author.” That was all.
Sarah asked herself how it was that her father had known about these moths. Somewhere, he had come across them in that dark, lost time before he became Gerald Candless. Their names seemed to mean nothing in particular, though for a few minutes she tried vainly making anagrams from them. Of course, it was always possible that the moth had played some decisive role in his destiny or his work, or, like Jung’s golden scarab, had flown up against his window and distracted him from writing a letter that would have been fateful. Or, by burning its wings at his light, have shown him a course not to take.
In that case, she would never know. And perhaps it was unimportant. But she wasn’t convinced that was so. The identification of this small dark insect contained somehow the solution to his identity.
Jason Thague always took a long time answering because the phone was downstairs in that tall old house and he had to be fetched or shouted for. At last, someone came, a woman who agreed grudgingly to summon him. But after Sarah had listened for some minutes to the sounds of the house, wind rattling the windows in Ipswich just as it was in Kentish Town, a door slamming, a radio blaring out soul music, the receiver was lifted.
“Ta for the check.”
She winced. He had the voice of a disc jockey on a local radio station. “Can you find some moth or butterfly books and look these up for me? Or get hold of someone who’d know? You haven’t got an entomology department at your university, have you?”
“I doubt it,” he said. “Now, if it was business management or computer technology …”
“Well, it’s not. These moths are called Odezia atrata and Epichnopterix plumella.”
He said to spell, please, and she did, following her father’s rules, which they had thought so amusing and witty while in their teens: E for epistemology, p for pomoerium, i for ichthyic …
“Yeah,” he interrupted her, “or how about p for patronize and i for ignoramus? Would you stop being clever for a moment and just spell it?”
It felt like an insult to her father’s memory. She became stiff with him and cold, spelled the names clearly and slowly. “Have you got that?”
“Yeah, sure,” he said. “I’ll give it a go. What about A White Webfoot and the Highbury murder?”
“You can leave that for now. Concentrate on the moths. I’ll call you from Devon on the weekend.”
She would research the Highbury murder herself. She contemplated the green cardboard folder Fabian had given her, feeling an inexplicable unwillingness to look inside. But not perhaps so inexplicable. Moths were safe; moths were harmless—they didn’t even sting. Murder, on the other hand, anyone’s murder, was dangerous, she thought. Even to read about it could conjure ugly suspicions and speculations. There could be no question of her father’s being involved, certainly no question of his having changed his identity on account of some involvement, for the murder had taken place years after he went to work for the Western Morning News and became Gerald Candless. But he had written a novel whose plot bore such strong similarities to the Highbury murder that critics had commented upon it and continued to do so even though he denied a connection.
He had waited more than thirty years before writing that book. Did that mean he had waited until certain people involved were no longer alive? Or that it had weighed upon him and oppressed him so that at last he had to exorcise it, or attempt to exorcise it, by writing a novel with a plot similar to life? Get it down on paper, clear his mind of it. But of what?
Not of guilt—of that, she was sure. Of fear, then? Of pain? It is always helpful, when we have some dreaded task to perform, to tell ourselves that preliminary work must first be done, the ground prepared. Postponement could thus be entirely justified. Sarah, after the manner of her father when he had some paper or document, the very sight of which triggered apprehension, did as he always had and covered it up with something else, in this case the folder of Mellie Pearson’s notes.
Out of sight, out of mind. At least for the present. She would prepare herself by rereading A White Webfoot. It was the story of two boys who had first met while at school in Norfolk, in the fenlands. Dennis’s father was an agricultural laborer, Mark’s the warden of a wildfowl sanctuary, before such places became commonplace, for the time period of the book was the aftermath of World War II and the fifties. The boys loved each other without knowing it, or at least without expressing their love in word or deed. Dennis understood his homosexuality, and that it was unchangeable, when he was very young, only fifteen. Mark denied his.
They were growing up in a world and under a legal system whose ideas had changed very little since the previous century. Homosexuality was still unmentionable in polite society. To reactionaries, it was evil, a crime on a par with murder, while the more liberal saw it as a sickness, a mental disease, invariably the result of the subject’s weakness and corruptibility.
While some sort of life was possible for the practicing homosexual in London, in a country village, he was obliged to be either a eunuch or an unwilling, perhaps repelled, lover of women. Dennis chose the former course for a while, but left home as soon as he could, Mark the latter. Not that it was a choice—it seemed to him a bowing to a miserable inevitable.
As she read, the book came back to her. But she felt as she had the previous time she’d read it, that for the first time surely her father was writing of something quite outside his experience. And she looked again at Mellie Pearson’s notes, reading once more of Psyche casta, the strange winged creature that for some reason abstained from sexual activity.
17
It is very hard to come to terms with the fact of someone simply not liking you.
—THE FORSAKEN MERMAN
THEY WENT TO A RESTAURANT NOT FAR FROM WHERE URSULA was staying and over dinner she told Sam things about her marriage she had never told anyone. He told her about himself, and when these exchanges were over, he asked her what it was she wanted.
“What do I want?”
“Out of life. For your future. What do you want now?”
“To get rid of that house,” she said. “To go back to the name I once had and to try to have a relationship with my daughters. Oh, and to forget Gerald. But that will be very hard.”
“Perhaps you shouldn’t try. The past may be less painful if the present gets better.”
“I don’t know. I think of the past a lot. I wish I didn’t.” She looked searchingly at him, experiencing as she had all evening the sexual pull she had first felt on the sands at Gaunton. With it came a sense of time wasted, of chances lost. “So tell me what you want?”
He said simply, “Oh, me, I want to be in love.”
“What?”
“I liked it so much the last time. Well, that was also the first time. I want it again. Is that so strange?”
“It’s not something people say,” sh
e said.
“No, they say they want sex or they want to find someone. I want to be in love. I want to be possessed and obsessed by it. I want the sky to change color and the sun to shine all the time. I want to long for the phone to ring and pace the room when it doesn’t. I want to be breathless at the sound of her voice and tongue-tied when I first see her. I want to be her and make her me.”
“You are an extraordinary man!” Ursula laughed aloud; she couldn’t help herself. “Have you made many attempts?”
“Let’s say I haven’t succeeded. Come, I’ll take you back to your hotel.”
He left her in the foyer after they had made an arrangement to have breakfast together. He would come at nine. She went up to her room, had a bath, and, in the absence of nightclothes, wrapped herself in the terry-cloth robe the hotel provided. The next day, she thought, she would tell Sam about Mrs. Eady. It would be someone to tell; yet as she thought of it, she wondered what she would have to tell and whether that encounter would have meaning for anyone but herself.
And did it even have meaning for her?
She was so polite. She was so gracious. When she saw a stranger there, an overdressed young woman with a pale, anxious face, she said good morning and asked if she could help her. Ursula said who she was in a stammering voice. She could hardly speak. She had never in her life feared fainting, but now she did.
“I am afraid you’re not well. Come in and sit down.”
Ursula shook her head. If she was to harangue this woman’s daughter, for it must be her daughter, she would do it on her own terms, in anger, in bitterness, not in the meek acceptance of hospitality. But those feelings now took second place to this overpowering faintness. She stumbled into the house, into the little front room, hardly seeing her surroundings, dazed and for a moment almost blind. This weakness, this feeble failure to cope with the house and its occupants, was something she hadn’t anticipated. Or not on this level. Not that fear and shock would bring her to sink into an armchair, to hold her head down in her hands and remain there until gradually the sensation passed.
