The Peppered Moth

by Margaret Drabble

  Enchanted realms to see

  Come, O my love, prepare thee

  In dreamland to wander with me...

  ‘Oh, belt up, Joe,’ said Ivy fondly, and she pushed him from the crimson velvet piano stool. Seating herself, arranging her skirt, wiping her fingers on her skirt, she took over from him and started them all off on ‘Ye banks and braes of bonny Doon Bessie sat silent, for like her mother she could not sing, but she listened sweetly, perhaps a little too sweetly, as Ada, Rowena, Joe and Ivy raised their voices in mock lament and mock Scots accents: ‘But my false lo-over sto-ole my rose, and a-ah he le-eft the thorn wi’ me...'

  Bessie glimpsed the banks of the Hammer, starred with white stitchwort and oxeye daisies. She saw white boy-bodies in the eel-dark water. She blinked and banished them.

  They hammed it up, the young people, and Mrs Barron, proud matriarch, nodded and smiled.

  Picture them there, in that airy but overfurnished Edwardian drawing room, with its low bow window, its stained and frosted and slightly phallic sub-Art Nouveau cock-and-balls grape-and-vine glass panels, its swagged plaster frieze, and its central plaster ceiling rose from which depended an inverted opaque frosted flower-stencilled glass bowl of a lampshade. In the glass bowl reposed a few fly corpses. Add large chairs, antimacassars, cushions, an embroidered firescreen displaying a peacock and lilies. Aspidistras, ferns, a curvaceous green-and-ochre pottery jardiniere. A busy floral carpet of blues and reds, and heavily fringed curtains of a goldish velvet. Occasional tables, highly polished. Bookcases with glass fronts, containing sets of Scott and Dickens, and well-read volumes of Victorian poetry. A tinted print of Cotterhall Castle, a Chinese screen, a sampler, a brass bell from Benares. A cluttered, old-fashioned, cumulative sort of room. The styles of the 1920s had not yet reached the drawing rooms of Cotterhall, and indeed seemed likely to bypass them altogether. There was no place here for the white and the straight and the pale, for the geometric, for the angles of Deco. All here was bulge and fringe. No wonder Rowena Barron was off to the Plain of Sharon and the dashing bounding remittance men of the Cape.

  Slender Bessie Bawtry was not daydreaming. She was alert and tense, as she sat neatly on the edge of her chair, leaning slightly forward, listening to Ada’s rendering of ‘Pale Hands I Loved Beside the Shalimar’. Her large periwinkle eyes were attentive, her knees and feet were carefully aligned and clamped together. She was a model of decorum, a little blue-eyed Dutch doll. Her soft straight silver-blond hair fell prettily from a low side parting, and was cropped at the nape of the thin stem of her neck in a short smart fashionably tapering shingle. Why was Bessie so anxious, so carefully censored, why was she sitting so much to attention? Nobody threatened Bessie here, nobody attacked her, nobody criticized her. Why could she not drop her guard for a moment? Why did she not dare to let her mind wander? Was she afraid of betraying some social ineptitude in this superior home? Did she suspect that Rowena thought she might be pursuing eligible brother Joe? Such a vulgarity would have appalled the delicate Bessie.

  Ada Marr was stronger, thicker-set, more developed, more confident. She threw her head back as she belted out the Indian love song. There was a touch of the Indian in her dark colouring, and she thought it would be glamorous to have Indian or Spanish blood. Maybe she had: she sometimes voiced this hope to her other close schoolfriend and confidante, Leila Das, daughter of Dr Das of Sprotbrough, who was a bona fide Indian and the only coloured young person within a radius of thirty miles or so. How the Das family had made its way to Sprotbrough God alone knew, but there it was, well settled and respected. Leila did very well at school too, and was, unlike Ada, determined to follow in her father’s footsteps and study medicine. This was not impossible, even in those days: one woman student from Breaseborough Secondary, a Dr Flora Hattersley, had already been practising for a couple of years in Jarrow. Leila had a double obstacle to overcome, of race and sex, but she did not seem to be aware of this.

  Rather those hands were clasped round my throat

  Crushing out life, than bidding me farewell!

  yelled Yorkshire Ada, making eyes as she sang, by way of practice, at Joe Barron. But Joe Barron, handsome, clean-cut, blue-eyed ginger-haired Saxon Joe, had eyes only for pretty Bessie, perched anxious and vulnerable on the edge of her chair. Her neck was so thin it seemed to invite assault. It looked as though it would snap if you touched it. A blow from the side of a man’s hand, and all would be over.

  Joe Barron and Bessie Bawtry echoed one another in their fair tones and colouring. Had they evolved together through the centuries from this soil? And if so, would it not show greater genetic wisdom on Joe’s part to pursue his opposite, and to make advances to the swarthy, thick-browed, lightly moustached Ada? In short, to marry out?

  Mrs Barron seemed unaware of these dangerous undercurrents as she tapped her foot to the rhythms of the unseemly but drawing-room-accepted music that her younger daughter Ivy was bashing out from the slightly out-of-tune walnut upright with its little mauve pleated silk vest. Mrs Barron was stitching evenly and with satisfaction at a circle of brownish-cream linen trapped in a round wooden frame: she had chosen the transfer, of a Jacobean-style wreath of roses, from the excellent selection in the stall in Northam covered market, and was now filling in a leaf with a particularly delightful shade of moss-green silk. Stitch after stitch, strand after strand, she covered the linen. She could not have said why her embroidery gave her such pleasure. It distracted her from her worries about Phil and the motorbike and the girls. Phil had threatened to race on the Isle of Man. He had threatened to learn to fly an aeroplane. Stitch on, and choose a strand of carmine. Mrs Barron knew the numbers of the colours of all these silks. They repeated themselves in her innocent dreams like a litany.

  Rowena was not sitting upright. She had dropped out of the group round the piano, leaving Joe and Ada to a duet. She was lounging, examining the cuticles of her oval nails. Hours of each day she spent examining her nails, pushing at the skin with an orange stick, filing, buffing, polishing. She would gaze at the little crescent moons as though she could read in them some augury, and would turn her ring finger slowly in the light as though displaying the refractions of an imagined diamond. Rowena lusted for a solitaire. She was lounging, one leg curled beneath her, the other provocatively extended. But there is nobody here to provoke. She twisted her ankle, admired its angles. Lord, how she loved her own legs. There were no legs like them in the whole of Hammervale.

  Rowena was wearing a powder-blue Celanese dress with embroidery-garnished sleeves and embroidered panels in the bodice. She had thought it set off her fair complexion. But maybe, she now considered, it made her look insipid? Like that pale little Bessie Nobody? Perhaps she should try a bolder shade next time she went to Cole’s? Elsie Scrimshaw was said to have been seen at the Rialto in red. Rowena Barron would be the talk of the town if she were to sally forth in red, for she was in a different class from Elsie Scrimshaw. What could Phil see in small-time small-town Elsie? Rowena hoped Phil would not let himself be trapped by scheming Elsie from Wath. He could do better than Elsie. Would red suit Rowena? Breaseborough and Cotterhall are brown and grey and navy and brown and fawn and tan. A splash of red would cheer things up. Scarlet town, scarlet woman, Californian poppy. The Vamp, the Temptress.

  She yawned, as Joe came to the end of his rendering of ‘Barbara Allen’. ‘Hey, sister dear,’ she said commandingly, to Ivy, who was leafing through the sheet music looking for yet another ballad of broken hearts, ‘let’s have something a bit more lively. This is the twentieth century, you know.’

  But Ivy could not find anything more lively. The Charleston and the tango and the Black Bottom had not yet reached sedate Cotterhall. The Barrons had not yet purchased a gramophone. The raucous strains of ‘California, here I come!’ had, it is true, been heard in neighbouring Breaseborough, which to its own surprise had once boasted three music hails, of which two had recently been converted into picture palaces: but Bessie, Ada, Ivy and
Joe did not frequent the music hall. So they were not well up in modern music, though they knew The Messiah and Elijah by heart. The wireless had not yet become a common household object, and the one remaining live theatre of Breaseborough, the Hippodrome, was more likely in those days to stage Brigadoon, or the works of Gilbert and Sullivan, or the Sequins and the Sunbeams, or the Merry Arcadians—already dreadfully old-fashioned nostalgic acts. The people of Hammervale, it was said, did not know how to enjoy themselves. Breaseborough was known in the business as the comedian’s grave, and even the hardened Carl Rosa Opera Company dreaded it. The legendary Gracie Fields said Breaseborough was the worst town she’d ever played, and that was saying something.

  At least it was saying something, not nothing. Breaseborough could be proud of being the pits.

  How had this come about? Could one blame a chapel-going puritanism, a contempt for and fear of the life of the senses, which had seeped into the soul and soil of the land, leaching out colour, poisoning the wells? Respectable people did not sing and dance. And if they must sing, let them sing hymns, or sacred oratorio, or lovesick ballads of betrayal and death.

  Perhaps this spirit was imposed from above, as a convenience, as an opiate for a depressed populace. Those that may not enjoy, let them not seek enjoyment. That thousand-fold increase in the nineteenth-century population of Breaseborough had not come there to have fun. It had been dragged in by need, as a servile workforce. Meekly it had taken itself underground to dig. Those who may not enjoy, let them not even wish to enjoy. No wonder the preachers born of the industrial revolution found texts in Isaiah, in Jeremiah, in Ezekiel. For what had the prophets said of Hammervale? ‘I will give it into the hands of strangers for a prey, and to the wicked of the earth for a spoil; and they shall pollute it. My face will I turn from them, and they shall pollute my secret place’ (Ezekiel 7:21-2). ‘And it shall come to pass, that instead of a sweet smell there shall be stink; and instead of a girdle a rent; and instead of glossy hair there shall be baldness; and instead of fine embroidery there shall be sackcloth; and burning instead of beauty’ (Isaiah 3:24). Why, the Old Testament must have been written with a denunciatory finger pointing at South Yorkshire.

  So it was not surprising that Rowena Barron, as she admired her own fine-turned ankles and rounded calves, as she caught the late-afternoon light on her shell-pink nails, should have nurtured strange fantasies of the Promised Land. She would escape from this vale of abomination and dullness, this cesspool of boredom, where there were no dance tunes, and she would set sail for the Land of Milk and Honey, for Cyprus and Damascus, for Salamis and Ashqelon. Aboard a Cunard or a White Star liner, beneath an orange moon, she would swoon and spoon and flirt amidst the scents of cedar and jasmine. Behold, thou art fair, my love: thy two breasts are like two young roes which feed among the lilies. Thou hast ravished my heart, my sister, my spouse: how much better is thy love than wine! A fountain of gardens, a well of living waters, and streams from Lebanon ... How beautiful are thy feet with shoes, O prince’s daughter!

  Little red shoes, perhaps, from Cole’s or Cockayne’s?

  Yes, Rowena had ransacked the Bible for its erotic spoils, she had confounded her own body with the body of the Church. She had searched through Cruden’s Complete Concordance, gilt-edged and bound in blue leather, for breasts, of which there were many (though not all of them very attrac tive), and for ankles, of which there were none. Like Bessie Bawtry, even the vain and fun-loving Rowena had been driven to the Bible. For we must find our sustenance where we may.

  ***

  The rain continued to fall upon the garden, and Mrs Barron expressed regret that the young people would not be able to go out to pick the raspberries which were ripe and dropping from the cane. (Bessie glanced at the darkening sky gratefully: raspberries were full of maggots and infested by blue flies and rudely copulating metallic green hoppers, raspberries were soft and squashy and disintegrated in the fingers into little bloody sacs, raspberries stained one’s best dress and got one into trouble. Bessie had had bad experiences with raspberries.)

  The afternoon was turning awkward, as it moved towards evening. The young people did not know how to get out of Mrs Barron’s presence, and she seemed reluctant or unable to release them. Ivy slammed down the piano lid, irritated by her sister’s yawning and stretching, irritated by Bessie’s meekness. Rowena yawned again and picked up her raffia basket. Where were the boys with the motorbikes, where were the big brothers? Rain fell, and raspberries rotted. Silence seeped into the room, and Ada involuntarily looked at her watch: it was twenty past the hour, the time of an angel’s passing. Into the silence, Mrs Barron suddenly said, addressing Bessie, ‘And how’s your sister Dora?’

  Bessie opened her big blue eyes in surprise and turned her head slowly towards Mrs Barron. Nobody ever asked after Dora. What could Mrs Barron possibly want to know about Dora?

  How slow life was in the past. How it dragged. How heavily those silences fell. A sermon could last a lifetime, a forty-minute algebra lesson could eke itself out for centuries. A baby, left to cry itself to sleep, as babies so often were, could endure an extended agony of bereavement in half an hour, and a small child could count the seconds through a long nightwatch of terror, and nobody thought to comfort or to care. Hell was on earth, and it was the common lot, and it was to be endured.

  But, in the early years of the twentieth century, things were at last beginning to speed up. Machinery had begun to click and whizz, and in the wake of the Industrial Revolution came movement, displacement for its own sake and global travel. One short generation took the industrialized world from horse and cart and pony and trap to railroad and steamship, and from that point we had galloped onwards, to bicycle and motorcycle and trolley bus and tram car, to motorcoach, motorcar, airship and aeroplane. Movement grew cheaper and cheaper. There was no need now to stay stuck in the same valley for centuries, for millennia. You could clamber out now, however steep the sides. Phil Barron dreamed of flying, and fly he will. Ellen and Bert Bawtry fell in love with their phallic Royal Enfield and its rattling sidecar: Bert would polish and tinker for hours of happiness, and mending punctures was to him a joy. Already, in Bessie’s young womanhood, the heroic journeys of Dickens and Twain, of Trollope and Matthew Arnold and Oscar Wilde, were beginning to look commonplace rather than heroic. The world was on the move, and the age was dawning when our astral bodies would flap wearily behind speeding jumbo jets, never able to catch up with ourselves. Successful authors would be forced to circle the globe on unceasingly repeating biennial book tours as though the convenience of the written word had never been invented. One form of restlessness begets another.

  Speed would reach even Hammervale, Breaseborough and Cotterhall. The slow years would be no more. If you didn’t like it where you were, you could go somewhere else. Couldn’t you?

  Dr Hawthorn, who is now at last about to be discovered, some decades later, in Breaseborough, beside his giant computer screen, is not interested in the long, slow, unpleasant past, that dull past from which we will now take a period of leave. He is a post-Gutenberg, post-word, up-to-date Internet man. He is interested in migrations, but not in the migrations of words or ideas. He operates, across time, with unimaginable celerity. His subject could be said to be a form of that old-fashioned pursuit called genealogy, but Dr Hawthorn does not have to waste time on handwritten records illegibly transferred to microfilm, he does not have to sweat it out in public record offices inspecting census returns and birth, marriage and death certificates. He does not have to battle foolishly and noisily with faulty machines and snappy, bad-tempered, snaking spools of slippery sepia, attracting disapproving stares from those who have laboriously mastered the interim technology of ancestor retrieval. Dr Hawthorn has already left all that behind him. When he wants to find out where somebody comes from, all he has to do is to plunge a needle into bone or tissue, and extract some DNA. You can be six thousand years in your grave, but Dr Hawthorn will track you down.

&nbs
p; Well, perhaps it’s not quite as easy as that, though he is so thrilled by the implications of the new developments in molecular biology that he would like you to think it is. He is a champion of the new, a proselytizer, a prophet. Behold him as he stands there, in the now largely disused hall of the Wesleyan Methodists—it is that very room where bored little Bessie Bawtry once sat listening angrily to children’s Sunday school sermons about virtuous little boys saving drowning babies from canals, while she idly popped the varnished blisters on the bench in front. Behold him, proud and powerful, as he prepares to unfold the wonders of his genealogical research! He is slight and light of stature, and grey of hair, but that grey hair bounds in exuberant curls irrepressibly from his small neat round head, a thick springing crop, borne upwards by its own momentum: he is a man of fire and wire and sinew, and his slightly protuberant blue-grey eyes flash with fervour at his audience while he propounds the amazing capacities of his computer, the novelty of his project and the implications of his experiment, and describes the help which he wishes to enlist from those who are gathered here together on this significant Saturday in June. ‘We’re all in this together!’ he cries happily, with boyish, impish, gnomelike fun. His face shines with manic happiness. He talks too fast for some of his slow audience, but most of them, even those who can hardly follow him at all, are carried along by his high spirits. ‘This is a grand opportunity,’ he keeps repeating, ‘a grand opportunity’ (does that usage of the word ‘grand’ loop back to link him to his Yorkshire heritage?) ‘and we’re all about to make history. We are history, every man, woman and child of us, every grandmother, every niece, every auntie, every babe in arms! We’re all part of one big happy family! I know a lot of you may have groaned when people went on about happy families —I used to groan myself, believe you me, and family duty was never a strong suit with me—but this business has given a whole new fascinating, fascinating, fascinating meaning to the family! Thanks to Mr Cudworth’ (here familiar, friendly Mr Cudworth, a quieter-mannered gentleman, more the sort that most of them were used to, smiled in acknowledgement), ‘thanks to Mr Cudworth, I’ve been able to assemble you all here—all the Cudworths, all the Bawtrys, all the Badgers, and all the rest of you that fit into this astonishing pattern of kinship, and we’re going to compile a historic survey that will stand beside the Domesday Book! The new Book of Doom is being written even now, here and now!’