The Peppered Moth

by Margaret Drabble

  Chrissie also was sent to private schools, despite Joe’s Labour principles, despite the excellence of the state education he himself had received at Breaseborough. He spent as much money on her as he spent on Robert. Not for her the second-rate female role. She was to get nothing but the best. But she was not sent away to boarding school. In her case, the best was considered to be a single-sex day school with high academic standards and a socially superior intake. And perhaps, at the back of his mind, Joe thought that if Chrissie wasn’t sent away to school, she could keep an eye on Bessie, who was becoming increasingly neurotic and withdrawn. Let the daughter watch over the mother.

  (Joe Barron, we should tell you, is no longer a Member of Parliament. He failed to be returned in the next general election: although he had been a popular constituency man, the swing went against him, and he resumed his life as a barrister, with a fair amount of success.)

  Joe had no idea of what Chrissie really got up to, during her girlhood and adolescence. Nor had Bessie. Bessie’s agoraphobia had led to an increasing lack of supervision. When the children were very small, she was able and willing to keep them under her eye and under her thumb, but as they grew larger they found that it was easier and easier to escape from her. Bessie never learned to drive—many women didn’t drive, in those days, and two-car families were rare—and she soon abandoned any pretence of walking them to school. The friendly chats at the school gate were an ordeal to her, and the other mothers filled her with dismay, even with terror. She pretended to despise the other mothers, but in practice she feared them, or so Chrissie suspected. Bessie convinced herself that it was quite safe for Robert and Chrissie to walk or take the bus or tram alone. She even sent Chrissie, aged seven, down to the shops for her. And it is fair to say that the streets were safer, then. Robert and Chrissie grew independent early. Independent, and secretive. In the house, they continued to behave in a subdued and respectful manner for most of the time, though Chrissie, as we have seen, punctuated her respect with wild outbursts of indignation. Out of the house, they did more or less what they pleased. And it pleased Chrissie, as she grew into her teens, to join the fast set at Holderfield High. Robert, at that age, was more interested in fighter pilots and model aeroplanes. Chrissie was interested in sex.

  Her friends were not the kind of friends that Bessie and Joe would have approved, though as she never brought them home they were not to know this.

  There are more ways than one of going to the bad.

  Rotters from Cape Town were not available in Holderfield. Rotters were out of date. Chrissie amused herself with the Tory youth of the county. They were the brothers of her schoolfriends, and they were shallow and smoothly callow, and they had more money than was good for them, and they drank more than they could hold, and they groped Chrissie with enthusiasm when they found she seemed willing. Heavy petting, it was called. They could not have been more different from those high-minded, hardworking, highly motivated between-the-wars fifth- and sixth-formers of Breaseborough Secondary School—Reggie Oldroyd, Philip Walters, George Bellew. Chrissie liked them because they were so awful, and so unlike anything her mother could have dreamed of. If she went out with boys like this, she could surely never turn into her mother? Turning into her mother was (and was long to remain) Chrissie’s darkest fear. These dreadful, unacceptable boys, with good manners and bad morals, would inoculate her against Bessie and her fate.

  Chrissie’s father was a sweet and serious man of high principles, and look what had happened to him. Already, by the age of fifteen, Chrissie could see that his virtues had made him unhappy. So she preferred these frightful frivolous lads, who copied out her essays to use when they got back to school, who never read a book, who flunked their exams, who stole from their parents when their money ran out, who nicked drinks from their parents’ drink trolleys, who liked to sit in the back row of the cinema with a hand in her pants or her bra. You didn’t have to fall in love with them. They didn’t have to fall in love with you. But you could have fun with them. And fun, at fifteen, was what Chrissie thought she wanted. She thought she’d have some while she could.

  These bad boys lived a subversive, underhand, underground life, well hidden from their parents, most of whom were respectable, middle-class churchgoing folk. The age of open rebellion had not yet dawned. This was an era of cheating and hiding and lying. Sexual relations, for teenagers, were rarely penetrative. The hand in the bra, the dirty handkerchief, the spilt seed. Terror of pregnancy haunted both girls and boys, and with good reason. So they stopped, just short of the limit, again and again. Even fast girls like Chrissie Barron knew when to stop. That was the code. These were the last years of restraint, if this licentious fumbling could be called restraint.

  Many of the contradictions of the nineteenth century were still in place in the 1950s. A provincial manufacturing town like Holderfield was layered backwards into its prosperous Victorian past. Large houses built of large blocks of granite had not yet been refashioned into flats, or demolished to make way for estates, or sold up to institutions: some were still inhabited by a single spinster, the last of a line, or a lonely widower, living in one room and eating off a tray. Old-fashioned servants had all but disappeared, with the war, as young women found the freedom of munitions and biscuit factories, though most middle-class women with families, including Bessie, had a daily help. An era was passing, but it had not yet departed. Vast gardens surrounded by gloomy conifers and high hedges went to seed, for gardeners, like maids, were in short supply. Small ornamental ponds, neglected for decades, grew deep with Canadian pond weed, and swarmed with silvery minnow and purple-and-orange stickleback. Sundials tried to keep their heads clear and record the passing of their reign, but they gave in to the ivy, one by one, and went under. The ivy tugged at them and pried at them and cracked them and weighed them down, and they fell into the burgeoning wilderness.

  These large, neglected gardens were invaded by children. Chrissie and her gang, aged ten, crept through many a hedge to play secretly in clearings, to make themselves dens in the undergrowth, to fish for minnows with nets and jam jars in the abandoned pools. Occasionally a witchlike figure would scream from a window, or an old man with a stick would totter down cracked steps towards them, but the children were quick and knew their escape routes.

  On one of these forays, Chrissie lost the little oval brooch that her father had brought back to her from the wars. It was neither a very beautiful nor an expensive little brooch. It was made of painted shells, stuck on plaster, with a circlet of pearls and a fragment of reflecting glass in its centre—a trumpery trinket, Italian, cheap, picked up from a roadside stall by Joe as he moved north through Perugia with the army. He had bought it for the little girl he had hardly seen, who had been growing up in his absence. Chrissie loved this brooch. It was her treasure. It was pointless, functionless, decorative, and her own. And now it was gone. She could not think what had happened to it, and wept for days as she mournfully searched the house, the garden, the schoolyard, the playing fields, the road to the bus stop, and all the secret truant places she could think of. Obsessively she sobbed and searched, telling herself madly, as children will, that the brooch was the key to her father’s love, and that if she did not find it he would cease to love her, and would leave her for London, or for another war. An intense guilt and grief shook her, though she told nobody its cause. She almost fell ill. But she looked at her mother, and recovered. She pulled herself together, and tried to forget.

  Five years later, when she was fifteen, she found the brooch, under the copper beech tree at the bottom of Miss Haversham’s garden. (Miss Haversham was not the proprietor’s real name. Her real name was unknown to her intruders.) Chrissie found it as she was picking beech leaves off herself, after an energetic and frustrating tussle with Dave Appleton at the beginning of the summer hols. The discovery struck her as profoundly significant. ‘That which was lost shall be found,’ she declared to Dave Appleton as he wiped off his trousers and zipped him
self up. ‘And all things that were lost shall be found.’

  ‘What?’ said Dave Appleton.

  And Chrissie showed him her shell brooch, which had lain quietly waiting for her for these last five years. There could not be another like it in the whole of Yorkshire, in the whole of England, in the whole of recorded time. It had been lost, and it had come back to her. Her father’s love was once more secured. ‘Amazing, isn’t it?’ said Chrissie, as she polished it up on the hem of her cotton skirt.

  Dave was not a poetic lad, and he was suffering from postejaculation sadness and embarrassment, but he managed to agree that it was a bit of a coincidence.

  ‘You’d better put it somewhere safe this time,’ he said.

  And so she did, but she forgot where the safe place was, and so lost it once more. But this time she did not grieve for it, for she knew that it would be restored once more.

  She did not tell her father that she had found it. But then she had never told him that she had lost it. Some things are better not said.

  The growing Chrissie Barron was not a conscientious scholar, though she did well enough at Holderfield High. She got reasonably good grades, without much effort, but she did not strive to be top of the class, as her mother had striven. She was happy enough to be in the top ten. She appeared to have less ambition than her parents had expected. What was she going to do with her life? Robert at this point seemed set to be a lawyer, in his father’s footsteps. But Chrissie, though frequently argumentative, said she did not want to be a lawyer. She was not even sure at this stage that she wanted to go to university. At times she thought she might be an archaeologist, and recover lost things. At other times she thought she might be a surgeon, or an air stewardess, or a ski instructor, or a barmaid. She did not want anything to do with words. The House of her mother was heavy with the Word. Chrissie did not like words. She had had enough of words.

  Joe Barron urged her to stick at her studies, to do her homework, to defer pleasure, as Miss Heald had instructed the class at Breaseborough. He liked to see her enjoy herself, but he did not want to see her lose ground. It was hard to get your foot back on the ladder, if you slipped. As he had slipped, when he had failed to get the County Major so confidently predicted by Miss Heald. Sometimes he thought Chrissie took her advantages for granted. He had worked hard for those advantages. Were Chrissie and Robert aware of the sacrifices that had been made for their future? Of the expense of bringing them up as a professional man’s children?

  He need not have worried. Of course they were aware. In their view, the cost of their education, of their school uniforms, of their hockey sticks and tennis rackets and bicycles was being drummed into them day and night. They were always being told what they cost their parents. And of course they were not grateful. Why should they be? They hadn’t chosen to be brought up like this, had they? They hadn’t asked to be born.

  Bessie nearly kept her vow not to set foot in South Yorkshire again. In the fifties, she had managed to escape Yorkshire altogether, for when Robert was eighteen and Chrissie fifteen Joe Barron took silk, and as a Queen’s Counsel he was no longer expected to live near his old circuit. He moved south, to London chambers, and the family moved south, to Surrey. To placate Bessie he bought a bigger, cleaner and broader house than the one in Holderfield. Bessie liked it very much. It had two bathrooms, and a conservatory, and two acres of garden to screen her from her uninquisitive neighbours. Bessie’s isolation was complete and triumphant, her metamorphosis achieved. She was delighted, she said, to have left Yorkshire for good. She liked the mild Surrey countryside, the big leisurely houses, the clean air, the quiet, the milder spring. She had always preferred rational Jane Austen to the self-pitying and hysterical Brontes. Frances and Molly, with whom she still kept in touch, would prefer to make their annual visit to Farnleigh, she was sure. They could never have liked Holderfield.

  Chrissie was puzzled by the violence of Bessie’s rejection of Yorkshire, by her praise of tame and suburban Surrey, by her need for a useless surrounding space into which she never ventured.

  How could Bessie explain to Chrissie that it would take her the rest of her life to decontaminate herself? That she needed an unoccupied and neutral zone around her to protect her from the frightening world’s intrusions and assaults?

  Bessie’s loneliness, to Chrissie, seemed deadly. Chrissie, at sixteen, yearned for action. The big house in Farnleigh, to Chrissie, was a living tomb, though she was rapidly discovering the possibilities of Farnleigh’s co-educational grammar school, to which she had been transferred, and where she was to take her A-levels.

  Bessie settled into the anonymity of the south. She avoided messages and memories from Holderfield and Breaseborough. She cut herself off and transplanted herself. She did not try to put down new roots, for she did not seem to want connections. She settled into solitude.

  She never went back to Holderfield. There was nobody there that she ever wished to see again. She had made no friends there. Mrs Macaulay, Mrs Todd, Mrs Stephens—these had been her companions. These had been those who took the place of friends. Her correspondence with the biology teacher in Pennington lapsed.

  Bessie Barron now sank into depression with an almost voluptuous abandon. In Holderfield, she had been forced from time to time to struggle towards an appearance of activity and normality. In Surrey, she gave in to despair. She lay in bed late and slept in the afternoons and began to watch television from time to time, a medium she had formerly derided. Inside her airy house, she wove her own dark cave and hid in it, surrounded by strangely lowbrow magazines and detective stories and soap operas. And Joe, also despairing, would have let her hide away there undisturbed, had it not been for Robert and Chrissie. Robert was almost free now of the family doom, and it was Chrissie who seemed to Joe to bear the brunt of her mother’s mental state. For Bessie was not consistently subdued and inert: she could rouse herself to spasms of violent and angry rhetoric.

  One weekend evening, Chrissie, charged to pick lettuce from the garden and wash it for supper, had failed to give satisfaction. The leaves, said Bessie, were dirty. ‘They’re not dirty,’ said Chrissie mildly, ‘they’re a bit bruised, that’s all.’‘Dirty,' yelled Bessie. ‘Wash them, wash them,’ yelled Bessie. ‘I’ve tried,’ said Chrissie less mildly, staring at the crinkled foliage. ‘Really, Chrissie, you are useless, quite useless,’ bawled Bessie. ‘You can’t even make a salad properly. You stupid, stupid girl. Can’t you do anything properly?’

  Joe, overhearing but not witnessing this interchange, heard the kitchen door bang, and saw Chrissie flounce out into the garden angrily. A quarter of an hour later he followed her and found her lying on the grass sobbing by the raspberries. ‘Come on, pet,’ he said gently.

  ‘She’s mad,’ said Chrissie, as she struggled to her feet. ‘The lettuce was fine. I did my best. She’s mad. The lettuce grows that way. I did my best.’

  ‘Come on in, child,’ said Joe. ‘Come on in.’

  And they sat down together to the poached salmon and the boiled new potatoes and the despised green leaves, crushed and wilted by a battery of cleanliness.

  It was a nice meal. Bessie was a good cook.

  It was soon after this episode that Bessie agreed to see a specialist, and started to take the tablets. They didn’t seem to have much effect, though Robert and Chrissie agreed that perhaps she lost her temper less often and less irrationally. She didn’t seem to be any happier, though she took a certain grim and monotonous satisfaction in talking about the specialist’s diagnosis of ‘endogenous depression’. The specialist, of course, like anyone connected with Bessie, was always described as ‘eminent’. Chrissie, at this period, found a slightly shaming relief in being able to say, to schoolfriends, ‘My mother’s rather ill, I’m afraid.’

  In later years, Chrissie decided that the eminent specialist had been a bloody fool.

  Would a better doctor have come up with better advice? Would a worse husband have achieved better results? Can one blam
e Bessie Barron for handling her own unhappiness in this unproductive way? Can one blame anyone for anything ever? There’s no point in feeling sorry for Bessie. It’s far, far too late for that. There’s still hope for Chrissie, but it’s far too late for Bessie and far too late for Joe.

  Bessie settled for endogenous depression in the alien land of Surrey, and she returned once more, and once only, to Breaseborough. She went in order to bury her mother, though she did not achieve that purpose.

  Bert Bawtry, whose real name was George, had died well before the Barrons moved south to Surrey. He died in 1950, of a set of complications following an attack of pneumonia. He was sixty-nine years old, and he was buried in the Breaseborough Cemetery, on the windy plateau, where Bessie had once learned by heart the sad inscriptions. Bessie attended the service with her mother and Dora and a straggle of neighbours and cousins and colleagues from the days of the electrical works and the Destructor. Joe did not go, though he would have done had he been able. The children were not invited. Children were not expected to attend funerals, not even the funerals of grandparents. The pious days of little Henry and his bearer were long over. It is to be doubted whether anybody who said good-bye to Bert had any faith or interest whatsoever in the life everlasting. This life had, some of them thought, been quite bad enough.