The Peppered Moth

by Margaret Drabble

  Lucky for Nick that the Child Support Agency hadn’t been thought up earlier. Lucky for Nick that his women hadn’t been litigious. Lucky for him that they had all loved him so much. The women who had chosen Nick had known what they were choosing, and they had got what they wanted. For a time, at least.

  Whereas with Bessie—there had been no end to her demands, her needs. She had never been satisfied.

  Chrissie had a long history with Nick Gaulden. She had met him when she was still a girl, before she was twenty. She had her memories. For decades, she had been afraid to look at them, afraid they could still cause her pain. Now that he was gone, now that the story was over, perhaps she would be able to dare to look at them again. They could not be taken away from her now. They were hers. No more pain, no more deceit could corrode or heap earth upon them. What would they look like now, if she tried to excavate them? Would they be worm-eaten, ashen, corrupt? Or would they gleam like buried gold? In the new age after Nick’s death, would she be able to recover him? For her memories of him now were equivalent to all other memories of him. All had lost him. He was equally dead to all.

  The wake was a riot. Wine, spirits and reminiscences flowed, as a great red harvest sun swam low in the cream-layered pink and violet sky: monstrous, swollen, presaging a disaster that had already happened. It lit Fiona McKnight’s drawing room with a last lurid glow, then suddenly gave up and sank from sight.

  Fiona’s house had a view. It looked out over London. On a clear day, you could see the Crystal Palace on the Surrey shore. Here Nick Gaulden and Fiona McKnight Gaulden had sat, night after night, listening to music on her expensive sound system, watching the sun set, pretending to be a proper middle-aged married couple. For three or four years they had kept it up. Whereas, as Serafina now loudly recalled, most of us lived in basements. Staring at brick walls, into dank areas, into other people’s kitchens.

  ‘Once I threw a mug at him,’ boasted Serafina, ‘and it went right through the window and across the alley and into the kitchen window next door. Think of that! Those were the days!’

  ‘You get what you pay for,’ said Joachim Barker, helping himself to a couple of smoked-salmon sandwiches.

  Eva Gaulden, who had long lost count of the number and names of her legitimate and illegitimate grandchildren, was listening patiently to Arethusa, who was talking about amniocentesis and prenatal scans. The new technology of childbirth. Arethusa seemed indignant about something or other, but Eva couldn’t work out what it was. ‘Yes, my dear,’ she said, from time to time, as her mind flitted from decade to decade, from migration to migration, from image to image, from face to face. Vienna, Berlin, Dover, London, the Taunton Children’s Home, London, the Finchley Road, Golders Green. It ended at Golders Green. Nick had been born in the sick bay of the Taunton orphanage where she’d been working, and she’d been too busy to pay him much attention. Times had been hard, in the late thirties. But Nick seemed to have found plenty of attention later on in life, so that was all right. ‘Yes, my dear, you’re quite right,’ Eva said, and patted Arethusa’s hand, and left her in midsentence to look for Rudi, to make sure Rudi was still alive.

  Stella, ever gracious, was being pleasant to Moira. But Moira did not seem to need her pleasantness. The downtrodden Moira, it emerged, had turned into a psychoanalyst, and now worked at the Tavistock. Stella was astonished. ‘However did you manage that?’ she asked. ‘Didn’t you have to pass exams?’

  Tiger was tormenting Aurelius. He wanted to hear about cricket. Aurelius was mad about cricket. Why? What was the point of it? Could Tiger go and see a match with him one day? What was cricket for? Was Aurelius a batter or a bowler? Did he play for his school? Why was Lord’s called Lord’s? Who was the fastest bowler in the world? Tiger adored Aurelius.

  Faro had been trapped by Eric Mendelsson. Like the Ancient Mariner he had accosted her and forced her to hear his tale. Back he went, over his ancient friendship with Nick, over their rivalries at school, their wartime looting of bomb sites, their truancies, their delinquencies, their failed ambitions. They had been going to do such things, the pair of them. Nick the painter, Eric the poet. (They had published a few pamphlets together, back in the sixties.) Eric was already very drunk, although the night was young: Faro was surprised that somebody who drank so habitually could still get so drunk. And you’d have thought that at a liver-transplant funeral he might have taken things a bit steadier. But no, like the mariner, he was condemned to endless repetition. He was stuck in his groove, in his three-mile-island of North London, in his own personal Spandau, which he paced hopelessly, day in, day out, year in, year out. Nick Gaulden had always been willing to offer him a drink, a joint, a seat by the fire. Eric Mendelsson had hung on, through the changing panorama of Nick’s women: faithful, unrejected, like a black dog, like a familiar devil. While Eric continued to drink more, why should Nick Gaulden try to drink less? Eric droned on, stumbling, slurring, repeating himself. Eric’s speech was slurred even when he was sober. Listening to his drawlings, Faro felt her own youth and health rising irresistibly within her like a fountain: it was hard to keep the lid on all the bubbling within her. She could feel it springing, spurting, its pressure gathering and rising like a jet. She felt herself taking strength even from Eric’s rheumy eye, his crooked teeth, his crooked smile. Clear water, welling upwards, the nub of its crystal surface throbbing and pulsing. Youth, hope, jouissance! Alas, poor Eric. How good her Dad had been to him. Good old Dad. She could never have endured the boredom.

  Stella Wakefield had moved on from the subject of Moira’s new career, and was now discussing green funerals with a young man called Dennis Rose. Stella wanted to be buried in a shroud of bracken and a coffin of willow beneath an oak tree in Horner Woods. She would rise again in a great clump of golden honey fungus. Dennis Rose did not seem to get the hang of this. He said that there wasn’t room on the planet for that kind of thing. Stella pointed out that it was because the planet was so overcrowded that green funerals were a good idea. They didn’t pollute, they didn’t interfere with the nitrogen cycle. Dennis Rose said that his father was doing his bit for the planet, he was in landfill, he owned a lot of sites up north. Stella said that she believed landfill wasn’t always a good thing—didn’t it create a lot of methane gas? Dennis said all that had changed, that was the bad old days, landfill was ecologically very sound now, and his father’s firm was working in partnership with a land reclamation scheme in South Yorkshire. It was reclaiming and landscaping Hammervale and the Lower Ham Valley, and turning them into a leisure centre, an earth park, a golf course and a field studies centre. Stella said that sounded ghastly to her, could he be serious? Dennis said, had she ever seen Hammervale? Nothing could be more ghastly than Hammervale. Whatever his dad Victor did to Hammervale would be an improvement. Anything would be an improvement. Stella conceded that she had never seen Hammervale. You just go and have a look, before you start talking about greenery, said young Dennis, squarely standing his ground.

  Serafina, at Tiger’s request, was unwinding her turban. She uncoiled it, length after length, to reveal a neat head capped by close-fitting tight black curls. The contrast was startling. Tiger was impressed. ‘Put it back on again,’ he urged, and Serafina obligingly twisted, wound, coiled and tucked, and behold, the wonderful erection was back in place. She didn’t even have to look. Her fingers knew. It was almost as good as the Indian rope trick, said Tiger.

  And where was Jenny Pargiter, the disconcerting giant? She was looming, alone, gazing out over the city, garbed in her blacks. She was keeping her secrets.

  Chrissie, the other black widow, found herself talking about plastic coffins to Fiona McKnight. It was Fiona who had raised the subject. Fiona was as sharp as a kitchen knife, as unsentimental as a lemon. Chrissie had always been afraid of Fiona. Because Fiona was cruel and rich and had class. But now, in this Hampstead eyrie, Chrissie felt her fear evaporate: for Fiona was nothing more nor less than a beady-eyed, clever, dried-up little old woman, wi
th a cackle of a laugh, and a fine collection of bric-à-brac. Fiona had given up the Fine Arts, in which she and Nick had not very profitably dabbled together, and had taken up Bakelite. Did Chrissie know anything about Bakelite? It was fascinating stuff, fascinating. Did Chrissie know that in 1938 someone had invented and designed the Bakelite coffin? Bizarre, what? Fiona had just been up to Doncaster to see an exhibition of the stuff. She was thinking, herself, of opening a new gallery. Plastic, shellac, Bakelite, casein. She was tired of trying to be modern. She was sick of the cutting edge. She thought she’d turn kitsch in her old age. What? Might be fun, what?

  ‘I had an uncle once who was fond of Bakelite,’ said Chrissie helpfully. ‘He used to manufacture it.’

  Fiona found this fascinating, fascinating. Did Chrissie know the trademark? Did Chrissie have any pieces? No, Chrissie didn’t. She didn’t really know anything much about that side of the family at all. But she’d try to find out, if Fiona really wanted her to.

  ‘You’re married to an archaeologist, aren’t you?’ accused Fiona McKnight. ‘Burial sites, funerary rites, all that kind of thing?’

  Fiona was taken with a fit of coughing, which she quenched with neat vodka.

  Yes, agreed Chrissie, that was his kind of thing.

  ‘I met your husband,’ said Fiona. ‘Met him at the Academy. Agreeable chap. Good for you. Never felt like taking the risk again myself. Lost interest in that kind of thing. Not that you could describe Nick as that kind of thing. Bit of a one-off, Nick, wasn’t he?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Chrissie thoughtfully. ‘Maybe he was a type, after all. Quite a rare one. But a type.’

  Fiona spluttered, coughed into her handkerchief, reached into her bag, lit up a cigarette.

  ‘Can’t give it up,’ she said. ‘It was hell, sitting and standing through all that chat and all that guitar music. Without a fag. I thought Eric would never get to the end. Have one?’

  ‘No thanks,’ said Chrissie. ‘I stopped.’

  ‘Good for you. Good for you. How did you manage it? You used to be heavy on the draw, like me, didn’t you?’

  ‘I made myself sick,’ said Chrissie.

  Fiona thought that very funny, or so her excessive laughter might have suggested.

  ‘Rum do, eh?’ she said, when her mirth died down. ‘Poor old Nick. Shall I tell you a secret? I thought I’d rescue him, I thought I’d save him from himself. Go on, laugh, do. And look what happened. Here I am, an old hag, smoking like a chimney and drinking like a fish. Serves me right, what? Did you think you’d save him? Did we all think we could save him?’

  ‘When I knew him first,’ said Chrissie, slowly and carefully, ‘there was nothing to save him from. Or there didn’t seem to be. When I knew Nick he was young, remember. And none of these bad things had happened.’

  Fiona’s eyes glittered, too bright in the withering of her too-small pinched white face.

  ‘And not so many of the good ones, either,’ she said, with companionable malice. ‘We had some fun up here, Nick and I. On our good days.’

  And Jenny Pargiter stared out lonely over the city, like the figurehead of a great ship about to slip its anchor.

  Christine Flora Barron Gaulden Sinclair sat back in her seat on the last slow train from Paddington and shut her eyes. It had been a long day. The train was taking her back to Oxfordshire, and it was taking her through the stations of Nick’s past. Paddington, Radley, Appleford, Slough, Didcot, Cholsey, Goring, Pangbourne, Reading, Ashton-under-Wychwood, Queen’s Norton. Nick Gaulden and Don Sinclair had both been Oxford men, though Don Sinclair had done more to deserve the title. And now Chrissie lived in a pleasant seventeeth-century house of yellow stone with latticed windows standing just off a village green in the Cotswolds. A pretty, rustic, charming building of character, with many original features, as the estate agents had accurately described it to the Sinclairs. A picture-postcard house. A second home for a second marriage. Bessie Barron had liked it a great deal and had been to stay in it as often as she was invited. More often, in fact.

  Bessie Barron had also approved of Donald Sinclair. Nick Gaulden had not been her kind of person at all.

  Chrissie shut her eyes, amidst the smell of old upholstery, newsprint, stale coffee and plastic beaker, as the train rattled through Radley. It rattled her backwards, to her first strange and fatal meeting with Nick Gaulden. Watch her as the years peel away from her, as her skin lifts and tightens, her hair reburnishes, her waist dwindles, her hard mouth softens, her eyes widen, her lashes lengthen. There is Chrissie Barron, nineteen years old and a virgin, waiting for everything to happen to her. Nick Gaulden walks into the room, and it begins to happen. He walks up to her, and offers her a cigarette. She accepts. She already has a glass of wine. It is a party, not a funeral, a summer party in a narrow little terraced house in a Cambridge side street. Nick is visiting from Oxford, he tells her. He is reading Greats. She tells him she is at the end of her first year, reading what is known as Arc and Anth. They cannot hear one another very well, for the room is crowded and everyone is shouting. The ash on her cigarette lengthens. He takes it from her, gently, as though it were precious, reaches behind him to a saucer on the mantelpiece, shakes off the ash, and gently, as though it were precious, restores the cigarette to her hand. Their hands touch in the transaction. It is done. That is it. A violent current passes from Nick Gaulden to Chrissie Barron, and both begin to tremble. It is as simple, as irreversible as that. That is how life is engendered.

  Transformed into a fountain, a tree, a breeze, a bird? Forget the poetry, forget the dignity of mythology. Chrissie at times has wished that she had been fried to a cinder at that first contact, that she had been frazzled and scorched to death. The adult Chrissie winces in her ageing body as the train grinds into Didcot.

  Chrissie had to climb back into college that first party night, for by the time she and Nick parted, the gates were locked. They did not sleep with one another that first night, nor the next, nor the next. It was a courtship, and Nick was a romantic. He liked foreplay. He could make it last. He wooed her with words as well as gestures—words, as she was later to discover, not all his own. She remembers them now. Words are like terrible little metallic containers, like capsules. They preserve what should be forgotten. They endure. When punctured, they release their dangerous, poisonous spores, to reinfect the drying, withering flesh.

  For I rather had owner be

  Of thee one hour, than all else ever.

  John Donne had been all the rage in those days. A poet of the fifties. A lot of people quoted him.

  Nick had wooed her with words his own and not his own, with kisses, with caresses, and with hard liquor. For those had been the drinking years, not the drugged years, and Nick had been a pioneer with the whisky bottle. He had hitched eastwards across the counties of Middle England to visit her, arriving, dramatic, on her threshold, with a bottle in a brown bag.

  He had deflowered her in her college bed. Chrissie, who has forgotten much, lost in a blur of pain, alcohol, sorrow, age and sheer relentless weighty brain-numbing overloading time, can remember every moment of this long-ago event, every sensation.

  The train draws out of Didcot, hesitates, stops. Something is wrong with its engine. An apology comes over the loudspeaker. There will be a slight delay.

  A woman’s first sexual experience is frequently disappointing and incomplete. Chrissie Barron’s, unfortunately for her, had been ecstatic. She had left the body and soared upwards. Her fleshly body had lain pinioned beneath Nick’s warm completed weight, and her spirit body had soared upwards, as her blood soaked the sheets. She had been freed of the body through the body. So many times on the verge of initiation, she had at last crossed the threshold and discovered the mystery.

  All had been perfect. Both had been awestruck by the simplicity of it. They had been made for one another, they were two halves of the same body, fused into one. And they could do it again, and again, and again. They could come together and achieve t
his miracle any time, any place. In a bed, in a ditch, in a field.

  That summer they had eloped to France, and on to Italy. With a canvas bag full of clothes, and thirty pounds in their pockets. Chrissie had lied to her parents: she told them she was going on holiday with her college friends Ilse and Barbara. Chrissie and Nick had wandered through Europe, drunkenly, in the innocence of the first youth of their passion. Chrissie had been subdued and given over to it. She had been soaked and saturated with sex. She became more and less than human. She took leave of her senses and was enthralled by her senses. And Nick had sworn he would love her, her only, her for ever, in endless, rapturous, hyperbolic protestation. She had drunk in his vows, through France, through the Alps, and down the Adriatic. He had sworn his love in bus stations, in cheap cafés, in wine cellars, in mountain villages, in classical ruins, and in a bedroom full of mosquitoes, where beneath the slowly turning creaking fan the walls had been spattered with their conjoined, commingled blood. Together, forever, he had said. And she had believed him.

  Or had she? How could she have done? Even to this day she did not know if she had believed him or not.

  No, of course she could not have believed him.

  Chrissie Barron, as the disembodied official voice apologizes once more for the delay, finds herself, forty years on, blushing with shame. Of course she had not believed him. She had known, even then, even at the very beginning, even at Cambridge, that he was faithless, that he was sleeping with other women, that he was transported by his own rhetoric, that he was a collector, that there was no way in which she could be the one and only love of his life. Even then, ignorant though she was, she had recognized that the very intensity of his lovemaking signified its duplicity. Yet she had deceived herself, she had pretended not to notice. She had hidden even from him the fact that she had once found another woman’s knickers stuffed down at the bottom of his Oxford bed-sitter bed. Why on earth had she not confronted him, then and there, with those stained purple net pants, and brought the whole thing to an end? She knew the answer. It was because she had not wanted to lose him. She wanted to pretend, even to herself, that they and what they signified did not exist. So she had lied, and lied, and lied. She had stuffed knowledge down to the bottom of the bed and hidden it. And Nick, deceived and deceiving, drunk on words and liquor, had continued to swear undying and exclusive love.