The Peppered Moth

by Margaret Drabble

  The train had left Didcot and was slowing down again just beyond Goring. It was a very slow train.

  And yet, thought Chrissie, she had put up some resistance. She had struggled against his version, his desire for total collusion. The story would have been tidier and more extreme had she succumbed at once, and abandoned all to his dominion. But something in her—some remnant of her sensible, Yorkshire, Bawtry-Barron self—had clung to the idea that she ought to stick it out, to get her degree, and run mad later, when she had some qualifications to fall back on. (Had something in her remembered Joe Barron’s two years as a travelling salesman, and Bessie’s collapse before her part one English B?)

  In her last Cambridge summer, her last long vacation, she had made a bid for freedom. She had told Nick that they must part. Had they quarrelled? Not exactly. But she had told him that she would not spend the summer with him. They must have a trial separation. (Did she tell herself that if their love survived this test; then she would, as he was urging, marry him?)

  It was an old-fashioned test, a trial by distance. Chrissie signed herself up to spend her vacation on the Faeroe Islands. He would never follow her there. She would be out of sight and out of reach, working on an archaeological dig. She would take herself off, with respectable, serious, hardworking colleagues, students and professionals, and dig in the damp earth.

  Bessie and Joe were relieved and delighted, and Joe offered at once to pay for the cost of the exercise. Chrissie said he need not bother, she had got a grant. At that point, her career was still open. Bessie and Joe had not at this point met Nick Gaulden, but emanations from him had reached them, and they had formed the conclusion that he was not a suitable match for their daughter. They had both sensed, though they never mentioned it to one another or to her, that Chrissie was no longer a virgin. They had both decided that handsome Nick Gaulden from Oxford, the Finchley Road and a Taunton orphanage, was not a marrying man. They still, at the back of their liberated minds, perceived of marriage as a woman’s destiny.

  Bessie and Joe were wrong. Nick Gaulden pursued Christine Barron to the Faeroe Islands, and claimed her as his bride. Was this what she had intended him to do? Probably.

  It had not been easy. The Faeroe Islands are inaccessible. They are not very far away as the gull flies—three hundred and eighty miles from Norway, and only two hundred from Shetland—but they are hard to reach, because not many people want to go there. They were not a popular tourist destination then, and they are not very popular now, even though the world has speeded up so much. They are too cold, too barren, too rocky and too wet, the land of the sheep and the puffin and the whale. Chrissie had liked the idea of them precisely because they were so unwelcoming. Nick Gaulden was a classical scholar, of sorts, and gifted in the Romance languages: he had seduced her in the soft option of the classical Mediterranean. The Nordic scene was not for him, and that was why Chrissie Barron had signed on as a willing hand to attempt an excavation of the supposed tomb and home of Sigmundur, who had expired on a heap of seaweed at the end of the first millennium of Our Lord, in A.D. 1000. If Nick Gaulden’s professed passion lasted for a month’s absence, so be it, she would believe in it and surrender. If not, let him dally with the second-best lady of the purple knickers.

  Chrissie, in those days, had been so sure, poor thing, that she was not second best.

  Chrissie had read the sagas and studied the strange, elliptical story of Sigmundur’s rise and fall. Sigmundur was credited with having introduced Christianity to the Faeroes, at the behest of King Olaf of Norway. Christianity had not done Sigmundur much good, for he had died in the maelstrom of a long feud of family hatreds and pagan practices, but it had certainly caught on as a creed with a Lutheran vengeance in later centuries in the Faeroes—a wasteland in need of a dark and stark religion. Chrissie had hardly spared a thought for Sigmundur in many a long year, but now, on the night of Nick’s funeral, she dredged up from the dark ages of her memory the amusing fact that Sigmundur’s wife Turid, a powerful woman in her time, had been known by the title of ‘Principal Widow’, a title to which Chrissie herself felt she could now also lay claim. How many wives had Sigmundur had? She had forgotten. Not as many as Nick Gaulden, for sure. He hadn’t had as much choice. There hadn’t been as many people around in those remote and unpeopled parts. There had been a seduction in a birch wood by a Norwegian fjord, or something like that. Sigmundur and Turid, the only man and woman in the wood of the wide world. He had chosen her because there was no one else to choose. A woman like an axe. Had that remote community on the islands of Skuvoy and Sandoy and Strey-moy celebrated the coming of the end of the millennium with jollity and fermented shark and stuffed sheep’s testicle and sliced blubber and fly agaric soup? Or had they let the moment pass unmarked?

  Prehistory was Chrissie’s period. The Old Stone Age. The Vikings and the sagas were a colourful diversion, a light relief from that unimaginable dark cold lurch at the beginning, when all the pain in the cave began. And there had been light relief and jollity, in that summer of the sixties, amongst her archaeological comrades, far away from the threat of Nick Gaulden. There had been singing and drinking as well as digging. Chrissie, worn out and rubbed aflame with sex, had retreated to a pre-pubertal Girl Guide and Boy Scout enclave. Group Leader was Professor Arkwright, an affable, bearded, boyish, British troll. Not Nick’s type at all. There had been thirteen of them on the dig, twelve workers, and Arkwright the Leader. They had all slept in a disused fish-gutting factory, where Chrissie shared a dormitory with four other young women, all of them vacation volunteers. There was Harriet from St Andrews, Susan from Edinburgh, Beth from Chipping Norton and Elinor from Dublin. Their room had smelt of damp, of oil, of gut, of lanolin, of mildewed straw, of herring. First there was fog, and then it rained steadily, for days, and they could never get dry, for the tumble-dryer machine had not yet reached this island: wet wool socks and cable-knit sweaters were hung on improvised washing lines, and turned by hand before a smoky fire. By day they laboured, slicing through the turf and stony earth, measuring, sifting, digging up stones, shards, animal bones, the shells of limpets and of mussels. How had people survived, century after century, in this outpost? Chrissie had wondered then, and wondered now. Holderfield in comparison had glittered like Paris of the belle epoque, and even Breaseborough had been recast in Chrissie’s recollection as a thriving, diverse and cultured community. Life had been primitive through much of Europe in the year 1000, and in Ultima Thule, nine hundred and sixty-odd years later, it remained so still. No videos then, no fax, no e-mail and, for many, still, no electricity. The men had fished and farmed, the women had stitched and knitted. In winter the days were dark and the evenings long, though in summer a pale endless light played on the cliffs and the turf and the seething waters. Professor Arkwright hoped to find the headless body of Sigmundur, or the foundations of his church, or his burial cross, or his deadly gold chain, the source of so much strife. His student vassals would dig for him.

  The Faeroes would have changed by now, supposed Chrissie. E-mail and mobile telephone and helicopter would have accessed all the islands. Maybe they were now overrun with tourists. She did not know. She had never dared even to think of going back.

  It had rained without much relief on Skuvoy that summer. Shoulder to shoulder, Harriet McGough and Chrissie Barron, in a trench of mud, had scraped and prodded. Harriet, her dark hair dripping rat’s tails, her cheeks reddened by the wind, recited her griefs and hopes to Chrissie, well out of earshot of the religious and censorious Susan, who did not care for bedtime stories. Harriet described her boyfriend, Jim McAllister, an aspiring marine biologist at Aberdeen, and the fright they’d had in May when Harriet had thought she was up the spout. Chrissie kept nodding, sympathetically, as she agreed that condoms were necessary but disgusting—though the truth was that Nick Gaulden’s objections to condoms were as strong, though less high-minded than Susan Lindsay’s, and Chrissie had been obliged to grapple with the Dutch cap. So far it had
worked. At least, Chrissie had said to herself, as she picked delicately at a protruding flinty nodule with dirty cracked fingernails, at least I don’t have to worry about that at the moment, on this faraway Faeroe, with the womb blood seeping out of me right now through a sodden tampon into the gusset of my bottle-green cotton knickers. How the hell, wondered Chrissie, was she going to manage to wash them and get them dry again in this soaking drenching sodding dump?

  They scraped and chatted, deep in their trench, in their Wellington boots and their weatherproofed jackets. What a masochistic way to spend the summer! Puffin casserole and potatoes again for supper, and some sheep cheese if lucky. Not much grows on the thin soil of the Faeroes. Oats and rye fail, and the barley does not ripen. The turnip does well, but one can soon have enough of the turnip. The leek, the beet and the cabbage survive, if cherished, and, in the spring, watercress flourishes. But Ceres has not poured her cornucopia freely upon the Faeroes. Fish head and lamb tail and sea fowl eke out her spare bounty, along with cans and tins and jars of baked beans, corned beef, pressed pork and pickled herring. But Harriet and Chrissie had been content, in their manner, as they gently coaxed the past to reveal itself to them, as their conversation moved from contraception and conception to the specialized named fogs of the islands: the high white hilltop fog called Skadda, the valley fog called something unpronounceable, and the common, pervasive, sea-blanketing thick, murky fog called Morkye. They had seen examples of all these, both in their natural forms, and as illustrated in his slide show by climatologist Crispin Christiansen in the lively Faeroese capital of Torshavn. He had predicted the weather would lift this very day, and maybe, after all, the rain was slackening, and was not that a glimmer of sunshine making its way towards them across the lightening glistening ocean?

  It was a gleam of sunshine, and it brought with it Nick Gaulden. He had come to seek his Christine. Undeterred, nay, inspired by distance and difficulty, he had hitched his way up through England, through Scotland, on a seaplane to Shetland, and across the sea on a trawler, a heroic four-day journey, and now he stood there, outlined against the sunburst, against the steeply rising hillside, gazing down at Chrissie in her subterranean chamber with her little trowel in her dirty hand. ‘So there you are,’ he yelled down at her, as she pushed her red wet hair back from her brow with the back of her hand. He too was wet: water streamed from his head and down the open throat of his shirt.

  ‘Come on up out of there,’ shouted the irresistible, travel-stained, consciously Byronic Nick Gaulden. ‘Come out! Come out!’

  And Chrissie Barron had clambered up out of the tomb which she had dug with her own shovel, and staggered, muddy, stinking of wool and fish, into his waiting arms. Out of the cleft of the earth she had climbed, into the watery sunlight.

  Well, one could not argue with such persistence.

  Her fellow diggers had been impressed by this apparition, though not all had taken it well. Professor Arkwright had been enraged by the distraction, and, when it became clear that Nick had no intention of shouldering a spade, he gave Chrissie the sack. She could clear off to Tôrshavn and make her own way back. She was no longer part of the expedition. Hangers-on not welcome. It was clear that the Prof felt Nick had made a mockery of his own elaborate yearlong preparations for this excursion by turning up there, dripping and smiling, as though he had swum like a fish across the straits.

  But on his first evening, Nick had been allowed to share the puffin stew, the smoky hearth, and to tell his traveller’s tales. Harriet, Elinor, Hamish and Otto had egged him on, as he described the seaplane and the trawler and the Viking captain with his golden rings and the gold chain round his thick neck. And they in turn had told him the story of Sigmundur and his cousins and the blood feud. Nick had brought with him a bottle of Bells ‘Afore Ye Go’ whisky, and he had passed it round. Then he had reeled meekly off to sleep in the men’s longroom, as though obeying some medieval monastic rite. ‘Tomorrow,’ he had threatened Chrissie, as he kissed her, like a troubadour, a chaste good night. And she had made her way with torch and lantern in her long damp nightdress to her straw mattress.

  The next day Chrissie and Nick had been ferried across the shining water to the sunny mainland island. They booked into the Viking Hostel, where they declared themselves to be man and wife, and took a double room the size of a single bed. It had a shelf, a bed, a chair and a hook on the back of the door, and its walls were whitewashed like the walls of a hermit’s cell. There, all night, they had made love, though what Nick Gaulden told her, as he reclaimed her, was ‘I’ve come to fuck you, I’ve come to fuck you so hard you’ll never be able to get away again.’

  And the forbidden word, so rarely uttered then, so common now, had plunged into Chrissie like a sword, and her flesh had closed around the wound as her blood drenched the bed. They had entered a new age of fucking. This was for real.

  In the morning they caught a country bus to the next bay, with a picnic, and had walked along the hilltop on the sweet short green grass. Wildflowers strewed their way—the crowfoot, the eyebright, the gilly flower, the starry saxifrage. Bugloss and self-heal blossomed purple and blue in banks and fissures, and beneath them, in the clear waters of a little cove, they could see great powerful coils of ribbed and ribboned seaweeds ebbing and flowing, inhaling and exhaling, with the sucking breathing waves of the tide. They came across a meadow of mushrooms, of little bubbles of the earth, and they sat down amongst them to eat their rye-bread sandwiches, and Nick had built a tiny toy fire of grass and paper, and lit it with his cigarette lighter, and grilled for her a mushroom skewered on a twig. So kind he had been, so gentle, so dedicated to her body’s pleasures. A lover beyond all praise.

  The train began to move again, through darkened Oxfordshire, towards Ashton, and her little station stop beyond, where her car was waiting for her. Chrissie had not dared to think about the Faeroes episode for years. She had blotted out the past and brutally repressed it. If Nick had not come for her then, would she have escaped him? And had he persisted only because she had provoked him?

  These questions would never be answered.

  Her parents had not received the news of her marriage to Nicolas Gaulden well. She had married him on her twenty-first birthday, and they had not been invited to attend. In fact Bessie had once said to Dora that she had no proof that a wedding had ever taken place. Both Bessie and Joe had assumed that the marriage, and Chrissie’s failure to take her degree, had been precipitated by the fact that Chrissie had got herself pregnant. They were half right and half wrong. Chrissie had thought herself pregnant, but she had been mistaken. Too much sex had fucked up her menstrual cycle, but the Dutch cap had not betrayed her. Nick said he was delighted when she told him she thought she was pregnant, and insisted on marrying her. She was at that stage more than willing. And, believing herself to be already inseminated, she had given up using the Dutch cap. And thus Faro had been conceived. She was born, to the surprise of many, a decorous ten months after the ceremony in Oxford Register Office. She was a normalsized baby, and apparently, despite the mixup, neither premature nor late. The perfect, seven-pound, full-term, life-attached baby. Aged all of ten minutes, she had latched on to the nipple like a leech. Nick and Chrissie had adored her. Joe and Bessie had, of course, adored her. Eva and Gyorgy Gaulden had adored her too, though more absentmindedly, for they were already losing count.

  What had the young couple lived on, in their Oxford digs, and then in their Barlby Road soup-kitchen? Carrots, beans, potatoes, mince and air. Nick’s college grant. Handouts and hand-me-downs and grandparental contributions. Odd jobs, improvisations and minor theft. The Family Allowance. Chrissie ran a play group and charged for it: she discovered necessity had taught her how to keep a good balance sheet. Nick sold his handsome face to a newspaper hoarding and smiled down surreally upon London, ten foot tall, with a cigarette in his mouth. Those were the days. They got by. Nobody starved.

  Chrissie felt, during this wild heyday, that she had truly esc
aped Bessie at last. She had burned her boats. Good-bye, Mother. For how could Nick and Bessie possibly get on? They did meet, occasionally, but their coexistence was not convincing. Nick, who thought he could charm anybody, failed utterly with Bessie. His smiles dashed against the rock of her disapproval in vain. Chrissie had found the experience of sitting in the same room with the pair of them so extreme that she thought she might faint, if one could faint while sitting upright holding a cup of tea in a Parker Knoll upholstered chair in Surrey. Images of Nick in less proper situations were so thickly manifested about him that Chrissie was sure that Bessie could see them too. From her expression as she stared at Nick perhaps she could. She was no fool.

  Joe was always civil to his son-in-law, whom he deplored. He could see the point of him, all too clearly. He worried about his little girl, married to a penniless rotter. He did not think it was going to work. And, of course, he was right, for eventually, after surviving or almost surviving several years of Moira and Serafina, Chrissie had asked her father for advice about a divorce, and he had helped to arrange it. He was less worried about her at this stage than he had been earlier, for Chrissie had showed considerable powers of survival. She had even, through Eva Gaulden, found herself a proper job. If she could get rid of Nick, she might be fine. She might remarry. Joe hoped she would.