She’s always saying this kind of thing to herself.
Faro has seen Sebastian a couple of times since her return from the Cudworth meeting in Breaseborough, and both occasions have been even more draining than usual. She has decided there is something seriously wrong with Seb. He is wasting away. It is true that most people would appear thin in comparison with that solid gathering in the Wesleyan chapel hall, but Seb’s thinness is becoming more and more unhealthy. His skin has taken on a pallid, parchment-like, unnatural texture, a mummified dryness, as though he has been living underground. And indeed he does not go out much in daylight. He prefers the dark. Faro turns naturally to the light, but he prefers the dark. It was a big mistake, getting involved with him in the first place. On the first post-Breaseborough evening she’d gone round to his place and tried to jolly him along, with jokes and stories and a Chinese stir-fry and a bottle of Valpolicella. She’d poured out her energy, but he’d hardly flickered. On the second evening, she’d gone for neutral territory, and that frightful gloomy cavernous smoky pub in Holborn that he favoured. She’d had a couple of drinks and a packet of crispy-bacon-flavoured snacklets, and then she’d run away to the Central Line, saying she’d got to write her ‘Pandora’s Box’ entry for the mag. Which was true, so why did he make her sound as though she were lying?
Now, on the phone, she is doing her best to resist his machinations. His technique is serpentine. Every time she is about to ring off, he introduces another issue to which she is forced or sometimes even tempted to respond, for Sebastian is not a man without interest, or she wouldn’t be talking to him at all, would she? For the moment, she has the initiative. She is telling him about Dr Hawthorn’s mitochondrial-based theories about migrations in the South Seas, which she has just been looking up on the Internet. Dr Hawthorn’s web site carries a high-minded protest about the DNA pirates who are colonizing the remoter parts of the world by buying up the gene pools of isolated tribes for the purpose of commercial experiment and exploitation. Dr Hawthorn’s web site argues that this is unethical. A man should not be allowed to sell his kidneys or his DNA, whatever the going price. Dr Hawthorn claims his own interests are purely scientific, not commercial. What does Seb think?
Nobody, thinks Faro, though she does not say so, would wish to buy the Cudworth-Bawtry genes. Who would wish to purchase inertia, ill-humour and a tendency to run stout in early middle age? With extra chins and jowls and swollen ankles? .
Seb is not interested in the Cook Islands. They are too exotic and too far away for him. He hears her out, and then strikes up his own subject. He too has been on the Internet, and he wants to tell Faro about Biston betularia, the Manchester moth, aka the peppered moth. It’s the kind of thing that ought to grab her. She can write a piece about it, he says. Seb says there is some new stuff on the net about this famous moth. According to a local Linnaean Society up north, it is behaving in a peculiar manner. Its population, which was thought to have been decreasing as a result of the Clean Air Acts, is showing a sudden and unexplained upsurge. It is fluttering and flourishing all over Hammervale. Yes, Hammervale, Seb assures her. She can look it up for herself if she wants. Hammervale is specifically mentioned. And so is Breaseborough. Not many items on the net mention Breaseborough, but this one does.
Damnit, this is, unfortunately, quite interesting. Seb is a wily chap. Has he made all this up? Has he trapped the moth in his death-jar and stuck it with a pin solely in order to trap her and stifle her and stab her?
Seb does not seem to have grasped the evolutionary point about the Manchester moth. He seems to think it grew visibly darker during the nineteenth century, as the soot of the Industrial Revolution poured from the chimneys and furnaces of Manchester and Preston and Liverpool and Leeds, as filth silted the canals and blackened the vegetation.
‘Of course it didn’t grow darker,’ protests Faro, rising to the bait. After all, this is a subject about which she really does know something. ‘It’s just that the darker ones survived amidst the muck and the paler ones shone out like beacons and got eaten by pigeons. It’s a classic illustration of the survival of the fittest.’
‘It grew darker,’ insists Seb, with that querulous edge of righteous mocking pedantry which pricks her so sharply. ‘It was a Lamarckian moth. It willed its own darkness. It acquired several shades of darkness. It clung on by willing its own darkness.’
The man’s barking mad, thinks Faro. She can see a vision of the peppered moth. She had written about it lovingly in her thesis. She sees its dusky wings open against the blackened bark of a city tree. A pollarded, peeling, shabby, robust city tree. Faro can see a plane tree from her own first-floor window. Does a Shepherd’s Bush moth nestle invisibly camouflaged in its crevices even now? A W12 moth, right here in her own artisanal terraced overpriced turn-of-the-century jerry built cul-de-sac? Oh, to get out and stand by a tree, a living tree, instead of standing here trapped on the end of this fucking telephone line talking to a fucking manipulative sadistic leech!
Seb tries to keep the moth-plot going, but Faro knows she will have to break the current now, or she will either go mad or agree to let him come to supper tomorrow.
‘Oh Jesus!’ cries Faro suddenly, with excessive violence. ‘There’s the bell! Sorry, Seb, got to go, it must be Tessa, she said she might pop round.’
Seb knows she is lying, but what can he do? ‘Speak to you soon,’ yells Faro, and rams the phone down hard on its plastic cradle. She is breathing fast. It is hard work, ending a phone call.
She goes to the door, and opens it, as though pretending even to herself that Tessa is about to call. Of course there is no Tessa. Tessa is touring Scandinavia with Opera East, singing in the chorus of Peter Grimes. The sight of the empty corridor is reassuring to Faro. She goes back into her flat and pours herself a glass of wine. Shall she boil up some spaghetti? Shall she watch TV? Shall she check her e-mail? Shall she check up on Bistort betularia on the Internet? Shall she ring Chrissie? Shall she ring her friend Cath? Shall she try yet again to contact Steve Nieman at the Earth Project?
She really needs to speak to Steve Nieman about his skeleton discovery. She ought to be getting on with her Prometheus article about Cotterhall Man, but her editor won’t like it unless she’s got the human angle. Anyway, she’s interested in the human angle. She wants to speak to Steve. She’s got a Northam number for him, and she’s left several messages on his answering machine, but he hasn’t responded. Maybe he doesn’t want to speak to her. Maybe he thinks she’s a meddling journalist. Maybe she is a meddling journalist.
She puts on the spaghetti water and eats a sour grape. Maybe Steve Nieman will know the latest about the peppered moth. Maybe Seb is speaking the truth, and Hammervale is swarming with them. Maybe they are settling even now on Auntie Dora’s window ledges and drying their wings on Great-Grandma Bawtry’s blackened tombstone. Faro had once visited this tombstone, and had stared at it solemnly for about a minute and a half. It had not yielded up any secrets. How stupid she had been, not to spend more time up there after the Cudworth gene convention. She was too impatient. She hadn’t been able to wait to get into her car and drive away, as far as she could, down south, down the motorway, down any old motorway, away from it all.
Faro drains her spaghetti so vigorously that the hot floury water splashes onto her wrist, and snakes of pasta leap out of the colander and into the sink. She puts some butter on the spaghetti, and some Parmesan, and some raw garlic, and sits down to enjoy this modest feast. When she is halfway through it, the phone rings. Will it be Seb again? Shall she let it ring? No, she cannot let it ring. She will have to risk Seb. Her curiosity and her optimism, at this early-evening hour, are too great. It may be something wonderful. She may have won the lottery, or the Nobel Prize, or two free tickets to see the Bother Boys at the Rialto in Northam.
The phone call is from Northam, but it is not offering her the Bother Boys. It is Steve Nieman, returning her call.
Faro, once more, is driving up the Ml to
Northam, where she has a date with Steve Nieman. She is looking forward to it. He seems eager to tell her all about his great discovery. Faro and Steve had talked for an hour on the phone, about the cave, about the Earth Project, about English Heritage and lottery money and the millennium, about the Cudworths and the Bawtrys and Dr Hawthorn, about Auntie Dora and Steve Nieman’s Grandma Levy and the freakish behaviour of the Hammervale peppered moth. Steve’s mind is quick and his jokes engaging. He is full of energy. He makes the spirits rise. They had laughed a lot. Faro knows she will like Steve Nieman.
And Steve Nieman, she can tell at the first glance, is a likeable chap. He is waiting for her in the bar of the city-centre hotel into which she has booked herself. She has checked herself in, overcome the irritation of finding the boasted hotel car park permanently full, found a municipal park, unpacked, and taken herself down in the lift to keep her appointment with the Howard Carter of Hammervale. And there he is. There is no mistaking Steve Nieman in this businessman décor. Nobody else could be he. Like Faro herself, he is endowed with a lot of curly hair. It is lighter in colour than hers, a rich brown with a bronzed reddish tinge, but it is as thickly sprouting. He wears jeans and trainers and an open-necked blue-checked shirt over a washing-machine-bruised T-shirt. He is an outdoor, casual, honest-Injun kind of young man, somewhere in his early thirties, and deeply tanned by the South Yorkshire sun. He wears a golden bracelet on one bony wrist and a small earring in one ear.
‘Hi!’ says Steve, bounding at her with outstretched hand. ‘You must be Faro! I’m Steve. Glad to meet you.’
Steve is radiant with good will and welcome. His handshake is friendly and firm, and his skin, unlike Sebastian’s, is warm and vibrant. His smile is open. Faro smiles back. They stand there, looking at one another. Animal magnetism flickers back and forth between them. Faro had known he would look like this, and she knows he is as pleased as she is with what he sees. She is proud of her persistence. She had gone on ringing this man until he rang her back. Good for her.
They settle down to half a pint while they plan their campaign. Steve suggests they go and have a meal—does she like Indian? There’s a famous vegetarian Indian up Broom Street, if she likes that kind of thing—and he’ll tell her all about it. Then, the next day, they’ll go to see Cotterhall Man in his glass coffin—Steve has made an appointment, they will be expected—and later in the morning he’ll take her to see the Earth Project and the cave. What about that?
Faro sips her Murphy’s and says that it sounds just great. She is suffused with happiness. What fun, says Faro, wiping a little froth of white foam from her upper lip. Vegetarian curry, Cotterhall Man and a cave. What could be more delightful? This is her summer holiday, and she’s being paid for it. She sips her black drink, and Steve drains his amber brew. Faro can’t stop smiling. One couldn’t possibly come to any harm, with a man like Steve Nieman in an Indian vegetarian restaurant in Northam.
Steve is well known in the Star of Asia, and the waiters are sweetly courteous to his attractive guest. They unfold her napkin for her and offer her pickles. The walls glow pink and the lights are dim. Small fish dart around in a large tank. A yellow candle flickers between Steve and Faro in a thickening shroud of wax. The air is full of spices.
Over spinach and eggplant and okra and rice and keema peas and pints of lager, Steve narrates the story of his historic discovery. Although he must have told it all many times before, he enjoys telling it again, and Faro knows she is hearing an uncensored, privileged version. Steve is telling her how it really was. He is doing her that honour. She has his confidence. They are part of the same plot.
Steve reveals himself as a happy-go-lucky amateur. He’d started to take a degree in geology, way back, but hadn’t been much interested in the kind of jobs it seemed to be leading to. So he’d gone off for a year or two to work in a kibbutz in Israel, where he’d learned carpentry. He’d enjoyed it. He’d come home and been attached for a while to a craft commune in Camberwell, then had founded a workshop of his own with his then girlfriend. But he’d found the bookkeeping and the VAT an absolute pain, and when his friend Niall had asked him if he was free to come and work on this Hammervale development he’d jumped at it. There’d been plenty of work going up here, and good-quality, interesting work. Building the exhibition centre, the observatory, the field studies centre, the water house. He’d show her some of it tomorrow. It wasn’t big money, but it was steady, and the work was useful. Reclamation. Making the place into something. It had been a tip before—a whole series of tips. But she would know about that, because her people were from round here, weren’t they?
Sort of, agreed Faro. Her grandparents were Breaseborough people. She had an auntie still living here.
Anyway, said Steve, he’d got to like the area a lot. He’d been here a couple of years now. He wouldn’t say he was settled here, but he liked it. He was a bit of a wanderer, but he liked it here.
And what about the skeleton, prompted Faro.
Steve told her about the skeleton. He’d found it by accident. He hadn’t been looking for anything. He’d just been scrambling around one evening. Fascinating, it was, the landscape round here—old canals, locks, disused pitheads, quarries. And the limestone cliffs. Sort of undiscovered terrain. They’d been told to keep out of the development area, partly because a landfill company had started work before the Trust put a stop to it and bought them out, and it was supposed to be unsafe. But Steve hadn’t been able to resist getting up there to have a look. There was a particularly interesting area called Coddy Holes, just at the bottom of Cotterhall cliff, which had been partly blasted by the landfill—a shame really. The development money had put a stop to all that. It was where the local youth used to go and hang out. They weren’t allowed up there anymore, but Steve hadn’t been able to resist going up to have a nose around. It was just up the far side of the railway and the canal, to the west, on the escarpment. Did she know where he meant? No? He’d love to show her. Though a lot of it looked very different now—some of it had been replanted. Then it was all just raw, ploughed mud and earth, at the bottom, and above, all the old secret places. And he’d gone climbing. It was a beautiful summer evening, almost exactly a year ago, and you know how it is, he kept meaning to turn back, but then he’d see something interesting just up above him, so he’d gone on scrambling up, through the rocks and the undergrowth and the thorn trees, and eventually he’d seen this sort of gap ahead of him, in the limestone. It looked kind of newish, as though something had collapsed during the blasting. But of course he’d gone on, and when he got nearer, he could see there was an entrance to what looked like a cave. Boy’s Own stuff. He had to investigate.
‘Of course you did,’ agreed Faro.
‘Well,’ said Steve, ‘there was a cave. I kind of fell into it. I thought I’d just put my nose in, but the ground gave way in a pile of loose dirt and scree and stones and stuff, and I skidded right down in there. For a moment I thought I’d fucking had it. I thought, what if I go down a fucking mineshaft? That whole area is undermined, you know. It would have been my own fault, wouldn’t it? But it was OK, it didn’t go any further. And there was a cave, a natural cave, quite big enough to stand up in. And there was this chap, lying on a ledge. Pretty well dead, he was. Just bones. But quite a lot of bones. My little landslide had knocked a few bits off him—don’t tell anyone I told you that, I think they all know, but we don’t mention it. But he still looked pretty well complete. Anyway, there he was, just lying there. Where he’d always been.’
‘Wow,’ said Faro.
‘That’s what I thought. Wow. And of course I didn’t know who or what he was, did I? He could have been anything. A dead potholer. A murder victim. How on earth was I to know he’d been there for eight thousand years and was about to become a national treasure? Anyway, there he was. Do you know what I did? I said, “Hello.” Stupid, wasn’t it? But I felt I had to say something.’
Steve grinned, and ran his curry-scented fingers through h
is thick hair, and appealed to Faro for approval. She granted it.
‘Of course you had to say something. Were you frightened?’
‘No, I was thrilled. I felt he’d be pleased I’d found him. It was a bit of a miracle, you know. They had been going to blow up the whole ridge. He might have ended up as bone-meal, with all the garbage of South Yorkshire on top of him. Actually, I’m not really sure he likes being in the university either. You’ll see what I mean. But perhaps it’s better than being mashed up with a lot of old hamburger cartons and pet-food tins. If you had to choose.’
‘And how did you get out again?’
‘It was easier getting out than in. A bit of a scramble, but nothing too tricky. I’ll show you.’
‘What an adventure,’ said Faro admiringly. ‘And how long did it take them to find out who he really was?’
‘Oh, months and months. Tests and radiocarbon dating and all that stuff. You know, I’ll tell you something. I nearly didn’t tell anyone he was there. I thought there might be trouble. I mean, I wasn’t meant to be up there at all. And I realized I shouldn’t have touched him.’
‘Did you touch him?’
Steve looked guilty. ‘Yes, I did. I—I sort of patted his head. And it sort of fell sideways.’
Faro choked into her lager. Yes, she would have another pint, why not, well perhaps a half-pint.
‘Did it fall off? she then wanted to know.
‘Not right off,’ said Steve, with winning candour.
Faro found Steve’s attitude to his discovery admirable in every way. He seemed so thoroughly human. He spoke of his skeleton not as of a trophy, but as of a fellow human being. This was not unknown amongst the scientists with whom she had professional contact, but most of them, like Dr Hawthorn, were more given to making populist jokes in an effort towards a disarming appearance of humanity. They didn’t really care about the dead. There seemed to be a tenderness in Steve Nieman. It was a relief. She liked it. She liked him.
The Peppered Moth Page 27
