The Peppered Moth

by Margaret Drabble

  Henri Bergson argues, if she remembers rightly, that consciousness is a by-product of mobility. Most plants draw their sustenance directly and unmediated from the ground in which they live, but animals are obliged to move in search of food and prey, and they become conscious as they do so. The vegetable is condemned to rooted torpor, the animal to hungry movement. And thus we evolve, and they stay where they are. Bergson had made some interesting points about those halfway species, the fungi and the insectivorous plants, but Faro can’t remember what they are. Was it Bergson who had called fungi the blind alleys of the vegetable world? Maybe the human species has evolved too far, maybe we all move around too much, too pointlessly, and consciousness will implode upon itself.

  Faro doesn’t know what Bergson would make of modern restlessness. Freud had thought that travel and transport were bad for the health, and on the present showing, he would seem to be right. It can’t be good to spend too much time on the London Underground. But maybe Bergson would have argued that the impulse to travel is an evolutionary necessity, that we are seeking ways to jump the planet and escape entropy. We are working out our escape, even as we sit underground in the dark.

  Bergson had suggested that we might learn how to escape death itself. Freud would have made short work of that suggestion. But Bergson may have been right.

  Faro sits tight, and starts, despite herself, to think about Sebastian Jones and his pancreas. She has looked the pancreas up on the Internet, that twentieth-century magnet for the hypochondriac, and has found little comfort there. True, there are accounts of successful pancreas transplants, with prices given in dollars, and there are portraits of sections of benign tumours, but these are outnumbered and outweighed by grim statistics. Faro has stared at slides of marbled, blotted and blotched cellscapes, representing Malignant Tumour, Ectodermal, Excellent and Malignant Tumour, Ectodermal, Good. She can’t see anything very good about them. The pancreas, which in its natural state is light tan or pinkish in colour, has been dyed in virulent laboratory shades of purple and green and red. Its cells splurge and cluster. A transplant, without an accompanying kidney, costs somewhere in the region of two hundred thousand dollars. Symptoms of a diseased pancreas include abdominal pain or pressure, relieved by leaning forward, which she supposes may account for Seb’s habitually hunched and bowed posture. Also one may expect a yellowish skin, weight loss, weakness and darkness of the urine. Faro has never seen Sebastian Jones’s urine, and does not wish acquaintance with it now.

  Faro pictures Seb sitting on his couch, hunched into himself, as though his body would cave in upon itself and devour its own entrails.

  Faro is not up to comforting a sick man, but she is even more incapable of refusing to try to do so. It is all very unfair. Why isn’t his mother there, looking after him? Surely vicars’ wives are trained for that sort of thing? Faro had had enough of deathbeds with the death of her father Nick Gaulden, the first anniversary of which is fast approaching.

  The train moves on, eventually, and carries her onwards, towards the condemned man. When she gets there, she finds Seb isn’t in bed at all, he’s sitting, alert and intent, on his unspeakable couch, watching a video. He doesn’t even switch off as she lets herself in, though he does grunt in acknowledgement of her arrival, then waits to the end of a sequence before pressing the pause button. He is watching an early black-and-white version of Frankenstein. The high-browed balding frozen monster peculiarly resembles Sebastian himself, Faro cannot help thinking.

  Slowly, Seb heaves his feet off the couch, and sits there, leaning slightly forward, hunched, in what Faro must now consider his pancreatic position. Then he pats the fraying foam cushion seat next to him, inviting her to sit. She goes to sit by him, and takes his hand in hers. It is white and cold and dry. He lets her hold it. She massages it, gently, trying to impart warmth, trying to transmit the vital spark. Seb shudders and does not return her friendly pressure. She continues to squeeze and rub, and sighs heavily.

  ‘Oh Seb,’ she says, ‘who would have thought it?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ says Seb.

  This uncharacteristic remark convinces Faro that he is not faking. But he follows it up with a request so dreadful that Faro is confounded.

  ‘Descend with me,’ says Seb. ‘Descend with me.’

  A pulse of hysteria leaps through Faro’s head and flickers in terror. Descend with me? What can he want of her? A nerve twangs at the base of her skull, and the small sharp pain shoots upwards to lodge behind her left eye. Whatever she does, whatever she says, will be inadequate, trivial, risible. How dare he trap her and test her like this? Will he play with her as a cat with a mouse? Is this the waiting game he has been playing throughout their unsatisfactory and pointlessly protracted relationship?

  Faro is a healthy young woman who does not want to have to think about the last things. She does not want to descend. She likes the light and the sun. She wants to sit on a sunny bank with butterflies about her. This gloomy apartment is as near the grave as she wishes to go. All the things that are in it speak of death—the unwashed sheets on the unmade bed in the poky little bedroom, the shower room with its dirty plastic curtain, the kitchenette with its unwashed plates, the piles of old sci-fi and horror magazines stacked in corners, the 1988 wall calendar portraying a street scene in Kampala. They all mark time for ever. The dust which lies on ledges, the London grime on the windowpanes of the old-fashioned broken-corded sash windows. Faro is not a tidy person, but her flat shines like an advertisement for Mr Muscle Home Cleaner in comparison with this place. Faro looks around her, desperately, as though the room itself will rescue her and give her some lines.

  ‘I brought you a chicken,’ croaks Faro at last, letting go of Seb’s hand.

  Seb grins, his skin stretching. His teeth look too big for his face.

  ‘I’m not so ill that I can’t get to the pub,’ he says.

  ‘I’m not going to the pub,’ says Faro, suddenly leaping to her feet and going to stare out of the window. ‘I hate that pub. I’ve always hated that pub. I’ve never been able to see what you see in that pub.’

  Seb’s flat is on the second floor back of an eighteenth-century terraced house which has seen better days. It looks out onto a small courtyard, in which grows a small thorn tree. It is overlooked by the backs of tall buildings of the sixties—an office block, the service area of a cheap hotel. It is a little corner of old London, and it is dying, even if Seb is not. Faro stares out stubbornly at the tree.

  ‘OK,’ concedes Seb. ‘We’ll have some chicken.’

  So Seb and Faro sit at Seb’s cluttered little table, which is almost as unhygienic as Auntie Dora’s, though its layers are differently constituted. It is strewed with dirty ashtrays, cigarette packets (and yes, like all diseases, cancer of the pancreas is linked to heavy smoking), bottle tops, paperback books, a bruised apple, a spotted banana, ballpoint pens, paper clips and two potatoes, green and sprouting transparent waxy fingers from their many sickly eyes. Faro eats a mouthful of cold chicken and wonders if she dreamed those words she thought she had heard. Descend with me. No, people do not talk like that, in the late twentieth century. They talk and they live in the upper reaches, in the rapid shallows. Nobody goes down there anymore, not even the dead and the dying. There is nothing down there anymore.

  Cotterhall Man with his long yellow shanks appears to Faro, as she silently chews on the dry white breast. He had been killed by a blow to the head. Seb, it seems, will die a lingering and medicated death. It’s a sort of progress.

  Nowadays, thinks Faro, as she clears up the dishes and piles them into the dirty sink, we go in for grief management and all that kind of nonsense. Or we write newspaper accounts of our mortal illness, or we die on camera. It’s a very long time since people believed in God, and the Resurrection of the Body, and the Life Everlasting. If they ever did. All this horror trip, thinks Faro, is a religion substitute. Descend with me. Where to, for Christ’s sake? Faro shudders, tosses her head, and splatters wa
ter from the balding washing-up brush, as she flutters about restlessly like a stuck moth trying to free itself.

  Faro is vital, but Seb is guttering. Will it help if she tidies up? She busies herself. She cannot bring herself to sit down near him again. She knows that Sebastian can smell Steve Nieman on her. Seb will do his best to keep her from Steve Nieman. Seb is contagious: he will infect the spirit, if not the flesh. Seb’s flat smells of sour milk. She pours herself another glass of wine, and stays on her feet, wiping, officiously rearranging, scraping at long-dried stains on the draining board, rinsing out the greenish deposit from a couple of dirty glass milk bottles. Her energy surges in little leaps through her body as she fights back against the scum and the silt. Seb has sunk into entropy. He is growing old and cold before her eyes.

  ‘Have another glass?’ says Faro, with a merry intonation. Her voice sounds almost convincing. Seb does not answer, but Faro has been cheered by the loud sound of her own self: she fills his glass anyway, places it by his side, puts the bottle on the floor with its fellow empties. She starts to sing as she rinses out the slimy J-Cloth. ‘There’s you and me and the bottle makes three tonight,’ sings Faro, in her pleasing light contralto. Can it really be only a week or two since she first had her DNA tested, and swapped stories with Peter Cudworth from Iowa? Why, a week is a lifetime. For all she knows, her mitochondrial DNA may even now be unfolding wonders of cultured mortality in its Oxford test tube. What is time? We merely borrow from it. We are leasehold. Faro’s spirits rise, she is restored, she can do it, and she will. All shall not perish.

  She bounds across the room, and flings herself down upon the couch by Sebastian Jones. The springs move and rattle under her weight. She bounces up and down, deliberately, like a child. Then she seizes Seb’s inert cold fist.

  ‘Hey, come on, Seb,’ she says, as she lifts his hand to her mouth, and kisses its tight clenched fingers. ‘Come on, Seb, I’m not descending anywhere with anyone. You come back up here to me.’

  Thus far Faro pledged herself, as she bent on him the dark lustre of her great eyes, as she stared at him with her hypnotic power. And Seb stirred slightly under her challenging gaze, and smiled a small dry smile from his sunken features, and uncurled his fingers, and grasped at hers.

  So Faro Gaulden undertakes her journey to the underworld, willing to descend at least ankle-deep with Sebastian into the waiting trench. She is sure that she will clamber out again. Seb may not, but she will.

  Over the next month, she rallies her troops. She enlists her friends, and she has many. But she is depressingly aware of the limitations of her thirty-something circle of unmarrieds. OK, they are kind-hearted, and they are free to drop in on Seb, to have a chat, to share a takeaway, to watch a video, to provide company. But they have no weight and no gravitas. They do not have homes fit to die in. Only the married friends have homes, and they are married because they have babies, and therefore they have no spare free time or free bedrooms. Their rooms are for serious living, not for dying. The shallow roots of Faro’s bachelor London existence are exposed. She has done her best to make herself a life, but it is thin stuff, thin stuff.

  Meanwhile, her new suitor Steve Nieman is besieging her with messages from Cotterhall. She does not tell him the full story of her deadly engagement with Sebastian Jones, but he senses it. He implores her to come up to see him again soon, as she had promised. He is building her a little gazebo of cedar wood and living willow at the end of the Wild Nature Park. He woos her on the phone, he writes her letters on real paper, he sends her postcards and peppers her with e-mail. His manner is as attractive as Seb’s is repulsive. Who would not, of these two, choose Steve Nieman? There is no contest. They are the dark and the light. Hyperion to a satyr. Yet she finds she has not got it in her to abandon Sebastian. She is torn in two. Steve is persistent, but so is Seb. They both persist. She is tied to a stake between them. Seb plucks and gnaws. Steve threatens to come and rescue her and carry her away, but she forestalls him. They must weather it out, she cannot run away. Maybe Seb will get so ill he will have to go home to his mother. Maybe he will be interned in University College Hospital. Faro finds herself wishing he would get worse quickly, but he seems to hang on. It is bad to find oneself wishing worse health on a sick man.

  Sebastian is full of strange fancies these days. They are his death row privilege. Is his medication making his mind wander? His fantasies attach themselves firmly to Faro. He thinks she ought to have a baby—not his, of course, for he is past that kind of thing—but somebody’s. She ought to perpetuate herself. She owes her genes to posterity. He talks about this a great deal. This is a clear case of immortality-and-survival-projection, and Faro blames herself for having interested him in the subject of genes in the first place. Who cares if her mitochondrial DNA perishes? She certainly doesn’t, and it’s no business of Sebastian Jones.

  His interest in reincarnation is more fantastic, and more far-fetched. He has become obsessed by the mummy portraits of ancient Egypt, and has tried to persuade Faro that she is the reincarnation of an unidentified Graeco-Roman Egyptian woman of the second century A.D., buried at Hawara and recovered by Flinders Petrie. Faro would like to tell him bluntly that he is raving, but now that he has pitched his tent in the fields of death she has to listen solemnly to any old rubbish he chooses to bore her with. That’s how it is with believers. Patiently, she listens. She consents to turn over with him the pages of the illustrated catalogue of the British Museum exhibition of Ancient Faces that had first awakened this morbid interest. And it is true that they do speak across time. These young men and young women had been the contemporaries of Hadrian and of Marcus Aurelius, and yet they smile and speak. There is language in their eyes, their lips, their necks, their noses. Confidently they insist on resurrection, with the full polychrome glow of the fully human. They wait for the morning. They have never died.

  Faro points out to Seb that her resemblance to any of these figures, even to the one that Seb has appointed as her soul twin and her foreshadowing, is only superficial. She grants that some of these Graeco-Roman Egyptians have their hair cut in a manner identical to the style intermittently imposed on Faro Gaulden by Carla at Crimpers: short, cut close to the head, black, tight and curly. Some of these fortunate dead beauties sport upon their brows a charming bandeau of small corkscrew or snail ringlets, such as Faro has always desired but never quite achieved. It is true also that some of these women display golden hoop earrings that echo precisely the design that she herself favours. And there is some similarity, she grants, in the general face-shape—a roundness, a fullness, an insistence on rings and globes and arches. These are not angular Cubist faces, she agrees. And she would like to think that she herself could smile through eternity with the enchantingly bold and wayward smile of her soul twin. But surely her mouth is not as wide, nor her nose so long?

  Seb will have none of these doubts. It is the eyes. Look in the eyes, he says.

  The eyes are dark lakes, lit with lustre. They stare and stare. It is nothing, says Faro. It is a trick of craft. It is art. These are not people, these are not even portraits of people. These are artefacts. They are works of art.

  That is no answer, says Seb, as he stares into the liquid darkness. And, in a way, he is right.

  Seb is mesmerized by the very language of these images. ‘Portrait of a young woman in encaustic on limewood, with added stucco and gold leaf.’ ‘Portrait of a woman in encaustic on fir, with added gilding.’ ‘Portrait of a woman in tempera on a linen shroud.’ The lively riches of encaustic favour the living flesh of Faro, Seb insists. Tempera is too pale and thin for her. ‘The flesh is warmly tinted in tones of cream, apricot and rose pink with an ochre-green shadow by the nose,’ intones Seb. Is not that pure poetry?

  Seb suggests that in time the dead will be made to live again. Cloning will bring back the dead. He has been reading and writing too many horror stories, and his science is hopeless, says Faro. But, of course, he has a point. Even now, pigs are growing
transplant organs for us, and Dr Hawthorn is busy with his swabs.

  Faro, while all this is going on, tries to think of Steve Nieman and the butterflies. London is full of gloom and anger. Faro finds herself irresistibly attracted to the lodestone of the north. Something is calling her, and perhaps it is not only Steve Nieman, though she finds herself looking back to their picnic on the limestone outcrop as to a lost golden age of radiant light. When she cannot sleep, she summons up Steve Nieman and the grizzled skipper and the swooping swallows. She searches the papers and the Internet for news of Cotterhall and Breaseborough. There is not much. Breaseborough has its own Knowhere Guide on the Internet, constructed by rueful and self-deprecating cynics. It declares that whereas Breaseborough once had three cinemas, it now has none, and that it has no ten-pin bowling, no McDonald’s, no Kentucky Fried Chicken—you name it, Breaseborough hasn’t got it. There’s a weekend disco at the Wardale Arms, and dodgy beer, karaoke and big-screen sports at the Glassblowers. The Full Inhalers will appear on Friday at the Prince of Wales, entrance free. Local crap like line dancing available at the Ferryboat, plus a barmaid with a see-through blouse who has caused the death by heart attack of three local lechers. The food highlight is Doug’s Hot Hit Snax, E. coli guaranteed.