The Sister

by Poppy Adams

  Before long those larvae, in turn, had pupated and the biscuit tin was swarming with flies under the glass, the huge body of the once Privet Hawk caterpillar half devoured by the flies’ forgotten forebears. Later Clive told me they were ichneumon flies, that their mother had stabbed the skin of the caterpillar and laid her eggs within it, so that when they hatched they wouldn’t be short of food. The caterpillar had become a living hamper.

  Well, that momentous event at six years old thrilled and disgusted me so much that I have been fascinated by these creatures ever since. The moths didn’t interest Vivi so it was always me, rather than her, who volunteered to help Clive during the busiest times of the year and it was me, rather than Vivi, who followed him into the profession. Clive often told me that I’d make a great lepidopterist. “It’s in your veins,” he would say. “Nobody can take that away from you.”

  It turned out he was right. But it wasn’t until a few years later, at Maud’s annual harvest drinks party, that I understood it was my vocation. I’ve always been taciturn and have never liked parties, so Maud, as usual, set me up offering people nuts from a tall glass dish and there I was, satelliting the room, hoping to be ignored. Even then I found eye contact with anyone outside of my family almost unbearable so, as I stuck out the dish for each little group of guests, I stared at the hands coming in to appropriate the nuts as if I was monitoring their takings.

  When I came to Mrs. Jefferson, the rector’s wife, I recognized her instantly from the waist down. She was a rotund, weatherworn, boot-and-skirt kind of woman who, when she had an opinion, let it be known. She would have thought it rude to ignore me, so, while she took four nuts in her fingertips, she asked what I was going to do when I grew up. I liked Mrs. Jefferson, and of course I would always have answered her, but I had no idea what I wanted to do when I grew up. I’d never thought about it. I was still studying the delicate frosted rim of the glass dish, searching for my answer, when Maud cut across me—she often talked for me—and said, “This one? She’s going to follow in her father’s footsteps.”

  Mrs. Jefferson bent down so I had to step back a little to give her room. “So it’s moths then, is it, Virginia?” she asked at my ear level.

  Is it? I thought.

  “Yes, moths,” Maud answered resolutely from above us.

  Mrs. Jefferson straightened and I went on to offer my nuts to a huddle of people by the window.

  From that day on everyone seemed to know that that’s what I was going to do. Maud, having said it, had cast the future in stone. Many years later, when Vivi and I were expelled from Lady Mary’s, it was a foregone conclusion, an undisputed assumption by everyone, even me, that I’d become my father’s apprentice.

  Vivi was fifteen when she was expelled for pilfering bananas from a box beside the fruit delivery van as it dropped off supplies to the school kitchens. She tried to argue that she simply had them a little earlier than she would otherwise but Miss Randal, the head, saw it differently. Randy had worked out that this must have been a long-term plan, with Vivi timing the delivery each week and taking notes of the man’s progress as he went in and out with boxes. Vivi was not only a thief (Randy said you either are or you aren’t, it’s part of you, like your nose shape) but it was a premeditated heist and there was only a cursory difference between this and a bank robbery (one leading to the other sooner or later). It was all about principle, Randy said. She made Vivi stand up in morning assembly in front of the entire school and say ten times, “I’m a thief.” Vivi thought it was funny but I cried for her in the back row and at the hopeless injustice of it all.

  Maud received the letter expelling her lying, thieving daughter on a Monday morning and by lunchtime, having hurtled through much of the West Country’s narrow, high-hedged lanes, she was banging on Randy’s door and making such a fuss that Ruby Morris came running to class 6M to tell me that my mother was trying to kill the staff.

  What happened next, and why I was also expelled, I’ll never know the truth of. Maud said she’d been so enraged by the abominable way Vivi had been treated that she’d taken me away too, as a sort of punishment to them, she said. But Miss Randal told me that thieving was inherent and that the same characteristic might possibly show itself in me too, at some point, and it was part of her job to protect the school against the inevitability of future occurrences. When I looked unconvinced she told me that, if I wanted to know the truth, I was only there in the first place because Vivi was there. We’d come as a package, she said, so we’d have to go as one.

  I was in her office and she was standing with her right fist on her desk as she spoke, her arm locked straight like a fulcrum for her stocky body, swaying back and forth with the pressure of a long and troublesome morning. Behind her hung a vast print of an oil painting, an elephant charging at full pace out of the canvas, and I was just waiting for it to hurry up and mow her down.

  When I told Maud about Randy’s sister package, she went berserk, said it was nonsense, that she’d never heard such tripe, and after that she swore rather a lot whenever Miss Randal was mentioned. Then she lectured me about how clever I was and what a lot I had going for me, which, I have to say, both my parents did frequently. They never seemed to offer the same compliments to Vivi.

  What surprised me most was that Maud wasn’t at all cross with Vivi for stealing the fruit in the first place. She said that seeing some bananas in a box outside school kitchens and helping yourself without asking was hardly an expellable crime. She accused Miss Randal of trying to find any excuse to get rid of us. She said the school was prejudiced.

  So, according to the school, I was expelled too, but to the family I’d left in protest and in allegiance with my little sister. It’s one of my most glorious memories.

  Clive had said we didn’t need any more schooling; we were clever enough as we were, so I knew that, after the long summer, I would at last become Clive’s apprentice.

  I haven’t made many active choices in my life—I’m not that sort of a person—and I’ve never resisted anything that life’s thrown at me, or even thought to steer it in a particular direction. I’m one of the lucky ones who are carried along and life falls into place by itself. It was as if my eventual success was printed at the beginning of time in the universe’s voluminous manuscript, a very small part of the wider big-bang/collapsing-star theory. I was always going to be famous, even if I’d tried to resist it. Did I tell you I’m actually quite a famous lepidopterist?

  Mrs. Jefferson would never have predicted it. Vivi was supposed to be the one to make something of the life she nearly lost when she was eight, not me. I just fell into it, and now my name will be heard for many years to come, whispered through the corridors of one eminent institution or other, citing my papers or my expertise in practical experimentation, the insight of my deductions or the acuity of my hypotheses. I hope you don’t think me immodest to imagine that those praises would now have spread around the world within the most highly regarded entomology circles, in all the leading universities, societies and other elite academic establishments. Even here, in the small farming community of Bulburrow, they’ve heard of my reputation. I believe that here I am commonly known as the Moth Woman—after my late father, the Moth Man.

  Clive did not follow directly in his father-in-law’s footsteps. The way I saw it, Clive was the first of a new breed of lepidopterist. He was not a collector and did not wish to be regarded as one. Collectors want to complete a collection. Some want to pin all the species to be found within an area, others want just one species, but from all parts of the country, while others still are rarity hunters. As long as the specimens can be grouped together in some sort of unified classification and the quantity in that categorization is a finite number, then, without doubt, that group will be collected.

  Clive’s goal was different from that of his colleagues. He didn’t care about collections and—between you and me—he didn’t care much for the insects either. Clive wanted to find out how nature worked. He was conc
erned with all nature, but he had chosen the moth as the subject of his research because, he said, it is an ancient animal whose evolutionary pathway is much older even than that of a butterfly, which, in biomechanical terms, is a lot more sophisticated. He wanted to know how a moth ticked, how all its intricate little processes make the thing live, die, breed, eat, move, molt and metamorphose.

  There was a fundamental difference between the way that the collectors and Clive (and those like myself who came after him) studied these insects. Collectors have one goal in common: they are looking for the perfect unadulterated specimen, with flawless markings and anatomical composition. An insect with an aberration, say a spot too few or a spot too many, or any other imperfection or handicap, would be discarded at once. The point is, my sick Privet Hawk caterpillar, the one that I found on my third day of being six, would have been thrown, by a collector, straight into the fire in disgust.

  To find out what makes a moth a moth it wasn’t the perfect specimens Clive was attracted to. He appreciated earlier than all of them—Thomas Smith-Ford, Robin Doyle and the D’Abbrette brothers—way back in that slow postwar era, that it was nature’s imperfections that we needed to study to discover the secret codes of inheritance and genetics and other biological mechanisms. Clive used to say you find out more about a machine when the machine goes wrong and, to him, that’s pretty much what a moth was—a little robot that one day could be reduced to its biomechanics, a formulaic equation; every little piece could be pulled apart and laid out on the table, rather like the pieces in a construction kit. He wanted the moth’s entire formula, such as

  5x + 2y + 11z + (all other constituents) = Moth

  Clive was going to unpick a moth like a cross-stitch jumper, so while perfect insects weren’t of the slightest interest to him, he became unbearably excited by a Six-spot Burnet with five spots, a wingless Fox Moth or tailless Lobster Moth, a blind Oak Eggar, a tongueless Convolvulus Hawk (which, I should mention, is a frequent deformity in that species). If you could work out, he said, how they’d gone wrong, you’d discover a lot more about how nature worked.

  While most lepidopterists concentrated on breeding the perfect insect, Clive concentrated on breeding the perfect freak. Clive and I designed and manufactured more cripples than I can remember. Between our lengthy careers, we’ve set hundreds, perhaps thousands, of “malfunctional conditions,” as I like to call them, during spring, when we’d dedicate a whole attic room to experimenting with deformities. Sometimes we’d set out with a specific goal, such as to create a particular aberration of the Lime Hawk, but often we’d just play around with adverse conditions and record the deformities that resulted from them, looking for patterns and clues to some of nature’s secrets. Like an unapparent god, we’ve transformed their entire winters, or changed the conditions during their time of emergence, giving them early summers, late frosts, flash floods. We’ve used Vaseline to bung up their spiracles, blocking off their oxygen, pierced their horny casings, frozen them through winter, emerged them in unnatural spectrums of light. We’ve dipped, sprinkled or soaked them in every combination of every chemical from our lab, sliced off their wing cases, removed their twigs, their moss or their mud. Maud thought cripple experimentation was a sick sideshow of scientific perversion, and Vivi called it the Frankenstein Room.

  A moth is such a simple machine in the animal world—the go-kart to the modern car—and it takes a lot of glitches to prevent it going. It’s this intriguing simplicity, the idea that you could pull it into its constituent parts and put it back together in the same rainy day, that if you pulled back the skin, you could watch the inner workings, that makes a moth such an absorbing creature to study. Moths have a universal character: there are no individuals. Each reacts to a precise condition or stimulus in a predictable and replicable way. They are preprogrammed robots, unable to learn from experience. For instance, we know they will always react to a smell, a pheromone or a particular spectrum of light in the same way. I can mimic the scent of a flower so that a moth will direct itself towards the scent, even if I have made sure that in doing so it goes headlong into a wall and kills itself. Each time each moth will kill itself. It is this constancy that makes them a scientific delight—you do not need to factor in a rogue element of individuality.

  Although a moth is complex enough to be a challenge, it is not too complex to imagine success at every stage. Reducing bits and pieces of it to a near molecular level, a series of spontaneous reactions, Clive convinced himself that it wouldn’t be long before we’d be able to predict all their equations of cause and effect, then perhaps even map out each and every cell, and configure them in their entirety as robots, in terms of molecules, chemicals and electrical signals. So, in Clive’s compulsive mind, it was not so unbelievable that one day, not too far in the future, we would know their complete chemical formula. And what fed this particular obsession was Pupal Soup.

  If you cut through a cocoon in mid-winter, a thick creamy liquid will spill out, and nothing more. What goes into that cocoon in autumn is a caterpillar and what comes out in spring is entirely different—a moth, complete with papery wings, hairlike legs and antennae. Yet this same creature spends winter as a gray-green liquid, a primordial soup. The miraculous meltdown of an animal into a case of fluid chemicals and its exquisite re-generation into a different animal, like a stupendous jigsaw, was a feat that, far from putting him off, fed Clive’s obsession. He believed it made his lifetime ambition easier because, however complex it might be, it was, after all, only a jigsaw, and to Clive, that meant it was possible. For all the chemicals required to make a moth were right there, in front of his eyes, in the Pupal Soup, as he called it, inside the horny casing of a cocoon. His fixation with the obscurity of a cocoon’s contents peaked each winter and led him to endless hours in the attic dissecting and extracting the biochemical formulas for as many compounds as he could find contained within the cocoon and its changing molecular state during transmutation.

  I think, in the end, the chemical composition of Pupal Soup crazed him, consumed him and eventually overran him. You see, Clive was in no doubt that he had been put on this earth to discover something, to educate us, to bring the world on in some way. It was inconceivable to him that his existence had no greater purpose, that it could be as worthless as he considered the lives of the creatures he studied. My family was fanatical. They all seemed to be consumed by something in the end.

  Saturday

  Chapter 6

  Methodology

  I’m awake again, for the second or even third time tonight. Perhaps I never got back off. Nights, for me, are an endless enterprise of waking and half waking and wandering the landing in pursuit of sleep. I dread the start of them, knowing the lengthy path of insomnia I have to tread for the next eight hours. I only wish there were a clearly defined pattern, but instead it’s made worse by its endless unpredictability: lying still, convincing myself I haven’t come to yet, that I’m still drifting in a dream and can slip back there if only I shut out any wakeful thoughts; or getting up and out of bed, pacing the landing in search of the weariness that comes so naturally during the daylight hours; or trying to tire myself with things other than the worries of sleeplessness.

  I heard the bell in the night, louder and clearer than ever before—and there it goes again, although I can’t tell if it’s real. Sometimes when a storm’s up, I’ll hear it even though it hangs on the other side of the house, not sounding like a gong, but a distant tinkling as the stick inside it glances the edge now and then. At other times I’ll hear it in my sleep or when the air outside is calm and still. Then I know it’s not the real bell, but the faint, relentless ringing in my ears, the reverberation of that single strike still trapped, rebounding in my head from when I was eleven, diminishing but never ceasing, never allowing itself to be fully absorbed; the strike I heard as I watched her fall.

  I cannot bear to hear it. I find it helps to think positive thoughts like reminding myself of what I am good at, what I
have a reputation for. Did I tell you I’m a fairly famous—yes, I think I can say famous—scientist?

  This night has been unusually restless. First, I’ve woken up exhausted, as if sleeping and resting have made me even more tired. Second, my head has been invaded by a surge of long-forgotten memories that have scratched their way to the surface and crowded the front of my mind. As a rule, I don’t like to dwell on the past. I’ve always thought that as soon as the past is permitted to fill more of your thoughts than the here and now, it precipitates old age. But I can tell you that since Vivien arrived yesterday I’m remembering things that happened half a century ago so much more clearly than what I did last week, as if her presence has given them the courage to crawl out of the past. I’ve thought of things I haven’t considered again since they happened. Nothing of any significance, and often just fleeting, unrecognizable moments vying for my attention and becoming exhaustingly tangled and disordered in my mind. My childhood, my family, school, and then there are the games I’ve just remembered I used to play with Dr. Moyse, card games he’d made up himself. I can’t tell you if it was real or something I’d dreamed, but I remember how the memories of it plagued me. I sense we played often. Different times, different places: in the kitchen and it’s sunny outside; wrapped up in a rug in the drawing room while it’s hailing or snowing; on the sofa in the library. I don’t say it, but the games are a bit boring and Vivi’s never allowed to play. It’s private. She’s not even allowed to watch. Maud brings me biscuits, she ruffles my hair, she looks over our shoulders.

  Even though I know Dr. Moyse thought I wasn’t very good at the games, he always enjoyed them more than I did.

  * * *

  It feels like Vivien’s been home for ages, but she arrived only yesterday afternoon, precisely fifteen hours and thirteen minutes ago. I heard her during the night, twice I think. I’m sure I heard her go to the kitchen and then the kettle whistled so I can only assume she made herself a cup of tea. Milky tea, I’ve noticed. I couldn’t possibly drink it the way she likes it, it’s hardly got a hint of color. I wonder if Vivien is as restless as I am during the nights, and if one day we’ll meet on one of our nighttime excursions and discover another trait that we share. Twisted fingers and night rambling. All I know is that, according to my bedside clock, she got up at 12:55 to make the tea, and then again at 3:05 when she went to the lavatory or, rather, when she’d finished in the lavatory. I didn’t hear her get up that time, but from my bed I heard the water gushing along the landing pipes once she’d pulled the flush, as it raced to join the downpipe in my bathroom.