The Peppered Moth

by Margaret Drabble

  And Dr Hawthorn presses yet another button on his machine, and brings up yet another array of chemical formulae, of double helices, of arrows and circles and flashing conjunctions, more thrilling to Dr Hawthorn than any one-armed bandit in Las Vegas or in the floating casinos of the Midwest, more childishly exciting than any game of road revenge in the Happy Eaters and Little Chefs of the roadway, than any pinball machine in any smoky pub of the West Riding. This machine means more to Dr Hawthorn, and, in his view, to humanity, than the sophisticated computerized defence programmes of the Pentagon. This machine will answer the riddles of time itself!

  The watchers blink in bewilderment, and some of them giggle nervously, but they are impressed. Dr Robert Hawthorn is impressive. He is the real thing. He is a millionaire and a genius and he is on his way, with their help, to win the Nobel Prize for Molecular Biology. He may sound like a salesman—he may even, in his smart casuals and his bright light brown suede shoes, look just a little like a travelling salesman—but he is not trying to sell them anything, as far as they can tell. He is, instead, trying to take something from them—though with, he assures and reassures them, their full cooperation and consent. He begs swabs from their cheeks, he beseeches tissue from their grandmothers’ skeletons, he pleads for their secret formulae, he wants their DNA. He is flash, he is brilliant, he is light on his feet, he is eloquent: but he does come from Yorkshire. This little pocket wizard with his mid-Atlantic accent is a grandson of Breaseborough by maternal descent. His mother had known its back alleys and its waste lots and its cinder paths and its recreation grounds, and he himself had often been to stay with his Breaseborough granny. As a naughty thieving boy he had scaled the forbidding high crozzle-topped walls of Mrs Barron’s orchard, and skinned his knees to steal the Barron apples, and been bawled out for the offence. Mr and Mrs Barron are long, long dead, and at rest, if rest it be, in the Nonconformist cemetery on Swinton Road, but one of their direct descendants is here now, ready to offer her secretions in the name of science.

  Dr Hawthorn does not at first glance look very like a grandson of Breaseborough, nor does he appear to have much in common with most of this commonplace congregation. Strong tea, powdered instant coffee, egg and cress sandwiches, bridge rolls and squares of Madeira and fruit cake are not his daily fare, and sharp-eyed young Faro Gaulden, who hopes that she herself also sticks out like a sore thumb from this assembly, can almost see a think-balloon hanging over his head which says ‘Jesus, do they still eat iced buns up here?’ Though the spread, in fact, had been carefully judged by the thoughtful master of ceremonies, Bill Cudworth, who knows that the older folk here—and there are a lot of those, in the nature of the exercise—would not appreciate anything too newfangled.

  Faro Gaulden is glad she came. Unlike most of those here, she is not a local, though she has local roots. She is here with a dual purpose, in part to accompany her Great-Aunt Dora, and in part to find out about Dr Hawthorn’s project, in which she has a professional as well as a personal interest. And she is also here in order to get away from London and from her onetime so-called ex-partner Seb. She will have to ring Seb when she gets back to her hotel room. At least she will have something new to tell him about. Seb has been getting her down horribly of late. She does not know what to do about Seb. She doesn’t know how she could have let him become such a problem to her. She shuts the thought of him from her mind, and concentrates on what is around her.

  The genetic pattern manifested in the clever Dr Hawthorn—thick curly grey hair, slight bones, short stature, a large nose in a small face—does not seem to be repeated anywhere else in the room. Dr Hawthorn must inherit his genius and his physique from the non-Breaseborough branch. On the other hand, the Cudworth-Bawtry type is well represented here. Faro notes the obese, waistless, bosom-heavy, thick-jowled, loose-skinned, round-nosed, double-chinned and stolid Cudworths, and knows that she is of them. She has Cudworth-Bawtry blood in her veins and their DNA throughout her structure. She cannot pretend that she has not got a big bust. Is that what she will look like if she lives to be fifty? God, she hopes not. Pity she ate that second egg sandwich. Faro shuts her eyes for a moment and conjures up the image of her redhaired mother, still a presentable woman, and the memory of her dead and dissolute father, famed as the most handsome man in Europe. Then she glances, sideways, at stout Auntie Dora with her swollen legs. Quite a genetic battle to be fought, between the Bawtry-Cudworths and the Gauldens. Can one will oneself to favour one side of the family rather than the other? What would Lamarck have said? In Faro’s case, she has to admit, there is bad blood on both sides. Pity she has to take after any of them. The weight of the flesh, the breeding in the bone. Pity one cannot spring from nowhere, or from fire or wind, like a phoenix or a flower.

  That good-looking Indian in the back row, hiding behind tinted glasses and making notes in his notebook, seems to have sprung more or less from nowhere. He can’t be a Breaseborough man, can he? What is he doing here? Is he a reporter, or a spy? wonders Faro. Or is he an archaeologist from Northam? He looks vaguely familiar, like someone she might have seen on telly. Perhaps he’s a cricketer? Perhaps he’s a Cudworth by marriage?

  The Cudworths are the largest named group in the assembly, for the meeting has been organized by Bill Cudworth, who happens to be the president of the Cudworth One-Name Society. You can’t tell much from looking at Bill Cudworth, as he is almost aggressively nondescript and average. He is Mr Everyman, five foot ten, eleven stone, brown-haired, fairskinned, lightly freckled, round-faced, bespectacled, affable, comfortable, comforting and utterly English, in his grey weekend trousers, his checked Viyella shirt, his sports jacket. He is the respectable essence of respectable Cudworth. Unfortunately, bearing the name of Cudworth does not in itself guarantee one an important place in the new Domesday Book, for, as Dr Hawthorn has tried to explain, he is primarily interested in matrilineal descent, which in Britain at least has little to do with naming. Nevertheless, the Cudworths and their readymade groundwork network will come in very handy for research purposes, and they can all look forward to the day when they will be invited by the Cudworth chapter in Argentina, or requested as guests by the Cudworth Congress in Iowa City.

  Iowa City is represented here today, as those who have consulted the charts and read the labels have already discovered. Some of the locals have introduced themselves to Iowa Man, who has appeared here in the shape of a curly-headed young-middle-aged Cudworth who teaches business studies at the University of Iowa. He has come here to visit his roots. (He is also here in a professional capacity to explore the possibility of setting up a joint degree course with the University of Loughborough, but nobody here has shown much interest in that. Some of them have been to Loughborough, but they do not speak highly of it. Nothing much goes on in Loughborough, according to the parochial people of Breaseborough, though one of them concedes that it is ‘a nice clean town’.)

  Argentina, in contrast, has not made it to this reunion, for Argentina is a very long way away, almost as far as Australia, and the airfares are a good deal more expensive. Dr Hawthorn has been interested to learn that the legend of the black sheep of the Bawtrys, who emigrated to Buenos Aires, is still remembered here, a century and a half later. He’ll try to catch the Argentinian Bawtrys next time he’s flying through. Australians and New Zealanders are here, but then Australians and New Zealanders are everywhere these days. They seem to spend their lives on the wing, taking after their native albatross, restless, round the world with unshut eye, unable to settle, back and forth, on cut-price tickets bought in bargain bucket shops, trying to find out more about why their ancestors had to get away in the first place.

  A rum mixture of people, in this hot chapel hall. Rum, but not at all random. They are carefully selected. There ought to be some meaning here, if only one could read it. Faro looks around, with an eye for dress codes rather than physique, and notes a quaint variety of English summer wear—.flower-patterned skirts worn with contrasting flower-patterned
blouses, lace collars and shapeless cardigans, plimsolls patterned with flowers, scarves patterned with flowers, handbags and tote bags decorated with flowers. The Cudworths seem fond of flowers. Paisley is also in evidence. Faro’s grandma had favoured paisley. Several of them wear what she guesses to be old National Health glasses with identically tinted pinkish-blue frames—does that represent a deep genetic pattern of taste, or merely the stock once favoured by the local optician?

  Dr Hawthorn now tells them that one of the most interesting riddles facing humanity lies not in the future but in the past. ‘How did we get here from there? This is the question which, in its many aspects, obsesses him, and it must interest them, or they would not be here at all, would they? The future lies in the past, argues Dr Hawthorn. (He speaks very fluently, perhaps too fluently: Faro Gaulden from London and Peter Cudworth from Iowa City, who are more accustomed to listening to public speakers than most of those here today, wonder if there is not perhaps a touch of the charlatan about him, but both, independently—for they have not yet been introduced—dismiss this suspicion as unworthy: the gift of the gab does not necessarily make one a bad scientist, does it?) The very future of our species may lie, repeats Dr Hawthorn, in our correct interpretation, with all the new tools now available, of the data of the past. Where we come from is the most interesting thing that we can know about ourselves.

  Some look doubtful at this suggestion. Of more immediate interest to some here is the result of the Yorkshire versus Australia cricket match currently being played at Headingley, or an anticipated pint of beer at the Glassblowers Arms, or a smoke on Castle Hill, or a coupling with some other Bawtry or Barron or Cudworth. Indeed, some may even have been contemplating a coupling with a far-flung Walters in Mexborough, or a Melia in Rotherham, or an Applebaum in Sheffield, or a Woolfson in Wath. They are not all stick-in-the-muds, not all stay-at-home slugabed intermarried untravelled folk. Some of them have been to places and seen the world. Some of them have come from places, and are wishing they were back there.

  For Dora Bawtry, the distant past is of very little interest, and she is half sorry she was persuaded to come and listen to all this claptrap. She wouldn’t have come if Faro hadn’t chivvied her. Her immediate preoccupation is how and when to try to get back to the ladies’ toilet, and whether she can get there before anyone else does. She hates a queue. She cannot wait in a queue. How annoying it is, she reflects—the older she gets, the more frequently she has to ‘go’, and the slower she is at getting there. It’s not right. No more quick nips to the outside lav in the yard during the commercials—it’s the slow hobble now on treacherous ankles, the leaking bladder, the soggy knickers, the wet tights. She can’t smell the smell, because she can’t smell anything now, but she fears others may. She just hopes she can last out, but this little chap seems able to talk for ever. He could talk the hind leg off a donkey. What’s that he’s got up there now? A skull, it looks like. She shuts her eyes, and tries to tighten her slack and aged pelvic muscles.

  A skull does now fill the screen, a virtual, ancient skull, projected and rotating as it were in three dimensions—how do they do that? It is all very clever. (Auntie Dora’s mind drifts back, semiconsciously, for a thousandth of a second, to a wonderful wooden machine—was it called an epidiascope?—which Ada Marr’s mother had found in the attic when they bought the new house at the top of Ardwick Street. It was a sort of magic lantern. She’d let the girls play with it. You put postcard views in it—the front at Scarborough, Filey Brigg, the bandstand at Harrogate—and turned a handle, and it all went 3-D and the little characters along the promenade or the pier almost seemed to move.) It is all very clever, and Dr Hawthorn is explaining that although the skull is very ancient, you can’t tell it’s ancient from its shape, or from the slope of its forehead. This isn’t a Neanderthal skull, with a heavy brow-ridge and a receding chin. Anatomically, it is a modern cranium, a Homo sapiens specimen. ‘There was plenty of room in that dome,’ Dr Hawthorn points out, ‘for a Breaseborough Grammar School-worthy brain.’ (Polite laughter, though all the locals note that this comment dates Dr Hawthorn, whose cranium contents belong to the period before the school went comprehensive and was renamed plain Breaseborough School.) ‘Yes,’ repeats Dr Hawthorn, ‘this, before you, is Stone Age Man.’ A twenty-two-year-old, eighty-centuries-old Stone Age Man, killed eight thousand years ago, in approximately 6000B.C., by a blow to the back of the head, and laid to rest in a limestone cavern beneath the cliffs of Cotterhall. Peacefully he had reposed there through the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age and the Age of Coal: by chance neither miners nor potholers had disturbed him, and he might never have been discovered, had not a combination of circumstances brought him to the light of modern day. ‘Many of you here will remember,’ he urged, ‘the proposal to turn old Bednerby Main and the lower stretch of the Hammervale Valley into a landfill site, for many of you were involved in the successful campaign to arrest and stop it, and many of you supported the rival proposal to reclaim the land, in what has now become known as the Hammervale Millennium Earth Recovery Project. Stone Age Man might have been blasted to pieces by the landfill operation, or he might have lain secretly in his sealed tomb for ever, above the new wetland gardens, the new school centre, the (as yet unfinished) sculpture garden, the recently opened organic restaurant. But, as most of you have heard—you saw the headlines—a young worker on the Earth Project, scrambling around up there of an evening, put his foot through a chimney and discovered the hollow chamber and the miraculously preserved skeleton, of which this is the skull.’ (He clicks a button.) ‘And here, here we have the whole man, as he was found by Steve Nieman last year. Here he is, as he was found, resting on his shelf of stone.’

  The site had been opened up, and excavated, Dr Hawthorn continues. The skeleton had caused a small sensation, for such finds were rare so far south in Yorkshire. He had been brought to the light of day and the electronic age by a team from the Natural History Museum and Northam University. He had been nicknamed Steve by the popular press, after his discoverer, Steve Nieman. More scientifically, he is now known as Cotterhall Man, and now he lies in state in superfine atmospheric conditions in a glass coffin in Northam. Like Sleeping Beauty, awaiting the Resurrection.

  Who was he? From what tribe, from what people, from what culture? He cannot be of the tribe of Nieman, for Steve Nieman is Jewish, and his family come from Riga. But he might be related, Dr Hawthorn explains, to many people in this room.

  Cotterhall Man, according to Dr Hawthorn, is physically not very different from the Cudworths and Badgers and Bawtrys of today. If you were to dress him up in Breaseborough School uniform, he would pass muster. But what could have been his world picture, what landscapes would he have surveyed? Dr Hawthorn spoke of ice ages and pre-Celtic cultures and the Indo-European names of rivers, encoding languages and peoples now for ever forgotten—unless memories lingered on in the bone, in the tissue, in the DNA of the Cudworths, the Barrons, the Badgers?

  In the year 8000 B.C., at the end of the last Ice Age, Yorkshire, said Dr Hawthorn, must have been intolerably cold. (That drew an appreciative laugh, on this warm early-summer day.) The landscape had been of the utmost desolation. He conjured up wastes of miry clay strewn with ice-borne boulders, ridged with mounds and sprinkled with tarns in the hollows. Frost-riven highlands, great sheets of water drowning the vales. But slowly the climate had relented, and the earth had begun to blossom with bracken, dog’s mercury and cow wheat, with nettles and rosebay willowherb, with ash and hazel and lime and birch. Red deer, roe deer, wild pig, wolves, aurochs and Cotterhall Man had roamed the hillside. Pike and salmon had bred in the rivers. Utmost desolation had given way to milder climes, to biodiversity, to hunting and gathering, to burial rites, to long barrows and round barrows, to flints and pots and beakers. Wildwood had yielded to coppiced oak on the clayland of the Coal Measures. Cultures had succeeded cultures. Fire, charcoal, bronze, iron, glass, coal. The earth had given up its secrets. ‘BUT,’
said Dr Hawthorn, his eyes luminous and prominent with the passion of his query. ‘BUT—how were we linked with him? Which of us here grew from him? What impulse propelled us forth from him? Newcomers poured into Hammervale, during and after the Industrial Revolution, and some left Hammervale—for Iowa, for Argentina, for Sydney, for Wellington, for Tottenham and Southend. Some had even crossed the Pennines.’ (Mild, obedient laughter.) ‘But some of us stayed on! Which, and why?’

  Faro Gaulden, at the unnatural clamour of his insistence (for why does he care so much?), felt a shiver go through her, as though someone had stepped on her grave. What was it to him? He, like herself, was only a grandchild of Breaseborough. She found Dr Hawthorn unsettling. He had issued a call to arms. She really didn’t much want to respond.

  Dora Bawtry, like many of the older folk, had been mildly distressed by the too-present, too-pressing apparition of the skull, too obviously a memento mori at her advanced age. She struggled to her feet, reached for her stick, and began to make her slow way back to the ladies’ toilet. ‘Shall I come with you?’ whispered great-niece Faro. ‘I’ll manage,’ grunted Dora ungraciously, as she stumped off.