The Peppered Moth

by Margaret Drabble

  Bessie laughed uneasily at this. She knew that Joe could tell she was afraid. He watched her with tenderness and not a little anxiety as she unwrapped his offering of a nice little leather-bound edition of Keats’s sonnets which he had picked up on his travels in a second-hand bookshop in Doncaster. ‘For Bessie, Bright Star, from Joe’, he had inscribed it.

  Bessie, sitting up in her bedjacket of lacy cream wool, thanked him for the Keats, and said she would treasure it. She said she hoped her health would be good enough to let her go to Cambridge. She gazed at him earnestly from innocent eyes.

  ‘Of course it will,’ said Joe with conviction. ‘Anyway, it’s just got to be. You can’t waste a big chance like that. I’d give my eyeteeth to get into Cambridge. If I’ve got any eyeteeth. What are eyeteeth?’

  And so they chatted, pleasantly, whimsically, with only the mildest edge of flirtation, as Joe attempted to rally her spirits and reinforce her image of herself as a successful person, as he tried to weaken her clinging to weakness. Joe Barron was an observant and generous young man, and he could sense in Bessie a yearning towards inertia, failure, self-pity, collapse. She needed careful nurture. Would she, with strength, with support, grow straight and strong? He was sure she would. He cajoled, he flattered, he encouraged. She could get up and walk, if she chose.

  It was kind of Joe Barron to take such trouble to encourage Bessie to be brave about her future, for his own future at this time was opaque. His father continued to refuse to contemplate financing any more education, and expected him, it seemed, to spend the rest of his life in the family business. It was not an appealing prospect. Joe Barron was ambitious, and hoped for more from life. Joe Barron’s life as a travelling salesman made him ache with boredom. He was easily bored. He could not take any interest in glass or Bakelite. But it was hard to know where to turn. His mother sympathized with his aspirations, and maybe she would wear his father down in time. But how much time was there? How late could one wait to apply for a university place? Joe Barron did not know how the system worked. He had stumbled and missed a step, and could not see where the road should lead next. Maybe this was all there was. The road to nowhere.

  His father Ben was an irascible, crabby old chap, at the best of times, and hard to please. Ben was annoyed with Joe’s reluctance to commit himself to Cotterhall, but he was not wholly pleased by Bennett’s enthusiasm for the family business. He didn’t want him to get a hold on the firm. He was a patriarch, and he wanted submission, obedience. He stymied Bennett’s attempts at innovation and experiment. Trouble was brewing in Barron Glass, and in Laburnum House. Joe wanted to get away from all of this, into a world where—well, he knew not what. The world he wanted took no clear shape. A world of ideas, and talk, and good works, and public service, and progress. The kind of world he read about in books. Culture. Civilization. Was it wrong to dream of these things? Was it presumptuous?

  He did not at this stage speak of these ill-formed desires to Bessie Bawtry, though in time to come he may. He did not speak of tensions at home, nor did he reveal to her the rebuffs he endured on the road. (Not everybody wanted Barron Glassware, and Joe was not a natural salesman.) To Bessie, he put on a good front. He was biding his time, he would work it through, all would be well—that was the line he took, though at this period he found it hard to believe it himself. And Bessie must get better. The Breaseborough air was bad for her lungs. No wonder she was off-colour. She would pick up like a primrose, as soon as she got away.

  Bessie drank all this in gratefully. She liked the attention. A nice-looking, eligible young man, sitting by her bedside, devoting himself to cheering her up. It was well worth being ill, to get this kind of attention. She thought she could do better with her life than marry a local boy like Joe Barron, handsome and clever though he was. But meanwhile, his attentions were acceptable to her.

  Joe patted her hand in a brotherly way, as he looked at his watch, thinking to himself that it was time he set off to keep his appointment with Alice Vestrey. He had done his bit. He thought he could do better with his life than marry a local girl like Bessie Bawtry, pretty and clever though she was. Bessie could tell that he was beginning to strain to leave the sickroom. But she would wheedle him back. He would come again. Oh yes, he would come again. He promised. Of course he would come soon.

  Did Joe Barron suspect, as he walked away, that in that little room he might have embarked on a lifetime of tragic appeasement?

  Bessie Bawtry thought that on balance she would get better and go to college. She would get better, and show them all what she was made of. She was made of stronger stuff than they thought.

  Or then again, perhaps she would lie here for ever, like the Dairyman’s Daughter.

  Energy and inertia struggled for possession of her. They exhausted her. She was so very very tired. The nights were so long. They were given over to the thorn and the wilderness. She lay and suffocated, she put her head under the bedclothes and tried to choke herself to death in safety. This was a small, mean town, full of small, mean people. Out there was a world. Politics, jazz, science, stars, aeroplanes. This was a small valley. A worldwide depression was driving towards Hammervale, bringing news of the mass revolts, the crazed ideologies, the conflagrations and massacres and emigrations of the violent twentieth century. Even sheltered Bessie knew something of troubles in the Soviet Union and China, of troubles in Europe, of Hitler and Mussolini, of strikes and lockouts, of stock-market crashes, of fortunes lost, of the economic consequences of the peace. She read the Manchester Guardian. She knew of Class Warfare. The miners’ employers were demanding lower wages and longer hours. The General Strike was on its way. The Depression was on its way. Depressed, Bessie hid her head under the pillow. Her own life was so small, so pitiable, so precious. It was hardly worth the effort to stay alive, in all this shapeless and indifferent turmoil. It would be easier to give in and let herself die. She could not face the struggles and the humiliations that lay ahead of her, in that place that was meant to be so pleasant. Better to die here, with her life still before her.

  But she breathed deeply, pulled herself together, and in the second week of May, she got up.

  It was a bad pattern. Slump, recovery, slump. Not healthy. A poor economy of effort. It could hardly end well.

  She got up, got herself back on her feet, stiffened her resolve, ratcheted up her sagging will, and started to put together her Cambridge virgin’s trousseau. She was the elected bride of scholarship. She had been wooed and won, and she would embrace her destiny.

  By the time she was ready to catch the cross-country train from Breaseborough to Cambridge (changing at March) she had managed to regain some pleasure in the prospect that lay ahead. She had received support from Ada Marr, who told her how lucky she was, and from Ethel Gledhill, who was about to go to study at the Royal Academy of Music in London and who seemed unafraid of the prospect. If they could do it, so could she. Her classmate Reggie Oldroyd from Wath was going up to Cambridge to read Law at Downing and he promised to ask her out to tea. It would not be so bad.

  She maintained a kind of optimism through the first months of her new life. She ate her meals in hall, she was invited out to tea parties by several women and some men, she attended lectures in the old lecture hall in Mill Lane, she sat on the bridge and looked at the punts on the Cam, she went for walks along the Backs, and found her way round various libraries. In the first week she was befriended by a friendless girl from the north, but Bessie quickly saw through that ploy, and shook her off. She was then taken up by a more acceptable young woman called Frances, a doctor’s daughter from Suffolk, whose room was in the same hall and on the same corridor. Bessie suffered the attentions of Frances more graciously, and they became friends, forming a threesome with Molly, the daughter of a well-to-do farmer from Somerset.

  Bessie was shy, but shyness was not considered a fault in a young woman. She attracted no adverse comment. Her dress, though inexpensive and plain, was unexceptionable, indeed ‘appropriat
e’. Her manners, also, were unobtrusive. When she did not understand what Frances and Molly were talking about, she remained silent. She listened and learned. Her voice and accent remained identifiably northern, as they were to do for the rest of her life, but nobody teased her about them. The college did not much indulge in teasing. It was high-minded, hardworking and earnestly aware of its secular mission. (It was a nondenominational foundation, chapel free.) There were some ‘characters’, some eccentrics, some intense artistic souls, some giddy husband-seeking socialites, but the majority of the undergraduates were serious and eager to justify their selected status. They knew that they were the chosen few, and that their college and their university expected much of them. They represented their sex. They were pioneers. They owed it to their college to do well.

  This atmosphere of cloistered commitment suited Bessie Bawtry. It helped to distance and to neutralize the painful memory of the misconceived fun of Highcross House, fun which she had found so unfunny and so exclusive. She was not left out of things here. She was not besieged here by the threat of the strain of do-wacka-doo, oogie-oogie-wah-wah, hello Swanee, Ukulele Lady, and such rubbish. She did not have to try to shimmy like her sister Kate, or get to know Susie like we knew Susie, or imitate the vamp of Savannah, hard-hearted Hannah. Some of the young women knew some of the songs of the day, but their familiarity with them did not bring them much cachet. You could get by without a gramophone or a wireless set. Frivolous noise was discouraged. Nor was Bessie pressed to play hockey, though many did, and she was only mildly and it seemed to her affectionately mocked by Frances and Molly for her failure to learn to ride a bicycle. (Frances and Molly gave up on her, after pushing her down a green slope a few times: Bessie simply had no sense of balance, and was of little faith.) The sober tea and coffee and cocoa parties were well within her social range, and she enjoyed the mild competition over the quality of coffee sets, for she had been presented with a very pretty set of her own as a leaving gift by Miss Heald: it was a smart modern Deco design of black and orange, which Bessie had doubted a little until she saw how much others admired it. A coffee set of your own, at that date, marked a rite of passage, and Bessie loved hers accordingly. She had a set of six little silver coffee spoons too, which her parents had bought for her, much to her surprise. She would stare at them with wonder. They were her very own. They had thin, delicate little handles, marked with her monogram of EB, in elaborate, intertwined, curling script.

  Sometimes Bessie even found herself wondering if some of the other young women were not a little dull. She exempted Frances and Molly, whose indulgence towards herself placed them beyond such reproach. But some of the others—were they not predictable, even timid in their views? She missed the intense intellectual sixth-form discussions back in Breaseborough. There was something cosy, girlish and coy in the atmosphere even of an aspiring and austere women’s college. Most of the undergraduates had been to highly regimented singlesex schools, and hardly knew any men apart from their brothers. (Bessie was not tempted by intense female friendships—‘raves’, as they were vulgarly called by some—though one or two were offered to her.) Yes, she found she could safely despise some of these well-qualified young women, from schools more famed than her own. She knew more of the world than they. She had led a less sheltered life than they. She was more accustomed to mixed company. Had she not talked of Keats and Browning and the dramatic monologue, of Shaw and socialism, of Ruskin and Robert Owen and Miners’ Welfare, with Joe Barron, with Ada Marr, with Ivy Barron and George Bellew and Jimmie Otley and Ethel Gledhill and Leila Das? A girl from Cheltenham Ladies’ College would not know a mine if she saw one.

  Bessie had even been for a ride on the back of Phil Barron’s motorbike. (It had been terrifying.)

  And Miss Heald, as Bessie increasingly realized, had been a rarity amongst schoolmistresses. Few of her contemporaries had been encouraged to read as widely as Bessie, and some of these Cambridge dons knew less of T. S. Eliot and Edith Sitwell, I. A. Richards and Virginia Woolf than Miss Heald in South Yorkshire. Bessie Bawtry had been well prepared. Intellectually, Bessie, in these early months, felt secure.

  The college buildings, with their warm red brick, their large sunny windows, their handsome bronze gates, their turrets and oriels, were everything that Breaseborough was not. They were built in harmony, to please. They w^re the heavenly city. Acanthus and sunflower adorned them. And the college routine was comforting and dignified. Bessie had her own room, and there was no slavish little spaniel Dora tagging at her heels. Bessie was treated like a lady. She was provided with clean laundry. Maids in uniform waited in hall, maids cleaned her room and brought her a scuttle full of coal each day to make up her fire in its efficient little grate. She took to her newly refined status as though made for it. Had she not always known she was born to be a lady? She enjoyed her six hours of daily reading, she enjoyed her supervisions, she enjoyed attending lectures and making notes in her clear, free, even, open hand. Nobody threatened her. The air was clean. Even the coal seemed cleaner than the coal up north. She sat by her hearth and toasted her legs, her fair hair falling forward, her head bent over Chaucer and Dryden and her notes on I. A. Richards. The room was all her own. She felt the safety of the space about her. She seemed to be in control.

  There were some anxieties and hesitations. She worried about money. Although she took care of every penny, she had at once realized—indeed, from the time of her first interview had foreknown—that she would be on a smaller allowance than most of her fellow students. Most of them were the daughters of barristers, of headmasters, of civil servants and farmers, of local government officers, of archdeacons and doctors and architects. Bessie did not discover any other daughters of electricians, though she might, had she tried, have encountered the daughter of a carpenter, a builder, a soldier-mechanic. Some of the acts of careless spending which she witnessed astonished her, though pride concealed her surprise. Frances from Suffolk, a kind and generous girl, noticed Bessie’s moments of embarrassment, and was tactful in her little gifts of tea and scones and biscuits—‘Try this, Bess, it’s delicious, it’s a shortbread, my mother sent it, do you like it?’ Frances and Molly bought the cake from Fitzbillie’s on Silver Street when the trio gave a party. All this was done so thoughtfully that Bessie was able to accept with silent gratitude. She was their little pet—they even called her ‘Pet’—and it was natural that they should treat her.

  Nevertheless, there was always a residual anxiety about her rail ticket home, about the cost of sending her trunk on ahead, about repairs to shoes, and extras for jam or sweets or laundry or firelighters. She kept a little notebook, for petty-cash entries. And petty they were—a shilling here, a sixpence there. Some of these women—Bessie was not the only one—lived like mice. Bessie did not mind living like a mouse, for she knew it was in a good cause, and, as we have seen, she had not been brought up to indulgence. But one did need shoes, laundry, paper, envelopes, cough mixture and the train fare home. The scholarship money had to be measured out with care.

  To Bessie, the college food was a pleasure. She did not notice that the soup was a thin, semi-transparent gravy, that the vegetables were wet, and the beef overcooked and tough. She did not care that the rhubarb and custard lacked élan. She did not expect claret, and sole and partridge would have terrified her. The food came, and her mother had not cooked it, and that was good enough, at this stage in her life, for Bessie Bawtry. She was in receipt of regular, nourishing meals. What more could one want? She listened to the Latin grace before Hall with primly bowed head, and was glad that she was not one of the scholars designated to read it aloud. She blessed the Lord, although she did not believe in him. She blessed the West Yorkshire Education Authority, whose form the Lord, for her benefit, had taken.

  She was happy. She reported her happiness to Miss Heald, to her parents, to the girls back home engaged to shop assistants or garage mechanics, to those on vacation from other forms of higher education. She boasted to Dora
of her room, her friends, her coffee set, her conquests, her excursions. In her first Cambridge summer she took tea at the Orchard in Grantchester (though Dr Leavis, whose supervisions she attended, had already reinforced Miss Heald’s suspicions and taught her not to admire Rupert Brooke). She bought books—a Hogarth Press copy of T. S. Eliot’s Homage to John Dryden and secondhand copies of the works of George Gissing and Mark Rutherford. She was to read and admire Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, which was too new to have captured Dr Leavis’s attention. She was taken punting, and drank cider sitting in deep grass. Once in a while she smoked a cigarette, delicately, to ‘keep away the midges’.

  See her, as she sits reading on a rug in the spacious college garden, amidst the glow of red brick and fresh white paint, amidst delphinium and lavender, by a sunken pond of water lilies. See her as she walks along the bank of the Cam, in her button-bar shoes, in her wide-collared, low-waisted, above-the-knee cotton frock. Her shingled hair, neatly cut and shampooed in Newnham Village, shines in the sun, and her legs are slim and brown. She is petite and slight, her skin is clear and fair, and her breasts are firm and small and shapely. She has escaped. Surely she has escaped. She has left the smuts and the clinker behind her. Pale blue and gold is she, with her cotton dress and her huge periwinkle eyes and her neat little ankles. She has cotton gloves for the daytime, and, folded in a drawer in tissue, she treasures the glacé kid gloves she wore at her first ball. She cannot dance, but she has been to a May Week Ball, invited by a polite young man from Pembroke who is reading Modern Languages. (They tried to teach her to dance, back in Breaseborough, but she could not get the hang of it. She could never hear the beat.) It does not matter that she cannot dance. Young women are in short supply at Cambridge, and Bessie is a pretty little thing, a decorative escort, full of shy admiring glances and sweet smiles. The sweetness of her nature is taken for granted by the young men who walk her out. Bessie will never ever snarl or snap or scorn.