The Peppered Moth

by Margaret Drabble

  She walks on, from her first summer into her second autumn, into her second year, budding, expectant, breathing in the clean and smokeless air, shaping her sentences, shaping her life, expanding her acquaintance.

  The cinema she attends, and the theatre. She sees pioneering productions at the Festival Theatre by Tyrone Guthrie and Ninette de Valois, though she has to leave early to rush back to college before the gates close: she rarely sees the last acts of plays. She sees, unknowingly, the early efforts of undergraduate Michael Redgrave. She is much taken by college performances of plays by Ibsen and Pirandello, and a Marlowe Society production of Coriolanus directed (though she does not know this) by a colourful and sexually ambiguous character called Frank Birch, who will double careers in the theatre and the wartime Secret Service. (Volumnia is played by the charming pink-faced young George ‘Dadie’ Rylands, friend and protege of Virginia Woolf: at this period, in the university dramatic societies, female roles were played by young men, as they were in the days of Shakespeare, a convention deplored by some and much relished by others.) She sees The Bacchae, all-male, performed in Greek. She sees Elektra, also in Greek, performed at Girton, with a thrilling performance of the deadly Clytemnestra by a hook-nosed Girton girl. Her life is full of discoveries. She sticks a Medici print of Van Gogh’s sunflowers on her wall. She reads of the mysteries of Tutankhamen, and buys a poster with Egyptian figures on it. Egypt, for a brief while, is all the rage, and the Egyptian dead are in fashion. She has an impassioned conversation with Reggie Oldroyd about evolution. If Darwin is right, why haven’t human beings evolved more visibly since the time of the Pharaohs? Surely six thousand years is a longish time? And what, challenged Reggie, are we supposed to have evolved into, since the Pharaohs? Are we supposed to have shed a toe, or a finger, or gained an extra eye or a different number of choppers? Don’t be an ass, Reggie! laughs Bessie—though that is, in fact, sort of what she had meant.

  Will Bessie Bawtry grow a third eye, or an extra toe? Watch and see if she sprouts. She may mutate at any moment. Dr Hawthorn is in the wings, waiting to spot a mutation.

  See her turn the corner into Petty Cury, a street of which the very name enchants—Bessie Bawtry, undergraduate and scholar, in the very heart of Cambridge, where once walked Milton, Wordsworth, and those brave early women who strode ahead and made smooth the path for such fortunate followers as Bessie from the north. Autumn is ripening, and so is she. Is she not every inch a success? How proud they are of her back home! Her little feet are light upon the pavement. She dawdles, looking in shop windows. She is on her way to Downing College, to talk about D. H. Lawrence, the miner’s son from Nottingham. She is shy, but can hold her own in debate.

  Watch her now as she walks up Sidgwick Avenue, amidst the rich rotting smell of autumn leaves. The glossy chestnuts split, the five-fingered fronds are trodden into leafmeal, the winged seeds drift, the brickwork glows red. She is off to discuss Andrew Marvell, that aristocratic Yorkshire poet of the northern dales. She will speak of him with the diminutive and kindly dwarf, the learned Miss Wellesford, who has a soft spot for our Bessie. Oh happiness! She is in her place, and all is well.

  Christmas comes, and she catches a mild chill, and is fortified with Virol.

  Where is Joe Barron, all this while? Please God that he has escaped too. If he has escaped Bessie, then all can be undone. Let it be undone. Let it all never have happened. Let it be unwound, unstitched, unwounded. An extra toe would surely deter Joe Barron? Quickly, quickly. It seems slow, this process, but now is the moment to prevent all the pain. If Bessie mutates now, then Joe will be saved, and all that may come to be will be cancelled, and posterity will be spared. Faro Gaulden will not have to sit and stare at that screen, nor will Faro’s mother be condemned to grief and pain, for neither of them will be born. They will be spared. Not to be born is best, as the ancients said. Can’t somebody tell that, now, to Bessie Bawtry and Joe Barron, before they inflict their shortcomings and their misgivings and their indecisions upon their suffering gene pool and bloodline? Can’t somebody warn them, before it is too late?

  Bessie did not mutate. She seemed to thrive and prosper, according to her own lights and her own plans. But, gradually, almost inevitably, something seemed to begin to go wrong. Her first year in Cambridge passed pleasantly and without incident, but in the middle of her second year she began to show vague signs of distress, signs that intensified as the last term of the year approached. There were telltale signals that anyone familiar with her medical track record would have noted with alarm. There were retirings to bed, and missings of lectures, and unfinished essays, and visits to the sick bay and the college nurse. The college nurse could not find much wrong with her, and suspected a case of examination nerves. Clearly Bessie had not got influenza, though there were flu panics and epidemics throughout the twenties, but Bessie’s temperature was if anything subnormal. The nurse listened with interest to the story of the Spanish flu in Breaseborough, then gave her charge a prescription for a placebo tonic, and sent her cheerily away. Bessie meekly drank up the bottle of mixture, and, two weeks into the summer term of her second year, she took, decisively, to her bed.

  She seemed determined to stay there. If she were not allowed into the sick bay, she would stay in her room and die.

  Her friend Frances, the doctor’s daughter, sympathetic about money and food, proved less sympathetic about illness. If Bessie wanted to stay in bed, let her. What could be wrong with her? Was she upset about that young man at Pembroke who had stood her up over an evening at the Festival Theatre? Bessie had certainly set her cap at him. She would have to pay the price of failure. Frances, who had herself no intention of marrying, and no interest in men, had taken against the young man from Pembroke. He had laughed too much, and had too many teeth in too square a jaw. Others thought him handsome, but Frances did not.

  Molly, the farmer’s daughter, showed more concern, and kept calling in with jugs of lemonade and mugs of hot milk. She too wondered if there were a man in the case. Bessie had sometimes claimed to have an admirer back home in Breaseborough, an old schoolfriend called Joe, who, belatedly, was to sit his Cambridge entrance that autumn. Did this Joe really exist, or was he a defensive invention, a strategic ploy? Many girls invented boyfriends back home, in order to avoid sexual overtures in Cambridge, or to explain a lack of sexual overtures. If this Joe did exist, had he broken off with Bessie? Did Bessie dread Joe’s arrival? Or his failure to arrive? Molly did not like the look of Bessie, as she lay pale, hot and miserable on her spinsterly couch, propped up on patchwork-covered pillows in a darkened room, complaining her head ached. Molly, a motherly young woman, who had cared for sucking calves and puppies and kittens, felt she ought to do something about Bessie. If she continued to lie around like this she would fail part one of her Tripos, and then where would she be? Molly knew what heroic efforts had brought Bessie from Breaseborough to Cambridge. She did not want to see them wasted. For herself, it would not matter much if she did not do well. She would marry, one day, she felt sure. And she was not delicate like Bessie. Perhaps Bessie was ill, really ill? Was it meningitis, rheumatic fever, heart disease? She felt hot to the touch, but her temperature remained normal. What did that mean? Was Bessie letting down the cause of Higher Education for Women?

  Molly took the liberty of writing to Mrs Bawtry about her daughter. She had no conception of the scale of this transgression. She had missed her own mother a good deal in her first year, and certainly, had she been off-colour (which she never was), she would have wished to see her arrive at college with hampers and motherly kisses and good will. So Molly wrote to Mrs Bawtry, a nice note saying Bessie was a little poorly, expecting this to elicit a comforting message in return. She was not to know how she had miscalculated, nor how seriously her letter would be read in Breaseborough. Surely only a fatal illness could justify a letter from a stranger?

  Mrs Bawtry, imagining the worst, determined that it was her duty to go and rescue her daughter from whateve
r it was that had laid her low. The thought of the train journey alarmed her, and she did not know what she would do for the fare. Ellen Cudworth had made a little money before her marriage as a pattern-maker, but as Ellen Bawtry she had never had a penny of her own. Every penny that she spent was taken from the housekeeping that Bert gave her from his pay packet each Friday night. Where would she find the five pounds she would need for a visit to Cambridge? She hardly knew where to turn. She did not dare to ask her own husband, her daughter’s father, because she feared his criticism of her budget. Being a ‘bad manager’ was the worst fear she had. So she asked young Dora.

  Dora, by now, was working for Auntie Florrie as a dressmaker’s assistant. She cut out patterns, stitched and machined seams on the handsome Singer treadle of polished brown wood and gleaming black and gold metal. She was a lot better at dressmaking than her mother had ever been. (The blouse she had made for Bessie’s Cambridge trousseau, of pale blue flowered artificial silk with a soft necktie and contrasting white binding, had been quite professional.) And she seemed to have a knack of getting the shapes together very thriftily. Wartime exigencies had schooled her well. Auntie Florrie was very pleased with her. She paid her by the hour, and the shillings mounted up. Dora liked the days she spent at Auntie Florrie’s, cutting out on the floor of the front room, or trying on and pinning. Florrie had a little dog called Trigger, and Dora loved Trigger. She knelt in the coal dust and dog hair, on a peg rug, cutting out children’s dresses and ladies’ wear, watched by a wire-haired fox terrier that was her friend. It was not very hygienic at Auntie Florrie’s, but nobody seemed to mind.

  Yes, Dora told her mother, she did have five pounds saved up, and of course her mother could ‘borrow’ it to go and see Bessie in Cambridge.

  And Ellen Bawtry would have braved the unknown and gone to Cambridge, had not a telegram arrived, forbidding her. Bessie had rallied, and risen from her couch, and cranked herself back into gear. The image of her discordant, uneasy mother, lost in mannerly Cambridge, had filled Bessie with such pitiful anxiety (on whose behalf she could not have said, but perhaps not wholly on her own?) that she pulled herself together, and started to revise for part one of her Tripos, which she was to sit at the end of May.

  Mrs Bawtry, stout, ill-dressed and clumsy: respectable, proud, plain and cleanly: willing to enter the realms of the enemy in search of her lost daughter, whom, despite all lovelessness, she loved. She would have knocked at the tomb door and said, come forth. But it was not asked of her. The summons was cancelled. Her daughter sealed the tomb from within.

  The shade of Ellen Bawtry shuffles along the long corridor in her best purple paisley dress and her flat best shoes, a little cracked and creaking under her combined Cudworth-Bawtry weight. Past the portraits, past the busts of antique matrons, beneath the Greek key frieze that tops the high wall, Ellen Bawtry pads along, on the polished, clinically disinfected wood-block floor. She is a substantial shade, an obese Yorkshire shade. She looks neither to right nor to left. Her face is set with a grim fix of disapproving fear. But she approves the high shine on the wood blocks.

  Or so it might have been, had the call been answered.

  The ghosts of classical scholars and wrangling mathematicians also walk these corridors and haunt these gardens. You may see them marching, heads held high, gaunt, caped, high-browed, shabby, eccentric, with touches of lace, with cameos at the throat, with big noses and haughty expressions and confident steps. They pace the lawns beneath the trees, of a summer evening. They perambulate the sundial and the sunken fishpond. Gallant old women, pioneers and protestors and adventurers. Quaint phrases linger after them, snatches and tags of Greek and of Latin, a faint odour of learning and of courage. Sherry, biscuits, peppermint, cocoa, violet.

  What have they to say, these learned ladies, to the shade of Ellen Bawtry? They do not speak the same language. They do not inhabit the same realm. A faint dying snigger of recessive laughter hangs in the air. Ellen Bawtry hears it, turns, listens, wounded, suspicious, shakes her head.

  The slut scrubs the steps. The damp souls of housemaids sprout despondently in little cupboards and kitchens, in dark corners and cold attics.

  Mrs Bawtry shuffles on, in search of her lost daughter. The wide corridors seem infinite, and, like the corridors of a maze, they lead her nowhere. She will never find her daughter here. It is as well that she does not come here to try.

  The black beetles scuttle. Surely somebody should sweep them up.

  Had Bessie Bawtry, somewhere in these corridors, overheard the phrase They let the scum of the earth in here now’?

  So Bessie Bawtry recovered, and bravely faced the possibility of failure, and sat for part one of her Tripos. She sat down, on the afternoon of Monday, 23 May, and confronted her first paper of what was then known as English B. Three hours of it, and a warm day; the sun shone outside, and indoors pens scratched on paper. Three hours of questions on La Tene firedogs, the Beaker people, bronze shields and the Mildenhall burials: to be followed by other papers on other hot days on the Vikings, on Teutonic brooches, on socketed axes, on the Plymstock and Arreton Down hoards, on trade routes and runes and ruins. Was it for this that Miss Heald had encouraged Bessie Bawtry to read J. Alfred Prufrock and Edith Sitwell? What had all this to do with English Literature? What was she doing here?

  Bessie was all at sea, and knew it, for it had taken her a year or so of her time at Cambridge to realize that these remote topics were part of her syllabus, not merely interesting background information, which she could take or leave as she chose. It had never occurred to her that she would be examined on them. She had sat with wandering and wondering mind through lectures on trade routes, dutifully taking notes, but taking little in, and mishearing ‘roots’ for ‘routes’—the sense was the same as the sound to her. Tree roots, trade routes, flies trapped in Baltic amber, coral necklaces, skulls in potholes, skulls split by axe heads. What had all these to do with the Word? She had been utterly confused. These subjects seemed as remote from the English literature which she had thought she was studying as the discoveries then being made by Newnham scholar Gertrude Caton-Thompson in the pre-dynastic settlement sites and Neolithic cultures of the Nile. It was the shock of discovering that she had to sit papers on trade routes that had precipitated her collapse. She did not dare to reveal her folly to anyone. She did not want to make herself out to be a slack, stupid, dumb girl from the north, who did not even know what course she was supposed to be studying: Had not Miss Heald insisted that it was of the utmost importance to READ THE QUESTIONS CAREFULLY AND ANSWER THE CORRECT NUMBER IN THE TIME GIVEN?(It Was Joe Barron’s failure to do this, in Miss Heald’s view, that had cost him his County.) And now she had done far far worse than Joe Barron! She had prepared for the wrong papers. Miss Heald would never forgive her.

  No wonder Bessie had taken to her bed.

  However, Bessie thought she might manage to scrape by, for during her convalescence she had managed to swot up secretly on some of the areas she had neglected. And now, sitting in front of her first paper, she was able to find, even in this archaeological waste land, a theme or two on which she could discourse intelligently—the conception of Fate amongst the Scandinavian peoples and its influence upon the form of the saga, a short essay on ‘The wo of these women that woneth in cotes’. And she was safe with her Beowulf, for she had her Beowulf by heart, as she had had her Virgil two years earlier for her Higher Certificate examination. She knew her Beowulf through and throughly. What could be conquered late by industry, she had conquered. And so she scraped by, though for the rest of her life those teasing terrible objects and subjects would rise up before her to torment her in her dreams—the Jellinge stone, the Oseberg Viking Ship, the Halton Cross, the funerary rites of the Romans in Britain. She would never be free of them, until death came to free her. They were scorched and scarred into her. They would be incinerated with her upon her funeral pyre.

  As soon as Bessie had completed her last paper, she collapsed ag
ain, and this time she managed to run a high fever and was briefly admitted to the college sick bay. If she were to fail utterly, would she be eligible for a sick note and an aegrotat? She did not want to go home until she had established either failure or success. But she could not languish in the sick bay for ever. She had to go home. She had nowhere else to go. She would have to wait in Slotton Road for the news, good or bad. So home she went, with her box and her railway ticket.

  (In fact, she need not have gone straight home. She could have gone to stay for a couple of weeks with Molly in Somerset. Molly’s mother had warmly invited her. But Bessie had declined. She wanted to feel as though she had nowhere else to go. She felt safer with fewer options. She preferred a sense of mild grievance over the risk of new scenes and new pleasures. She would have liked to see the farm, but she had not the spirit for it. So she perversely cherished her sense of exclusion.)

  And maybe she had other reasons for going home.

  She waited, anxiously, in Slotton Road, for her results. Did her parents realize how worried she was? She hoped not. Fortunately for her, they were distracted by an event of larger portent. They had become interested in the forthcoming total eclipse of the sun, predicted for Wednesday, 29 June of that year. You wouldn’t have thought, Bessie said to Ethel Gledhill, that they’d be interested in that kind of thing, would you?