The Peppered Moth

by Margaret Drabble

  ‘So Bennett Barron went bankrupt?’ prompted Faro, trying to steer the conversation away from price differentials at Morrison’s, Kwiksave and Mrs Maggs on the corner, and the weight of tins of cat food.

  ‘More or less,’ said Dora, with the satisfaction that Yorkshire people so often take in the sorrows of others. ‘He ruined the business. He wasn’t declared bankrupt, but he ruined the business. Dragged his brother Alfred into it too. And it didn’t affect your father’(my grandfather, silently emended Faro—Dora was always muddling up her generations), ‘no, it didn’t affect your father, he’d got away by then, it was hard on the girls. Mind you, they asked for it. Man-mad, Rowena was. And Ivy was worse, she wasn’t interested in men at all. Yes, a lot of what went wrong with the firm was Bennett’s fault. He was too newfangled. He wasn’t satisfied with glass. He wanted to invest in that stuff made of milk.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That stuff made of milk. You know the stuff—what was it called? They used to make picnic sets of it. And clocks and things. And buttons. What was it called? It began with a C. Anyway, Bennett went in for it, but it didn’t work out. Well, it wouldn’t, would it? Bennett wanted to use it for lampshades. But it didn’t work out. Casein, that’s what it was called. Bennett wanted to go in for casein. Nearly ruined the business over casein.’

  ‘What is casein?’ asked Faro nervously, for she was beginning to think that Auntie Dora’s narrow-tracked but hitherto reliable mind was at last wandering. ‘I’ve never even heard of it.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have, would you? It’s out of fashion now, isn’t it? I don’t know if they still make it. It’s a sort of—product. It’s a product, made of dried milk. They used to make cups and saucers of it. Picnic sets and cigarette boxes and suchlike.’

  She has gone mad, said Faro to herself. Picnic sets made of milk? And the moon is made of cream cheese.

  ‘It was all the rage,’ repeated Dora, with retrospective bewilderment at the vagaries of modes. ‘It was all the rage, but it didn’t catch on.’

  Faro vowed to herself that she would try to remember this classic Auntie Dora sequence, but knew already that she would forget its wording. Auntie Dora’s speech, although distinctive, was almost impossible to reproduce. Whenever Faro tried to report it, in an attempt to amuse her friends or her mother, she found herself at a loss. It was too idiosyncratic, its patterns too deep to repeat. Even Dora’s accent defied mimicry and mockery. Faro was a good mimic, but she couldn’t ‘do’ Dora, just as she had never been able to ‘do’ her Grandma Barron. They were inimitable. They could not be captured. They should, in theory, have been sitting targets. But no, they always escaped. They escape now, still on the wing, or hiding, protected, in the obscuring undergrowth.

  Breaseborough, to young Faro Gaulden from London, was disquieting. Breaseborough jerked one from the banal to the surreal, from the ancient to the postmodern, without warning. A visit to Breaseborough could blow the mind. And this visit, with its Stone Age skulls, its DNA, its iced buns, its casein and Auntie Dora, had been almost too rich. (Can one extract the DNA from the casein of a mock-tortoiseshell cigarette box? And reconstruct from it the South Yorkshire 1920s cow?) Faro had had enough of these teasers. She needed to take cover in the real world of the recognizable.

  The Phoenix Hotel, on the ring road round Northam, was comfortingly recognizable. An ordinary, modern, two-storey, moderately priced 1980s business motel, built in red brick, in a postmodern style that belonged to all periods and to none, in a jumbled compromise between chateau and chalet and dungeon and supermarket. Just the place in which to recover from the too-pressing, high-smelling past. The Phoenix stood on a featureless stretch of dual carriageway that would, if one let it, whisk one straight past Breaseborough and Cotterhall and Wath and Rawmarsh and Pontefract and all those smalltime, small-town eccentric subplaces, with their strangely lingering indigenous populations: it would whisk one painlessly on, from motorway to motorway, from ring road to ring road, to north, to south, to east and to west, along the length and breadth of Britain. (Auntie Dora has a friend called Dorothy who lives in Wath. She often speaks of her to Faro and to Faro’s mother.)

  What a relief, after the chapel, after the bridge rolls, after Auntie Dora and the undying malingering spider plant, to check in somewhere so anonymous, so utterly ahistorical!

  Faro collected her plastic electronic key from the receptionist, and took a lift to the first floor: she would have preferred to walk, after all that sitting about, but where were the stairs? She would settle herself in for a comfortable evening, in the timelessness that she recognized as real time. She would dine in the restaurant: room service was fun but it so often arrived cold and congealed these days, and anyway it would be more fun to have a snoop about and to stare at all the other real-unreal unknown transit people, people whom one need never see again. Motorway people, without history, without provenance. But first, she would change gear with a stiff drink from her plastic half-bottle from her United Airways flight back from JFK.

  Singing to herself, Faro poured herself three fingers of whisky, and splashed in some water from the tap. Then she inspected her terrain. How many bedrooms had she slept in this year? Twenty? Thirty? Faro liked to be on the move. Her job took her about a bit. There’s you and me and the bottle makes three tonight, sang Faro Gaulden to herself: an old fifties lyric picked up from a new movie she’d just seen. Faro had a good voice. Her father had been musical, and so was she. She loved this song. It seemed paradoxically appropriate to her comfortable solitude. She was so happy to be alone.

  The room wasn’t at all bad. A queen-sized bed, bedside lights that worked, a red winking clock, a minibar, curtains covered with pale pink and grey zigzags and a poster print of a moorland scene with sheep. Very nice, very meaningless. Faro had had enough of meaning. She drew the curtains, swigged her drink, went into the bathroom and was promptly hit on the head by the shower-curtain rail. It fell on her from on high, as she was wondering whether to wash her feet under the cold tap. She tried to stick it back up again, but it didn’t seem to fit anymore. Should she complain? It seemed a bit rich, to be hit on the head at the price of a hundred quid a night, but why bother? She bunged it in the bath. The mag was paying.

  It was a whole lot cleaner and brighter here in room 122 of the Phoenix than it had been in the chapel or at Auntie Dora’s, but the cleanness had a curious smell to it. A disinfectant perfume. Faro sniffed, sniffed again, inhaled. A horrible, fruity smell. A pink smell. It seemed a pervasive smell these days in cheaper toilet facilities—perhaps some people actually liked it? She was surprised to encounter it here. Faro preferred green smells to pink smells. Pine and mint. Or fern. Not that real ferns smell of anything much, do they? What on earth, wondered Faro, can casein have smelled of? Sourness, surely? Perhaps that was why it hadn’t caught on?

  The drink was rising to Faro’s head in little spurts and spasms of temporary happiness. She was beginning to feel light and cheerful, cheerful enough to ring Seb as she had promised she would. Ringing Seb these days was almost always an ordeal, but she was feeling strong enough to take him on. Seb Jones was a leech, a bloodsucker. She dialled, he answered, as though he had been waiting to pounce. He needed her energy. As she spoke, she could feel it coursing from herself to him through the telephone wire. His gaunt and cavernous features would be softening, warming, filling out a little as she spoke, and his hair would cease to recede from his bony temples for the twenty minutes of this mercy call. Seb was younger than she was, he was only twenty-nine, but he was beginning to look like an old man. Once she had thought his grim pallor romantic. Now she had come to see it as something quite other. Nevertheless, she chatted lightly on. She told him about the manic Dr Hawthorn, about Steve the skeleton, and about the room full of stout Cudworths. ‘I’m too fat,’ she cried to him, in what she hoped was entertainingly mock despair, ‘I’m too fat, and soon I’ll look like Auntie Dora and weigh fourteen stone! She’s even fatter than my grandma used to be
! And that’s saying something! I’ve got fat genes, and there’s the end of it! They’ve got control of me!’

  Faro looked admiringly at herself in the mirror, as she let out this volley of cries. She was looking just fine. The summer weather suited her.

  Seb wanted to know what she was having for her supper. She must eat up, drink up. He liked a fleshly Faro to feed upon. And he was looking forward to hearing more about the Cudworths. He took a malicious interest in the Cudworths, none of whom he had ever met. Seb wanted to know if the real Steve had been there, along with his skeleton? No, said Faro, Steve Nieman hadn’t showed up. Rumour had it that he was a bit embarrassed about his fortuitous fame and his unrelated bone-find. Had Dr Hawthorn stolen a sample of her DNA, Seb inquired, and had she been to see the cave where the skeleton was discovered? Seb was quite interested in DNA, but he was even more interested in caverns and potholes and sewerage and subterranean workings. He had even tried potholing himself. Faro disapproved of his underground obsessions, and did not want to talk about caverns: she was in fact feeling slightly guilty that she hadn’t found time to visit the site and interview Steve Nieman. The site wasn’t open to the public, but she could easily have wangled it, as a science journalist. They’d have been pleased to see her, probably. She knew she’d been lazy. She hadn’t bothered. She might have to come back another day. She diverted Seb back to DNA, and told him about the darling little toothbrush swab-thing with which she had scraped her inner cheek for Dr Hawthorn. Dr Hawthorn had a nice fresh sample of her DNA, newly filed away and labelled, along with the swabs from Auntie Dora, Bill Cudworth and all the other Breaseborough folk.

  ‘Were you wise to let him have it?’ asked Seb. ‘It isn’t a good idea to give away your body parts. And suppose you find you’ve got some incurable disease? Suppose you find you’re a changeling? There might be worse things than fatness back there in the gene bank. It’s dangerous, digging around in there. You don’t know what you might find.’

  Seb was beginning to turn nasty: he always did. Twenty minutes of him was enough.

  ‘I can’t be a changeling,’ said Faro, more robustly than she intended. ‘Anyway, what if I were? I might find I’m the living missing link with Neanderthal woman. That would be fun, wouldn’t it?’

  (Faro had felt a superstitious flicker of fear as she had handed back her swab, and she had watched carefully as Dr Hawthorn had sealed it up in its little plastic wallet. What indeed if it held bad news? If it did, would Dr Hawthorn tell her? He didn’t look like the kind of chap who spent much time worrying about medical ethics. But she didn’t want to talk to Seb about this. Seb was always taking advantage of her weaknesses, her sillinesses. He was cruel, was Seb. Why, oh why did she listen to him?)

  ‘Neanderthal woman? Nonsense. There wasn’t any interbreeding. They’ve proved it,’ said Seb, the edge of pleading menace sharper in his voice.

  ‘No, they haven’t proved it,’ said Faro, who knew more about this than he did, although her mind was not as organized as his. ‘They can’t prove it. They’ve found a chap in Portugal who might be a cross-breed. Lagar Velho boy, that’s his name. It would only take one positive result for them to have to rethink the whole of prehistory.’

  Faro uttered this with confidence. Faro did not mention that Lagar Velho boy was almost twenty-five thousand years old, but she felt she had scored a point. Clearly Seb had never heard of Lagar Velho boy, with his coloured shroud of red ochre, his pierced snail-shell necklet, his little toys of rabbit bone. Seb was momentarily silenced, and Faro took advantage of the pause to ask him what he had been up to.

  ‘Working, working,’ was all he would admit. And in Seb’s case, that could mean anything or nothing. Seb’s career, if such it was, remained a puzzle to Faro. He wrote a film column, and he made films, sometimes, and he wrote short stories, sometimes, and in his spare time, of which he had much, he lectured on horror movies at Holborn.

  Faro did not live with Seb, though she had once tried to. Seb lived in a room of his own in Bloomsbury, in a squalor even Faro found extreme. Seb was becoming more and more of a worry to Faro. He was demanding and haggard and neurotic, and she wished she’d never gone to bed with him in the first place. He seemed to think he had staked her. He’d stuck his prick in her, and staked her, and then he had become dependent. He needed her, though at first he’d pretended not to, and Faro found need hard to resist. She hadn’t realized he was so helpless when she took him on. Now she didn’t seem to be able to wriggle free. She was resigned to sticking with him, in a low-key kind of way, for the next stretch. Until something else happened.

  ‘You’d better go and get some supper yourself,’ said Faro, in a terminally cheerful tone. ‘I’m too fat, and you’re too thin. You’d better go and eat some chips.’

  Seb didn’t seem to mind this bossy nanny tone, which Faro herself found false and shaming. He liked it.

  Seb said he was meeting Raoul and Rona in the Red Lion and would probably have Today’s Special. Today’s Special was always the same. It was always lasagne. ‘Rather you than me,’ said Faro. She was sick to death of lasagne.

  As Faro Gaulden tidied herself up for dinner, unbidden memories of Seb’s style of fucking came to revisit her. At first she had found it quite exciting, and a welcome change from the limpness of her previous long-term lover. Seb had not been at all limp, despite his unhealthy appearance. He had a cock as hard as a lump of wood, which was almost permanently, in her company, erect. He liked games of bondage, and so, at first, did she. It was quite fun, letting herself be tied to the table leg, while he went at her. But after a while she began to realize that although he was as hard as a lump of wood, he was about as insensitive. He could do it, for hours, monotonously, and that had its advantages, from a woman’s point of view, but it did get tedious. Also, it was dirty on the floor. Faro didn’t much mind mess, but the smell of carpet and cigarette ends began to get her down. It got dull, being thumped at, in and out, in and out. Faro began to long for something a little more varied, a little more soft and sensuous. And when she did manage to connect up with an orgasm of her own, she had a sense that he sneered at her for it. So she’d taken to faking. It wasn’t as hurtful to be sneered at for a fake. But then she’d realized that the whole business was a waste of time. Why bother? So she’d refused to sleep with him anymore, but did that get rid of him? Oh no. He claimed other rights in her. And she was sorry for him, so she’d let him. He’d got her where he wanted her. She was still tied to the table leg.

  This conclusion to this sequence of thoughts made her smile at herself, as she gargled with minted mouthwash, as she curved her lips to the lipstick. What nonsense! She was a free woman, alone in the Heartfree Motel. Round any corner waited a new future. She primped up her halo of curls for the last time, smiled in a more come-hither manner and took herself down to the restaurant, where she confidently requested a table for one.

  There was a special promotional menu of prawns. Prawns were in or with everything, and if you filled in the form on the back of your menu you could win a couple of free seats for the Bother Boys next month at the Rialto. A heavenly happiness took possession of Faro Gaulden, as she joked with the waiter about the Bother Boys. She tucked into her prawns and noodles (Indonesian style) and looked around her. Young businessmen, a few older businessmen, a scattering of businesswomen. At the table next to hers sat a mixed-sex party of eight, all, she guessed, in their late thirties, early forties. She eavesdropped as she sipped her lager. At first the men, wearing ties but in their shirt sleeves, made the running, commanding, assertive, in joking joshing public Yorkshire voices, but gradually the women began to strike up their own orchestra, as they steered the conversation towards less rowdy topics, as they brought it back to the matters of the day. They were all delegates at some sort of conference. They were talking about fuel emissions, methane and waste management. One dark-suited black man, the most solemnly dressed of the group, sat quietly at the far end of the table; he kept his jacket on througho
ut the meal. He was treated with deference. Was he the boss, a flown-in American? She thought she had detected an American accent. The women careered along. Catalytic converters, government regulations, the Kyoto agreement, electric trams. They knew their stuff. Women did, these days, didn’t they? It was a good time to be alive, for a woman like Faro, reflected Faro. Perhaps she should ask them what they were all up to? There might be a story in it for her section. Women and transport, women and motoring, women and lead-free petrol, women and waste.

  Faro didn’t notice Mr Iowa Cudworth until she’d finished her coffee, signed her bill and started to make her way towards the foyer. She’d been sitting with her back to him. He too had been eating alone, and he saluted her, waving his prawn-embossed menu at her as she passed. She waved, hesitated, crossed over to him.

  ‘Hello, cousin,’ she said.

  ‘I thought it was you,’ he said with admiration. And Faro knew she looked great, in her pretty cotton heliotrope mailorder frock. She was full of bounce and bubble. The beer bubbled. She bubbled. Her hair bubbled. She agreed to join Mr Iowa for a drink in the bar.