Faro cannot reconcile herself to her father’s death, or to his life. She bleeds inwardly for her mother, to whom she has been too close, too close, for her poor mother who has turned cold and stiff. Her mother, a grim and sensible woman, a Yorkshire woman of Yorkshire grit. Chrissie had put the Gaulden wreckage behind her, had against heavy odds made herself a career, had in the end remarried. But Faro knew her mother, and knew that her mother had a broken heart.
Sitting on her bed, drinking fizzy water fortified with the dregs of JFK—well, why save it, better to empty the bottle—Faro recalls that long-ago evening when her mother Chrissie had tried to cheer up her little girl by telling her about the Faeroe Islands. Her father had gone upstairs to visit his second (or was it perhaps by then his third?) family, and Faro had seemed so peaky and sad and bereft downstairs in the Chief Wife’s apartment. And Chrissie, perhaps unwisely, had assured Faro that not all had always been sadness and deprivation and humiliation and fear. There had been happier times in earlier days, out there, at the top of the world, out on a rock in the middle of the Atlantic, with the white sailing clouds above and the grassy turf below, and the westward view to Ultima Thule, where the great whales sailed. And Chrissie and Nick Gaulden had been happy there, promised Chrissie. They had eaten the dark meat of fish-flavoured puffin, and the Camembert-ripe flesh of rotted shark, and little white fresh mushrooms that sprang like manna from the hilltops. They had watched the little fawn and golden Faeroe ponies graze. They had loved one another, and all had been well for a while. Not all of life had been broken crockery and bruises and bailiffs.
‘And he has always adored you,’ said Chrissie Gaulden, as she pegged patiently away at a scarlet bedside rug made of precut Anchor wool. ‘He adored you from the moment he saw you. He loved babies.’
‘He still loves babies,’ the young Faro had said, as the wailing of the youngest Gaulden bastard drifted down the uncarpeted wooden stairs. And both women had laughed, the comradely laughter of women on their own.
Ah well, thinks Faro, as she polishes off the contents of her beaker, perhaps it really hasn’t been too bad. She yawns, vigorously. All those conglomerations of people, all those Barrons and Bawtrys, all those Goldsteins and Goldbergs and Gauldens, back in the bombed waste land of Europe. Jews, Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Gypsies—God knows what. God and Dr Hawthorn. And she was the end-product. A miracle, really.
She hadn’t meant it when she’d told Peter Cudworth that she hated her own name. In fact, most of the time, she loved it. Faro was a good name, an original name, and it had served her well at her London comprehensive school. It amused, it was memorable, and now it made a good journalist’s byline. It was a lucky name, taken not only from the isles of the north and a Portuguese resort, but also from a Regency card game. It designated Faro herself as a winner in luck’s lottery. And Gaulden was a good name too. Nick’s parents had done well so wittily to anglicize whatever it had once been. Nick said they’d stolen the name from a manor house in Somerset, but she’d never bothered to check. If so, good on them. Oh yes, it was all OK really. She forgave them all. And, in a mood of forgiveness, she went into the bathroom, brushed her teeth rather forcefully and clumsily, slapped some moisturizer on her moist and resilient skin, and flopped into bed. She was too tired to have a bath, and it was too late, and anyway the pole from the shower curtain was still lying in the tub. She’d fix it in the morning. She lay down, and fell instantly asleep.
She fell instantly asleep, as was her way, and, as was her way, she woke at three in the morning consumed and feverish with panic, terror and remorse. What could she have been thinking of the night before, to have told her life story to a stranger? She was always telling secrets to strangers. A couple of drinks, and she couldn’t keep her mouth shut. Why did she do it? What did Peter Cudworth care that her father was dead? There were so many dead. Dead without hope, dead without purpose, dead without reprieve. Living without hope, dying without hope, dying young, dying in caves, dying of selfinflicted wounds, dying from axe blows to the head, dying of the drink, dying in death camps, dying of history, dying reluctant, dying angry. All, all, dragged to death as at the horse’s tail? What was the point of all the dead? Faro moaned and rocked and put the pillow over her head for comfort. She was going mad. For comfort she bashed her head back and forth under the pillow. Was redemption waiting, now, on the horizon, for the human race? Was death at last to die? Yes, so they claimed. Immortal life was within reach. Cloning, genetic engineering, spare-part surgery, xenografts, then immortality. Nobody shall die needlessly. All shall be saved, and all manner of people shall be saved. Man, at last, has conquered and outwitted death. It’s taken a long time, but he’s done it.
But what, howled Faro, silently, uselessly, into the synthetic foam of her motel pillow, what of the dead themselves? What of the already dead? Shall there be a resurrection for them? Shall there be a Harrowing of Hell? Shall they be redeemed, all of them? What of the virtuous heathen? What of those born before the genome? What of those who never had a moment’s happiness? What about the forgotten bits of prehistory? All the hominid mandibles, all the forelimbs and hindlimbs, all the fossils and partial face and cranial fragments of the past? They had suffered pain. Shall Cotterhall Man be redeemed of his pain?
Steve the skeleton lay very quietly through the night in his air-conditioned temperature-controlled casket. His neighbours were Egyptians, a few millennia younger, better preserved, and of a better social class. Whatever they had endured in life was long over. It could never be revived. Not even Dr Hawthorn could reach it with his swab or his needle. Or could he? Is there to be a new hell? And if so, who will come to harrow it?
Faro Gaulden woke the following morning with a bounce and without a trace of hangover or fatigue. This capacity for instant recovery might be seen, perhaps, as one of the more dangerous legacies of her alcoholic father. But one could take a more optimistic view. She was young, she was in excellent health, and she had access yet to hope. She uncrumpled and unfurled herself like a revived flower. Her sap rose quickly. She ran her fingers through her glossy black hair, and it stood on end round her head in a faro-halo like the stiff fronds of a chrysanthemum. She conquered the shower rail, thrusting it back into its bracket amidst a scattering of falling plaster, and bathed in a lavish green gel that fought with and overpowered the pinkish sickly odour of synthetic fruits. She towelled herself energetically with the large white bath sheet, then tackled the coffee equipment. The brew basket and the thermal platter and the reinforced decanter held no terrors for Faro, although she’d never seen anything quite like them in all her travels: she tore with her fluoride-strong white teeth at the impenetrable vacuum sachet of ground Colombian, stoked up what she took to be the machine’s engine, and got it all bubbling in no time. Its red eye blinked, its steel tubes hissed, its hot brown liquid spurted forth at her command. She drank it down, dressed, signed her bill, marched out, leaped into her car, remembered she had forgotten to get the car-park barrier combination exit pin number from the reception desk, parked at the barrier while she went back for it, was hooted at angrily by various early-morning travelling salesmen, waved at them cheerily as though responding to admiring salutations, and was on her way.
What was her way? Back to London, back down the Ml, and back to work. But beyond that, whither? Who cared? She fiddled with her car radio, looking for the beat. She found it, and turned up the volume. A good, clear signal. Knowing her luck, she bet she’d find she’d won those tickets to the Rialto to see the Bother Boys. She put her foot down, and the car in front of her gave way in terror. She put her dark glasses on, and sang along in the fast lane.
Peter Cudworth, rising at eight thirty, looked in the breakfast room for his cousin Faro, but could not see her. Nor was she visible in the foyer, nor waiting in line for the cashier. She was nowhere to be seen. In bed still, he supposed, sleeping it off. He loitered, regretful. He would have liked to say goodbye. But there was no sign or sense of her. As he paid his bill
, he asked, boldly, for Miss Faro Gaulden, and got what his Yorkshire kin would have called a funny look. He was told that Miss Gaulden had left an hour ago. This reply made him feel old, and he made his way, soberly, to his hired car.
Miss Gaulden, by this time, was on her mobile talking to her mother Chrissie in Oxfordshire from a petrol station. Faro and her mother speak nearly every day, sometimes several times a day. Faro has forgotten that last night she thought her mother was a heartbroken tragedy queen, and has connected up with the real daytime Chrissie, who wants to know all about the Cudworths. ‘You should have come, Mum,’ yells Faro, over the racket of the garage forecourt. ‘It was hilarious! What? Yes, Auntie Dora’s fine. And I met this lovely cousin from Iowa. What? I can’t hear you! No, he’s a Cudworth. Iowa, not Argentina; The Argentine one didn’t show. You should have seen the skeleton. What? Yes, in a cave. Peter Cudworth, his name was. He’s a professor. I can’t hear you! Are you still there? Shit! Can you hear me? Can you hear me? Shit!’
Faro switches off her flat-batteried handset and gets back on the road to London, thinking, as she drives south, of the migration of the grandparents of Peter Cudworth. He had told her that it was an everyday story, a dull story, but nevertheless she finds it full of mystery. How had they managed it? What had made them want to manage it? How had they got their passports and visa papers? How had they known how to get them? Why had they gone, and others not? Why hadn’t depressed Yorkshire emptied itself into Canada? Had they gone to Canada first because it was easier to get into part of the British Empire than into the U.S.? All the way from Leeds to Toronto to New Jersey! She simply could not begin to fill in the links of the chain. Human beings were opaque, amazing, in their leaps, their motivations. And yet there were links, reaching backwards into the cavernous recesses of time itself, into the limestone, into the potholes, into the caverns. How could one begin to follow the leaps? Did families remain static for centuries, then suddenly, in an instant, in a generation, mutate? Did whole cultures leap and surge? How many jumped and fatally missed their footing? How many brave attempts were hit on the head by a spade?
Faro’s grandfather Joe Barron, speaking to her one evening as they strolled round the Surrey garden, had mentioned his sisters Ivy and Rowena. ‘You can say what you like,’ he said, ‘but they had pluck.’ Faro is trying to remember this, but she cannot. It hovers, out of reach.
Her father’s family had suffered a different fate. They had been driven, forced, expelled. Not pluck but wisdom had distinguished their emigration. Back in Berlin they had read the signs and storm clouds correctly. They had not waited for the shattering of crystals and for the nights of long knives. They had packed up and quit. They had survived. But they could not be said to have prospered.
Which does Faro favour, the Breaseborough branch, or the Berlin branch? Who can predict which genes will triumph, or whether her mitochondrial DNA (which has no Berlin component) will ever be passed on?
Faro continues to ponder the mysteries of DNA as she drives south down the motorway. Is Faro pleased, as a feminist, that it is the female line that has provided these new clues to genealogy, these new aids to research? Is she pleased that the uses of mitochondrial DNA have provoked Dr Hawthorn and his colleagues to comment that it would have been easier to trace family ancestries in the distant past if naming had followed the mother line, as in Iceland, instead of the father line, as in most of what we call the developed world? Yes, she is pleased, though only on a frivolous, point-scoring level. Faro is a feminist, as women of her class and education are these days. She is not a sentimental feminist, and does not hold the view that all women are good, all men bad, all mothers good, all fathers bad—though in her particular domestic circumstances she might well have been expected to adopt this ideological fallacy. (We have not seen much of Chrissie Gaulden née Barron yet, but the serious shortcomings of Nick Gaulden have been touched upon.) But yes, Faro is a feminist, and she is pleased by the irony of the power of the new magic of mitochondrial DNA. She is amused by the way in which men cannot conceal their irritation when she tries to describe the scientific basis of the new research. She has learned to conceal the fact that the reason why female mitochondrial DNA is easier to trace and detect is because it is less ‘pure’ than unisex nuclear DNA, and therefore more conspicuous under the microscope. We’d better not lay claim to impurity as a virtue, even when it is one. Words like that can lead to grave misunderstandings. History is riddled with such misunderstandings.
Peter Cudworth drives quietly to Loughborough, through middle England. It is a complicated, cross-country route. The roads are not straight, as they are in Iowa, and he could have done with a companion to read the map. His wife Anna was good at map-reading, but she had not wished to accompany him on this trip. England attracted her not at all, and she was afraid to set foot in Europe.
Peter Cudworth had not spoken much of his wife Anna to his cousin Faro. He had established her existence, from reflexive self-protection, but had not evoked her. Nor had Faro enquired after her. Anna was foreign, non-germane, and had no part in the Cudworth story. For Anna, like Faro’s father Nick Gaulden, was a second-generation refugee from Old Europe. She too had been newly infected by a curiosity about her homeland. But Anna, unlike Peter, did not dare to go. She was afraid of what she might find. Anna’s parents and grandparents came from a village in Saxony in east Germany, newly accessible since the fall of the Berlin Wall. And Anna knew what she might find amidst the wooden chalets and the high sloping pastures. Flatred and guilt might lie in wait for her there. Her family had been the blond oppressors. They had become economic refugees, not moral refugees. They had got out in time, through a mixture of luck and foresight, and Anna had been born an echt American. But nothing pleasant could await Anna in that pastoral Saxon landscape amidst the tinkling cowbells.
Anna does not know if she ought or ought not to go back to her homeland. It used to be inaccessible, but it is easy to go there now. Everywhere is opening up. New problems, new challenges have arisen in the last decade. Jews who forced themselves to tour the concentration camps are compelled to retrace their steps yet further, to revisit once-impenetrable domains, to seek the sparse kin who lingered on and lived through the Holocaust, to haunt synagogues and cemeteries behind the Wall and the Curtain. Should Anna also face the unacceptable past? Anna is neurotic, and she torments herself. How innocent, how dull the Cudworth past, said Anna, as she urged her husband to attend Dr Hawthorn’s'séance. What can Peter find to fear in Breaseborough?
Tourists do not go to Breaseborough, though the Hammervale Millennium Earth Recovery Project is trying to attract them. Hitherto politics have prevented tourists from visiting the innocent beauty spots of Anna’s parents’ youth. As yet they remain undiscovered, timeless, undeveloped. All that will change, as the glutting scum of money flows on, as operators send out their scuttling coaches. Now would be the time to go to this lost Arcady. Now, if ever. Before the scum mounts and drowns the mountaintops. Bautzen and Spreewald are said to be crowded already, and Weimar is overrun.
Anna, thinks Peter, has become unhealthily obsessed by the past. He is worried about her. Maybe he shouldn’t have left her for so long.
Peter Cudworth drives onwards, leaving spoiled industrial England behind him. He finds himself, after one or two wrong turnings, on a straight road through wolds, with long blue views falling gently and spaciously and as it were infinitely to his right, glittering with distant sunlight. The trees are heavy with fresh new leaf, majestic, sculpted. The nearer fields are green and gold. This is a Roman road, and it drives straight. Church spires and church towers rise from time to time from the landscape, and beckon, and recede, and vanish. They are calling to Peter Cudworth to stay, but in one morning he traverses parishes, manors, estates, whole counties. Where the legions slowly tramped, where great carts and lighter carriages followed, Peter Cudworth drives on in his hired capsule, at fifty miles an hour, towards Loughborough, that clean and pleasant town. He drives mor
e slowly and more carefully than his cousin Faro, who is a dashing motorist. He is older and has more, or so he thinks, to lose.
Bessie Bawtry, like her granddaughter Faro, also called herself a feminist, though the word meant something a little different in the twenties and thirties. There had not been much evidence of feminism in her decision to marry Joe Barron. Perhaps she was biding her time and waiting for the right moment to express herself fully as a feminist.
Faro’s mother and Bessie’s second child, Christine Barron, as we have seen, was born soon after the beginning of the war, in the Montagu Maternity Hospital in Northam, at two thirty in the afternoon. Christine, like her brother Robert, was a healthy child, though a little yellow from baby jaundice, and weighed a conventional seven pounds one ounce. Bessie was to recall this uneventful birth in embarrassing detail and speak about it to people who could not, in the infant Chrissie’s view, have been at all interested in it. Bessie, despite or because of those earlier miscarriages, prided herself on being exceptionally gifted at maternity. Baby Christine had appeared after twelve hours of labour, no forceps, and a little gas and air. (Who cares? Who cares? the dumb and infant Chrissie would silently howl, inside her shamed beleaguered head, as she heard this intimate birth saga repeated to total strangers for the hundredth time.) Dr Fox and a midwife had been in attendance. Joe Barron had not been there: in those days husbands were not expected to hang around the delivery room, and Joe Barron would not have been able to do so, even had he wished, as he was in an army camp in Essex at the time.
Baby Christine, Bessie and Robert did not stay long in Northam, for that city of steel was now threatened by the bombs that had already scored in London. The threat of aerial bombardment, which had hung over England through years of appeasement, was at last being realized. Joe thought at first of sending his little family to the safety of America, and even wrote to one of Bessie’s college friends, a Quaker in Philadelphia, inquiring about the possibility of evacuation. But Bessie had no intention of being sent to America by herself, nor had the Quaker in Philadelphia any intention of receiving her. So that scheme came to nothing, and Bessie, Robert and the baby found themselves in a small town in the Peak District, which they reached by one of those chains of coincidences that scattered bits of population somewhat randomly around the country at that period. There they took temporary possession of a small newish suburban terraced council house, on the edge of town, and Bessie Barron took up a temporary post teaching at the King’s Grammar School, Boys Only. Married women were allowed back to work, at this period. They were all to be sacked as soon as the war was over, when the men came home, but this was not as yet clear to them, and for the time being they were in demand. Bessie enjoyed being in demand, though she did not say so: she abided by the conventions of subdued complaint about the well-recognized inconveniences of war. People complained noticeably less in Pennington than in Breaseborough. There was less of a culture of complaint in Derbyshire. The air was cleaner in Pennington than it had been in Breaseborough. People had less to complain about.
The Peppered Moth Page 16