The Peppered Moth

by Margaret Drabble

  The thought of her Smollett asset amused Bessie, and she was almost smiling to herself as the train pulled in at Derby. There she was joined in her hitherto empty compartment by an elderly female traveller. This person endeared herself to Bessie by getting into a muddle about her ticket, her luggage and her destination. Bessie was able to put her right on all points, and over the next hour or so proceeded to tell her all about her prospective holiday, about Lyme Regis, about the cottage the Barrons had rented, about the sea view, the bedroom and bathroom facilities, the brand name of the electric oven. Bessie preferred gas, but she could manage with the electric, she assured her grey-haired companion. Dutifully, the person asked about Bessie’s family, and received rather more information than most people would have wanted. She heard a good deal about my husband the barrister, who had taken silk last year, and about my son who was off to do his National Service, and my daughter who was doing her A-levels at Farnleigh Grammar School. She was subjected to a long analysis of the differences between Holderfield High and Farnleigh Grammar, and of daughter Christine’s ability to do well under either regime. No allusion at all was made to the fact that Bessie’s mother Ellen was in her deathbed in Breaseborough. There was no place for Ellen in this discourse. The stone was rolled against the door of the tomb, and she would not be allowed out anymore.

  Leicester passed, and Luton. No other passenger entered the compartment to disrupt this flow of self-protecting self-congratulatory family description. Bessie had mastered the art of the uninterrupted monologue. She did not like talking to those she considered her equals, but she was very good at addressing the butcher, the baker or the woman in haberdashery in John Lewis’s. She would talk to people at bus stops and on buses. She would talk for hours to strangers. The person in the railway compartment listened, politely, as though mesmerized, and at first made no effort to offer any information of her own. Bessie often had this effect on strangers. They tended to accept her at her own valuation. It was less trouble that way.

  South of Luton, Bessie at last faltered, and the person from Derby tentatively murmured that she herself was going to Bexhill, to see her sister. Bessie nodded, rather severely. She clearly did not think much of Bexhill. The person, perhaps discouraged, fell silent.

  ‘Of course Lyme Regis,’ continued Bessie, as though the Bexhill card had never been played, ‘was where Jane Austen set part of Persuasion.’ It was in some indefinable way clear from her tone that she did not expect the person to recognize this literary allusion, but that she nevertheless could not resist making it. ‘And,’ Bessie went on, importantly, with that rising inflection that prevents interjection, ‘there are many fossils.’

  ‘Yes,’ said the harmless old lady from Derby, goaded into response. ‘Yes, I know. Isn’t that where that young woman found that ichthyosaurus? What was her name? Mary Anning, if I remember rightly.’

  Chrissie and Robert, who had sat with embarrassment through many such monologues, would have congratulated the person from Derby, had they ever learned of this interchange. Not many scored so well. And yet Chrissie and Robert were, in general, sorry for their mother. They recognized that it was her insecurity and her unhappiness that made her talk so much. They were old enough to know this, but not old enough to know what to do about it. They could not make things easier for Bessie. They had to watch and suffer for her and for themselves in silence. They worried about her, in their way.

  Walking together along the Cobb at Lyme on a clear calm evening, they discussed their mother, as Bessie and Dora had discussed theirs. They had endured the increasingly neurotic and overorganized ordeal of holiday departure (never again, resolved Robert, never again, swore Chrissie), and now were after all quite pleased to find themselves in this beautiful curving town by the curving bay of the southern sea. Lyme was romantic. Lyme was in good taste, and had not in those days taken on the powerful British seaside odour of onion, vinegar, ketchup and fried foodstuffs. It still smelled of sand, salt, sea and fish. They liked Lyme Regis. They were young, and they were still hopeful.

  ‘She says she’s depressed,’ said Chrissie.

  ‘Depressed? What’s she got to be depressed about?’ said Robert.

  ‘It doesn’t work like that,’ said Chrissie. ‘She says it’s something called endogenous depression. It’s an illness, she says. Like mumps or measles. That’s what she says Dr Hancox says.’ Robert didn’t bother to reply. He knew it didn’t work like that.

  ‘But I don’t believe in it,’ continued Chrissie. ‘It’s her own fault. She never goes out, she never sees anyone. No wonder she’s depressed. She ought to make more of an effort. It’s not natural, never to see anyone.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’ said Robert. He was not very sociable himself, though he did not admire himself for this. He admired Chrissie’s reaction more, but found he could not replicate it. He sometimes tried, but something always seemed to stop him.

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ said Chrissie firmly. ‘She ought to try a bit harder. She ought to get out and see people.’

  ‘She doesn’t know anybody to see.’

  ‘She doesn’t know anybody because she never goes out.’ They had reached the end of the pier, and stood there, gazing down into the sucking, slapping water. Beneath their feet the large hewn stones of the Cobb were starred and studded with small fossil life, with shell and frond millennia old.

  ‘She says it’s his fault, because he won’t take her out.’

  ‘There’s some truth in that,’ said Robert.

  ‘Yes,’ said Chrissie. ‘But when he does offer, she makes such a fuss. Gets ill, or makes a scene. You know what I mean.’

  He did know what she meant. Retreat, hysteria, shouting, sulking, abuse. There’d been less of that since the tablets, but it could still happen, unpredictably, at any time.

  Poor Robert and Chrissie, trying to retrace the progress of the disease which was eating up their mother and punishing their father. It stretched back too far for them to know its origins. It stretched back beyond old Ellen Bawtry, who hadn’t quite died yet after all. The infection of habit, from generation to generation. Do these two think they can escape? They have been twice transplanted, and more moves are soon to come. Will they be able to take on the colouring of a new environment? Will they succeed where Bessie has failed?

  Chrissie and Robert turned, and began the stroll back, through the mild evening air. Promenading, watching, being watched. Chrissie, sweet sixteen and many times kissed, in the first full bloom of youth, attracted admiring and licentious glances. She stepped out proudly, wasp-waist pinched by a broad elasticated yellow belt with a big snake buckle, swishing a full flaring blue-and-white-striped cotton skirt, strutting along with neat brown ankles on open-toed white plastic sandals with a raised cork wedge heel. A tarty tight white V-necked cotton top showed off her full Cudworth breasts, and round her neck was a double string of plastic pearl-simulation popper beads. She flicked from time to time her long bright full red Barron hair. She was a head-turner. Would her unknown admirers recognize that Robert was her brother and not her boyfriend? She did not care. It was attention she wanted, not assignations, as she and Robert performed the evening passeggiata. She had plenty of assignations back home in Surrey. Here, she just wanted to make people stare at her, and stare they obligingly did.

  The holiday is turning out better than anyone had hoped. Bessie seems almost relaxed, now she has got her linen sorted and her kitchen organized. Her terrible dissatisfaction is temporarily assuaged. She enjoys sitting in a deck chair with a book, listening to the band. She enjoys watching other people’s children build sand castles and run screaming into the tiny waves. She enjoys looking in the antique-shop windows, and lunching in the Lobster Pot. Playing cards of an evening, she becomes quite skittish. They never play cards at home, but on holiday, in a rented lodging, they can become a Happy Family. Bessie and Robert are quite good at cards. Chrissie is hopeless. Joe lets other people win whenever he can.

  Joe has sometimes wished that B
essie would learn bridge, for the idle ladies of Hartley had played bridge, and so no doubt do the idle ladies of Farnleigh, were one ever to find out who and where they are. But Bessie, although herself idle, despises idleness, and despises the bridge set as vehemently as she despises the bingo set. And, on balance, Joe sees her point. He himself does not have much respect for the opium of bridge or bingo. Better serious misery than shallow happiness.

  The little dark yellow oblong telegram came on the morning of the first Tuesday. It announced in ugly black lettering that Ellen Bawtry had died in the night. MOTHER DIED ONE AM PLEASE RING AUNTIE FLORRIE, it read.

  None of them could predict how Bessie would react to this news. They sat there, over breakfast, waiting for some sign from her. But there was no sign. After breakfast, Bessie went out with a purse full of coins to the red telephone box on the corner, but when she came back she did not report what she had said or what was said to her. As far as Chrissie and Robert could later recall, nothing was ever said about Ellen Bawtry’s death. It was as though it had never happened. The holiday was to continue, without interruption, as though Ellen Bawtry had never lived and never died. Chrissie remembered feeling that this was carrying stoic reticence, thrift or indifference to an extreme, but as neither Joe nor Robert seemed surprised or otherwise by Bessie’s silence, she also kept her mouth shut. Perhaps there was some funerary code at work that she was too young to understand. She felt somebody should have said something, but nobody said anything.

  Bessie did not attend her mother’s funeral. She stayed in Lyme Regis and completed the full term of her annual seaside holiday.

  Dora, Auntie Florrie, and a handful of elderly neighbours and cousins saw Ellen off. She was buried in Breaseborough Cemetery in the same grave as Bert, where it might be expected that they could both lie undisturbed, only slightly more inert and silent in death than they had been in the later years of their lives. It is hard to imagine what will next disturb them, or what will be the end of Breaseborough Cemetery. Subsidence, a methane explosion, a new housing estate, tectonic plate disturbance, another ice age. Or will it be Dracula Hawthorn with his needle?

  On the night of the day of the funeral, Joe, Bessie, Robert and Chrissie went to the cinema and saw a torrid Technicolor Hollywood drama set in the South Seas, featuring heavy rain, palm trees, breasts, lust, adultery and alcohol. It was a great deal more lively and colourful than the funeral of Ellen Bawtry, so perhaps the Barrons were wise to prefer it as an entertainment. It was said that Dora had provided nothing for the post-interment refreshment but ham sandwiches, without mustard, and tea. Not much of a feast. She hadn’t even bothered to get out the Crown Derby.

  The Bawtrys had always been against mustard. To hear them speak of mustard, you would think mustard and its manufacturers had committed some kind of criminal offence.

  What are we to do about these dreadful people? Is there any point in trying to make any sense of their affectless, unnatural, subnormal behaviour? Shall we just forget they ever existed, bury them, and get as far away from them as possible? Put our foot down on the accelerator, jab our finger onto fast forward, and scroll on to join Dr Hawthorn in the electronic age? The next generation can surely bury this lot, and forget all about them. There is no need to grieve for them. They could not help their stony lives. If you think too hard of them and the waste of it all, your heart might break. And what would be the point of that?

  Let’s get back to Chrissie. Things may yet turn out well for her.

  Chrissie, contemplating the choice between mustard-free ham sandwiches and lust, adultery and alcohol, was drawn strongly towards the latter package. Getting away fast and far was her plan. But she couldn’t get away in one move. She had to map her course, and that wasn’t easy. You couldn’t just say, I’ll have lust, adultery and alcohol, please. You had to work out a strategy, and conceal your real objective. That much Chrissie appreciated. She was a clear-headed young woman, quite capable of trying deliberately to plot a course of irrational, lateral and therefore liberating behaviour. But she had obstacles to contend with, including her own ignorance. The future for her was as shapeless and uncertain as it had been to Joe Barron while he was driving around in the Fancy Glass van. Her will was strong, but she was not sure on what, in the immediate future, to exert it. Some decisions would have to be made, and soon.

  She knew she would have to get herself some kind of higher education. That was the best way out. She no longer wanted to be an air stewardess or a ski instructor or a barmaid. Of her earlier fantasies, that left only surgery or archaeology, either of which could presumably be combined with parallel careers in lust, adultery and alcohol. The world, which two years earlier had seemed to lie before her like a land of dreams, had narrowed down rather rapidly. It was already too late to be a surgeon, as she had found herself taking the wrong A-levels. She should have started planning even earlier.

  That left archaeology.

  Fossils, prehistory, bird-fishes, dawn stones, lost cities, tores and necklets of buried gold.

  Perhaps she would settle for archaeology, and the recovery of lost things.

  And so it was that Chrissie Barron, the passionate little child, the red-haired rebel, the tearaway, the fast girl who had sworn she would never settle for safety, found herself applying to the University of Cambridge to read a degree in Archaeology and Anthropology. Exactly as though nothing had moved on at all in the postwar world. Exactly as though she were still under the thumb of the spirit of Miss Heald.

  Don’t laugh at her. Chrissie thought she was rebelling. She thought she was exercising the freedom of the will. She thought she was breaking with the past by choosing the past. After all, nobody in the family had ever been interested in Archaeology and Anthropology, had they? It was a new departure, a new beginning. Wasn’t it?

  She would have applied to Oxford, not Cambridge, out of bravado. But Oxford didn’t offer an undergraduate course in archaeology, and was not to do so for another forty years, so there was no point in her waiting for that. Things moved slowly, in our ancient universities. It took decades to introduce a new degree or to change a syllabus.

  Why did she have to go to an ancient university? you may ask. She went to an ancient university because that’s what she was programmed to do. She didn’t yet know it, but she was programmed to follow in her parents’ footsteps. Most people are. It takes a lot of effort to break the pattern. It costs a lot. A hundred pages back, Chrissie’s future, like her past, had been utterly unformulated. Anything had been possible. But the nearer she got to the future, the more her past filled in with inherited and acquired characteristics, and the further that freedom fled.

  Chrissie thought she was breaking the pattern by refusing to study matrilineal English Literature or patrilineal Law. She knew that there must be some more decisive, some more dramatic way of expressing herself, but she couldn’t yet work out what it was. She could always try to get herself pregnant, by losing her virginity either to one of the Farnleigh sixth-formers or to Mr Stuart (Latin and Greek), who seemed willing. But a step like that would create a lot more new problems, for which she wasn’t yet ready. Though, if worst came to worst, pregnancy would answer. It remained an option.

  She will make a wild leap, and she will make it quite soon, but it will depend on accidental outside agency, on a factor not yet part of the plan. She cannot manage it alone. And it will be a desperate measure, in the eyes of her parents, her teachers, her peers. It will carry her a long way, but not in the directions she had expected.

  Chrissie saw archaeology as a revenge on Bessie’s hatred of shields and shards and firedogs. Chrissie had grown tired of hearing these dumb things abused. Even as a child, Chrissie had been attracted by a kind of pity to the drab and dismal stone artefacts that were so dully displayed in the museums of the day—to flints and hand axes and notched antlers. She would devote herself to them.

  Bessie and Joe considered Chrissie’s decision mature and respectable.

  So now we
can picture Chrissie, at the age of eighteen, about to set off to university, as her mother had before her. Thousands of years of uneducated and minimally educated Bawtrys and Cudworths lie behind these two, this mother and this daughter, and they exert a strong backward pull. But you can’t go back, you have to go on. Is there an emergent pattern, and are Bessie and Chrissie the two who created it?

  The story could, in theory, have gone in many different directions. But in practice the options are as limited as they are in computerized, apparently open-ended works of interactive fiction. The imagination fails to supply the necessary freedom. It loops back on itself, it repeats itself, it returns to its own obsessions, it provides dull solutions, for it too is a creature of habit, it cannot really initiate, its routes are determined. It needs the Other. But it cannot create the Other. Whether it will meet the Other is a matter of chance.

  Chrissie Barron met the Other during her first Cambridge year, in the unpredictable form of Nicolas Gaulden. And from then on, everything was changed. The past, present and future were all changed. New blood entered the bloodstream. A new pattern began to emerge. New births, new beginnings. Conception, marriage, lust, infidelity, adultery, alcohol, death. Surely Nicolas Gaulden’s shocking power could do the trick. He could overwhelm any respectability. He could even prevent Chrissie from taking her college degree. He could liberate her from the tyranny of the examination and the grade. Let us celebrate Nick Gaulden. Let us meet him at his funeral, and play the scroll backwards.

  Ellen Bawtry’s funeral had been thinly attended, and the ceremony plain. Nicolas Gaulden, in contrast, in death commanded a full house and many tributes: though that, reflected the woman who had been Chrissie Gaulden, as she sat in Golders Green Crematorium, was not entirely to his credit. Nick Gaulden would have been Ellen’s grandson-in-law, had she lived long enough to witness her granddaughter’s marriage. This relationship seemed improbable, and it was just as well that it never took place in real time. Those two would not have got on at all. So thought Chrissie, as Ellen for some reason swam into her mind. One funeral reminds one of another. Chrissie Gaulden Sinclair sat in the front pew, thinking of Ellen’s funeral, which neither she nor her mother had attended, and of those of her own parents, which she had. And now here she was, saying good-bye to her onetime husband Nick. This was only the third funeral of her life. This was one she had not been able to fail. It seemed likely to prompt a replay of the whole of her brief courtship, her brief marriage, and their long fall-out. But she also had to concentrate on the present. She had to be on guard. The story was not over yet. Her memories could wait. There would be a long reckoning.