The Peppered Moth

by Margaret Drabble

  ‘So what did you do next? Did you report him at once?’

  ‘I didn’t know what to do. I knew I’d have to own up, fingerprints, disturbing the landscape, and all that. Anyway, I was beginning to think he might be a bit of a coup after all, and I might as well claim the credit as well as the blame. But I didn’t know who to report him to. The police? The project manager? My mate Niall? In the end I told Niall, and Niall told Charlie Henderson, and Charlie got on to the police, and the police got on to the forensics, and the forensics got on to the university.’

  ‘And you became a hero.’

  ‘In a manner of speaking. I got a bit of a bollocking from Charlie Henderson and from my mum. But it all blew over. Everyone’s quite pleased with me now. I’m careful not to give interviews without telling them, because they don’t like that much. And I’m careful what I say.’

  ‘You’re giving me an interview,’ said Faro.

  ‘You’re different,’ said innocent Steve, without pausing to think.

  ‘How do you know?’ asked Faro, but didn’t wait for a reply, because the question had been dangerous, premature and impertinent. ‘You realize,’ said Faro quickly, ‘that he might be my ancestor? If Dr Hawthorn can track back the mitochondria, he might be able to prove it. You might have disinterred the bones of my ancestor.’

  ‘I didn’t disinter them,’ said Steve. ‘I just happened upon them. They were disinterred—well, exposed, really—by a blast of TNT set off by those greedy buggers from Rose & Rose. What a name, for a firm of methane-gas peddlers! Rose & Rose and coming up roses. They’ve even got a slogan about it for their sites. Cotterhall Man wouldn’t have stood much of a chance if they’d been allowed to carry on with their plan for the region. I’m telling you, he’d have been hundreds of feet deep under the impacted refuse of South Yorkshire. It wouldn’t have been nice for him at all.’

  ‘Who did you say?’ asked Faro.

  ‘Who did I say what? Rose & Rose? You know, well-known vandals and mass poisoners. They’ve got craters of garbage on both sides of the Pennines. Did you read about that disaster in Kirkdale? Fifty homes evacuated, and one subsided and fell down the hole and was never seen again. The cat went with it. There was a terrible stink. Poor cat.’

  ‘Rose & Rose,’ said Faro, picking up her next pint, and nibbling a flake of poppadom. ‘Rose & Rose. Oh dear. I think I’m related to them too. In fact, I know I am. How odd. How embarrassing.’

  ‘How come?’ asked Steve.

  Faro tried to explain. Victor Rose, founder of the Rose & Rose family business, was her father’s cousin, son of her paternal grandfather’s older brother, if she’d got the generations right. She’d never really known him, though she’d met him once or twice at family events—a wedding, an anniversary. And she’d met his son Dennis Rose quite recently, last autumn, at her own father’s funeral. Victor hadn’t been there, as far as she had been able to see, but she and Dennis had had quite a long talk about something stupid—the superiority of the Honda to the Toyota, Japanese takeover bids, that kind of crap. They hadn’t got on to Hammervale and landfill. Though she had known that Rose & Rose were into waste management. Bit of a coincidence, wasn’t it, if she was related both to Cotterhall Man and to Rose & Rose? Made her a bit of a missing link, didn’t it?

  ‘Not really,’ said Steve. ‘We’re all descended from Eve. Or Lucy, as we now seem to prefer to call her.’

  Faro could tell he was trying to make her feel better, and that he didn’t think much of Rose & Rose, although he didn’t want to offend against kinship by insulting her cousins. She said that she didn’t think much of them herself, and that he could be as rude about them as he liked. Had they really got such a bad reputation?

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Steve. ‘They’ve got a bad name round here, but that’s largely because people don’t want landfill on their own doorstep, do they? And there are stories. I think they struck some kind of a deal with the council. They’ve started a new tip over by Denvers Main. There was supposed to be something fishy about the sale of that land, but I didn’t follow it.’

  ‘You know,’ said Faro, ‘they say that there are only three hundred thousand human generations between us and our common ancestor. That if I held hands with my mother, and she with hers, and so on and so on, the line would stretch only from London to Northam before we were linking hands with the common ancestor of ourselves and the chimpanzee.’

  ‘How ever do they prove that?’ .

  ‘They don’t. It’s just the sort of illustration that popular science goes in for these days. It may be true. It probably is. It’s like that image of crowding all the population of the world onto the Isle of Man. My mag loves that kind of thing. Five million years’ time span, or something like that. I’m not very good at figures. And it’s only eight thousand years back to your skeleton. You’d be holding hands with him well this side of Potters Bar.’

  ‘Well,’ said Steve, ‘that means you and I are next of kin.’

  Faro smiled. ‘That’s quite nice, really,’ she said.

  And she and Steve wandered back together to Faro’s hotel, through the rebuilt streets of Northam, streets which had been bombed back to brickwork and earth during World War Two. Faro’s grandmother Bessie had been evacuated from Northam to Pennington in rural Derbyshire, but Faro had never been to Pennington, though Grandma had sometimes spoken to her of the clever boys of 5B. Steve and Faro were far too young to remember the craters of war, the flapping wallpaper and suspended fireplaces and the valiant blossoming of buddleia and willowherb and such plants as love the rubble of masonry. They did not see the older archaeology of Northam: they saw only the postwar layers of the bold and brutal sixties, the nervous eclectic seventies, the postmodern eighties, the cottage-chateaux-supermarkets of the nineties. They were children of the present. They strolled through the warm night.

  ‘Have a drink,’ said Faro.

  And they sat in the executive bar, and swapped family stories, as Faro had swapped family stories with Peter Cudworth. Faro told Steve of the arrival of the Gauldens in England in the 1930s, and about Eva Gaulden’s struggle to adapt and make ends meet. Steve told Faro that his own family had emigrated from Eastern Europe during the 1880s, and were, unlike the Gauldens, ‘wholly Jewish’—‘whatever that might mean’.

  ‘One thing’s for sure,’ said Faro, ‘it’s a damn sight easier to get back to Breaseborough than to work out where all those Gauldens came from. Though there’s not much of a record on either side.’

  ‘Everyone seems to be into their ancestors these days,’ said Steve. ‘Do you think it’s a millennial thing? Have you ever been to any of the death camps?’

  Faro shook her head.

  ‘No. Have you?’

  ‘No. I wouldn’t even go to the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem. Couldn’t face it. It’s all on the Internet now, you know. They’re trying to retrieve every man, woman and child. Every tooth and every bone and every golden ring.’

  ‘Bit bloody late, isn’t it?’ said Faro. ‘What good will it do anyone? They’re all bloody dead, aren’t they?’

  ‘People seem to need to know,’ said Steve sententiously, and then laughed suddenly. ‘You know, I got them in a terrible tizzy one Passover, when Great-Granny Charles from Riga was going on and on about how she didn’t know how old she was and had never seen her own birth certificate and blah blah blah till you could die. She was as deaf as a post, one of those little dried-up old granny types, you know, like a fossil, all bony, dressed in black, you know the sort, but as strong as a whippet, and all her own teeth in her head. Imagine that, at ninety-two, and never heard of fluoride. And I said, why didn’t she get herself radiocarbon dated. She didn’t hear what I said, of course, she never heard anything and never listened to anyone, but everyone else did. My ma was furious. Outrage, scandal. And my brother picked up on it and kept yelling it at Granny until she got it too, and then wow was I in the doghouse. I still can’t see why they took it so badly. I mean, if you want
to know, why don’t you find out? But they didn’t want to know. And they thought I was being cheeky. Me, cheeky? Like they kept saying, next year in Jerusalem. And when I asked, why didn’t they go next year to Jerusalem, they’d got plenty of money, why not just buy a ticket and go, they didn’t go for that either. I was the only one that went to Jerusalem. They didn’t like that either. They didn’t approve of the kibbutzim. Too left-wing for them. Too outdoor and too left-wing.’

  ‘And why did you go to Israel?’

  ‘Somebody had to,’ said Steve, without flippancy.

  Faro stared at him, but he was looking down at the table.

  ‘Your great-granny must be dead now,’ volunteered Faro.

  ‘Long dead. And both my grannies too. I’d have more sense now. I wouldn’t dare try to stir it up like that. I was only a boy. What about you? You said your father’s mother was still alive? What about the other one?’

  ‘Oh, my Breaseborough granny died quite a while ago. About eight or nine years ago. One day I’ll tell you about the strange death of Grandma Barron.’

  ‘Tell me now,’ said Steve.

  ‘No, I’m too tired, I wouldn’t do it justice. I’ll tell you another time.’

  ‘OK, that’s a deal,’ said Steve, and took the hint, and took his leave. They parted, in the hotel foyer, with much good will. There would be another time. They had a joint project. They would meet in the morning. They had enjoyed one another’s company, and had left time in which to say unsaid things. It is not often one can feel so pleased with an evening, reflected Faro, as she brushed her teeth and slapped her face with moisturizer. The dead could sleep quietly in their resting places tonight, and she could sleep quietly in her own weirdly wedgeshaped executive bed after watching a bit of late-night TV. No dreams of hell tonight, no dreams of burials or burnings. Steve Nieman was an aboveground, aboveboard chap. He was a chap who knew when to say hello and when to say good-bye. She liked him. Sweet dreams.

  Dora Bawtry does not know that her great-niece Faro is back again in South Yorkshire, fifteen miles along the valley. Dora’s dreams have not been good. Dora has not been feeling too well of late. Dora has not been feeling well since the day of the chapel meeting and the DNA swab. Her legs seem more swollen than ever, and she finds it harder and harder to get up the steep, short and narrow staircase. Sometimes she thinks she might spend the night downstairs in the armchair. But she knows that would be the beginning of the end. There is nothing wrong with her chest, she tells herself—she does not wheeze as her mother and father had wheezed. But she is short of breath and her legs don’t work too well. She has no unmarried daughter to wait on her, though she has a younger neighbour who will shop for her and get her the heavier items—cat food, bottled drinks, washing powder. Some of her friends have died, some have moved away, some have turned peculiar. Some, though still living near by, are too far to visit easily. She gave up her car years ago, and although public transport is not bad she finds it hard to get on and off the buses. What will happen when she cannot get up that staircase?

  As Faro and Steve Nieman are discussing methane gas and landfill, Dora is putting herself to bed. And when she is in bed and sleeping, she dreams a dream. She is a great dreamer, though you might not think it from looking at her stolid inexpressive countenance and her thick ankles. Her days are uneventful, but her nights are not.

  Now, in old age, her dreams frequently feature bones, skulls and mortality. Any little incident—and she is a great one for tracking her dreams back to daytime incidents—seems able to set her off. A shining round knuckle bone at the butcher’s, silver-blue and gleaming with polished gristle in its socket, can spark a nightmare of bony clubs and truncheons. A television news story about an exhumed Red Indian returned from Brompton graveyard to the Black Hills of Dakota can fill the screen of her sleep with scalps and campfires and herds of bison and memories of silent movies long ago. A trailer for a four-part television series featuring an archaeological dig prompts a conviction that she is being buried alive: she wakes struggling with her forty-year-old scratchy leaking eiderdown.

  Dora has never understood why her niece Chrissie and Chrissie’s new husband Donald are so keen on old bones, and she thinks little of her elderly neighbour in Ardwick Street who has enrolled in a local-history class and spends happy days on coach trips to visit prehistoric and Roman sites in Doncaster and Rotherham and Northam. Dora has nightmares enough about deaths and burials without, as she puts it, going looking for them.

  She is stoic about these nightly visitations. She is getting old, and will die soon. Naturally the prospect worries her. She is bound to have bad dreams.

  Her sister Bessie had got off lightly, in death. Sometimes Dora thinks this was not fair. Bessie had had all the luck.

  Her dream of the Cotterhall skull is not therefore unexpected, though it is peculiarly distinct and memorable. Nor, though it is profoundly disturbing, is it wholly horrifying.

  Dora dreams that she is a little girl again, taking her father his lunch at the works. This she was allowed to do, in the school holidays, as a treat. Down at the works was the flaming fiery furnace known as the Destructor, into which Pa Bawtry would occasionally be asked to chuck unwanted puppies and kittens, the waste product of the animal population of Breaseborough. The Destructor, ceremonially opened in 1902 (Pa Bawtry had attended the dinner), was, Dora had later decided, an early sort of recycling machine, but when she was little she had no idea what it was, and the idea of it frightened her. Not even her unimaginative parents had threatened her with the Destructor if she was a naughty girl, but you couldn’t help thinking you might just fall in by mistake. If you got too near. Which you didn’t.

  In her dream, little Dora trots along down Bank Street and Cliff Street past the Primitive Methodists and the Powder Works towards Bednerby, where she meets her father at the gate, clutching a box of potted-meat sandwiches. And in her dream her father asks her what he never asked her in life. He asks her if she would like to see the Destructor. And she says yes. So he leads her through a maze of corridors, along iron walkways, up gridded steps, until he reaches a great oval metal door clasped with huge metal bolts. He asks her, again, if she is sure she wants to look inside, and she says she does. He unbolts the metal door with his bare hands—and in her dream, she wonders why his hands do not burn and blister—and together he and she look within at the heart of its incandescent flames. And there, within it, ranged, are tiers upon tiers of glowing skulls, a great bonehouse of them, a bonfire, a bone-fire, a pyramid, all glowing, yellow-red-bright, flowering and blazing with brilliant light. They glow but they are not consumed. They are immortal, imperishable, in the refining fire. Dora puts her stubby little hand into her father’s big dirty hot one, and they stand there, gazing at all the firefolk who have gone before, in that crematorium cavern. And Pa holds her hand, and she is not afraid.

  When she wakes, she thinks, yes, that dream came from that glowing skull that Dr Hawthorn kept showing off on his screen, all red and green and electric. And hadn’t there been some nasty pictures in the paper recently of some skull museum out in the Far East? What people want to go to museums for to look at that kind of thing, Dora cannot imagine.

  But she can still feel that big warm hand of her father’s, squeezing hers. And his tobacco smell on the dawn air.

  Faro Gaulden and Steve Nieman stand in silence and gaze at Cotterhall Man in his air-conditioned, humidity-controlled casket. He has been reassembled and laid out as found, but there has as yet been no attempt to reproduce in fibreglass the environment of his deathbed. Small bits of him are missing, as Steve had warned Faro: they are undergoing testing in various laboratories up and down the country. But they are small bits, and Faro is impressed by how complete he looks. No wonder Steve had thought he might be a twentieth-century potholer or a suicide or a murder victim. Instead of a 6000 B.C. murder victim, which is what Dr Hawthorn and the archaeologists believe him to have been. The gash in the back of his skull is clearly visible.
Faro can feel it. She can feel the blow fall.

  Cotterhall Man is a sombre sight. Faro, like all late-twentieth-century products of the Western educational system, has seen many museum bodies. She has seen Australopithecus and Neanderthal remains. She has seen Egyptian mummies and she has seen Magdalenian Girl and Lindow Man. She has worried about them all, every single one of them, but none has touched her as deeply as Cotterhall Man, with his cleft yellow skull, his helpless, hapless grin, his long shanks and his winged pelvis. He is her kinsman. He cannot move, he cannot speak to her. He must lie there and wait for the next probe.

  Their reverent attention is broken by Professor Armitage, who bustles in again to make sure they are behaving themselves, and to give Faro yet more data about Northam University’s prominent record in palaeontology and allied fields of research. He wants to make sure his department gets a good write-up. And it would be helpful if Miss Gaulden could mention the generous sponsorship of Rose & Rose.

  ‘Who?’ asks Faro quite sharply. Steve’s sideways glance tells her to say no more, to let Armitage speak.

  Professor Armitage describes the helpful collaboration of Rose & Rose, who have been associated for some time with the Earth Project, and who have paid for some of the costs of transportation and preservation of the skeleton. They have also financed a research post to assist with collating data and publicizing the find. Eventually it is hoped that Cotterhall Man will be displayed as an exhibit for the paying public. All this costs money, as Miss Gaulden will appreciate. Rose & Rose have been most supportive.

  Faro wants to ask why, but Steve’s expression again warns her to say nothing.

  Professor Armitage is keen to usher them out and see them off the premises. She can tell that he feels proprietorial about the bones. Faro indicates that she would like to stay a moment or two longer, she wants to make a few notes on her shorthand pad, to do a quick sketch of the remains. Armitage potters over to the corner to stare out of the window, while Faro sketches. He sucks noisily at his teeth to encourage her to get a move on. Faro and Steve stand side by side, and after a couple of minutes, as Faro closes her pad, Steve puts out his hand and gently touches her upper arm. Her downy arm is bare, for it is summer. His fingers touch her skin. It is a gesture of condolence. A current passes between them, and Faro turns to look at him. She gazes at him, with her large dark eyes. He is standing very close to her. He gazes back, and smiles.