The Peppered Moth

by Margaret Drabble

  The horizon stretched in all directions, empty, glittering, blue. She passed joggers and strollers and idlers, all enjoying the sea air. How could one, why should one be sad or guilty, in such a space? Her spirits sang. Seagulls swooped and screeched. She saw a sparrow sitting boldly in the rigging. Was it an English sparrow? Had it embarked at Southampton, and would it go all the way with them to New York? Its little wings would never carry it home now. It was a freeloader, a migrant, a stateless mid-Atlantic sparrow.

  And so the first day passed, in mild and passive pleasure. Chrissie was relieved when her mother declined the opportunity of listening to an afternoon lecture by a retired politician who had latterly made a living by making inflammatory and apocalyptic utterances on television and in the tabloids. Bessie chose instead to sit in a deck chair with her feet up, wrapped in a blanket, snoozing over Henry James. Chrissie had no criticism of that: she snoozed herself for half an hour before leaping up restlessly to pad once more up and down the deck. All this was just fine. She could escape from her mother, yet be back to base in a matter of minutes. It was a hundred times better than sitting cooped up by the fire in Queen’s Norton, or yawning to death by the television in Surrey. Why hadn’t she been brave enough or generous enough to do this before? Vague fantasies of future cruises arose in Chrissie’s imagination: if it really was as easy as this, maybe Don could accept one of those invitations to lecture his way round the isles of Greece, and Mother could go along with them for free as part of the package? Or she could offer herself as a travelling computer consultant in the Computer Learning Centre? She could do just as good a job as the professional on board the QE2. And in this way the recurrent Holiday Problem would be solved, and Mother would have something to look forward to all the year round, for as long as she lived. Chrissie thought she saw a clear blue sky opening in the future, as clear as the sky above her.

  There was plenty to do on board. Chrissie read her Dos Passos, and wandered around the boutiques deciding not to buy anything, and wondering whether to have a facial in the Steiner Beauty and Fitness Salon. She watched a game of deck quoits, and inspected an appalling photograph of herself and Bessie, taken at the moment of embarkation. Both of them looked quite mad, grinning falsely, eyes red and manic in the flash, a parody of fun. At least she could trust Bessie not to want one of those. Bessie thought commercial photographs were vulgar.

  Chrissie watched her fellow passengers, and eavesdropped with interest. Many were elderly, but there were some young families, and one or two honeymoon couples, and one or two who needed to cross the Atlantic and were too neurotic to fly. There were schoolmistresses on a spree and sixty-year-old wives on wedding anniversary or birthday outings and bridge-playing widows and solitary gentlemen. For some this was a trip of a lifetime, but others, she learned, spent much of their lives afloat. They did the Caribbean, the Pacific, the South China Seas. They even did Alaska and the Arctic. Chrissie was amazed by the manifestation of global restlessness. Why were so many people on the run? And where did all the money come from? From shrewd investments, from retirement income and personal pension plans, from golden handshakes and property sales? Did people sell their homes and take to the high seas, like perpetual pilgrims, forever adrift? Did they know what they were seeking, and would they ever find it? Were they happy on the ocean, or did they carry with them their own deep discontent?

  The German-speaking trio at the next table seemed discontented. Their demeanour was strange and unnatural. Over dinner on the second night, Chrissie discreetly studied them. Mother, short, iron-grey-haired, unsmiling, dressed in a low-cut solidly manufactured stiff brocade, and adorned with what looked like a string of antique emeralds, ate her way silently through the lavish menu, and drank her way through several glasses of carefully selected wine. Daughter was slim and golden brown, and her skin had the unreal Technicolor gloss of a model or a film star. She wore a white dress and a good deal of what Chrissie hoped was yellow metal costume jewellery. This blond beauty, with her unnaturally flawless complexion and carefully styled hair and elegant figure, also ate her way through the menu, and paid fastidious attention to her choices. So she too one day might be a fat old woman. It seemed unlikely, but it might be so.

  The son-in-law looked like a Viking pirate. His dinner jacket confined a broad and straining chest and giant shoulders. His hair was reddish gold, and he had a short gold beard. Despite his girth, he ate less than his womenfolk. Chrissie could not help watching him. She guessed that he was Scandinavian, and he could have stood in for Sigmundur of the Faeroe Islands, after whose thousand-year-old bones Chrissie had once scrabbled in the driving rain. Was he paying for all these langoustines and cheeses and ices, or was it Mother? They were a silent trio. No small talk was exchanged over the dainties. They spoke more to the obsequious, neat-bummed, olive-skinned, plum-waistcoated wine waiter than they spoke to one another. Chrissie, watching them from the corner of her eye, felt indulgent towards her own blue-gowned, chattering mother, who was so visibly enjoying herself and her lamb cutlets and the spectacle of the other diners and the opportunity to wear a long dress. Bessie was chattering about all the things that she wanted to see in New York. Should she go to the lecture on architecture in the Grand Lounge the following morning? She had heard there were good guided tours of the city. She didn’t want to miss anything.

  Chrissie was already worried about what to do with her mother when they arrived. How would she manage to entertain her for four days without exhausting both of them in the effort? Chrissie was a good walker, but she wasn’t as young as she had been, and Bessie did not walk. She had not walked in years. The QE2, with its fourteen lifts and its many decks and corridors, was the perfect answer to Bessie’s mobility problem. New York would be a challenge.

  The QE2 could cross the Atlantic much quicker than it does. She has deliberately decided to add an extra day and an extra night to her voyage time. Many prefer to travel peacefully rather than to arrive. Many dread their destinations. Cunard has been advised of this, and has slowed her down accordingly.

  Bessie’s days at sea succeeded one another in agreeable languor. She finished The Bostonians and made her way rapidly through a Ruth Rendell and a R D. James before sinking back into the past with Anthony Trollope. She did not much like the look of Manhattan Transfer, and said she would save it up to read on arrival. She made the acquaintance of a retired headmistress, with whom she discussed the comprehensive system, of which neither approved, and the West Riding Education Authority, of which Bessie loyally spoke highly. They also spoke, with restrained competition, of gardening. Bessie established that her garden was the larger, and was content. Bessie also exchanged friendly words with people in passing, and as far as Chrissie could see she did not manage to bore, annoy or embarrass anyone. And she went out of her way to mention from time to time that she was grateful to Chrissie for arranging this treat.

  All this was ominously out of character. Chrissie could not help recalling Auntie Dora’s description of Grandma Bawtry’s death, the death which Bessie had managed to avoid by escaping to Lyme Regis. According to Auntie Dora, the night that Grandma died, she had said to her daughter Dora, ‘Thank you, Dora, for all you’ve done.’ Chrissie never knew whether these words had really been spoken, or whether Auntie Dora had invented them on Grandma’s behalf. It was impossible to tell, from Dora’s narrative style, and there had been no witnesses.

  Chrissie Sinclair need not have worried about how to amuse her mother in New York. For Bessie Barron refused to set foot in the New World. On the penultimate night of the crossing, she undressed, and took a bath, and brushed her teeth, and brushed her hair, and applied face cream to the soft folds of her face. She put herself to bed, and sat herself up against a heap of pillows, and reached for her remote control. She switched the television to the channel of grey and white night water that showed the progress of the liner through the ocean. She followed the view of the bridge as it heaved slowly forwards through the sea. New York was within r
each, but the Queen Elizabeth was in no hurry to arrive there. She was dawdling and losing speed. And Bessie too was beginning to lose speed. She too had no wish to arrive. Ahead lay effort, exhaustion, challenge, confrontation. Here was a quiet, smooth and everlastingly forward motion, into the gunboat greyness of eternity. Bessie Barron did not believe in eternity, but despite her lack of faith in it, it was moving slowly towards her.

  She turned down the volume of the repeating track of classical music which accompanied the moving image, and took up her volume of Washington Square. She read a few paragraphs of James’s slow and stately prose. There had been times when she would have liked to accompany Daisy Miller to Rome, to walk in the Champs Élysées with a refined and admiring American gentleman, to visit Boston, or to see Washington Square. But now that Washington Square was sailing towards her, she no longer wished to go there. The time for wishing was over.

  She laid down her book, and gazed once more at the dull grey screen of night. A spatter of raindrops filmed over the glassy lens. Bessie’s eyes filmed over into unseeing. The digital minutes and the sea miles clicked silently away, smooth, regular, evenly paced, as they closed in on their destination. What was the point of arrival? Arrival was nothing but disappointment and diminution. Arrival would mean trying to please her daughter by trying to look grateful and trying to be good. The time for all of that was past. Arrival was an unnecessary triviality.

  Bessie gazed and gazed at the slow and stately image of movement. The heavy vessel cleaved through the dense and heavy water, and she lay in it, warm in her single bed, as in a capsule, as in a chrysalis, a white grub in her girlish white nightdress. She was content. With or without her knowledge, with or without her consent, with or without her effort, she would sail onwards, away from Breaseborough, away from the smoke and the grime and the slag and the crozzle, away from stifling Dora, away from the hot fevered hours of study, away from the condescension of Gertrude Wadsworth and the rationed contempt of Miss Strachey, away from that snub about Mary Anning and the fossil bones. The long-tried patience of Joe Barron, the courtesy of the tradesmen of Surrey, and the lonely evenings with her supper tray fell away in her wake. No more hesitations in the grocery store, no more waiting for the telephone to ring through an empty house. No more surrender to the drug of ringing her poor long-suffering daughter. There would be no more testing and no more failure. She could lie here forever, suspended, waiting for the next phase. It would come to her. Out there, slowly, it would come to be. The pattern would emerge, if only she could cease from all effort. Watchman, what of the night? Joy cometh in the morning.

  It was Chrissie who came in the morning, tapping on the door at nine, surprised that her mother had not yet tapped on hers. For in their soothing shipboard routine, each day, Bessie had woken, rung for the early-morning tea on which she had insisted, then had taken her shower, dressed and knocked on Chrissie’s door at a quarter to nine to accompany her to breakfast. But this morning, no knock had summoned Chrissie, nor was there any response when Chrissie went to bang on Bessie’s door. Bessie being dead, there was no answer. Five minutes later, Chrissie tried again. As Bessie was still dead, there was still no answer. Chrissie, alarmed by now, went back to her own cabin and rang her mother’s telephone number and, failing to get a reply, rang for the floor steward, who came round with a key. He unlocked the door, with Chrissie at his elbow, and, as he was later to tell his colleagues, he realized at once that the old lady was dead, though he couldn’t have said why he was so sure. For Bessie Barron was lying quite restfully, on her back, her eyes politely shut, her head centred on the pillow, for all the world as though she were sleeping. Her book lay open, face down, on the bed, with her reading glasses by it. The television silently played on.

  The steward put out a warning hand to forestall Chrissie, to give him time to inspect the corpse more closely. But Chrissie was close behind and not to be forestalled. They both stood there together and looked down at the body of Bessie Barron.

  Bessie’s skin was pale and dry. Otherwise, there was no change in her. There had been no struggle, no fighting for breath. She looked unworn, unused and younger than in life. How could anybody, let alone Bessie Barron, have slipped away with so little fuss?

  Chrissie was never able to remember what she and the steward said to one another. She remembered that she had sat down on the bed, and that the steward had rung the number of the ship’s hospital. Then he had offered to go and fetch her a cup of tea and she had said she would rather have coffee. Bessie had died without her last cup of early-morning tea. And the doctor and a paramedic had arrived, and Bessie had been pronounced officially dead. The doctor was very calming, for he was used to this kind of thing, but Chrissie felt that she did not need calming. She was already calm. Soon, she knew, there would be a flurry of activity and anxiety—there would be talk of coffins, certificates, insurance, repatriation of remains. But for the moment everything was very still, as though time had stopped. And Chrissie felt a strange weightlessness, as though the Old Woman of the Sea had been lifted from her shoulders. She breathed the air, and her lungs seemed to fill more deeply. Bessie looked now like a light husk. How could she have weighed so much?

  The doctor and the nurse were debating whether to use a stretcher or a wheelchair to take Bessie to the morgue. Would Chrissie like to stay a little while alone with her mother? Chrissie reached out a hand and gently touched Bessie’s hand and said no, she would not.

  A stretcher, a wheelchair? What did it matter? A wheelchair would be simpler. No, Chrissie didn’t mind. Bessie wouldn’t have minded, so why should she? Bessie had often said she would be happy to be buried in a bin bag, so she would certainly not have thought a wheelchair irreverent. Telephone calls were made. Coffee was brought. It was understood by all that there was to be no fuss. No wailing, no lying in state. A discreet and veiled departure along the corridor to a service elevator, and so down to the hospital on Six Deck, and into the cooler. These things happened all the time. Sea voyages are the pastime of the elderly, and in the natural way of things the elderly die. There was a well-tried procedure, a fast track for the deceased. Routine took over.

  Mrs Barron was to be congratulated, posthumously, on the style of her departure. She had shown excellent manners. She had not choked to death noisily in the restaurant, or suffered a stroke by the fruit machines, or fallen down a stairwell and broken a limb. She had not thrown herself overboard, or drowned in her bath. Such things had happened. Mrs Barron had ceased upon the midnight with no pain. Her passing was to be envied.

  Bessie was wheeled away, propped up to look as though she was still alive, and Chrissie was escorted to the telecommunications room to ring home. She rang Donald, who said all the right things and asked all the right questions and said he would fly out at once to meet her at the dock if she wanted him. Was Chrissie all right? Yes, of course she was, she said. She wasn’t even shocked. It had all happened too smoothly for shock. Maybe she would feel shocked soon. But so far, no. So far, so good. They would speak again the next day.

  Then she rang Robert in Waterford, where it was by now early afternoon. Bessie had managed to choose a good hour as well as a good death. Robert said dryly, ‘Good God, what a dirty trick to play on you.’ These were his very words. Was Chrissie all right, he also wanted to know. Yes, of course she was, she replied. ‘Well, who would have thought it?’ was Robert’s epitaph upon his mother.

  Chrissie was more than all right. She was suffused with an extraordinary sensation of lightness. She sat in her cabin for a while, simply breathing. She had rejected offers of sedatives and tranquillizers. She had no need of pills.

  Should she ring Faro? No, she would defer that dangerous pleasure.

  Her mother’s heavy body, weightless and shrunken in death, vanished from sight as though it had never been, and Chrissie spent the rest of the day in a dream. It was her last day on board on this voyage of deliverance. She inspected the travel-insurance documents, as she had promised Donald th
at she would, and noted that the cost of repatriation of remains was covered for a sum of up to six thousand dollars. The doctor had said that would be more than adequate. She paced the sun deck and the boat deck. The sparrow was still perched in the rigging. What had Bessie died of? Chrissie did not really want to know. Her heart had stopped, and that was that. After so many illnesses, feigned and real, she had decided to die. No more would she be able to torment others by saying she wished she was dead. She had her wish.

  Chrissie packed her mother’s clothes and possessions neatly into their suitcases. Her outsize underwear, her tights, her slippers, her blouses, her talcum powder, and a thin paisley dressing-gown which Chrissie had known for more than twenty years. She folded the newly purchased evening dress and the newly purchased cocktail dress back into their shrouds of white tissue paper and laid them to rest. She parcelled up the string of cultured pearls from John Lewis on Oxford Street, the amber brooch which Chrissie had given her one Christmas, the golden chain which had been Grandma Bawtry’s, and the large opal ring which Joe had bought her on his visit to Ivy in Australia. The lace-edged handkerchiefs smelled of lavender and eau de Cologne. Chrissie sighed, but not with grief. It was the waste of it and the pity of it. The pity and the waste.