The Peppered Moth

by Margaret Drabble

  Faro looks around her, at the spider plants, the enormous television screen, the flowered wallpaper, the plastic lampshades, the dead-end casein relicts. Then she heaves a sigh and goes up the narrow stairs to look for the hairbrush and the dressing-gown and the flowery sponge-bag. While she is parcelling them up and tucking them into a plastic bag, she hears a knock at the door, and guiltily, like a thief, runs down to see who is there. It is the cat-feeding next-door neighbour, Mrs Sykes, worried that Faro is a burglar. Faro confesses that she has been taking possession of various personal items, and thanks Mrs Sykes for feeding Minton. They natter, for a few minutes, about Dora, and what-to-do, and Mrs Sykes describes the details of Dora’s collapse—the banging on the wall, the garbled phone call, the cry of ‘Let yourself in!’ It’s a good thing Dora hadn’t put the chain on the front door. Though she ought to have done—there have been a lot of break-ins lately, and only last week someone had come banging on their doors asking for old furniture.

  Faro finds it hard to credit that anyone could want anything belonging to anyone in Swinton Road, but conceals her scepticism. Mrs Sykes seems to be quite a nice person, best to keep on the right side of her, they may have need of her.

  Dora is pleased to see her matted and battered old Mason Pearson hairbrush, and to hear good news of Minton. Faro stays for a while, chats for a while, says she’ll keep in touch. She promises to try to speak to Dora’s friend Dorothy in Wath, and let her know what has happened. She finds a cup of tea from the Friends’ Comfort Room, and a vase for the depressing selection of ill-assorted and unnaturally tinted carnations and African daisies she has bought at the cemetery gates, then ruthlessly kisses her great-aunt good-bye. Steve Nieman will be waiting. It is already late afternoon.

  Steve is waiting for her in the pub on the corner of his street, on the outskirts of the Breaseborough side of Northam. He lives on the top floor of a high block of council flats with a doorcode entry system which he says is always buggered, and he’s said he’ll wait for her in the Telstar, which he has described to her as a conspicuously unsuccessful establishment. And there he is. Faro, who has been thinking about him almost incessantly for a month, is so relieved to see him again that tears start up into her eyes. For he is even more what she needs than she had been imagining. He hadn’t been a fantasy. There he is.

  He seems to feel the same about her. Chivalrous, he makes sure she’s parked her car safely—it’s a bit of a dodgy district—and buys her a Guinness and a packet of crisps. They sit together, at a small round wet beery wooden table in a corner, and he strokes the back of her hand, tenderly, while she tells him about the hospital. The hairs on the back of her hand stand up at his touch. He radiates heat like a furnace. He glows tawny in the gloom. He has described the pub correctly. It is even gloomier than Seb’s local in Holborn. It has a different genre of gloominess, impoverished, sparse, dark and mournful, and Steve and Faro are decades younger than the only other merrymakers, who are silently watching a football match on a large overhead TV screen.

  Steve hopes it’s all right with her, he’s bought her some supper. Will she come up for it? Of course she will. Her heart sinks slightly at the sight of the graffiti-adorned entrance to his grim concrete sixties-built residence, and the smell in the lift is worse than the smell of Swinton Road, but Steve assures her it will all be OK when they get up there. She fears the worst, but tells herself that no bachelor pad can be as dreary and dirty as the second-floor back of Sebastian Jones, and that Steve would not invite her into a fouled nest. Even so, she is taken aback by the brightness and beauty of Steve’s apartment. He is right to be proud of it. He tells her about it as he uncorks a bottle of Rioja. He gets it for next to nothing from the Council, through the Project, because nobody wants to live up here, it’s too high and the lifts keep breaking down. Not many people can face ten flights of stone steps. And yes, he’s done it up himself. After all, he is a carpenter. It’s his job.

  It is a two-bedroom flat, and he has painted it white and taken most of the doors off their hinges. It is spacious and airy. His bicycle stands in the corridor. There is no furniture, apart from a few wooden platforms with cushions, and some bookshelves. There are no curtains. But there are large pots of tree ferns and date palms, some of them ten feet tall. Faro admires the sharp green plumes of the phoenix of the Canaries, which is flourishing here in South Yorkshire. The apartment is light and minimal. Everything is clean. After Seb’s horrors, this is like heaven. And the view is spectacular. Steve can see all the way up the valley, westwards towards Cotterhall and Breaseborough. In the distance lie the Wild Nature Park, and the Water House, and the gazebo he has built with his own hands for Faro. He shows her a balsa-wood model of it. It is octagonal, and looks in all directions. It is Faro’s lighthouse, and he will take her to see it one day soon. Its official name is Goosebutt Gazebo, but Steve thinks of it as Faro’s Folly, and so must she.

  Steve and Faro stand by the window, shoulder to shoulder, gazing out over the landscape. The brilliant golden October day has turned into a dramatic evening, and the sun is sinking in a red glow, more lurid than the furnace fires that these two have never seen. Great slate-grey and purple cumulus clouds swell and grow on the horizon, shot with rays of orange and yellow light, and towers and castles of darkness mount and break and shift before them. They are watching black vesper’s pageant. It is the moment of Nick Gaulden’s passing, but neither of them is thinking of Nick Gaulden. The wind is beginning to whine in the double-glazing. It will be a wild night.

  When Faro wakes, at three in the morning, she wonders for a moment where she is, and why, and what has woken her. Has the earth moved? Has she heard a faraway explosion? Something has happened. And then she remembers that here she is, with Steve Nieman, who is sleeping by her side. She breathes him in. He is warm and naked and hairy, and he smells of warm earth and resin and cedarwood.

  It is nighttime, but there is enough light for her to find her way to the bathroom, where she pees as quietly as she can, and drinks a glass of water. A strange red light is still flowing through the high windows. The sun is long set, and the foundries have been dead for decades, but there is an unnatural and unearthly glow to the west. Faro, wrapped in a small towel, approaches the large window from which she and Steve had admired the post-industrial view, in front of which they had eaten their modest supper. Faro gazes forth in consternation, for, far away, the valley seems to be on fire.

  Is it some trick of the light, some natural phenomenon? It cannot be an early dawn, for it is in the east that the sun usually rises. Should she wake Steve and tell him about it? She stares at the dull and distant flickering. Is it an industrial disaster? Is it the end of the world?

  It is not the end of the world, but it is a conflagration. Faro wakes Steve, and they stare out together through Steve’s binoculars. It is Steve’s valley that is burning. ‘Jesus Christ,’ says Steve, in shocked amazement. What can have happened? They dial 999, and report it to a person who thanks them and says that fire engines are already on the scene. The person will not tell them any more details. They tune to an all-night local radio station, and at first get nothing but music, but after ten minutes a news bulletin reports that there has been an explosion at Bednerby, between Breaseborough and Cotterhall, and that high winds are fanning the flames. So far no casualties reported, but there may be an evacuation of adjacent buildings if the fire is not brought under control. There is an emergency number. Stunned, Steve rubs his eyes and strains his vision.

  They cannot return quietly to their bed and wait till morning for more news. They ring the emergency number, and are told that police are on hand and assisting evacuation of Goosebutt Terrace and Rattenhole Edge. This is terrible news to Steve. This is the very edge of his own territory. Silently, Steve and Faro clamber into their clothes. Faro will drive.

  Steve has worked out the best way to get near the Project, along what locals call the Road to Nowhere, which is a rarely used short stretch of expensive newly surfaced
and expensively finished dual carriageway linking Breaseborough and Cotterhall. It had been built with European money in the days when a revival of local manufacturing industry was still a realistic expectation. They drive through the night, towards the blaze, and eventually reach a cordon of police vehicles. The police not surprisingly seem to think they are at best unnecessary intruders and at worst sensation-seekers, and try to turn them back. Steve gets out, argues with them, pleads with them, questions them. They become more friendly as he reveals his local credentials, and tells them Faro is an important and accredited journalist working for a famous scientific magazine. They tell him that the fire began just before midnight, and although a spontaneous explosion of methane and/or natural gas is suspected, arson has not been ruled out. Some of the site buildings of the Project have already been destroyed. Fifty firemen are fighting the blaze, and reinforcements are on their way from Doncaster and Sheffield. No, they can’t let Steve through, it isn’t safe. Steve asks if his boss, Charlie Henderson, has been informed. The police have never heard of Charlie Henderson. None of the emergency numbers of Rose & Rose are responding, they say. All is chaos.

  Steve says he doesn’t see the point of waking Charlie in the middle of the night with bad news. It can wait till morning. He gives the police some names and numbers, including his own. Then he gets back in the car, and asks Faro to reverse away from all of this.

  There is soot on the air, and a smell of destruction.

  Steve says they can drive up, round the back, and look down from the top quarry road at the back, above Coddy Holes. There’s no point in watching, but he can’t quit now. He wants to see the worst. So Faro follows instructions, and winds her way back down the valley, and up through some suburban 1930s terracing (Mount Pleasant, Quarry View, Bella Vista, Braeside, Crosswinds) and on to a high ridge looking down over the valley. There is a screaming of the convergence of fire engines, and below them leap the flames of hell.

  They are not alone on the vantage point of the ridge. A little ragged band of spectators has gathered there to witness the day of judgement. A couple of first-shift firefighters, who have knocked off and are now taking a breather and drawing hard on their cigarettes, are staring glumly down at the scene of destruction. Their faces are blackened, as had in the old days been the faces of their forefathers the miners, and their teeth and eyeballs shine white in the darkness. The tips of their cigarettes glow. A small and wizened old man with a raincoat over his striped pyjamas stands with his hands in his pockets, muttering to himself. A group of whey-faced late-night local revellers is standing near him, representing the unemployed of Breaseborough. They have cans of beer in their hands, but they have stopped drinking. Will the fire spread and engulf the whole of Breaseborough? Steve goes to speak to the firemen, who shake their heads and say they cannot tell what will happen. You can’t tell what’s underground, in these parts. It’s been building up for centuries. They speak of the great fire of Hatfield Moor, which had burned for over two weeks through the December snows of 1981, and which had at last been extinguished not by the firemen of Doncaster but by a Texan oil-well troubleshooter called Boots Hanson. Their jokes are as bitter as their faces are black. Boots is probably dead by now, and so is Red Adaire. Who will be flown in now to save Hammervale? And who will pay? Cheaper to let us all burn to cinders, says the old troglodyte in his raincoat. Who gives a fuck about Hammervale? If there was gas down there, or oil, now that would bring them in. But there’s nowt down there but rubbish.

  Steve watches the work of his hands go up in flames. Faro’s gazebo has surely gone, and probably also the Water House and the Observatory. He seems to be in a trance. Faro leaves him standing there, and goes back to the car. She switches on the car radio, puts in the tape of Grandpa Barron’s Messiah, opens the car doors, turns up the volume. The music floods out into the night sky. And every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill made low, and the crooked places shall be made plain... The music fills the earth and the heaven. They all listen, the boys, the old man, the firemen, Steve and Faro. For the people that walked in darkness have seen a great light ... On and on pours the music. There is no stopping it. Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Speak ye comfortably unto Jerusalem ... Tears pour down Faro’s face, streaked with smuts borne on the dying breeze. The music defies hell and soars to heaven, and it seems to Faro that all the caverns of the cliff will open and give up their dead, that the men of the ages of stone and bronze and coal will come forth from their subterranean mansions, and that they will be redeemed. For now is Christ risen, and hell has been harrowed, and those that sleep shall be awakened. The skeletons totter out into the blaze Faro weeps and weeps, as she sits on the low wall, with the car doors wide open like a beetle’s wings.

  When the first track of the tape comes to an end, one of the firemen comes over to Faro. She half expects him to tell her to turn the fucking volume down or fuck off back down the Ml back to where she came from, but what he says is ‘Is that the Northam Choral Society singing there?’

  Faro nods.

  ‘I thought it must be,’ says the fireman. ‘I could tell it was. My dad sang in that choir. He sang for that very recording. With Sir Malcolm Sargent, in the City Hall, in 1957. They could sing, in them days. Now, it’s nowt but striptease and karaoke.’

  ‘My Great-Grandpa Bawtry used to sing with the Breaseborough Chapel Choir,’ says Faro.

  He nods, as though this is what one would have expected and, less predictably, stretches out his grimy hand to her. ‘Pleased to meet you,’ he says. They shake hands, across the divide. His hand is hot and safe, his grasp is firm.

  The pause ends, the tape reverses, and the second side of the tape begins to play. I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that though worms may corrupt this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God. The trumpets sound, and the ashes stand upright at the latter day. The joyful voices of the dead rise in impassioned and glorious unison. Cotterhall Man hears them, in his glass coffin. Their voices harrow hell and pierce the firmament.

  The fire did not burn for forty days and forty nights, nor even for four days and four nights. The offspring of Red Adaire were not flown in to quench it. It burned for three days, and at first attracted national press and TV coverage. Interest waned quickly. The usual clichés were rolled out—‘a miracle nobody was killed’, ‘a disaster waiting to happen’. But even as the valley continued to smoulder, the cameras moved on. There was one small human-interest story—old Mrs Clegg, who had for some years been stubbornly resisting efforts to rescue her from her endangered yet strategically desirable slum, had barricaded herself into her bedroom on that first flaming night, and had refused to move. She said she’d survived two world wars in that house and would prefer to die there. The Germans hadn’t bombed her out, and she wasn’t leaving now. Who’d won the wars? She had. She wasn’t having any firemen giving her a fireman’s lift. Her oaths were impressive. She was talked out at dawn by the only woman on the scene, a young London journalist called Faro Gaulden (or Golden, as some papers understandably misspelled her name). This person had persuaded Mrs Clegg to come forth, and had bullied her into taking shelter with a neighbour. Mrs Clegg was not a grateful or a pleasant survivor. She kept on saying she’d rather die than spend a night under the roof of a stranger. And as the danger passed when the wind changed direction, she was allowed home the next day. Not much of a story.

  More was made of the reasons for the disaster. Was it the chicken shit? Was it the methane? Was it the curse of Cotterhall Man? Several column inches were devoted to the technology of energy creation from waste disposal, to the virtues of anaerobic digesters and the dangers of landfill. Faro, who wrote a good deal about the incident herself, became an instant expert in the acronyms of waste management, and her conversation became rich with references to LFG (landfill gas), MSW (municipal solid waste) and NFFO (non-fossil fuel obligation). Rose & Rose with their greendump sites were acquitted of any malpractice: in fact, it emerged that the claims made to
Stella Wakefield at Nick Gaulden’s wake, and relayed to Chrissie Sinclair, were not wholly false. Rose Sc Rose had considered the environment as well as their own profits. Mistakes had been made, but not mistakes worthy of the description of criminal negligence. It was the ancient poison that had broken out. Rose & Rose had cracked the crust by overeager excavation and let it out, but they could not be blamed for what was down there in the first place. It was not they who had been digging and rooting and undermining Hammervale all the way through the Industrial Revolution. They’d been far away, minding their own business, in a shtetl in Poland, in a tailor’s shop in Austria, in the history department of the University of Heidelberg. Not guilty, was the verdict on Rose & Rose.

  The discovery, on site, of two 45-gallon drums of depleted uranium was hushed up by the Environmental Agency. This volatile and dangerous substance, which can ignite spontaneously, burns at 1,000°C and vaporizes everything around it. Its presence on the Rose & Rose dump was inexplicable. It had been illegally dumped, but by whom? Investigators are still at work. Mrs Clegg had a lucky escape.

  The valley and the Earth Project would recover, in time, and Steve said he would rebuild Faro’s gazebo. Flowers would grow once more from the ashes. Cinders are good for the soil. There was a small sympathy vote from the Lottery distributors, and a little more money trickled back again—not enough, but a little. Hammervale would soon be forgotten again. The ragwort and the hawkweed would blossom in peace.

  Dennis Rose’s claims to an environmental conscience had some substance, but Sebastian Jones’s claims to a cancerous pancreas did not. He had been lying to Faro. Faro, returning from the flames, had accused him of lying, and he confessed. He was ill, but not fatally ill. Faro told him he needed to see a psychoanalyst more urgently than a physician and recommended Moira, whom she had just met at a book launch to celebrate a new genetics-based study of mother-daughter relationships called The Maternal Genie. Moira, Faro said sharply, would be just the person to sort Seb out. Moira had been through hell and back again, and she would drag Seb out too, if she could. Seb expressed horror at this suggestion, but Faro had lost patience with horror. He had overstepped the mark, and he had lost her. She would not go back. Sebastian Jones had wasted quite enough of her time. She was sick of waste. The crudity of his death wish, she told him sternly, was unworthy of someone of his intelligence. He should think of something more sophisticated next time.