Sebastian Jones, perversely, seemed to enjoy her severity, and he began to perk up once Faro had finally quit him. Or so Raoul and Rona reported to Faro. She should have ditched him long ago, said Raoul and Rona.
A couple of weeks after the Breaseborough disaster, Faro received an e-mail from her distant cousin Peter Cudworth. It started mildly enough, telling her that he had seen her name on the Internet news coverage of the fire, and had read with interest her article on the history of municipal solid waste disposal and recycling techniques in the nineteenth century. Her e-mail address had been attached, so he had taken the liberty. It had been good to see her name, and to be reminded of their meeting in the summer. He felt he had to tell her that he had been through a very bad time. She had told him about her father’s death, and now he had to tell her about his wife’s. Two weeks ago, Anna had committed suicide. She had survived an earlier bout of severe depression, some five or six years ago, but this recent recurrence had proved intractable, and the drugs which had seemed to work reasonably well on a previous occasion had produced an unfortunate reaction.
Faro, reaching this point in the e-mail, decided to print out. She couldn’t read stuff like that on the screen, it didn’t seem right.
The printer clicked on and on, as it spewed out Peter Cudworth’s long, sad story. No wonder the message had taken some time to retrieve.
Peter apologized for unburdening himself to a stranger, but he felt that Faro, because of her own family history, would understand. Anna, he wrote, had become obsessed by the history of the Holocaust, and had taken to reading nothing but Holocaust literature, of which there was now, in these recent years, so much. She had read her way through histories and diaries, through novels and poems, through Primo Levi and Hannah Arendt and Albert Speer and Gitta Sereny. She had read Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s Hitler’s 'Willing Executioners, and convinced herself she came from evil stock. ‘There’s no need for me to tell you,’ wrote Peter Cudworth, widower, ‘that she wouldn’t have hurt a fly. She was a good woman.’ He had tried to persuade her that it would be a good idea, next year, for them to go back to the village, to look at her past, for it would prove either innocent or alien. He’d even suggested they should brave a tour of the death camps. ‘She’d see it had nothing to do with her, I told her,’ wrote Peter. ‘But she was beyond reasoning. I hadn’t realized it had got so bad with her.’
There had been other factors—medical, menopausal. But it was history itself that had weighed upon her. He was sorry to burden Faro with this, but it was good to be able to tell somebody. His friends and colleagues in Iowa City had been more than kind, but there were things he could not talk about to them. He signed himself off, With all good wishes for your health and happiness, your kinsman Peter. Stemmata quid faciunt?
Faro was sympathetic but cautious in her reply. She could not cope with another sick man. She did not want Peter Cudworth to arrive on her doorstep. She would keep him at a safe cyber-distance. She seemed to attract sorrow and sickness like a beacon. She would try to dim her light.
Auntie Dora, the last survivor of the old world of Breaseborough, did not make a good recovery. It was soon clear that she would never be able to go home to Swinton Road and to her cat Minton. She would not be able to live by herself again. The list of registered care homes picked up by Faro at the Wardale Hospital came in handy. At first, Chrissie was surprised by how eager and helpful Faro continued to prove over the timeconsuming and saddening administration of Dora’s illness, but when she learned that Faro was having an affair with a nice Jewish boy up in Northam, she was surprised no longer. No wonder Faro was always ready to drive up and down the Ml. Steve Nieman sounded just the right kind of chap for Faro, and she looked forward to meeting him one day soon.
Auntie Dora was moved from the hospital into a home in Cotterhall, where she had a small room to herself, with fulltime nursing care, and was allowed to keep Minton with her. She did not at first adapt well to institutionalization, and objected strongly to being dispatched all the way from Breaseborough to Cotterhall, but eventually she accepted Faro’s insistence that it was the only nursing home she could find which would take pets. She was able to enjoy pouring good strong Bawtry scorn on the other residents, who seemed to her to be suffering from an exaggerated array of geriatric complaints, such as leglessness, toothlessness and witlessness. She still had most of her teeth, despite or because of the fact that she hadn’t seen a dentist for thirty years: her teeth had protected themselves with a natural coating of tartar and plaque, and could still munch their way through a chop or a pork pie. She refused to do her exercises, but stroking Minton kept her thick and gnarled old fingers moving. Minton, a wily and sociable cat, soon found many other admirers, and was seen to spend much time eyeing Enid Love’s powder-blue budgerigar. But he was polite enough to remain loyal to his old mistress, and always retired to the end of her bed for the night. Faro, secretly, was astonished that this was allowed, in this age of hygiene, but she was so relieved by the lenience of the regime that she kept her astonishment to herself. Minton, in her view, deserved a medal.
Faro got on well with the manager of the home, a fussy old gay called Ronnie, with a penchant for flowery wallpapers and upholstered toilet rolls, and a partner called Len who organized bingo and card games. Ronnie had once been a publican: he told Faro that there was more money in old folk these days than in beer. They were his little gold mine. He was, as far as Faro could see, very kind and gallant to his old ladies and gentlemen. He praised them and petted them and urged them to live on to the next millennium, and he iced cakes for their birthdays with his own hands. Dora, in time, came to like him, though she remained critical of many of her fellow inmates. Faro, watching Dora respond to Ronnie’s flirtatious teasing, wondered, and not for the first time, if Dora herself was gay. Or had been gay. Clearly, by now, she wasn’t anything along those lines. But she did ask, sometimes, after her friend Dorothy in Wath. Could Faro let Dorothy know where Dora was? She hasn’t heard from Dorothy for a long time, not since her last birthday card. Faro promises that she will, but is hampered by the fact that Dora doesn’t seem able to remember Dorothy’s married surname and therefore can’t find her address or phone number in her little address book. She’ll get round to sorting it out one day.
Chrissie and Faro soon became familiar with the tiresome and complex bureaucracy of old age, with benefits and social services and care allowances. It was clear that it would be sensible for Dora to sell Swinton Road as soon as possible and get rid of her small capital, and Faro undertook to investigate the housing market. She was shocked by what she found. Prices were lower than she could have imagined. Whole houses were going for a quarter of the price of a one-room London flat in an undesirable area miles from the nearest Tube. In Breaseborough, you could buy an end-of-terrace for £26,000, and a midterrace for £19,000. Faro has fantasies of buying one, and setting up a little northern home of her own. Dora’s house was valued at £30,000, but Faro thought that was optimistic.
The house would have to be cleared, and, again, Faro volunteered. She had already taken a selection of Dora’s treasures to her bedroom in the Poplars, but there was a lot of rubbish still to go before the house could be put on the market. Faro and Steve made several trips to the Rose & Rose Greendump with the worst of the stuff. The contents of the freezer proved a problem. Steve, a Jewish vegetarian, was particularly worried about the pork chops, which looked as though they had been there for decades. It didn’t seem right to chuck them in a greendump. A pity, said Faro, that Great-Grandpa Bawtry’s Destructor had ever been decommissioned. They’d have roasted away nicely in there.
Faro tracked down the house of Dora’s friend Dorothy, but she came too late, for Dorothy had died suddenly, and the house was for sale. Dorothy Cooper, née Clarkson, had lived in a house called Walden in Quarry View Road, Wath-upon-Dearne. If Faro had expected a picturesquely depressing residence, she was disappointed. Wath itself was depressing, because depressed, but Walden prov
ed to be a pleasant 1930s building with stained glass in the panels over its bow windows, and a front garden full of rose bushes. Had it been named after Thoreau’s Walden? Had Dorothy Cooper read Thoreau? A little island of peace, overlooking the quarries. Faro stood there for a two minutes’ silence, watching the removal men as they heaved out the old furniture. In the garden next door stood an extraordinary and unlikely object, twelve foot tall, bristling with wires and spikes and crowns of thorns. Was it a sculpture? No, the removal men told Faro. It was a ham-radio transmitter. From this forgotten ridge, somebody was reaching out to the world.
Faro, amongst the leavings of her great-aunt’s life, sits alone, one dark winter evening. She is once more going through the drawers of the living-room sideboard, where Dora had kept her papers and her photographs and her albums. It is a sad task, but Faro is not unhappy, for she is spending the night with Steve, and looks forward, as always, to seeing him. She has, at times, wondered if she should brave spending a whole night in Swinton Road, to see if the ghosts of her grandmother and great-grandparents will visit her, but she has not been able to face it. It is too unpleasant there, and she does not think the ghosts will come.
She has, however, on her various visits, found some evocative mementoes. She has found her aunt’s little suede autograph album, and read its jokes, its poetic inscriptions, its pious exhortations. She has found the little brownish card from Breaseborough Urban District Council inviting George Albert Bawtry to a dinner at 6.30 on Monday, 2 June, at Hardy’s Rooms to celebrate the opening of the Destructor and Electric Lighting Works in the year of the Coronation of King Edward VII, 1902. It is signed, Obediently Yours, by a committee of four. She has found Little Henry and His Bearer and The Dairyman’s Daughter, and various inscribed hymnbooks and Bibles. She has found books of coloured scraps, carefully pasted in by tidy children. She has found postcards from her great-grandfather to her great-grandmother, dating back to the days when Ellen Bawtry was still Ellen Cudworth. She has found postcards from unknown Cudworths and unknown Bawtrys. Her aunt’s old driving licence, and her postwar ration book. A sheet of Polyfotos of a much-replicated fierceeyed Chrissie Barron, aged about ten, in a panama school hat, and a similar sheet of her Uncle Robert, staring solemnly at the camera and half-strangled by a large knotted school tie. A photograph of the little sisters, Bessie and Dora, in their Sunday best, all frills and embroidery and sweetness. A photo of Grandma Barron’s wedding day, taken in Breaseborough churchyard. A photograph of Bessie and Dora, fair and young and pretty, sitting on a grassy bank in cloche hats, full of hope, smiling. A rather surprising portrait of Great-Grandpa Bawtry in drag, looking like Charlie’s Aunt. A lineup of about twelve motorbikes and sidecars, off on a rally, the men in caps, with cigarettes bravely clenched between their teeth, the women in hats with earflaps. The Mongol hordes of South Yorkshire. They conquered nothing.
There are too many memories here. Impatience is overcoming Faro. She has several plastic bags full of rubbish, and she is sure she is about to discard something important. Though how could any of this be of any importance? These are such little lives. Unimportant people, in an unimportant place. They had been young, they had endured, they had taken their wages and their punishment, and then they had grown old, and all for no obvious purpose. And now she is throwing them all into a plastic bag.
Most of Auntie Dora’s books, apart from the Victorian Sunday school keepsakes and Dick Francis hardbacks, are old Reader’s Digests or cheap book club editions, and Faro boxes them up for charity. She hesitates when she finds a novel by Georgette Heyer called Faro’s Daughter, and starts to browse through it. It tells the story of the beautiful Deborah, spirited niece of an aunt who runs a gaming house in Regency Mayfair. Faro, skipping rapidly, is pleased to find that despite her professional disadvantages this daughter of the game marries the disdainful and stylish gentleman who had been so rude to her in the first pages. This unlikely romance is cheering. Faro admires the innovative boldness of Georgette Heyer, and her careless disregard of probability. She puts the book to one side. She reprieves it from Oxfam. She will hand it on to her mother. She glances at the rest of the Georgette Heyer collection, and finds another title of interest, a very early work called The Black Moth. It doesn’t look as though it is about industrial melanism, but she puts that to one side too. Maybe Georgette Heyer is trying to tell her something?
Auntie Dora has asked her to look for her gold bracelet, her father’s silver watch and her mother’s engagement ring. So far, Faro has not discovered them. She will have one more look, in Auntie Dora’s bedroom. She climbs the narrow staircase, lit from above by a dangling light bulb. Dora’s bedroom is very damp. The window had been left open, letting in the rain, and now it will not close properly, for the old wooden frame is swollen. There are dark patches on the plaster ceiling, shaped like the billowing mushroom clouds of atomic explosions. The room smells of cat and human urine. Here is the very bed in which Chrissie and Robert would snuggle up to warm, buttery Auntie Dora when they were on their Breaseborough visits. These are the very stains at which they had stared, and of which Chrissie had spoken to Faro. They had frightened Chrissie, for those had been the days when children lived in fear of another Hiroshima.
Faro rummages in the chest of drawers and on the top shelf of the wardrobe. She discovers a cache of all the crisp new linen tea-towels that she and Robert and Chrissie have been giving Dora as Christmas extras over the years, emblazoned with representations of the counties of England, the wildflowers of Wales and country recipes from Somerset. She finds, in the bottom drawer, a forlorn pile of antique unused bed linen, and folded amongst it a pair of beautiful lace-edged pillowcases, embroidered, white on white, and enclosed in yellowing tissue: with them is a handwritten card, which says To Dora, for your Bottom Drawer, with best regards from ABB. She also finds a couple of promising boxes. One is square and wooden, one is round and lacquered. Both contain a touching jumble of what look like more or less worthless treasures—a glittering paste buckle, a chipped Wedgwood cameo brooch, some strings of pearls and glass beads with broken clasps, a rubber-banded scroll of out-of-date banknotes, a little leather child’s purse of coins, a tortoiseshell hairpin, an amber cigarette holder and a silver napkin ring with the initials DCB engraved upon it. Faro spills the coins out over Dora’s glass-protected kidney-shaped dressing table. There are bronze farthings, with their stubby little wrens, and octagonal threepenny pieces with their emblems of flowering thrift, and a silver sixpence dated 1951. The sixpence is discoloured. Faro has never seen a farthing before, but the sixpence reminds her of something. She can’t think what.
She finds the gold chain, and the engagement ring. The ring is a clear and eloquent candidate for pity. Its slender golden band has worn thin and its shaft is broken. She tries it on, but even in its broken state it is far too small to encircle Faro’s smallest finger. Can Ellen Bawtry’s fingers ever have been so slender? This fragile circle bears a diamond-shaped cluster of eight small dull rubbed pearls, which, examined through Dora’s bedside magnifying glass, look more like tiny teeth than jewels. In the centre of the pearls is set a tiny square of pale green glass. It does not even pretend to be an emerald. Faro feels sorry for the poor ring, and for her grandmother.
Bert Bawtry’s round solid-silver watch is more robust. It has a heavy silver chain attached to it. Its face displays roman numerals, in a plain handsome black script, on a white ground. Faro manages to prise open the complicated layers of its back, inspects its hieroglyphic hallmarks, and gazes into its intricate workings. She shakes the watch, holds it to her ear, and to her astonishment hears that it begins to tick. Its second hand moves. It lives again. It has waited patiently through all this time for her to come to discover it and reawaken it.
At the bottom of the wooden box is a brown envelope. Inside it is a photograph. It is of the two sisters, taken on Grandma Barron’s wedding day, for Bessie is wearing her wedding dress, and Dora is playing bridesmaid. They are sitting in a b
ackyard on a bench next to what is clearly an outdoor privy. It must have been taken at Slotton Road, before the sisters set off to the church to meet Joe Barron. Both sisters look happy, shy, hopeful and enchantingly pretty. Bessie’s hair is charmingly shingled, Dora’s is in ringlets. The world was all before them, where to choose ... Faro stares at this photograph, in the belief that it has more to say to her than it can show. She examines it through the magnifying glass, and it seems that through the curve of the thick plastic lens, round the receding edges of the image, she begins to see movement. It is as though the frozen moment lives again. Somebody is standing behind Bessie and Dora Bawtry, in the shadows. Who is it? Will this person come out of the shadows? Who is there, with these young women? Is it their Redeemer?
On the way down the stairs, she remembers, with a sense of sudden shock, the last time she had seen a silver sixpence. It had been hidden in the Christmas pudding that Bessie Barron had served up at her last family Christmas at Woodlawn. Bessie, who had sliced the pudding, made sure that little Faro got the sixpence, and Faro, who had noticed the manoeuvre, had nevertheless been pleased and excited to find the little coin, hygienically wrapped in foil, half hidden in her rich brown fruity portion. Faro stands stock-still on the seventh step, for she can see Grandma’s happy face, smiling, as Faro cries out and unwraps the silver treasure. Grandma Barron had always made a good Christmas pudding. Faro had always enjoyed the Surrey Christmas. She felt safe there, in that large, bright, clean house. Like a proper child.
The Peppered Moth Page 38