The Peppered Moth (11 page)

Miss Heald persevered. (Was she sexually attracted to Bessie? Certainly not, she would confidently have answered. And she would have known what the question meant.) In a lighter vein, Miss Heald invited Bessie to listen to Mendelssohn and Melba and Caruso on her new Gramola Table Grand. Bessie hated the Gramola, though of course she did not say so, and Miss Heald had to conclude that Bessie, for all her gifts, was not very musical. The Debating Society in Northam and the Reading Room of the Literary and Philosophical Society were more successful. But Bessie remained oddly lacklustre. Was it boy trouble? Or had she found her first sighting of Cambridge a little—well, intimidating? If the latter was the problem, Miss Heald could sympathize. She herself had felt very much up against it when she had first left her parents’ home in little Rawmarsh for the big city of Leeds, and it had taken her a whole term to make real friends there. And as for her first weeks at the University of Toulouse, studying for her diploma—they had seemed a long dark night of loneliness and misunderstanding and ostracism. Sylvia Heald had felt out of place and conspicuous, attracting nothing but unfavourable attention. But she had worked hard at Toulouse, and had learned to love it, and to love the French language. She had learned to adapt and to fit in. Her delight in the language was never to fail her. She had stored up treasures for heaven as well as on earth. On her painful deathbed, she was to cheer herself up by reciting Lamartine lugubriously to her visitors—

O temps, suspends ton vol! et vous, heures propices
     
Suspendez votre cours:
Laisseznous savourer les rapides délices
Des plus beaux de nos jours!

Assez de malheureux ici-bas vous implorent,
     
Coulez, coulez pour eux
...

Miss Heald had even learned to like Toulouse sausages, which had at first struck her Yorkshire palate as an abomination. She had broadened her horizons, and had brought her new tastes and her discoveries back with her to Breaseborough, to her happy modern home with Miss Haworth, from which she spread sweetness and light and slices of foreign sausage.

Surely Bessie too would overcome her difficulties. She could not be as tender as she looked. There was determination in her as well as fear. She would survive. What she needed was a little help, a little encouragement. Of course she had found Cambridge intimidating, on her first visit. But she too would adapt.

So reasoned Miss Heald, and it was with the best of intentions that she asked permission to take Bessie Bawtry with her to the Easter party at Highcross House. She had for some years been favoured with open invitations to this annual event—‘Do bring some amusing young things along with you, Sylvia!’ had been the cry from Gertrude Wadsworth, to which Miss Heald had over the years responded with a relay of the best of Breaseborough and beyond. It was an honour to be honoured by Miss Wadsworth, and Miss Heald was sure Bessie would be pleased to be included. It would do her good to see a bit of the wider world.

Gertrude Wadsworth was the queen of Hammervale, or would have been had she condescended to visit her native regions more frequently: as it happened, her unhappy childhood at Highcross had prejudiced her against the entire county, and she came there as little as possible. But once or twice a year she made her way to the old house, which stood in parkland (but not very ancient parkland) between Cotterhall and Blaxton. Her aweful father was now bedridden, and therefore less threatening than he had been in his patriarchal days: indeed, she now had the upper hand, and could have moved back to South Yorkshire in style with her gay London entourage. But the gloomy old dump, she declared, was a perfect frost. It got her down. It was damp and dirty, and the air—honestly, you could hardly breathe in it, it was thicker even than a London fog. She preferred London, where she moved in a fast Bohemian set. She was said to mix with artists and writers and women-about-town.

Gertrude had really had a rotten time as a girl. She had been sickly and lonely. Rescued from a sadistic governess who had luckily overstepped the mark and been given the sack, she had been sent away to Cheltenham Ladies’ College, where she had been slightly less sickly and lonely. Her mother was a hypochondriac who spent most of her time undergoing unnecessary surgery, and it is much to Gertrude Wadsworth’s credit that she refused to follow this powerful maternal example. At the age of twenty-one, she had decided to be well, and to tell herself every morning that every day in every way she was getting better and better. It worked. She flourished. She would never overcome some of her natural disadvantages—she took after her father rather than her mother in physique, and she was far too tall, plain-featured, large-boned, largenosed, heavy and tending to stoutness—but she gallantly decided to ignore these drawbacks. She addressed her innate shyness frontally, charging it as though she were taking a fence, and leaping, on most occasions, boldly and safely to the other side.

Her unnatural advantages were considerable. She was very rich. And she was an only child. She was also far from stupid, though she often seemed stupid. In her social world, it was often safer to seem stupid. And she did not need to pass examinations.

She wanted to be good and to do good. Whether this was an advantage or a disadvantage was not dear.

Her father, Joel Heathcote Wadsworth, owned Bednerby Main and all the coal that came from it. It was on his behalf that the colliers, rope boys, pit boys, stokers, pit sinkers and pony drivers trooped forth each morning at dawn to work all day below the earth. (Some of them worked night shifts: production had to be kept moving.) He was an extraordinarily disagreeable old man, foul of mouth and foul of temper. Nobody liked him. His colliery managers hated him. His estate workers hated him. His wife hated him, and took her revenge on him by paring away bits of her body until there was nothing much left for him to abuse. His daughter Gertrude hated him, because he was cruel and rude to her, and mocked her height and girth and features. Joel Heathcote Wadsworth had no class. He spoke broad Yorkshire, pitilessly, like the farmer’s son he was, and he played the tyrant and the bully. But now, in nineteen twenty-something, his wife was dead—an operation too far, on a perfectly healthy organ, had finished her off, to her own weak surprise—and he himself had been semiparalysed by a stroke. The stroke had served him right, in the view of his servants. He was not intemperate in his drinking habits, but he ate far too much, weighed twenty stone, and was intemperate in all other ways available to him, working himself up into a red-faced apoplectic rage at least twice a day about matters of utter triviality. And now he was confined to a spinal chair, and at their mercy. They were not very kind to him. It was their turn now. They were the masters now.

For Gertrude Wadsworth, this was liberation. She had not been disinherited, as far as she knew, and the rest of her life was before her. She was only thirty-five. She would never marry. But she could enjoy herself, and help others to enjoy themselves. She could try to have some fun.

Highcross House was not designed for fun. It had no tradition of fun. Nevertheless, once or twice a year Gertrude left her bijou little London house in Trevor Square and travelled north to see what was going on amongst the old slag heaps. She tried to import festivity. This was good of her, as her acquaintances acknowledged. Miss Heald was one of these acquaintances.

Sylvia Heald and Gertrude Wadsworth had met at a charity concert given by the Operatic Society at the Breaseborough Hippodrome, in aid of the Miners’ Welfare Fund, and had taken to one another through a shared dislike of the principal soprano’s striking air of misplaced self-satisfaction. A wincing look of cultured despair had passed between them, involuntarily, and they had fallen into conversation over the ices. Miss Heald had subsequently prevailed upon Miss Wadsworth to present the prizes at the school speech day, a considerable coup, as Miss Wadsworth, through a mixture of guilt and shyness, ignored most local activities. Miss Wadsworth had been impressed by Breaseborough Secondary School, which seemed to compare not unfavourably with Cheltenham Ladies’, and the friendship had mildly prospered. Miss Wadsworth had been agreeably surprised to find Miss Heald and her companion Miss Haworth so well read, though she was too polite to show her surprise. She pleased herself and them by sending them books and magazines from London. (It was through Gertrude that Miss Heald had first discovered the poetry of T. S. Eliot and Edith Sitwell.) Of the visual arts, Gertrude noted, the Misses H. knew nothing—but then, how could they, up there in that ugly wilderness? She herself had hardly looked at a painting until she was twenty. There
were
no paintings in South Yorkshire.

Gertrude was now a frequenter of Private Views and the Chelsea Arts Club. She was a member of the Sesame Club, where she liked to entertain. She was renowned for her generosity over drinks and dinners, and was kind, on principle, to many young artists. She was still not very sure of her taste, and relied on others to introduce her to the new, the shocking, the up to the minute. Arnold Bennett took her under his wing, as he took several gauche and serious young men and women, and explained to her the merits of Roderic O’Conor and Modigliani, two painters whom he seemed to think he had invented for himself. He introduced her to Roger Fry, who introduced her in turn to the Omega Workshops, where Gertrude spent a lot of money on furnishings for the house in Trevor Square. Would she, she wondered, when her father died, as he surely soon must, attempt to do over the décor of Highcross House? Get rid of the Victorian drapes, the Scottish baronial plaid, the dark reds, the plush, the meat-colours, the brawn textures, the gravy browning? And fill it with turquoise and lime, with shrimp and apricot and buttercup? Or should she just sell the pile for a song and move away and forget it and what it stood on and stood for?

Such were the benevolent and artistic thoughts of Gertrude Wadsworth as she got herself up for her annual Easter bash. She had invited a hundred guests from all over the county, her highest score yet. Her father was confined to his quarters, and Otley and Bateman understood that they were not to bring him out whatever he said. Miss Wadsworth adjusted her flesh
pink stockings and suspenders, heaving largely inside the supposed liberation of her supple newfangled buskless corset—‘light and airy and soft and lissom’, its label had declared, and, with its mere seven bonings, it was ‘to all intents and purposes non-existent’. So it had promised, but nevertheless Miss Wadsworth found it uncomfortably restricting. Why did one have to wear such things? And why was she such a bloody awful shape, as her father was never tired of remarking? When the fashion, now, was to look boyish? Gertrude Wadsworth might from some angles look mannish, but boyish, never. She groaned, sighed and bit the bullet, pulling on her
eau-de-Nil
low-waisted gown with its silvery beaded fringing. What did it matter if she looked a perfect fright? Nobody would care. She draped herself with long chains of pearl and paste diamond. They seemed to make matters even worse, so she took them off again. Her shoes, at least, were pretty. Her feet were not very large. Large, but not very large.

A hundred guests, from all over the West Riding. A scattering of gentlefolk from farms and halls and manors. The colliery manager and his wife, and Captain Sligo, the moustached owner of Pottles Pit. The nice Methodist minister from Wath. (She had not invited any vicars. She disapproved of the Church of England.) The Misses Heald and Haworth. Mr and Mrs Farnsworth. Some local businessmen and manufacturers, glassmakers, confectioners, a wholesale potato dealer. A few doctors, a racing driver and a pianist. A painter and a poet. Some farmers, and a scion of the Wardale family. A professor from Northam University. An antiquary from Leeds, and a bookseller from Sheffield. And there was a handful of houseguests, her chums from London, who were occupying the damp and disused bedrooms, and who would add a cosmopolitan tone to the occasion. A heterogeneous mix, a crude but brave mingling. And into this tricky gathering, as yet unknown to Gertrude Wadsworth, would enter innocent, inexperienced little Bessie Bawtry, garlanded with academic laurels, yet naked of all other ornament. Bessie Bawtry had not even a string of artificial pearls to dangle round her neck.

But did that matter, for a fresh girl of eighteen? Will not her natural grace and beauty glow and glimmer sweetly? ‘Full many a gem of purest ray serene, / The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear’. ‘Whatever you are, be That: Whatever you say, be True’. Bessie Bawtry has many a humble motto to guide her, and she is much prettier than Gertrude Wadsworth has ever been, will ever be.

It is natural, at Bessie’s age, that she should be paralysed with fear and apprehension. She has never been to so large a house in her life. Highcross House is far larger even than Breaseborough School, which is a sizeable stone-faced building grandly decorated with four grumpy cherubs. Highcross House is not as large as King’s College, or Trinity, or Newnham College, but to Bessie’s eye it is getting on that way. It is too large to be a home, and there is nothing homely about it. Above the gatepost in the cold spring evening loom two affronted stone figures, and the drive winds onwards and out of sight towards the Victorian mansion. Bessie, sitting squashed between Miss Heald and Miss Haworth, in Phil Barron’s Austin, wishes she could jump out and run away into the night. But she knows she has to go through with this ordeal. She reminds herself that she is a pet, that she is clever, that she has a State and a County Major and a College Exhibition. But her throat is dry, and her hands are cold and damp. She never perspires, but a cold dew seems to have settled on her brow. She is turning into a frog. It is meant to work the other way round. She is supposed to turn into a princess, at this, her first ball. But instead, she is turning into a frog. A frog, in a homemade dress.

Joe Barron will be there, she tells herself. He too has been a beneficiary of Miss Wadsworth’s broad benevolence. He will be a welcome and an easy guest. Joe is good with people. The Barrons, as Bessie knows well, are one of the best families in the neighbourhood. And Joe has always been a good friend to Bessie, kind to her in her hesitations, supportive of her ambitions. She has come to rely on his partiality for her. She knows she can always fall back on Joe’s good will. He is a friend, perhaps more than a friend. But Bessie has not seen so much of Joe since her recent triumphs. It was too bad about his not getting a County. She had imagined that they would go up to Cambridge together, that he would be there for her as an escort and an ally amidst the alien youth of southern England. What will happen to him now? He can’t spend the rest of his life selling Barron Glass. Can he? Is he jealous of her success? Has he been avoiding her?