The Peppered Moth (21 page)

Faro’s grandfather Joe Barron, speaking to her one evening as they strolled round the Surrey garden, had mentioned his sisters Ivy and Rowena. ‘You can say what you like,’ he said, ‘but they had pluck.’ Faro is trying to remember this, but she cannot. It hovers, out of reach.

Her father’s family had suffered a different fate. They had been driven, forced, expelled. Not pluck but wisdom had distinguished their emigration. Back in Berlin they had read the signs and storm clouds correctly. They had not waited for the shattering of crystals and for the nights of long knives. They had packed up and quit. They had survived. But they could not be said to have prospered.

Which does Faro favour, the Breaseborough branch, or the Berlin branch? Who can predict which genes will triumph, or whether her mitochondrial DNA (which has no Berlin component) will ever be passed on?

Faro continues to ponder the mysteries of DNA as she drives south down the motorway. Is Faro pleased, as a feminist, that it is the female line that has provided these new clues to genealogy, these new aids to research? Is she pleased that the uses of mitochondrial DNA have provoked Dr Hawthorn and his colleagues to comment that it would have been easier to trace family ancestries in the distant past if naming had followed the mother line, as in Iceland, instead of the father line, as in most of what we call the developed world? Yes, she is pleased, though only on a frivolous, point-scoring level. Faro is a feminist, as women of her class and education are these days. She is not a sentimental feminist, and does not hold the view that all women are good, all men bad, all mothers good, all fathers bad—though in her particular domestic circumstances she might well have been expected to adopt this ideological fallacy. (We have not seen much of Chrissie Gaulden née Barron yet, but the serious shortcomings of Nick Gaulden have been touched upon.) But yes, Faro is a feminist, and she is pleased by the irony of the power of the new magic of mitochondrial DNA. She is amused by the way in which men cannot conceal their irritation when she tries to describe the scientific basis of the new research. She has learned to conceal the fact that the reason why female mitochondrial DNA is easier to trace and detect is because it is less ‘pure’ than unisex nuclear DNA, and therefore more conspicuous under the microscope. We’d better not lay claim to impurity as a virtue, even when it is one. Words like that can lead to grave misunderstandings. History is riddled with such misunderstandings.

Peter Cudworth drives quietly to Loughborough, through middle England. It is a complicated, cross-country route. The roads are not straight, as they are in Iowa, and he could have done with a companion to read the map. His wife Anna was good at map-reading, but she had not wished to accompany him on this trip. England attracted her not at all, and she was afraid to set foot in Europe.

Peter Cudworth had not spoken much of his wife Anna to his cousin Faro. He had established her existence, from reflexive self-protection, but had not evoked her. Nor had Faro enquired after her. Anna was foreign, non-germane, and had no part in the Cudworth story. For Anna, like Faro’s father Nick Gaulden, was a second-generation refugee from Old Europe. She too had been newly infected by a curiosity about her homeland. But Anna, unlike Peter, did not dare to go. She was afraid of what she might find. Anna’s parents and grandparents came from a village in Saxony in east Germany, newly accessible since the fall of the Berlin Wall. And Anna knew what she might find amidst the wooden chalets and the high sloping pastures. Flatred and guilt might lie in wait for her there. Her family had been the blond oppressors. They had become economic refugees, not moral refugees. They had got out in time, through a mixture of luck and foresight, and Anna had been born an
echt
American. But nothing pleasant could await Anna in that pastoral Saxon landscape amidst the tinkling cowbells.

Anna does not know if she ought or ought not to go back to her homeland. It used to be inaccessible, but it is easy to go there now. Everywhere is opening up. New problems, new challenges have arisen in the last decade. Jews who forced themselves to tour the concentration camps are compelled to retrace their steps yet further, to revisit once-impenetrable domains, to seek the sparse kin who lingered on and lived through the Holocaust, to haunt synagogues and cemeteries behind the Wall and the Curtain. Should Anna also face the unacceptable past? Anna is neurotic, and she torments herself. How innocent, how dull the Cudworth past, said Anna, as she urged her husband to attend Dr Hawthorn’s'séance. What can Peter find to fear in Breaseborough?

Tourists do not go to Breaseborough, though the Hammervale Millennium Earth Recovery Project is trying to attract them. Hitherto politics have prevented tourists from visiting the innocent beauty spots of Anna’s parents’ youth. As yet they remain undiscovered, timeless, undeveloped. All that will change, as the glutting scum of money flows on, as operators send out their scuttling coaches. Now would be the time to go to this lost Arcady. Now, if ever. Before the scum mounts and drowns the mountaintops. Bautzen and Spreewald are said to be crowded already, and Weimar is overrun.

Anna, thinks Peter, has become unhealthily obsessed by the past. He is worried about her. Maybe he shouldn’t have left her for so long.

Peter Cudworth drives onwards, leaving spoiled industrial England behind him. He finds himself, after one or two wrong turnings, on a straight road through wolds, with long blue views falling gently and spaciously and as it were infinitely to his right, glittering with distant sunlight. The trees are heavy with fresh new leaf, majestic, sculpted. The nearer fields are green and gold. This is a Roman road, and it drives straight. Church spires and church towers rise from time to time from the landscape, and beckon, and recede, and vanish. They are calling to Peter Cudworth to stay, but in one morning he traverses parishes, manors, estates, whole counties. Where the legions slowly tramped, where great carts and lighter carriages followed, Peter Cudworth drives on in his hired capsule, at fifty miles an hour, towards Loughborough, that clean and pleasant town. He drives more slowly and more carefully than his cousin Faro, who is a dashing motorist. He is older and has more, or so he thinks, to lose.

Bessie Bawtry, like her granddaughter Faro, also called herself a feminist, though the word meant something a little different in the twenties and thirties. There had not been much evidence of feminism in her decision to marry Joe Barron. Perhaps she was biding her time and waiting for the right moment to express herself fully as a feminist.

Faro’s mother and Bessie’s second child, Christine Barron, as we have seen, was born soon after the beginning of the war, in the Montagu Maternity Hospital in Northam, at two thirty in the afternoon. Christine, like her brother Robert, was a healthy child, though a little yellow from baby jaundice, and weighed a conventional seven pounds one ounce. Bessie was to recall this uneventful birth in embarrassing detail and speak about it to people who could not, in the infant Chrissie’s view, have been at all interested in it. Bessie, despite or because of those earlier miscarriages, prided herself on being exceptionally gifted at maternity. Baby Christine had appeared after twelve hours of labour, no forceps, and a little gas and air. (
Who cares? Who cares?
the dumb and infant Chrissie would silently howl, inside her shamed beleaguered head, as she heard this intimate birth saga repeated to total strangers for the hundredth time.) Dr Fox and a midwife had been in attendance. Joe Barron had not been there: in those days husbands were not expected to hang around the delivery room, and Joe Barron would not have been able to do so, even had he wished, as he was in an army camp in Essex at the time.

Baby Christine, Bessie and Robert did not stay long in Northam, for that city of steel was now threatened by the bombs that had already scored in London. The threat of aerial bombardment, which had hung over England through years of appeasement, was at last being realized. Joe thought at first of sending his little family to the safety of America, and even wrote to one of Bessie’s college friends, a Quaker in Philadelphia, inquiring about the possibility of evacuation. But Bessie had no intention of being sent to America by herself, nor had the Quaker in Philadelphia any intention of receiving her. So that scheme came to nothing, and Bessie, Robert and the baby found themselves in a small town in the Peak District, which they reached by one of those chains of coincidences that scattered bits of population somewhat randomly around the country at that period. There they took temporary possession of a small newish suburban terraced council house, on the edge of town, and Bessie Barron took up a temporary post teaching at the King’s Grammar School, Boys Only. Married women were allowed back to work, at this period. They were all to be sacked as soon as the war was over, when the men came home, but this was not as yet clear to them, and for the time being they were in demand. Bessie enjoyed being in demand, though she did not say so: she abided by the conventions of subdued complaint about the well-recognized inconveniences of war. People complained noticeably less in Pennington than in Breaseborough. There was less of a culture of complaint in Derbyshire. The air was cleaner in Pennington than it had been in Breaseborough. People had less to complain about.

(Had Pennington people migrated to Breaseborough, looking for work, during the Industrial Revolution? Had they liked what they found there? Had they adapted well? Will Dr Hawthorn track them back through their wanderings to the clear source?)

Bessie fought her way through privation and rationing as best she could, which was quite well. She was thrifty, and, like her mother, she prided herself on being a good manager. The enforced reduction of choice calmed her. The egalitarian sufferings of wartime did not displease her. She could do without bananas and tomatoes. She grew her own beans and potatoes in the back garden. She made rhubarb jam and gooseberry pie.

Her sister Dora sometimes came to stay. Auntie Dora was good with the children. Dora, unlike Bessie, liked children, and enjoyed playing board games and card games and doing jigsaws with them. She taught them how to do French knitting with a cotton bobbin and nails, and how to make fluffy pompoms from cardboard milk-bottle tops and the wool of unravelled jerseys. She helped them to make Christmas decorations out of silver paper, and dye an Easter egg with onion skin. Eggs were priceless: Robert and Chrissie would share one as a treat. (Faro, when told this story of the halved egg, would not believe it. She thought it was a bit of World War Two folklore. But Faro would be wrong.)

Dora taught Robert and Chrissie to play patience, and bought them a delightful card game called Belisha, based on collecting road signs and the staging posts of the Great North Road. She was a good auntie, and she smelled sweetly, of baby powder, perspiration and yellowy butter.

Bessie welcomed Dora’s practical help and her company, but she simultaneously despised them. She was always relieved when Dora caught the bus back to Breaseborough and left her to her own devices. She could not think properly when Dora was around.

Picture Bessie, alone of an evening, towards the end of the war, in the drab front room of that little rented house in Pennington. There she sat, marking the exercise books of the King’s Grammar School boys. She had been teaching them about dependent clauses and the use of the semi-colon. She preferred grammar to Dora. She ticked and crossed and added comments with her red pencil. In Europe, terrible events were taking place. Bessie kept in touch: she read the
Manchester Guardian
and Joe’s censored letters and she listened to the Home Service. Bessie was no fool, unlike the women she heard gossiping in the greengrocer as they queued for carrots. Upstairs, Robert slept quietly in his bed, and Chrissie whimpered restlessly. Chrissie was a poor sleeper, and suffered frequently from earache, but Bessie did not believe in pampering babies, and she let her cry. Chrissie would soon snuffle herself to sleep.

Joe was out there in Italy, and she sat here in Derbyshire.

Bessie enjoyed teaching the boys. She had hated teaching in Breaseborough. It had been too sad. She had felt like an understudy, a second best. But here she had independence and authority. Nobody knew she had been Bessie Bawtry. Here, she was Mrs Barron, with a husband at the front. She mimicked the mannerisms of Miss Heald, and held the attention of the class. The headmaster was grateful to her and treated her with respect. The biology teacher was her friend, and had set up an aquarium for Robert and Chrissie. It held two newts. They sat on their miniature stony terraces like ageless little dinosaurs, and watched Bessie quizzically with their jewelled eyes.

What was she thinking of? What were her prospects? Was she eager for her husband’s return? Was she lonely in her double bed? Was she wondering, as Dr Hawthorn was to wonder on her behalf, how on earth she had got to
here
from
there
? Was she wondering where the next staging post of her journey would be?

Robert missed his father but was too proud to show his feelings to his mother, who did not encourage emotions. Bessie rarely spoke of Joe, though whether this was because she thought of him too much or too little was not clear to Robert, and never would be. Chrissie did not miss her father, for she was too small to have any recollection of him. In some ways, she later decided, life had been simpler without him. He was a stranger to her when he returned. She was at first suspicious of him, and cried angrily when he tried to make her acquaintance. But he was a gentle father, and he did not pinch her cheeks or force his kisses upon her. He bided his time, and he won her round. He had brought her from Italy a little shell brooch, which she cherished, and a colouring book with outlines of moths and butterflies. She had never had such treasures. She cried when the colours of her paints ran and turned the pages into a smeared and murky brown. She wanted the swallowtails and the red admirals and the brimstones to be clear and brilliant and perfect, as they were in the picture on the book’s jacket. ‘Don’t cry, pet,’ Joe said, touched by her intense distress. ‘It’s lovely. You’ve done it beautifully.’ But she knew it wasn’t lovely. She was her mother’s daughter, and she knew.