The Peppered Moth (24 page)

One thing was clear: whatever suspicions and apprehensions she may have had about her sister, she couldn’t have been jealous of Dora’s single state, could she? A married woman had far, far higher status than a single one. Everyone knew that.

So the children do go and stay with Dora, from time to time. They keep in touch with Breaseborough through Dora. It is more than an ancestral memory for them. It is a real place. They know her house, and their Bawtry grandparents’ house. They are allowed to climb into Auntie Dora’s high bed with Trixie in the mornings, where she tells them stories. They do not visit the Barrons in Cotterhall, for the Barron grandparents are dead, and some kind of family feud has divided the rest of the Barrons. Auntie Dora never goes to Cotterhall. (Many years later, Dora will say to her great-niece Faro, ‘We never had much to do with Cotterhall people. We didn’t get involved with them.’)

Joe is pleased that Robert and Chrissie visit the old place from time to time, though, like Bessie, he rarely goes there himself. And he likes to see little Chrissie kiss her fat old grandma, her whiskery old grandpa. Perhaps she will grow up to be a normal, healthy, happy, affectionate little girl, after all. Joe is beginning to dread the genetic trap.

Joe watched both his children with concern, when he was at home, and would from time to time attempt to defend them from the fallout of their mother’s erratically darkening temperament. (That beating, undertaken on Bessie’s behalf, had been highly uncharacteristic.) Robert gave less obvious cause for anxiety: he was serious, scholarly, a little introverted. He was sent to a conventional prep school, then to a minor Yorkshire public school, well out of his mother’s way. His progress reports were good. He plodded on, sharpening his critical faculties. His point hardened. Wastepaper baskets filled. He discarded, discarded. He was to become picky, pedantic. Even as a boy, he picked and pierced. He defended himself carefully, and protected his own core. Nobody could get near Robert.

Chrissie, in contrast, was emotional, female, flibbertigibbet. She veered and tacked and turned with the wind. She liked the wind. Like her uncle Phil Barron, she liked speed. She adored it. Yes, she took after the Barrons, not after the Cudworths and the Bawtrys, in her sporting skills. She could wack a rounders ball, serve an ace, dive off the top board and jump the long jump. She nearly killed herself when she was given her first two-wheel bicycle, a dashing little red Raleigh: she couldn’t resist freewheeling down from Sowerbrigg Tops at thirty miles an hour, and ended up in hospital with a concussion and a split knee. This taught her no lesson: as soon as she could get back on again, she did. She discovered riding, as middle-class suburban girls did in those days, and she loved it disproportionately: the wind in your face, the thunder of hooves, the rush, the lack of control. And she longed to ski. How she longed to ski! But here, her parents put their feet down. Skiing was expensive. In the fifties, when Chrissie was a girl, foreign travel was still rationed. Only the rich went off to ski. No, Chrissie could not join the school ski party.

Chrissie also was sent to private schools, despite Joe’s Labour principles, despite the excellence of the state education he himself had received at Breaseborough. He spent as much money on her as he spent on Robert. Not for her the second-rate female role. She was to get nothing but the best. But she was not sent away to boarding school. In her case, the best was considered to be a single-sex day school with high academic standards and a socially superior intake. And perhaps, at the back of his mind, Joe thought that if Chrissie wasn’t sent away to school, she could keep an eye on Bessie, who was becoming increasingly neurotic and withdrawn. Let the daughter watch over the mother.

(Joe Barron, we should tell you, is no longer a Member of Parliament. He failed to be returned in the next general election: although he had been a popular constituency man, the swing went against him, and he resumed his life as a barrister, with a fair amount of success.)

Joe had no idea of what Chrissie really got up to, during her girlhood and adolescence. Nor had Bessie. Bessie’s agoraphobia had led to an increasing lack of supervision. When the children were very small, she was able and willing to keep them under her eye and under her thumb, but as they grew larger they found that it was easier and easier to escape from her. Bessie never learned to drive—many women didn’t drive, in those days, and two-car families were rare—and she soon abandoned any pretence of walking them to school. The friendly chats at the school gate were an ordeal to her, and the other mothers filled her with dismay, even with terror. She pretended to despise the other mothers, but in practice she feared them, or so Chrissie suspected. Bessie convinced herself that it was quite safe for Robert and Chrissie to walk or take the bus or tram alone. She even sent Chrissie, aged seven, down to the shops for her. And it is fair to say that the streets were safer, then. Robert and Chrissie grew independent early. Independent, and secretive. In the house, they continued to behave in a subdued and respectful manner for most of the time, though Chrissie, as we have seen, punctuated her respect with wild outbursts of indignation. Out of the house, they did more or less what they pleased. And it pleased Chrissie, as she grew into her teens, to join the fast set at Holderfield High. Robert, at that age, was more interested in fighter pilots and model aeroplanes. Chrissie was interested in sex.

Her friends were not the kind of friends that Bessie and Joe would have approved, though as she never brought them home they were not to know this.

There are more ways than one of going to the bad.

Rotters from Cape Town were not available in Holderfield. Rotters were out of date. Chrissie amused herself with the Tory youth of the county. They were the brothers of her schoolfriends, and they were shallow and smoothly callow, and they had more money than was good for them, and they drank more than they could hold, and they groped Chrissie with enthusiasm when they found she seemed willing. Heavy petting, it was called. They could not have been more different from those high-minded, hardworking, highly motivated between-the-wars fifth- and sixth-formers of Breaseborough Secondary School—Reggie Oldroyd, Philip Walters, George Bellew. Chrissie liked them because they were so awful, and so unlike anything her mother could have dreamed of. If she went out with boys like this, she could surely never turn into her mother? Turning into her mother was (and was long to remain) Chrissie’s darkest fear. These dreadful, unacceptable boys, with good manners and bad morals, would inoculate her against Bessie and her fate.

Chrissie’s father was a sweet and serious man of high principles, and look what had happened to him. Already, by the age of fifteen, Chrissie could see that his virtues had made him unhappy. So she preferred these frightful frivolous lads, who copied out her essays to use when they got back to school, who never read a book, who flunked their exams, who stole from their parents when their money ran out, who nicked drinks from their parents’ drink trolleys, who liked to sit in the back row of the cinema with a hand in her pants or her bra. You didn’t have to fall in love with them. They didn’t have to fall in love with you. But you could have fun with them. And fun, at fifteen, was what Chrissie thought she wanted. She thought she’d have some while she could.

These bad boys lived a subversive, underhand, underground life, well hidden from their parents, most of whom were respectable, middle-class churchgoing folk. The age of open rebellion had not yet dawned. This was an era of cheating and hiding and lying. Sexual relations, for teenagers, were rarely penetrative. The hand in the bra, the dirty handkerchief, the spilt seed. Terror of pregnancy haunted both girls and boys, and with good reason. So they stopped, just short of the limit, again and again. Even fast girls like Chrissie Barron knew when to stop. That was the code. These were the last years of restraint, if this licentious fumbling could be called restraint.

Many of the contradictions of the nineteenth century were still in place in the 1950s. A provincial manufacturing town like Holderfield was layered backwards into its prosperous Victorian past. Large houses built of large blocks of granite had not yet been refashioned into flats, or demolished to make way for estates, or sold up to institutions: some were still inhabited by a single spinster, the last of a line, or a lonely widower, living in one room and eating off a tray. Old-fashioned servants had all but disappeared, with the war, as young women found the freedom of munitions and biscuit factories, though most middle-class women with families, including Bessie, had a daily help. An era was passing, but it had not yet departed. Vast gardens surrounded by gloomy conifers and high hedges went to seed, for gardeners, like maids, were in short supply. Small ornamental ponds, neglected for decades, grew deep with Canadian pond weed, and swarmed with silvery minnow and purple-and-orange stickleback. Sundials tried to keep their heads clear and record the passing of their reign, but they gave in to the ivy, one by one, and went under. The ivy tugged at them and pried at them and cracked them and weighed them down, and they fell into the burgeoning wilderness.

These large, neglected gardens were invaded by children. Chrissie and her gang, aged ten, crept through many a hedge to play secretly in clearings, to make themselves dens in the undergrowth, to fish for minnows with nets and jam jars in the abandoned pools. Occasionally a witchlike figure would scream from a window, or an old man with a stick would totter down cracked steps towards them, but the children were quick and knew their escape routes.

On one of these forays, Chrissie lost the little oval brooch that her father had brought back to her from the wars. It was neither a very beautiful nor an expensive little brooch. It was made of painted shells, stuck on plaster, with a circlet of pearls and a fragment of reflecting glass in its centre—a trumpery trinket, Italian, cheap, picked up from a roadside stall by Joe as he moved north through Perugia with the army. He had bought it for the little girl he had hardly seen, who had been growing up in his absence. Chrissie loved this brooch. It was her treasure. It was pointless, functionless, decorative, and her own. And now it was gone. She could not think what had happened to it, and wept for days as she mournfully searched the house, the garden, the schoolyard, the playing fields, the road to the bus stop, and all the secret truant places she could think of. Obsessively she sobbed and searched, telling herself madly, as children will, that the brooch was the key to her father’s love, and that if she did not find it he would cease to love her, and would leave her for London, or for another war. An intense guilt and grief shook her, though she told nobody its cause. She almost fell ill. But she looked at her mother, and recovered. She pulled herself together, and tried to forget.

Five years later, when she was fifteen, she found the brooch, under the copper beech tree at the bottom of Miss Haversham’s garden. (Miss Haversham was not the proprietor’s real name. Her real name was unknown to her intruders.) Chrissie found it as she was picking beech leaves off herself, after an energetic and frustrating tussle with Dave Appleton at the beginning of the summer hols. The discovery struck her as profoundly significant. ‘That which was lost shall be found,’ she declared to Dave Appleton as he wiped off his trousers and zipped himself up. ‘And all things that were lost shall be found.’

‘What?’ said Dave Appleton.

And Chrissie showed him her shell brooch, which had lain quietly waiting for her for these last five years. There could not be another like it in the whole of Yorkshire, in the whole of England, in the whole of recorded time. It had been lost, and it had come back to her. Her father’s love was once more secured. ‘Amazing, isn’t it?’ said Chrissie, as she polished it up on the hem of her cotton skirt.

Dave was not a poetic lad, and he was suffering from postejaculation sadness and embarrassment, but he managed to agree that it was a bit of a coincidence.

‘You’d better put it somewhere safe this time,’ he said.

And so she did, but she forgot where the safe place was, and so lost it once more. But this time she did not grieve for it, for she knew that it would be restored once more.

She did not tell her father that she had found it. But then she had never told him that she had lost it. Some things are better not said.

The growing Chrissie Barron was not a conscientious scholar, though she did well enough at Holderfield High. She got reasonably good grades, without much effort, but she did not strive to be top of the class, as her mother had striven. She was happy enough to be in the top ten. She appeared to have less ambition than her parents had expected. What was she going to do with her life? Robert at this point seemed set to be a lawyer, in his father’s footsteps. But Chrissie, though frequently argumentative, said she did not want to be a lawyer. She was not even sure at this stage that she wanted to go to university. At times she thought she might be an archaeologist, and recover lost things. At other times she thought she might be a surgeon, or an air stewardess, or a ski instructor, or a barmaid. She did not want anything to do with words. The House of her mother was heavy with the Word. Chrissie did not like words. She had had enough of words.

Joe Barron urged her to stick at her studies, to do her homework, to defer pleasure, as Miss Heald had instructed the class at Breaseborough. He liked to see her enjoy herself, but he did not want to see her lose ground. It was hard to get your foot back on the ladder, if you slipped. As he had slipped, when he had failed to get the County Major so confidently predicted by Miss Heald. Sometimes he thought Chrissie took her advantages for granted. He had worked hard for those advantages. Were Chrissie and Robert aware of the sacrifices that had been made for their future? Of the expense of bringing them up as a professional man’s children?

He need not have worried. Of course they were aware. In their view, the cost of their education, of their school uniforms, of their hockey sticks and tennis rackets and bicycles was being drummed into them day and night. They were always being told what they cost their parents. And of course they were not grateful. Why should they be? They hadn’t chosen to be brought up like this, had they? They hadn’t asked to be born.