The Peppered Moth (25 page)

Bessie nearly kept her vow not to set foot in South Yorkshire again. In the fifties, she had managed to escape Yorkshire altogether, for when Robert was eighteen and Chrissie fifteen Joe Barron took silk, and as a Queen’s Counsel he was no longer expected to live near his old circuit. He moved south, to London chambers, and the family moved south, to Surrey. To placate Bessie he bought a bigger, cleaner and broader house than the one in Holderfield. Bessie liked it very much. It had two bathrooms, and a conservatory, and two acres of garden to screen her from her uninquisitive neighbours. Bessie’s isolation was complete and triumphant, her metamorphosis achieved. She was delighted, she said, to have left Yorkshire for good. She liked the mild Surrey countryside, the big leisurely houses, the clean air, the quiet, the milder spring. She had always preferred rational Jane Austen to the self-pitying and hysterical Brontes. Frances and Molly, with whom she still kept in touch, would prefer to make their annual visit to Farnleigh, she was sure. They could never have liked Holderfield.

Chrissie was puzzled by the violence of Bessie’s rejection of Yorkshire, by her praise of tame and suburban Surrey, by her need for a useless surrounding space into which she never ventured.

How could Bessie explain to Chrissie that it would take her the rest of her life to decontaminate herself? That she needed an unoccupied and neutral zone around her to protect her from the frightening world’s intrusions and assaults?

Bessie’s loneliness, to Chrissie, seemed deadly. Chrissie, at sixteen, yearned for action. The big house in Farnleigh, to Chrissie, was a living tomb, though she was rapidly discovering the possibilities of Farnleigh’s co-educational grammar school, to which she had been transferred, and where she was to take her A-levels.

Bessie settled into the anonymity of the south. She avoided messages and memories from Holderfield and Breaseborough. She cut herself off and transplanted herself. She did not try to put down new roots, for she did not seem to want connections. She settled into solitude.

She never went back to Holderfield. There was nobody there that she ever wished to see again. She had made no friends there. Mrs Macaulay, Mrs Todd, Mrs Stephens—these had been her companions. These had been those who took the place of friends. Her correspondence with the biology teacher in Pennington lapsed.

Bessie Barron now sank into depression with an almost voluptuous abandon. In Holderfield, she had been forced from time to time to struggle towards an appearance of activity and normality. In Surrey, she gave in to despair. She lay in bed late and slept in the afternoons and began to watch television from time to time, a medium she had formerly derided. Inside her airy house, she wove her own dark cave and hid in it, surrounded by strangely lowbrow magazines and detective stories and soap operas. And Joe, also despairing, would have let her hide away there undisturbed, had it not been for Robert and Chrissie. Robert was almost free now of the family doom, and it was Chrissie who seemed to Joe to bear the brunt of her mother’s mental state. For Bessie was not consistently subdued and inert: she could rouse herself to spasms of violent and angry rhetoric.

One weekend evening, Chrissie, charged to pick lettuce from the garden and wash it for supper, had failed to give satisfaction. The leaves, said Bessie, were
dirty.
‘They’re not dirty,’ said Chrissie mildly, ‘they’re a bit bruised, that’s all.’
‘Dirty,'
yelled Bessie. ‘Wash them, wash them,’ yelled Bessie. ‘I’ve tried,’ said Chrissie less mildly, staring at the crinkled foliage. ‘Really, Chrissie, you are useless, quite useless,’ bawled Bessie. ‘You can’t even make a salad properly. You stupid, stupid girl. Can’t you do anything properly?’

Joe, overhearing but not witnessing this interchange, heard the kitchen door bang, and saw Chrissie flounce out into the garden angrily. A quarter of an hour later he followed her and found her lying on the grass sobbing by the raspberries. ‘Come on, pet,’ he said gently.

‘She’s mad,’ said Chrissie, as she struggled to her feet. ‘The lettuce was fine. I did my best. She’s mad. The lettuce grows that way. I did my best.’

‘Come on in, child,’ said Joe. ‘Come on in.’

And they sat down together to the poached salmon and the boiled new potatoes and the despised green leaves, crushed and wilted by a battery of cleanliness.

It was a nice meal. Bessie was a good cook.

It was soon after this episode that Bessie agreed to see a specialist, and started to take the tablets. They didn’t seem to have much effect, though Robert and Chrissie agreed that perhaps she lost her temper less often and less irrationally. She didn’t seem to be any happier, though she took a certain grim and monotonous satisfaction in talking about the specialist’s diagnosis of ‘endogenous depression’. The specialist, of course, like anyone connected with Bessie, was always described as ‘eminent’. Chrissie, at this period, found a slightly shaming relief in being able to say, to schoolfriends, ‘My mother’s rather ill, I’m afraid.’

In later years, Chrissie decided that the eminent specialist had been a bloody fool.

Would a better doctor have come up with better advice? Would a worse husband have achieved better results? Can one blame Bessie Barron for handling her own unhappiness in this unproductive way? Can one blame anyone for anything ever? There’s no point in feeling sorry for Bessie. It’s far, far too late for that. There’s still hope for Chrissie, but it’s far too late for Bessie and far too late for Joe.

Bessie settled for endogenous depression in the alien land of Surrey, and she returned once more, and once only, to Breaseborough. She went in order to bury her mother, though she did not achieve that purpose.

Bert Bawtry, whose real name was George, had died well before the Barrons moved south to Surrey. He died in 1950, of a set of complications following an attack of pneumonia. He was sixty-nine years old, and he was buried in the Breaseborough Cemetery, on the windy plateau, where Bessie had once learned by heart the sad inscriptions. Bessie attended the service with her mother and Dora and a straggle of neighbours and cousins and colleagues from the days of the electrical works and the Destructor. Joe did not go, though he would have done had he been able. The children were not invited. Children were not expected to attend funerals, not even the funerals of grandparents. The pious days of little Henry and his bearer were long over. It is to be doubted whether anybody who said good-bye to Bert had any faith or interest whatsoever in the life everlasting. This life had, some of them thought, been quite bad enough.

It was Ellen’s last illness that summoned Bessie home for the last time. Ellen had been failing for some time, as Dora had faithfully and fully reported. She had developed chest pains, first diagnosed as heart disease, then as lung cancer. This diagnosis was not considered very surprising by either of her daughters. True, Ellen had never smoked a cigarette in her life, as far as they knew, but in Breaseborough you didn’t have to be a smoker to inhale smoke. And you didn’t have to go down the pits to ruin your lungs. Just living, breathing and walking in the streets would do it. So Dora and Bessie were not indignant or astonished. This kind of death happened all the time. Ellen had well outlived her husband, as women did, and do. It was time for her to go.

The link between cigarettes and lung cancer was well known, even at this period, however much this pre-knowledge was to be disputed and denied. The links between lung cancer, passive smoking and other kinds of pollution were less well established. But Dora and Bessie were not interested in cause and effect. They were fatalistic about death. It came, and that was that. (As far as other people were concerned, that was that. It was always a bit different when it seemed to be coming for you.)

Dora, as was expected, had done all the hard work during Ellen’s illness. She had popped round to Slotton Road every morning and every evening, poaching eggs, frying up bacon, making Welsh rarebit, burning the occasional pork chop. From January to July she had been on the run, back and forth, changing the sheets, emptying the chamber pot, listening to the laboured breathing, the spitting in the handkerchief. There was pain, but Dr Marr’s successor gave her what he could to alleviate it. Ellen did not want to go into hospital. She wanted to die where she had given birth, in the Tudor-style bed from Leeds with its half-tester.

In July, Dora moved back into the house in Slotton Road. The time was near. She slept again in the bed of her childhood, from which she had so often been evicted by the health crises of delicate Bessie. She smelled the smell of the old house, and dreamed of her father. Was it her fancy, or did the smell of pear drops from the amyl acetate from his accumulator boxes linger yet? He had always liked to have a child around, when he messed about with his soldering and tinkering. Dora remembered sitting on a little wooden buffet by him and handing him screws and bolts and bits of wire. Those had been happy times.

Dora dreamed of Bert, and woke to tend to her mother. Her mother remained grim and unpleased and unpleasing. Time and old age had not improved her character. What Dora was doing for her was no more than her duty.

Ellen Bawtry had never taken Dora into her arms and cuddled her and rocked her and comforted her. She had not been a tender mother. And Dora was not a tender nurse. But she was conscientious. She did her best. She would have liked to be able to hug her mother, and to kiss her, and to hold her hand through the nightwatches. But when she tried, once, to touch that gnarled hand with its embedded wedding ring, Ellen had snatched it away angrily. Ellen didn’t like fuss.

Dora was hurt by this rejection. But she tried not to show it.

Ellen grew worse, and Dora knew she would have to summon Bessie, the First Daughter, the First Lady of Breaseborough. Dora did not look forward to this task. She did not like using the telephone. Although she was in other ways a competent person, who could even change a car tyre, to her the telephone remained a newfangled instrument, to be used with thrift and caution. She would become more familiar with it as the years passed, and had one of her own installed before the end of the decade (for emergencies only), but she always tended to shout down it and never learned the art of hanging up. Now she had to brace herself to go round to Auntie Florrie’s, and her armpits grew clammy as she yelled the bad news down the line at six o’clock on a Sunday evening.

Bessie did not receive the message well. Ellen had decided to die at a most inconvenient time. As Bessie loudly reminded Dora, she and Joe and the children were about to go off the next week to Lyme Regis for their annual seaside summer holiday. The cottage was already booked and paid for and could not be cancelled. She would come when they got back at the end of August. She’ll never last that long, said Dora. If you want to see her, you’ll have to come now, before you go to Lyme. Bessie, whose domestic life lacked all appointments and employment, conceded that she could come up on the Wednesday, in two days’ time. She couldn’t leave on a Monday, because that was the day the gardener came, nor on a Tuesday, for on Tuesday mornings she and Mrs Baker cleaned the silver, and on Tuesday afternoons the grocery order was delivered. She would come by train on Wednesday. Wednesday was library day, but she supposed she could send Chrissie, now term was over.

‘You can sleep in my house,’ said Dora. ‘It’s empty. I’m staying with Mother.’

No reproach entered Dora’s tone. Had she not been using her unnatural telephone pitch she would have sounded deferential and placatory.

Bessie greeted this offer with a temporary silence. Dora panicked. Had the instrument seized up? Had she pressed the wrong bit? She shook the heavy receiver, miserably. Had she been cut off?

She had not been cut off. When she put her ear back to the earpiece she heard Bessie say, ‘We’ll see about that.’

One cannot blame Bessie for hesitating as she flinched from the thought of spending a night under Dora’s roof at Breaseborough. Bessie, since her schooldays, had become more and more fastidious in her habits—obsessively so, in Chrissie’s opinion. She liked to wake in a room where sunlight streamed in through spotless windowpanes. Dora had travelled in the opposite direction. She had grown messier and messier as the years had gone by. She had a hatred of waste, and she could not bear to throw away anything that might come in handy in the next war. She collected paper bags, old jars, rubber bands, bits of string, old magazines, broken clothes-pegs. Her little house filled up rapidly. Dora did not like space and air. She liked a good fug.

Chrissie as a child had enjoyed this relaxed and unhygienic regime—the cosy teas of buttered toast, the puddings of tinned fruit and whipped evaporated milk, the fish and chips wrapped in newspaper, the jumble of pot plants and tea cosies and egg timers and biscuit tins that occupied the small, square wooden kitchen table. But even Chrissie was to register that the nature of the clutter grew more unattractive year by postwar year. The kitchen table, once a plain wood, was covered with an unappealing pink-check stick-on badly fitting plastic coating, which began to peel round the edges, but stuck there, barely wiped, for decades. Biscuit tins gave way to—or rather, alas, were joined by—plastic boxes, tupperware, melaware, polythene. Cancerous growths of polymer branched and spread. Drawers burst and shelves buckled with hoardings. The new postwar rubbish was more durable than the old. It did not perish. Dora picked, saved, purchased, built up her nest.

Bessie found Dora’s nest disgusting. She could hardly breathe its fetid air. Would she really be obliged to spend a night or two in it, in the good cause of paying her last respects to her mother? She had had her mother and Dora to stay with her in Surrey for a whole week over Christmas. Hadn’t that been enough?

No, it had not been enough. Duty was duty. Bessie Barron sat on the train from St Pancras to Northam in a state of subdued anxiety. She rarely went anywhere alone. She began to calm down as the train made its way through the unattractive northern suburbs of London, and settled back into her seat. She could cope with the confines of a railway carriage, and she smiled graciously at the ticket inspector. The rhythm of the train soothed her, and she opened a book. She had brought three books with her, for she was still a greedy and rapid reader: two were detective stories, a Dorothy Sayers and a Margery Allingham, for Bessie enjoyed detective fiction, particularly novels with well-educated, upper-class, but apparently gormless heroes. They made her feel quite safe and superior. And she knew that it was acceptable to read such works. Even professors of English Literature read such works. And wrote them too, come to that. The third book was from Farnleigh Library, selected for her by Miss Ashley, and collected for her by Chrissie. It was about travel and wildlife in India and was somewhat luridly entitled
Man-eaters of Kumaon.
Perhaps Miss Ashley had slipped up this time, though her taste could usually be trusted. Bessie liked travel books. She always said that she wanted to travel, and that she hoped to do so when the children were off her hands, when Joe had more time, when Joe retired. She would like to see more of Abroad, which in those days meant Europe.