The Peppered Moth (29 page)

Perhaps it wasn’t fair to say that nobody in that chapel had ever had a proper job. Some of them had tried. It is true that the first generation of the Gaulden family, once uprooted from Berlin and its homeland, had found it difficult to settle and to find appropriate employment. But it had not come to England to make its fortune. It had come here to survive. Like many thousands of others it had left most of its possessions behind, and it was not easy to make a fresh start in a foreign country on the brink of war. They were lucky to have been allowed to settle in Finchley, and not to have been interned as enemy aliens on the Isle of Man.

Gyorgy had been traumatized by the events of Europe. His own parents had been interned as political dissidents, and died in a camp. Most of his family disappeared. Gyorgy never recovered, physically or mentally, from the shock of his sudden forced exodus. His health had suffered; and he developed chronic asthma, though he found it difficult to give up smoking. And he lacked the resilience and the élan of some of the new refugees, who were to found publishing houses, start businesses, retrain for professions, re-enter academe or join the BBC. Gyorgy could not make a new start. Gyorgy haunted the Reading Room of the British Museum, that refuge of the refugee, where he claimed to be writing a history of his native province, but no person ever saw a word of his manuscript. He dwindled into invalidism, while his wife went out to work.

Eva Gaulden, despite bearing several children, managed to earn enough money to keep her family going. She worked first as matron in a hostel for refugee children, then as translator of black propaganda for the BBC, and finally as subeditor and typist for a respected literary monthly financed with American money. Maybe she could have founded a publishing house, had she been less preoccupied with children and survival, with Gyorgy and the news from Europe. But she kept going. She kept a roof over their heads.

Eva Gaulden, unlike Bessie Bawtry, had been faced with hard and potentially deadly choices, and had worked hard all her life, and now the most gifted and beautiful of all her sons had gone before her. Tributes were paid to Eva that day, and rightly. It is not good to lose a child, even when one is in one’s eighties, even when he has invited his own death. Chrissie squeezed Faro’s hand again, as Eric began to round off his eulogy. Maybe Eric was right. With so many dead people behind him, maybe Nick had done well to try to spread his seed and his genes and to repopulate North London. And it was wrong to think harshly of Eric. Eric might have wasted his talents in the eyes of the world, and blown his mind with many substances, but who was to blame him? He had done no harm in his mild life. He had merely wasted it. There were worse things.

The only Gaulden relative who had ever made serious money was said to have made it somewhat dishonourably. Gyorgy’s nephew, Victor Rose, was said to have made a small fortune. (Chrissie sneaked a glance around the room and back up at the gallery, to see if she could see him, but if he was there, she didn’t recognize him. But she hadn’t set eyes on him for years, had she? She had lost touch with most of this lot.) Victor Rose had made his fortune out of scrap, then landfill. The images that this
métier
evoked were not fortunate. Smoke, bulldozers, incinerators, mountains of rubbish, noxious gas and scavenging birds of prey. Seagulls, the rats of the sky.

Now was the time for the coffin to slip forward to its destruction. A waste of good wood, Bessie might have remarked: Bessie had often declared that she would be happy to be buried in a bin bag. But she hadn’t been allowed that choice. Her dispatch had proved quite expensive. Joe and Bessie Barron had been cremated in Surrey, and both had slid away, like liners down the last runway into the ocean of fire. Joe had escaped first, for he had died in his early seventies, after some years of ill health and a few months of painful illness. Until the onset of that last illness, and for a few weeks after its onset, he took Bessie an early-morning cup of tea in bed. She never said thank you. She lay there like a white worm and took it from him. When he was too ill to perform this ministration, she complained to Chrissie that he was faking. Shortly after this he died. Bessie had survived some years of widowhood, during which she had complained bitterly about the size of her pension. Then she too had departed, in a surprising, mysterious and wholly uncharacteristic manner. We shall return to that story.

Nick Gaulden, whose boxed remains were even now gliding smoothly down the polished track, had not, in his early years, given much thought to pensions. Had he left anything at all to anyone? He had been a long time dying, and had had plenty of time to think of these things. Had he died as he had lived, in debt? Had he made a will? Chrissie had no cause to worry for herself, for her days of want were over, but she could see the possibility of feuds and factions, heirs and claimants, amongst the other Gaulden branches. He ought to have left at least some token for Faro, his firstborn. Who had owned the house in Kentish Town, where he had shacked up with young Jessica?

The curtains parted, electronically, and the coffin slid out of sight. There was a fair amount of stifled and not-so-stifled sobbing and sniffling, and Chrissie, glancing covertly sideways, could see tears pouring down Faro’s cheeks. Poor girl, what a father, what a history. Chrissie’s own eyes felt dried up at the source. He should have died earlier, had he wished her to weep for him. There had been a time when had he died, she would have followed him. But now the time for tears was over. So the woman who had been Chrissie Gaulden told herself, as she stood erect, to attention, like royalty.

And now Nick Gaulden was bursting into incandescence, and rising in smoke through the crematorium chimney, and drifting into the upper reaches of the thickly peopled autumn air. The skies above this place were dense with the souls of the departed. Conveyor-belt cremation, five in a day, and the other four today all Asian, if one could judge by the names on the wreaths and cards and markers. The old European diaspora was dying out, and members of the new diaspora were already leaving their subcontinental signatures on the walls of memory:
‘Love Always Dad’,
exhorted Shanti Ramesh Patel, claimed by the new wave of death. The generation of traumas and death-camp tattoos, of Finchley Road accents, of chicken soup and Viennese pastries and pickled cucumber, would soon be completely extinguished, leaving a heritage of semi-assimilated survivor guilt. The old tearooms and cafés had been converted into Thai restaurants, pizzerias, Chinese takeaways and sushi bars. The Jewish landmark of Bloom’s with its chopped fish still survived, outliving its more famous East End ancestor—but for how long, she wondered. These children of the Holocaust, these friends of yesterday, these second-generation settlers—Eric Mendelsson, Anna Hayman, Michael Rudetski, Rachel Rosenthal, Edith Woolfson, Dieter Kahn, Hannah Roditi—why, they were all old now, and their hair was grey. We are all old, thought Chrissie with astonishment, as she wandered out with the crowd to the cloisters, to the ‘designated dispersal areas’, to the green lawns where delicate clumps of pale mauve-pink autumn crocus reared their softly tissued little horns and trumpets in pretty clusters. It seems like yesterday, but we are all old.

Such unexpected, such pretty little flowers, so hidden for so long, and then so startling, appearing from nowhere, from the cropped smooth flattened grass, putting up their tender heads like snails from their shells, unfolding like the fronds of the anemones of the sea. Brave little flowers, to risk the trampling of the booted foot. For, unlike anemones and snails, they could not retract. They could not shrink back to safety. If you trod on them, they would bruise and bleed and die.

Tears for the poor crocus rose in Chrissie’s eyes. She wept for them.

It was a mild and pleasant day, a global-warming,
fin de siecle,
autumnal day, a gracious day for a funeral, a better day than Nick Gaulden had deserved. But why invoke desert when the ash was yet hot? The sun shone down upon the nondenominational red arches, upon the ranks of standard rose with their votive tags, upon the rectangular pond where goldfish rose to bask and warm their plump backs, upon the sundial, upon the plaques and tablets of stone and ceramic, upon the guests and mourners, and upon Jenny Pargiter, to whom Chrissie now found herself being introduced by Stella Wakefield.

‘Jenny,’ said Stella, pulling by the elbow towards Chrissie an immensely tall, red-faced, stoutish woman in her midforties, clad, like Chrissie herself, in widow’s black. She towered over Stella like a pillar, and Stella was not small. Jenny Pargiter’s hair was a frazzled brownish grey, the veins in her cheeks and nose were broken, her face was unpowdered, and her eyes were Saxon-blue. She did not seem at all eager to be introduced to Chrissie. She stood in her own orbit, unmoved.

‘Jenny,’ said Stella, with what, from her, was almost a plea. ‘Jenny, let me introduce you to Chrissie. Chrissie Sinclair, I should say. Chrissie, this is Jenny Pargiter.’

Chrissie looked round for Faro, for moral support, but Faro had deserted her, had gone off to suck up to her halfsisters Arethusa and Iona, and to pet their babies: so Chrissie had to stare Jenny Pargiter out on her own. She went through the defensive routine that life with Nick Gaulden had taught her: straighten the shoulders, rear the head, pull in the chin, raise the back of the neck, square the body, tuck in the elbows, stare, confront.

‘Hello,’ said Chrissie Gaulden, now Lady Sinclair, to Jenny Pargiter.

‘Hello,’ said Jenny Pargiter, with massive indifference. ‘Nice to meet you. At last.’

Chrissie did not think that it was at all nice to meet Jenny Pargiter, and could not think why her friend and ally Stella had been so malicious as to force this awkward and unnecessary introduction. Jenny was not at all what she had expected. She bore no resemblance to any of Nick’s other women. She was far, far too big. Serafina was big, but not in this ungainly English way. The sight of Jenny filled Chrissie with a panic which she could not at first analyse. Perhaps it was the sheer unexpectedness of this bulk? No, it cannot have been that. It was what the bulk implied. Jenny had clearly not attached Nick Gaulden to her through her appearance, so she must have had some other more dangerous, invisible attraction which had kept him in her thrall for four long years. Perhaps, like a gross Wagnerian soprano, she hid within herself a voice of superlative purity and power? The voice of sex itself? What siren songs had Jenny sung to deceive poor Nicolas and to lure him to her bed? Jenny Pargiter was a heavyweight rival, a mattress crusher, and now Nick was dead, and neither of them, none of them, could ever win him back.

Nevertheless, ‘Nice to meet
you,
" responded Chrissie, that gracious Lady. ‘A nice service, didn’t you think?’

And niceties they had exchanged, for a few minutes, until the drift towards the cars seemed to be about to begin. There was to be a wake, at Fiona’s in Frognal. Fiona had volunteered. Money had spoken. All were invited. Chrissie and Faro had not yet decided whether they would attend.

Faro had been keeping half an eye on her mother, during the drifting introductions and greetings and formings of little groups and clutches of Gauldens and honorary Gauldens, of old schoolmates and fellow drinkers from the Three Horseshoes, the Freemason’s Arms, the Wells, the Magdala. A thick, incestuous congregation, in which Faro knew far too many familiar faces, though she did not recognize that very tall person to whom Chrissie and Stella were now speaking: was she some kind of interloper, or some skeleton from a hitherto locked cupboard? Faro was not sure how much more of this scene she could take.

She had managed, so far, to avoid a conversation with Eric Mendelsson, whose very existence seemed to reproach her, and she had survived her ritual exchange with Iona and Arethusa—a mixture of affection, effrontery, attitude and regret. She had waved at Paul Noble, been embraced by Dieter Kahn, sidestepped her uncle Rudi, kissed her grandmother Eva, and been lobbied by Joachim Barker, who always wanted her to get him a job. Even at her father’s funeral he tried it on. Who did he think she was? She was lucky to have a job herself. Nobody had a job these days. His reproachful eyes followed her as she advanced upon the diminutive Tiger Wakefield (surely he was very undersized for his age, whatever his age was?), who had been beckoning at her eagerly for some time. Joachim was all washed up. Like her father, like Eric, he had been a man of promise, but all he did now was to walk the Heath in all weathers, like a tramp. He wanted to write an article for her mag, but she was sure he couldn’t put two words together anymore, poor old sod.

Tiger Wakefield wanted to point out to Faro that the top of the sundial was missing. Its brass plate, its roman numerals and its gnomon had been removed. Tiger thought this was a disgrace. ‘In a cemetery, of all places,’ he said, as he patted the empty round flat surface, cratered like a pancake, pitted like the moon. An absence, where time should have been.

‘Do you think it’s been vandalized? Do you think it was stolen? Should we report it? Do you think they know?’

‘You’re a very
busy
little chap,’ sighed Faro, in response to this barrage. ‘What does it matter? Let it be.’

‘And is that Nick’s smoke?’ he wanted to know next, as he pointed to the thick black billows ascending, straight and undispersed, into the still air.

‘I don’t know,’ said Faro. ‘I don’t know how it works. I don’t know if they do them straightaway, or if they stockpile them. Do them in batches.’

‘I wonder who’s going to get the ashes,’ said Tiger, scanning the gathering knowingly. ‘A lot of claimants, aren’t there?’

‘Don’t,’ said Faro.

‘Sorry,’ said Tiger.

‘That’s all right,’ said Faro, as she blew her nose.

That word ‘stockpile’ had been unfortunate. But Tiger shouldn’t have encouraged her. He had led her on into treachery. Unlike her, he had hardly known his father. He owed him little. But Faro owed Nick much. She should not have made a joke at his expense.