The Peppered Moth (33 page)

But Chrissie’s divorce had one serious disadvantage. It brought Bessie back into her daughter’s life. With the threat of a visitation from the satanic Nick finally and formally removed, there was nothing to stop Bessie from seeing a lot more of Chrissie and Faro. Her son Robert was not much use to her, socially: he had turned into a reclusive academic, a historian rather than a lawyer, single, sardonic, locked inhospitably away in the University of Waterford. Mothers are expected to favour their sons, but Robert had not allowed her to favour him. So Bessie concentrated on Chrissie. This had not been good for Chrissie. Joe had done his best to protect his daughter from his wife, but it had not been easy.

Bessie would ring Chrissie, and complain to her, for hours on end. She would demand her company. And Chrissie would, as often as she could, oblige. Bessie, by this stage, had become even more grossly and conspicuously unreasonable than she had been during Chrissie’s schooldays. She continued to take great pride in her officially depressed status, and liked to recite the names and quantities of the many pills she swallowed daily. As far as Chrissie could see, they did not seem to do her much good, but maybe she would have been even worse without them, who could say? Bessie, at this period, shocked Chrissie on one occasion by telling her that she had been to see her doctor for some minor ailment, and had managed to read, in his notes on her, upside down, the word ‘hypochondriac’. What had shocked Chrissie most about this was that Bessie had seemed to accept the charge, and to find it very funny. This was bewildering. What did Bessie know or think about herself? It was a mystery. Bessie was a mystery.

Chrissie felt sorry for her mother, now that Bessie was ageing. She was no longer afraid of her, or shamed by her. But she continued to be puzzled by her. Would she ever be able to make any sense of Bessie’s strange and uneventful and disappointed life?

Chrissie knew her visits to Woodlawn were a relief to her father, who, after his retirement, would take advantage of Chrissie’s sacrificial appearances to disappear himself, on brief excursions—to Buxton and Bayreuth, to Glyndebourne and Salzburg. He set up the fiction that he went away for the music, for Bessie’s indifference to music was so well established and so often reiterated that she could hardly renege on it now in order to dog his footsteps. He himself was not at first as ardent a music lover as he claimed. Like many York-shiremen, he had always been deeply moved by oratorio, and tears came to his eyes whenever he heard the great choruses from
The Messiah.
He also had a habit of singing to himself the cry from Mendelssohn’s
Elijah:
‘If with all your heart ye truly seek me, ye shall ever surely find me.’ This too brought tears to the eyes, for he sought, and was not sure that he found. But in these later years, his musical interests widened, and he came intensely to enjoy Mozart, Beethoven, even Wagner, during his weeks of escape. Another example of successful adaptive preference formation.

One of the unkindest things Joe ever said to Chrissie about Bessie was provoked by the subject of music. On the eve of his last trip to Salzburg, Bessie had been holding forth over supper about Mozart. She seemed to disapprove of Mozart. Walking in the garden after supper that evening, Joe had said to Chrissie, ‘You know, your mother believes that if she could be bothered to learn to play the violin, she would be the greatest violinist in the world. In fact I think she believes she
is
the greatest violinist in the world. It’s just that she never found time to learn to play the violin.’ And Chrissie, disloyally, had laughed, while wondering how Joe had managed not to murder Bessie.

Joe was a dutiful husband, and he had taken Bessie on many nonmusical holidays. But he never took her on the world tour he had promised her. She often complained about this. It was clear that Joe could not face her company as he circled the globe. So he fobbed her off with shorter trips to Cyprus, to Malta, to Italy, to France, to the Dalmatian coast—all places that in her Breaseborough days would have seemed dream des ‹nations. But they were not good enough for her now. She complained and nagged and complained. Her war of attrition failed, proved counterproductive. Joe became stubborn. And he held the purse strings. So that was that.

Chrissie thought that towards the end he began to take a pleasure in denying Bessie. His character had been deformed by hers. He held the purse strings, but she had won. This had been sad to see.

Joe had died before he had a chance to meet Donald Sinclair. He never knew that his daughter remarried. He died three months before his sister Ivy died in Australia. It was Chrissie who rang to give her aunt the bad news. As we have seen, Bessie did not like her sister-in-law, and had continued to dislike her, although she had not seen her for more than thirty years. So it was Chrissie who had to tell her of Joe’s death.

‘I know why you’ve rung,’ said Ivy Barron, in a strong Yorkshire accent almost identical to that of Bessie Barron’s, though lower in register. ‘I’m sorry. I knew he wasn’t well. Thank you, Christine, for letting me know.’

Chrissie wrote to Ivy once a fortnight, after Joe’s death, taking over Joe’s old routine. But Ivy did not live long. The same illness carried them both away. They died of asbestosis, a killer disease, contracted decades earlier in the playground of Cromwell Place Infants in Cotterhall. Ivy had fled from Cotterhall and Barron Glass and South Yorkshire to the uttermost parts of the earth, but she had fled, as the scriptures prophesied, in vain, for even there the Cotterhall dust claimed her, as it had claimed Joe Barron in Surrey.

Joe’s illness had been wrongly diagnosed for years, as angina. Lawyers in Surrey were not expected to die of asbestosis.

They were all dead now. Joe, Bessie, Ivy and Nick Gaulden.

The train was three quarters of an hour late when it arrived at Queen’s Norton, but there was her car, waiting for her. She got in, switched on the ignition, switched on the radio, then switched it off again. She wondered if Don would have eaten all the supper, or would he have left some for her? She thought she might be hungry. She’d been too busy talking and listening to eat much at the wake. Little frilled oblongs of ravioli began to materialize like manna in her mind as she drove through the sleeping landscape. She left the main road for her own turning. A badger shuffled slowly into the hedgerow. She drove slowly up her own drive, parked, quietly closed the car door. She stood for a moment in the garden, breathing in the night air. The air on the Oxfordshire-Northamptonshire border was soft and clean and pure, and smelled of grass and apple and newly clipped box. Over her head stretched Cassiopeia, like a great butterfly. This was rural England, pretty England, the England of second homes and donnish retreats. Chrissie loved it. Nick, who had never been to Queen’s Norton, had despised it. Orphanage-born Nick had been faithful to his own exiled urban style.

It was after midnight. Quietly, like a thief in the night, she unlocked the front door, and closed it behind her. Her little black cat, Pandora, had heard her, and padded across the stone-flagged hall to greet her with a muted cry, but from her husband Donald there was no sound, for he had gone to bed, as instructed, and would now be sleeping soundly in his separate room.

Had he eaten his supper up, like a good boy? Chrissie eased off her funeral shoes, and made her way in nylon feet along the polished wooden corridor to the kitchen, where she switched on some of its many lighting effects. The daffodil-yellow ceramic tiles glowed at her and the dangling brass-bottomed pans glinted against the marigold paintwork. Pandora rubbed against her legs and purred politely. Chrissie plugged in the kettle. She would make herself a mug of Marmite.

Don had left his dishes in the sink. College-fostered, he feared and distrusted the dishwasher. She loaded them—two plates, a knife, a fork, a wineglass. She looked around for the remains of the pasta, and found them, in a bowl in the refrigerator, neatly covered with cling film. Should she pop them in the microwave, heat them up, eat them? No, she would have them for lunch tomorrow. She was pleased but not surprised to see them so thriftily preserved. She and Don shared many little generational habits. They both disliked waste. Faro would have scraped these ragged grey-white leavings messily into the garbage. Faro seemed to think food grew on trees. Faro threw away loaves of bread. Thrift, jealousy, rage, pain—all seemed to have spared the blessed Faro.

The mushrooms of the Faeroes had sprung from the earth so bravely in their little clumps. The earth hath bubbles, as the water hath, and these are of them.’ Had they, like Macbeth’s witches, made her false promises? In her garden here, at Queen’s Norton, she had a fairy ring. Each autumn a circle of low white puffballs sprouted from the grass, raising their small plushy domes from a surround of trimmed grass and clover and illicit rosettes of daisy and plantain. The gardener mowed them down, and back they came, week after week, year after year. Ten years now she had been married to Donald Sinclair. It did not seem very long. Ten months her marriage to Nick Gaulden had lasted, before the arrival of Faro and of Moira. It had seemed a lifetime.

The purple crocus, the fairy ring. But Nick Gaulden would not come again, would he?

Chrissie sat down, sipped at her hot dark brew of Marmite, stirred it, sipped again.

After many desertions, Chrissie had continued, against the odds, against the evidence, to believe that Nick Gaulden would come again to reclaim her. Long after it was reasonable to expect any such reprieve, she had continued to await his return. Surely he would come for her in the end! Even now, now that he was burnt to ash, she half expected him to tap upon the darkened windowpane. Now, more than ever.

He had haunted her for more than half her life. She had seen his shadow disappear around corners, had heard his voice in crowded rooms, had seen his handwriting on messages in hotel lobbies, in airports, on noticeboards in public places. She knew he had not forgotten her. When she ceased to see his ghost, that would be when he had forgotten her.

He had not been very pleased to hear about her marriage to Donald, or so Faro reported. He seemed to think that Chrissie was doing it expressly to annoy him. Like Bluebeard, he did not like escapers or deserters.

Bessie, in contrast, had been very pleased by her family connection with Sir Donald Sinclair, archaeologist, author, academic, onetime head of college and titled gentleman. Chrissie, in middle age, was no longer as embarrassed by Bessie as she had been when young, but nevertheless she still winced occasionally when she heard Bessie boasting to the Surrey housewives and shopkeepers about her son-in-law and his fine attributes. Donald, being a gentleman, put up with it all very well and, with Chrissie’s encouragement, kept out of her way as much as he could: he still had a room in college, to which he could retreat during Bessie’s Oxfordshire visits.

But there had been bad evenings. As Chrissie brushed her teeth—a task which takes her much longer than it takes her daughter Faro, and which she has to approach with much more delicacy and care—she revisits one of them, and so may we.

An autumn evening, some ten years or so ago, in the eighties, in the first year of Chrissie’s second marriage. A mother-daughter scene. Perhaps it is Bessie’s first visit to Queen’s Norton. Bessie is a widow now, and she and Chrissie are sitting in the Osborne & Little and linen-loose-cover country drawing room pretending to watch the BBC nine o’clock news. (Bessie refuses, in company, to acknowledge the existence of commercial channels, though she has occasionally and inadvertently betrayed her acquaintance with them.) Don is out, at a pub or a club or a dinner, or sitting in his college room, or sitting on the Paddington train. A pleasant wood fire is flickering in the grate. Chrissie thinks it is pleasant, but her mother feigns horror that a daughter of hers should have fallen for such a time-wasting, dirty, polluting and unsatisfactory source of heat. Bessie hates coal and she extends her hatred to logs. Chrissie has given up trying to defend her flames. She likes them, and if she can’t have flames at her age, it’s a pity. She likes to see the dark wood blossom and the deep light glow.

Bessie, on this remembered evening, has reverted to her obsession with the dead Joe’s alleged parsimony. It is an inexhaustible theme. Chrissie fingers the remote control, wondering whether to turn the volume up or down, or whether to let Prime Minister Thatcher and Bessie Barron talk it out with even honours. She lets them both play and tries to listen to neither.

Sometimes Chrissie wonders if Bessie is veering towards senility. Is this endless repetition a sign of dementia? Is this obsession with money a symptom of florid paranoia? But Bessie’s brain is still sharp. She does not repeat herself word for word, and she phrases and rephrases her arguments with some skill, as though she were the barrister of the family, and the late Joe were in the dock. Item: that he never took her on the world cruise that he had promised her. Item: that he had refused to convert the second bathroom into a shower room. Item: that he had bought a rhododendron of a sort she particularly disliked and deliberately planted it in full view of the drawingroom window at Woodlawn. (Can Chrissie be right to recall that it was a rhododendron called Judas Maccabaeus? Surely not?) Item: that at school aged thirteen Joe had missed six weeks pretending to have meningitis, though everybody knew he wasn’t really ill. Item: that for eight years, during the war and after the war, Bessie had hardly been out of an evening, nor had she in the whole of her life owned more than two evening dresses.
(So fucking what?
yells Chrissie’s voice inside her head.
So fucking what? Who wants a fucking evening dress?)
Item: that Bessie had never been out of England until 1954, whereas lucky Joe had been all over Europe with the army. Item: that on their last holiday in Greece the hotel hadn’t provided proper puddings, only fruit, and not very good fruit at that. Item: that Joe had always asked her to endorse her state pension of £68 a month and had paid it direct into her housekeeping bank account without letting her touch it. Item: that he had made her cash her Granny Bonds. Item: that she was expected to survive on half of his pension, whereas if he’d outlived her he’d have got the lot. Was she, as a woman, worth only half a man?