The Peppered Moth (44 page)

Faro is vital, but Seb is guttering. Will it help if she tidies up? She busies herself. She cannot bring herself to sit down near him again. She knows that Sebastian can smell Steve Nieman on her. Seb will do his best to keep her from Steve Nieman. Seb is contagious: he will infect the spirit, if not the flesh. Seb’s flat smells of sour milk. She pours herself another glass of wine, and stays on her feet, wiping, officiously rearranging, scraping at long-dried stains on the draining board, rinsing out the greenish deposit from a couple of dirty glass milk bottles. Her energy surges in little leaps through her body as she fights back against the scum and the silt. Seb has sunk into entropy. He is growing old and cold before her eyes.

‘Have another glass?’ says Faro, with a merry intonation. Her voice sounds almost convincing. Seb does not answer, but Faro has been cheered by the loud sound of her own self: she fills his glass anyway, places it by his side, puts the bottle on the floor with its fellow empties. She starts to sing as she rinses out the slimy J-Cloth. ‘There’s
you
and
me
and the bottle makes
three
tonight,’ sings Faro, in her pleasing light contralto. Can it really be only a week or two since she first had her DNA tested, and swapped stories with Peter Cudworth from Iowa? Why, a week is a lifetime. For all she knows, her mitochondrial DNA may even now be unfolding wonders of cultured mortality in its Oxford test tube. What is time? We merely borrow from it. We are leasehold. Faro’s spirits rise, she is restored, she can do it, and she will. All shall not perish.

She bounds across the room, and flings herself down upon the couch by Sebastian Jones. The springs move and rattle under her weight. She bounces up and down, deliberately, like a child. Then she seizes Seb’s inert cold fist.

‘Hey, come on, Seb,’ she says, as she lifts his hand to her mouth, and kisses its tight clenched fingers. ‘Come on, Seb, I’m not descending anywhere with anyone. You come back up here to me.’

Thus far Faro pledged herself, as she bent on him the dark lustre of her great eyes, as she stared at him with her hypnotic power. And Seb stirred slightly under her challenging gaze, and smiled a small dry smile from his sunken features, and uncurled his fingers, and grasped at hers.

So Faro Gaulden undertakes her journey to the underworld, willing to descend at least ankle-deep with Sebastian into the waiting trench. She is sure that she will clamber out again. Seb may not, but she will.

Over the next month, she rallies her troops. She enlists her friends, and she has many. But she is depressingly aware of the limitations of her thirty-something circle of unmarrieds. OK, they are kind-hearted, and they are free to drop in on Seb, to have a chat, to share a takeaway, to watch a video, to provide company. But they have no weight and no
gravitas.
They do not have homes fit to die in. Only the married friends have homes, and they are married because they have babies, and therefore they have no spare free time or free bedrooms. Their rooms are for serious living, not for dying. The shallow roots of Faro’s bachelor London existence are exposed. She has done her best to make herself a life, but it is thin stuff, thin stuff.

Meanwhile, her new suitor Steve Nieman is besieging her with messages from Cotterhall. She does not tell him the full story of her deadly engagement with Sebastian Jones, but he senses it. He implores her to come up to see him again soon, as she had promised. He is building her a little gazebo of cedar wood and living willow at the end of the Wild Nature Park. He woos her on the phone, he writes her letters on real paper, he sends her postcards and peppers her with e-mail. His manner is as attractive as Seb’s is repulsive. Who would not, of these two, choose Steve Nieman? There is no contest. They are the dark and the light. Hyperion to a satyr. Yet she finds she has not got it in her to abandon Sebastian. She is torn in two. Steve is persistent, but so is Seb. They both persist. She is tied to a stake between them. Seb plucks and gnaws. Steve threatens to come and rescue her and carry her away, but she forestalls him. They must weather it out, she cannot run away. Maybe Seb will get so ill he will have to go home to his mother. Maybe he will be interned in University College Hospital. Faro finds herself wishing he would get worse quickly, but he seems to hang on. It is bad to find oneself wishing worse health on a sick man.

Sebastian is full of strange fancies these days. They are his death row privilege. Is his medication making his mind wander? His fantasies attach themselves firmly to Faro. He thinks she ought to have a baby—not his, of course, for he is past that kind of thing—but somebody’s. She ought to perpetuate herself. She owes her genes to posterity. He talks about this a great deal. This is a clear case of immortality-and-survival-projection, and Faro blames herself for having interested him in the subject of genes in the first place. Who cares if her mitochondrial DNA perishes? She certainly doesn’t, and it’s no business of Sebastian Jones.

His interest in reincarnation is more fantastic, and more far-fetched. He has become obsessed by the mummy portraits of ancient Egypt, and has tried to persuade Faro that she is the reincarnation of an unidentified Graeco-Roman Egyptian woman of the second century A.D., buried at Hawara and recovered by Flinders Petrie. Faro would like to tell him bluntly that he is raving, but now that he has pitched his tent in the fields of death she has to listen solemnly to any old rubbish he chooses to bore her with. That’s how it is with believers. Patiently, she listens. She consents to turn over with him the pages of the illustrated catalogue of the British Museum exhibition of
Ancient Faces
that had first awakened this morbid interest. And it is true that they do speak across time. These young men and young women had been the contemporaries of Hadrian and of Marcus Aurelius, and yet they smile and speak. There is language in their eyes, their lips, their necks, their noses. Confidently they insist on resurrection, with the full polychrome glow of the fully human. They wait for the morning. They have never died.

Faro points out to Seb that her resemblance to any of these figures, even to the one that Seb has appointed as her soul twin and her foreshadowing, is only superficial. She grants that some of these Graeco-Roman Egyptians have their hair cut in a manner identical to the style intermittently imposed on Faro Gaulden by Carla at Crimpers: short, cut close to the head, black, tight and curly. Some of these fortunate dead beauties sport upon their brows a charming
bandeau
of small corkscrew or snail ringlets, such as Faro has always desired but never quite achieved. It is true also that some of these women display golden hoop earrings that echo precisely the design that she herself favours. And there is some similarity, she grants, in the general face-shape—a roundness, a fullness, an insistence on rings and globes and arches. These are not angular Cubist faces, she agrees. And she would like to think that she herself could smile through eternity with the enchantingly bold and wayward smile of her soul twin. But surely her mouth is not as wide, nor her nose so long?

Seb will have none of these doubts. It is the eyes. Look in the eyes, he says.

The eyes are dark lakes, lit with lustre. They stare and stare. It is nothing, says Faro. It is a trick of craft. It is art. These are not people, these are not even portraits of people. These are artefacts. They are works of art.

That is no answer, says Seb, as he stares into the liquid darkness. And, in a way, he is right.

Seb is mesmerized by the very language of these images. ‘Portrait of a young woman in encaustic on limewood, with added stucco and gold leaf.’ ‘Portrait of a woman in encaustic on fir, with added gilding.’ ‘Portrait of a woman in tempera on a linen shroud.’ The lively riches of encaustic favour the living flesh of Faro, Seb insists. Tempera is too pale and thin for her. ‘The flesh is warmly tinted in tones of cream, apricot and rose pink with an ochre-green shadow by the nose,’ intones Seb. Is not that pure poetry?

Seb suggests that in time the dead will be made to live again. Cloning will bring back the dead. He has been reading and writing too many horror stories, and his science is hopeless, says Faro. But, of course, he has a point. Even now, pigs are growing transplant organs for us, and Dr Hawthorn is busy with his swabs.

Faro, while all this is going on, tries to think of Steve Nieman and the butterflies. London is full of gloom and anger. Faro finds herself irresistibly attracted to the lodestone of the north. Something is calling her, and perhaps it is not only Steve Nieman, though she finds herself looking back to their picnic on the limestone outcrop as to a lost golden age of radiant light. When she cannot sleep, she summons up Steve Nieman and the grizzled skipper and the swooping swallows. She searches the papers and the Internet for news of Cotterhall and Breaseborough. There is not much. Breaseborough has its own Knowhere Guide on the Internet, constructed by rueful and self-deprecating cynics. It declares that whereas Breaseborough once had three cinemas, it now has none, and that it has no ten-pin bowling, no McDonald’s, no Kentucky Fried Chicken—you name it, Breaseborough hasn’t got it. There’s a weekend disco at the Wardale Arms, and dodgy beer, karaoke and big-screen sports at the Glassblowers. The Full Inhalers will appear on Friday at the Prince of Wales, entrance free. Local crap like line dancing available at the Ferryboat, plus a barmaid with a see-through blouse who has caused the death by heart attack of three local lechers. The food highlight is Doug’s Hot Hit Snax,
E. coli
guaranteed.

Somebody has written in to suggest that the best thing to do with Breaseborough is to blow it up and begin again. (Nothing changes: Faro remembers Grandma Barron saying exactly the same thing on several occasions.) Another wag has responded, more passionately, ‘Why not blow up the human race and begin again with a silicon base?’

It seems that Auntie Dora, up in Breaseborough, is not too well. This doesn’t matter so much, because Auntie Dora is pretty old, and what can one expect, but it’s sad, just the same. Faro is fond of Auntie Dora.

The grizzled skipper, according to the butterfly page on the net, feeds upon wild strawberries.

While Faro has been worrying about the ill health of Sebastian Jones, Chrissie has been worrying about the ill health of her Auntie Dora. Dora, so recently and reassuringly reported by Faro at the Cudworth Reunion to have been in reasonably good spirits, has been sounding very miserable on the telephone. Of course, she complains more to ageing Chrissie than she complains to young Faro, because she feels she has a right to do so, but, even so, Chrissie suspects she really may be deteriorating. Her legs are not good, Dora says, and she is finding the stairs difficult. Her strength is ebbing and her natural stoicism is beginning to falter. Chrissie is not sure what to do—she is, as usual, very busy, what with one thing and another, and moreover in October she has to go to Australia with Donald for ten days to an archaeological conference. When she gets back, she promises herself, she will pay a brief November visit to Dora, and reassure her that she will be expected, as usual, for Christmas at Queen’s Norton. Maybe she can persuade Faro to go up with her to Breaseborough to keep her company. Surely Dora can hang on that long? The prospect of Christmas always cheers Dora, though it mildly depresses Chrissie. It doesn’t depress her as much as it did when Bessie was alive, and she’s happy to have Dora to stay. But surely it’s enough to do Christmas?

Chrissie is also acutely aware that the first anniversary of Nick Gaulden’s death approaches, and that it is going to be disturbing both to herself and to Faro. She dreams about Nick constantly, and suspects that Faro does so too. So she has arranged for Faro to come to Queen’s Norton for that weekend, so that they can be together. The date falls on a Sunday. Chrissie and Don get back from Sydney on the Friday. They can tell Faro their traveller’s tales, and speak or not speak of Nick as they choose. It will be a comfort to have Faro there. Faro seems to have been having trouble with yet another unsuitable boyfriend. Chrissie wants to hear all about it.

On the eve of Chrissie and Don’s flight to the other side of the globe, Dora rings, and says she is feeling really awful. Her legs are all swollen, and she hadn’t been able to shut her bedroom window, and the rain had rained in on her bed, and she’d got all wet during the night. She’d caught a cold. She was miserable. She felt ill. She’d had an aspirin, but she still felt ill.

Chrissie feels guilty for suspecting that Dora is saying all this because she knows Chrissie is about to fly off to Australia. She prevaricates, says she’ll be home soon, and urges Dora to see her doctor. Dora says she’s too ill to go out. Then get the doctor to come to see you, says Chrissie. Oh, they won’t do that anymore, says Dora. They will if you’re really ill, says Chrissie firmly. Dora says that she will ring her doctor in the morning, if she doesn’t feel better. Dora, unlike her late sister Bessie, hates seeing the doctor. Nor is she a hypochondriac.

So perhaps, thinks Chrissie, five miles up in the sky over Dubai, there is something new wrong. She sighs, heavily, and toys with her executive-class minimeal. Maybe she should have cancelled her trip and gone up north instead? But all the plans had been made so long ago, and the tickets were so expensive, and the visas so tiresome to obtain, and Don would be disappointed, and so, to be honest, would Chrissie, who has never been to the Antipodes. Sydney Harbour is said to be one of the wonders of the world. Joe Barron had spoken of it with much admiration. He had enjoyed his visit to see his sister Ivy.

Don has been to Australia several times, but he too is looking forward to the trip. He is giving a paper on the new cave findings on Malta, entitled ‘The Vulva, the Bird and the Chevron’. The conference has a feminist slant, and although there will no doubt be some fierce separatist hard-line women there, with extreme views on the essential placidity of the early paleolithic matriarchies, there will also be some interesting discussion. And Don will be made welcome by most, for his writings on the pre-Eleusinian mysteries have been famously well received by men and women alike. In fact, Don is an independent proto-feminist. Some women may shout at him, but most will be glad of his scholarly interest and support. And anyway, Don can look after himself. He doesn’t notice when people shout at him. Or he pretends not to notice, which comes to the same thing. It’s pretty odd of me to have ended up with an archaeologist, thinks. Chrissie, but then, you just can’t get away from your own past, can you?