The Peppered Moth (10 page)

Faro Gaulden, at the unnatural clamour of his insistence (for why does
he
care so much?), felt a shiver go through her, as though someone had stepped on her grave. What was it to him? He, like herself, was only a grandchild of Breaseborough. She found Dr Hawthorn unsettling. He had issued a call to arms. She really didn’t much want to respond.

Dora Bawtry, like many of the older folk, had been mildly distressed by the too-present, too-pressing apparition of the skull, too obviously a
memento mori
at her advanced age. She struggled to her feet, reached for her stick, and began to make her slow way back to the ladies’ toilet. ‘Shall I come with you?’ whispered great-niece Faro. ‘I’ll manage,’ grunted Dora ungraciously, as she stumped off.

Faro Gaulden pulled herself together. She sat upright on her wooden chapel chair, pulled in her belly, straightened her shoulders and blinked several times, rapidly. Her eyes, like Dr Hawthorn’s, were large and shining, though much darker in tint than his: his are hazel, whereas hers are a deep, unreal, violet blue. (Could she, others often wondered, be wearing dyed contact lenses?) Faro Gaulden, all glowing O eyes, all round breasts, Faro Gaulden, with purple-painted toes and straining poppers on her bright cyclamen shirt, Faro with indigo-outlined eyes and dark-blue-painted lashes, Faro with curls and bedazzle and golden hoop earrings, all expectation and vigour, in the prime of her middle youth—how did Faro Gaulden get here from there? Why is she sitting in the dusty hall of a dying cult on a fine spring afternoon, instead of being out at play? And how did she get to be called a damn silly name like Faro?

To find the answer, we must track backwards down a winding path. We need not go as far as Cotterhall Man, nicknamed Steve, but we must return to Bessie Bawtry, back in the 1920s. Bessie Bawtry was, you will recall, anxiously waiting for news of her Higher Certificate examination results, and preparing, if they are good enough (as Miss Heald assures her they will be), to go back to school for one further term to sit her Oxford and Cambridge examinations in November. As we rediscover her, in late summer, she has made progress: she has matriculated with distinction (Joint Matriculation Board) in four subjects, and has been awarded a State Scholarship and a County Major Scholarship from the West Riding County Council, which will pay her way through university: £190,
per annum,
will be hers for four years. The school as a whole has done well and the
Breaseborough Times
has written a congratulatory leader, declaring that ‘clever boys and girls abound amongst us, chiefly in the humblest homes’. It has also issued warnings about the overcrowding of the teaching profession and the expensive training that is going to waste as young people fail to find suitable jobs. The Depression looms, even for the newly educated, though not many realize it is on the way. Few of the teachers at Breaseborough are yet much concerned about the unemployment figures (rapidly mounting) of glassworkers and miners, though many of their own pupils are the sons and daughters of glassworkers and miners, and will expect to find work at the pit or the pithead, on the railways, in the bottle factories. The teachers are understandably more concerned with their best products, their sixth-formers, their university candidates, than with the rank and file.

Joe Barron, incidentally, has had an unpleasant surprise. He has unaccountably failed to get a County grant, and his father, pointing at the lazy overqualified youth of Cotterhall (well, at one lazy scapegoat youth of Cotterhall called Ivan Watson, who has done nothing with his Leeds degree but loaf about and play tennis at his father’s expense), Joe’s father, pointing at Ivan, insists that he has no intention of supporting Joe while he goes to university. Joe can go into the family business, like his brother Bennett. Barron Glass needs a travelling salesman. Let Joe get on his bike or into the family van and sell glass.

No such halfway fate is in store or indeed on offer for Bessie. Nor will she be claimed, as will many of her female classmates, by a future of ‘home duties’. For her, it is college or death. Much has already been expected of her, and now yet more is at stake. Her parents, unlike Joe’s, back her. Why? Is it because they are humbler and poorer than Joe’s father, and therefore more trusting? They have faith in the headmaster, Mr Farnsworth, and in the senior mistress, Miss Heald, for they are important people in the town. These two have faith in Bessie, therefore Ellen and Bert have faith in them. If Mr Farnsworth and Miss Heald think Bessie can make it, then she can. Mr Farnsworth and Miss Heald know the ropes. They know all about admissions policies, and grants, and interviews, and examination boards. Mr Farnsworth himself has a Cambridge degree. Leeds and Sheffield and Northam and Bingley are not good enough for Bessie, their prodigy. (They alone know that in the secret national register of marks, ‘never on any account to be seen by the pupil’, Bessie has scored some marks so high that they are almost off the map.) Bessie must go forth like a dove from the ark across the swollen waters. She may come back to visit, to attend reunions, to present prizes on speech days, but forth she must go. Dissatisfaction is slumpily brewing in South Yorkshire, and Bessie must depart.

The strain of all this makes Bessie feel sick. But she cannot resist the pressure. She accepts it, gives in to it. She is taken over by it.

Her parents are a little in awe of their daughter, though they try not to show it. How can they have produced this swan child? Is she a freak, a throwback, a throw-forward? They support her. They might well not have done, but they do. Breaseborough Secondary School has indoctrinated them well.

Nobody has any high expectations of little sister Dora. Dora, of course, is not as clever as Bessie, or so everyone assumes. She has to struggle to keep up at school, and finds Latin and Botany difficult, though she manages a Pass in both, she cannot think how. (She passes with Credit in English, French, Mathematics and Geography, but thinks that too must have been a bit of a mistake—or perhaps everyone gets a Credit?) Dora prefers needlework, and is disappointed not to receive higher praise and higher marks for her collars and buttonholes and garment repairs. When Dora thinks about her future, she thinks she might like to be a dressmaker, like her Ferrybridge aunt or Auntie Florrie in Makin Street, or to run a little corner shop and sell potted meat and jelly babies, like Auntie Clara. Or she might like to marry and have some real babies. She likes babies. She walks a neighbour’s baby round the cemetery on a Sunday afternoon. (Bessie thinks this is mad, and says so.) She also likes to borrow Auntie Florrie’s dog. She likes dogs, and cats, and canaries, and all small pet creatures. She has small, domestic dreams. Dora is at home in Breaseborough. Breaseborough is quite good enough for her, and she often wishes Bessie wouldn’t sneer at it so much. Dora looks up to Bessie, but Bessie does have a way of trying to spoil things for other people. Bessie never says anything nice to Dora, or about her. She shouldn’t expect it, but she can’t help hoping that one day Bessie will praise her for something. For anything. That’s all she asks.

Bessie hardly ever thinks about Dora at all. She had successfully neutralized Dora years ago, as soon as she started to pose any kind of threat, and now her mind is on more serious things. Bessie Bawtry has nightmares about examinations. She will have nightmares about examinations for the rest of her life. She will remember for the rest of her life the questions, the set texts, her answers, her mistakes. The examinations now upon her are the most important ordeal of her life. If she fails now, she fails for ever.

Her granddaughter Faro will not see life in these melodramatic terms. Will she? Things will ease up. For everyone.

Bessie swots and revises. Shakespeare, Browning and Keats. French verbs. Lamartine and Verlaine. General Knowledge. The League of Nations. Universal Suffrage and the Women’s Vote. John Stuart Mill on Liberty, Ruskin on Manufacturing. Miss Heald ponders: perhaps a touch of the moderns? May one admit to reading D. H. Lawrence, Edith Sitwell?

The nightmare of the forced brain trapped in its skullcage. Bessie sits in the corner by the fire at a low little hexagonal wooden glass-topped table, which they call a vitrine: it serves her as desk. There is nowhere to put her legs, but she ignores the discomfort. She is lucky that her parents recognize her need to work, and give her this space. Her brain stitches and stitches, her pen scratches and loops. Outside in the smutty street the children shout and play, but indoors Bessie works for the future. Pleasure deferred, pleasure interrupted. Shall she be initiated? Failure she dreads more than she dares think. At night she dreams she is writing about Browning, she dreams she is translating Virgil.
The Aeneid,
Book IV. Creusa, O Creusa! O hollow, hollow, hollow. Her eyes are hot. She sleeps badly. Her friend Ada has already departed for Saffron Walden, and she writes letters to Bessie about her happy days there, letters full of little jokes and boastings. But she knows and we know that the Saffron Walden life is not good enough for Bessie Bawtry. She must slog on and on. The cave is dark, her eyes are hot and dim, her head aches. Shall she be ill? O, the comfort of illness! Let her lie down again in that large bed, let her sleep there for eight thousand years, let little jellies and broths be brought to her, let her be sealed up for all time behind a large stone, with the grave trophies, the offerings, the Virgil, the French Grammar and
Palgrave’s Golden Treasury
! Let them light a heathen candle by her and let her fail and gutter and die and be forgotten. Let them not come searching for her with their needles and their probes.

But she does not die. She struggles on, supported, encouraged, forced by Miss Heald and Mr Farnsworth. She sits her examinations. She covers the pages with careful and wellshaped scriptings. She answers every question in order. Her pages are carefully named and numbered. Her handwriting is calm and free. She lays down her pen. She breathes deeply and waits. She is summoned for interview. She is interviewed. She will learn she has passed. She will be offered her place in paradise. In Cambridge, where gracious buildings of yellow stone have been built for the eye and the mind’s delight.

Why then does she come home to Breaseborough from her college interview in so subdued a manner? (The return fare had been paid for her by her father, counted out at the station with serious, meticulous care: that fare must be justified.) Why does she sit on the train so rigidly, holding so anxiously on to the handle of her cheap little suitcase? Why does she not return triumphant? Why is she so pale? Is she sickly, is she ailing, has she ‘overdone’ it, is she one of those delicate young women who will justify the current male view that the health of the female is not suited to higher education? Will she become a dangerous statistic in one of Mrs Sidgwick’s sociological surveys? The news that she has won not only a place but also a small college scholarship, quaintly known as an Exhibition, does not seem to revive her as it should. All are proud of her, but she remains anxious and downcast.

There can be nothing to worry about, she has just worked too hard, ‘crammed’ too much, and now she must take things easy, take a little exercise, learn to ride a bicycle, learn to swim. There is a new public swimming bath at Bednerby, which is proving immensely popular with the young people. Bessie must learn to relax.

Bessie hates the fresh air. Bessie hates exercise. Bessie cannot learn to ride a bicycle. Bessie will not learn to swim. And anyway, says Bessie fretfully, what’s the point of telling her to get out and enjoy some fresh air. There
is
no fresh air in Breaseborough.

Bessie mooches and fades. Christmas comes and goes, and Bessie smiles faintly at her college-geared presents from parents, uncles, aunts, Miss Heald. The New Year comes in, the year that will usher Bessie into her own fuller life. Still she cannot sleep quietly. Dreams and riddles haunt her. Formidable escarpments of examinations rise before her, and she cannot believe she has scaled them. Even though she has been accepted in person as well as on the page, still she dreams of those papers, haunted by the blank sheet, the margins, the ruled lines. The unwritten script, the unwritten life, the unanswered question. Begin again, begin again. But you cannot begin again. It is done now. You cannot go back. The gap has opened. You have crossed the boundary and leaped across a widening crevasse. You cannot go back. You are on the far side, for better or for worse.

Dora is puzzled. Dora cannot see why Bessie does not rejoice. Bessie has her exit visa, which is what she has always said she wanted. Why is not Bessie happy now, now that she has only a few months to wait before she takes up her rightful place and enters on her inheritance?

For Bessie, these empty months prove an eternity of selfdoubt. She lives now in Doubting Castle, and she tries to clean it up. Bessie scrubs at the back step in Slotton Road. Bessie disposes of a dead rat that she finds lying in the drain. She picks it up with fire tongs and wraps it in rags and throws it in the dustbin. Bessie takes down the curtains and washes them in the tub and stares at the sooty water. Viciously she mangles them through a heavy wringer and hangs them in the backyard to dry. They sag heavily on the line, and dark smuts descend upon them as they hang. They brush darkly against the dirty wood of the clothes prop. It is impossible to get them clean or to keep them clean.

Her mother Ellen is not wholly pleased to see her clever daughter scrubbing the step. She smells criticism. Ellen is no slut. She does her best. It is the place that is at fault, and Bessie will learn that she cannot conquer place.

Although Bessie had now formally left school, Miss Heald kept in touch with her prodigy. At first she was not too disturbed by her low spirits. It was natural to suffer a reaction. Such moods were common in young people. Once Bessie got to college in October, and found herself among her peers, in young and lively company, then all would be well. Nevertheless, she knew that Bessie was a delicate plant, and she was concerned enough to make suggestions to cheer her and to help fill this dormant phase. She encouraged Bessie to go to the Gilchrist Lectures at the chapel, on ‘Stars and Nebulae’, on ‘Mediterranean Flora’, on ‘The Life Cycle of the Honey Bee’, on ‘Darwin’s Finches’, on the ‘Pessimism of Thomas Hardy’, on ‘The Romans in Ancient Britain’. Bessie stared, in a mixture of horror and boredom, at the reconstructed image of fragments of a bronze diploma awarded to a Roman soldier in A.D.124 to commemorate his discharge after twenty-five years in the service of his Divine Emperor: it had been dug up near Sheffield in A.D.1760, and the original, like most such spoils, had been removed to the British Museum in London. So even the wretched Romans had needed diplomas and certificates and documents to validate them. This soldier had been of the first cohort of the Sunuci; he had been honourably discharged at last, and allowed, at last, his citizenship and one legal marriage (but only one, according to the bowed and barely audible Professor Harding). Twenty-five years was a long haul, thought Bessie, and perhaps that was why she sighed and shivered.