The Peppered Moth (13 page)

Hours later, Joe Barron is still looking for Bessie Bawtry, but he cannot find her. Bessie had come to the party with Miss Heald and Miss Haworth and his brother Phil, but he can’t see Phil either. Have they all gone home? It is after midnight, a late hour in South Yorkshire. He may as well drive back home to Laburnum House in the tradesman’s van in which he’d arrived. He has hidden it way down the drive, outside the gateposts, under a chestnut tree, by the cattle grid. The van has
BARRON & SONS GLASS AND FANCYWARE, TELEPHONE COTTERHALL
225 emblazoned upon it. Not quite a pumpkin, but it would not have done as a conveyance for Bessie Bawtry. After all, nothing but the best is good enough for Bessie.

After the Easter party at Highcross, Bessie Bawtry took to her bed. Her pretext was a bad cold, which developed into a fever. It was less severe and dramatic than the Spanish flu, but it was hot enough to keep her indoors and under covers for weeks. She was not promoted to the best bed this time, but Dora was demoted from the twin room and sent downstairs to sleep with the cats on the couch in the kitchen. Bessie’s mother blamed the festivity and the folly of stepping out at night in a thin dress. It was no wonder that Bessie was ill. It served her right for trying to have fun. Mutely, grudgingly, Ellen Bawtry carried jugs of lemon barley water and bowls of soup up the stairs to Bessie. Mutely, grudgingly, Bessie accepted them, and delicately she sipped. She could not eat. She refused to get better. She lay in bed, with an air of listless indifference, reading until her head ached and her eyes were sore. She began to lose weight, and her mother began to worry about her. Ellen’s attentions became less grudging. Dr Marr was called in, diagnosed ‘nervous prostration’, prescribed tonics.

Bessie’s father too became anxious. His little girl was fading and he didn’t like it. He tried to entertain her, bringing to her bedside the new wireless set he’d bought for them all last Christmas. He sat by her, breathing heavily and fiddling with the knobs. Her father understood the wireless: he had taken instruction from Mr Ogilvy, B.Sc., from whom he had bought the set, and had assembled it himself on the kitchen table. He was now more expert than his mentor at coaxing sounds from the brown box. Home Service talks, dance tunes, classical music, weather forecasts. Bessie listened patiently. She preferred reading, but she acknowledged the submission with which her father bowed to divert her. He sat on Dora’s bed, tapping his big broad feet in time to the incongruous beat of ragtime.

‘That’s good, Bess, isn’t it?’ he would say hopefully. ‘It’s a good clear signal, isn’t it?’

Bessie didn’t like ragtime, but she managed to smile to please her father.

Sister Dora ran errands and delivered messages, as she had before. She brought library books, writing paper, throat sweets. She hung around, waiting for a kind word, for thanks, for recognition. Gratitude would come in the end, she was almost sure. Bessie accepted Dora’s attentions as though they were her due. Dora was lucky to be allowed to wait upon her big sister.

Bessie was depressed. She was sinking. Her body felt limp. Her mind felt limp, yet at the same time curiously overactive, with a detached hot invisible motion of its own, as though it were not really she herself who lay there. It was not Bessie Bawtry, late of Breaseborough Secondary and recently accepted at university, who lay there, in this small bedroom, in this small corner house. It was some simulacrum, some chrysalis, some meaningless waxy body container, in which a new form of life was trying to hatch. Poor Bessie, we have been too hard on her. Our tone has been harsh and pitiless. It is the tone she taught us, it is true, but we must try to unlearn it, we must try to see her as she was, suffering, longing, vulnerable, unformed. How is she to know how to manage these hot flushes of grief, these night sweats and terrors, these humiliations and tribulations? She reads for solace, for enlightenment, for escape, for a sight of the next rung upwards on the ladder, for the next gleam of light ahead that might lead her from the prison of her cavemind. Books have hitherto been her friends and allies, and she had harnessed them to her will, but now they too begin to threaten and oppress her, to show her darknesses too horrid and lights too blinding. They no longer befriend, they mock. She saw through and rejected the Bible long ago, for she has seen that there is no God: God is a stone at the mouth of the tomb. But those other books, books that had seemed to lead her out into the bright air from the darkness of soot and gravecloths, they now confuse and alarm her. How can she cope with this rich world of words and language and light? She is a weak little grub. How could she have thought she could ever take part in the butterfly display of the educated world?

She lay still, in turmoil. A seething, a pregnant brewing, a splitting, a proliferation of particles. Is it a sickness, is it a fermentation, is it a couching, and what will it bring forth? Is it a growing or a dying?

Miss Heald was told of her protegee’s sickness, and came round, bearing books. Mrs Bawtry eyed her daughter’s visitor with respect and distrust. She blamed her for this malady, for was it not Miss Heald who had procured the invitation to Highcross? Was it not Miss Heald who had overtaxed her daughter’s mind? Books were the last thing Bessie needed. Books breed maggots in the brain.

Miss Heald, adding her own small but influential impetus to the nationwide process of cultural diffusion, brought a volume of plays by Bernard Shaw, Lawrence’s
The White Peacock,
Hardy’s
The Woodlanders
and some little poetry magazines. She brought T. S. Eliot, whose
Waste Land
she had now read: she recommended Bessie to try ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, flattering her by telling her she was probably the only young woman in South Yorkshire who would understand it. She told Bessie that she herself was preparing a paper to deliver to the Literary Institute in which she hoped to compare the dramatic monologues of Browning and Eliot. She brought the poems of Edith Sitwell which had, like so much, been drawn to her attention first by Gertrude Wadsworth. Gertrude knew Edith Sitwell personally. The Sitwell family, for reasons of geographical proximity, had something of a reputation in Breaseborough, though not, it must be said, a very happy reputation. They were, naturally, despised in their own land. Too much coal dust had settled in the lake at Renishaw for the Sitwells to be regarded with favour or admiration. Their eccentricities were relayed round the neighbourhood, and mocked. But they were noticed. And Gertrude Wadsworth, who knew and liked Edith, was loyal to Edith, and therefore Sylvia Heald was loyal to Edith, and tried to pass on her loyalty to Bessie Bawtry. Loyalty fought with class hatred in Bessie, and it was not yet clear which would win.

Gertrude Wadsworth had once merrily described herself as ‘a poor man’s Edith Sitwell’—identifying with the plainness, the oddness, the lack of conventional sexual charm. ‘I wish I could write,’ Miss Wadsworth often declared. ‘Or paint. Or do
anything
.’ And then she would laugh her jolly girl’s laugh.

Gertrude Wadsworth, only daughter of a rich mean man, was, in point of fact, a great deal richer than Edith Sitwell, who at this time lived in a shabby flat up four flights of stairs in Bayswater, pouring tea from a cracked brown teapot, and offering her guests iced penny buns. Gertrude Wadsworth lived in a pretty house in Knightsbridge, and could have afforded a staff of chauffeurs, cooks and lady’s maids, had she been able to endure the close physical proximity and deference of her own species.

None of this was known to Bessie Bawtry, who rose to Miss Heald’s barbed bait as she lay sickly in her bed. Her saucer eyes were painfully hooked by Sitwell and Eliot, by Eliot and Sitwell, by Prufrock and
Façade.
They swam with effort. But no, she was too ill. She closed the pages, closed her eyes.

At night, in the ice-cool metallic spring darkness, as she tried to sleep, she was besieged by temptations. To quiet, surrender, brain fever, despair. Yet something in her was also gestating. If she stayed alive, if she crawled out and kept her appointment with her destiny, she would undergo a metamorphosis. If she stayed here, she and all of her line would rot.

Images of Highcross House and the large threatening figure of Miss Wadsworth swam into her nighttime dreaming. She had been able to make no sense of that evening, of that building, of that woman. It had all been shapeless, noisy, confusing.
Three o’clock in the morning.
The hit tune goes round and round unwanted in her head. Bessie lived again and again through those moments of humiliation—the endless drive leading onwards and upwards, the snarling stone monsters on the gateposts warning her to keep out, the threatening merriment of the lighted threshold, the house too large for the eye to control, the candles, the flowers, the heavy silver, the maid who snatched her coat and left her naked, the drooping and dipping of her hem, the swooping of towering Miss Wadsworth, her shame at the wrong thing said, her helplessness with Freddie Farley, her rejection by those two smart-set shiners, her retreat, her hiding, her crumpled abiding, her cowardice, her smarting eyes, her stinging red nose: and afterwards, looping backwards through the torments of memory, she goes back in the nightwatch to that December visit to Cambridge for her interview, where instead of a kindly welcome she had found humiliation, grief, rawness, her very skin aflame with tenderness, her clothes exposed, her accent exposed, amidst all those confident southern girls from boarding schools, and Miss Strachey, the principal, examining her across her large desk as though she were a discarded morsel, and addressing her, with insulting condescension:
So you have a County Scholarship to support you, I see?
The tone burns. And petted Bessie, who had been so proud of that scholarship, saw it held up for inspection as though it were a damp kitchen rag, a servant’s dishcloth, instead of a laurel wreath. Austere Miss Strachey, shapeless and sexless Miss Wadsworth, they had undone her.
I’m pretty, I’m clever, I’m pretty,
whispered Bessie to herself at three in the morning.
I’m eighteen years old, and I have an eighteen-inch waist, and yellow hair, and blue eyes. I’m pretty, I’m clever, I can read
The Waste Land, T
he Waist Land, I’m not plain Jane as tall as a crane. I’m petite and I’m pretty, I’m not like Dora, dumb dull dim Dora, stick-in-the-mud Dora. I can escape, I can escape, I can escape.

But Miss Wadsworth and Miss Strachey, two vast grotesque affronted figures, rose before her like angry angels to bar the way. Downstairs, uncomplaining Dora slept heavily on the lumpy horsehair couch.

Joe Barron came to see Bessie, bearing gifts. He, like Miss Heald, felt implicated in her illness. He had failed to find her at the Highcross party. He had looked for her, but he had not looked very hard. He had assumed she had found her way through the social maze, and he had forgotten about her, and enjoyed himself. He had danced with an outrageous young woman from London, and flirted with her, and talked nonsense with her, as though he were another kind of person altogether. He had enjoyed himself. Then he had driven home alone, in the Fancy Glass van. And he had been happy, driving back through the night. He always liked driving through darkness. A badger had slowly crossed the road in the light of his headlights. He had been pleased to see its old-man’s gait. And since the party, he had stepped out once or twice with his old friend Alice Vestrey. They had been to the cinema in Rotherham. In the summer they had played tennis together, mixed doubles with Phil and Rowena. Now they were keen on swimming at Bednerby Pool. Alice was taking diving lessons. Alice was a sport.

There was nothing wrong in all of this, for his friendship with Bessie was only a friendship. She could not expect anything more from him. They were too young and too untried to have an understanding. He had kissed her once when he was playing Lysander to her Hermia—indeed he had kissed her several times, and perhaps more warmly than the performance had demanded. But that was in play, not for real. And Bessie was on her way to Cambridge, which seemed to him still a distant goal. She was outstripping him and leaving him behind. Soon she would be a woman of the world, where she would meet other suitors, other admirers, he assured her, while he would remain a poor perpetual provincial, for ever left behind. (Into his mind fluttered, as he spoke, the memory of that outrageous young woman from London, with her fast talk and her beaded skirt.)

Bessie laughed uneasily at this. She knew that Joe could tell she was afraid. He watched her with tenderness and not a little anxiety as she unwrapped his offering of a nice little leather-bound edition of Keats’s sonnets which he had picked up on his travels in a second-hand bookshop in Doncaster. ‘For Bessie, Bright Star, from Joe’, he had inscribed it.

Bessie, sitting up in her bedjacket of lacy cream wool, thanked him for the Keats, and said she would treasure it. She said she hoped her health would be good enough to let her go to Cambridge. She gazed at him earnestly from innocent eyes.

‘Of course it will,’ said Joe with conviction. ‘Anyway, it’s just got to be. You can’t waste a big chance like that. I’d give my eyeteeth to get into Cambridge. If I’ve got any eyeteeth. What
are
eyeteeth?’

And so they chatted, pleasantly, whimsically, with only the mildest edge of flirtation, as Joe attempted to rally her spirits and reinforce her image of herself as a successful person, as he tried to weaken her clinging to weakness. Joe Barron was an observant and generous young man, and he could sense in Bessie a yearning towards inertia, failure, self-pity, collapse. She needed careful nurture. Would she, with strength, with support, grow straight and strong? He was sure she would. He cajoled, he flattered, he encouraged. She could get up and walk, if she chose.

It was kind of Joe Barron to take such trouble to encourage Bessie to be brave about her future, for his own future at this time was opaque. His father continued to refuse to contemplate financing any more education, and expected him, it seemed, to spend the rest of his life in the family business. It was not an appealing prospect. Joe Barron was ambitious, and hoped for more from life. Joe Barron’s life as a travelling salesman made him ache with boredom. He was easily bored. He could not take any interest in glass or Bakelite. But it was hard to know where to turn. His mother sympathized with his aspirations, and maybe she would wear his father down in time. But how much time was there? How late could one wait to apply for a university place? Joe Barron did not know how the system worked. He had stumbled and missed a step, and could not see where the road should lead next. Maybe this was all there was. The road to nowhere.