The Peppered Moth (20 page)

Faro did not hear him. She was melting and glittering and glowing with violet electric light, in her heliotrope dress, as she turned towards an invisible subterranean sun.

‘They called me Faro after the Faeroe Islands!’ she suddenly cried. ‘Can you imagine the stupidity, the mockery! How dared they? They said I was conceived on the Faeroes! The Dry Islands! Puffins and whale blubber! What a joke!’

Peter Cudworth murmured that Faro seemed quite a nice name to him. How did she spell it? When she’d first introduced herself he’d seen it more as an Egyptian sort of Pharaoh, but he must have got that wrong?

‘It’s all very well for you,’ said Faro. ‘You’re called a nice sensible name. Peter’s a good name, a good rocklike name.
My whole life
said Faro loudly and earnestly, ‘has been ruined by my name. And they didn’t even spell it right. They spelt it like some damn stupid tourist airport in Portugal. F-A-R-O, that’s how I spell it. They said it looked nicer like that on the birth certificate. I ask you. Who wants to be called after an airport?’

The barman coughed, and ostentatiously wiped the bar once more. The clock struck one.

Faro and Peter made their way to their respective beds. They shook hands in the featureless corridor, and Faro said she was sorry if she’d gone on a bit about her dad. It had all been a bit upsetting. And it had been a long day, hadn’t it? Peter said it had been a real pleasure to meet her, he’d enjoyed talking to her. And so, politely, subdued, they parted.

Faro, in the safety of her bedroom, poured herself a glass of carbonated water from the minibar and sat down on her bed. Her mind was curdling and churning as violently clashing images washed around in it. Was it her mind, was it her spirit, was it her soul, or was it merely a processing machine? What was it that contained these pictures, these memories? Would the vessel burst and break? Sometimes she thought she could not stand it anymore. Talking about her father had set in motion the terrible turbulence which was always waiting to engulf her and sweep her away. Was it from him that it came?

She sees Auntie Dora’s little house, that grim warm ark stranded on the shelf of time. She sees Golders Green Cemetery, and her father’s many mourners. She sees her mother, hard-faced, proud, stoic, ceremonially dressed in melodramatic black. She sees her grandfather, a sweet and patient man, and her grandmother, a scolding shrew. She sees her Gaulden grandparents, washed up back in the 1930s on the Finchley Road, and hanging on there through her sixties childhood. She tries not to see her father, Nick Gaulden, but he is there, unbidden. He is everywhere. He will not lie quietly.

Faro had loved her father. Her father had been much loved, and he himself had loved many. He had been a Don Juan, a seducer. First, he had seduced her mother, and ruined her life for ever. (That is not how Faro’s mother sees it, but it is how Faro, in this stage of her life, chooses to see it.) Then he had moved on, and loved and ruined others. Faro had suffered a disturbed childhood, reared in a succession of households of grossly unorthodox complexity
—ménages à trois, à quatres, à six,
households without a single responsible adult apart from her nobly enduring mother, households where no meals appeared on time. There had been quiet flats where Faro and her mother were alone, and noisy houses where they had taken in battered refugees from Nick Gaulden’s other passions. Nick Gaulden, unlike Don Juan, had found it hard to abandon his mistresses. He had let them pile up behind him and around him, in heaps of twisted wreckage, smouldering, impacted. As though he feared to be left alone on a dark night. As though he feared to lose them all.

In her turbulent childhood, Faro had oscillated from extreme to extreme, from happiness to despair, from neglect and alcoholic excesses to gleams of joy and elation. Had it been heroic, squalid, creative, experimental, desperate, or all these things? Had her history been a blueprint for a future of the extended family, or an unrelieved, irredeemable mess? She had tried to hate her father, but had failed. Her mother had tried to hate her father, and seemed to have succeeded, for her mother had survived, had made sense of her life, had prospered. But what had been the price of that survival? Faro’s mother Chrissie has paid too high a price. You can tell that from the sharp set of her lips, from the wrinkles round her eyes, from the sharp edge of her tongue.

Faro cannot reconcile herself to her father’s death, or to his life. She bleeds inwardly for her mother, to whom she has been too close, too close, for her poor mother who has turned cold and stiff. Her mother, a grim and sensible woman, a Yorkshire woman of Yorkshire grit. Chrissie had put the Gaulden wreckage behind her, had against heavy odds made herself a career, had in the end remarried. But Faro knew her mother, and knew that her mother had a broken heart.

Sitting on her bed, drinking fizzy water fortified with the dregs of JFK—well, why save it, better to empty the bottle—Faro recalls that long-ago evening when her mother Chrissie had tried to cheer up her little girl by telling her about the Faeroe Islands. Her father had gone upstairs to visit his second (or was it perhaps by then his third?) family, and Faro had seemed so peaky and sad and bereft downstairs in the Chief Wife’s apartment. And Chrissie, perhaps unwisely, had assured Faro that not all had always been sadness and deprivation and humiliation and fear. There had been happier times in earlier days, out there, at the top of the world, out on a rock in the middle of the Atlantic, with the white sailing clouds above and the grassy turf below, and the westward view to Ultima Thule, where the great whales sailed. And Chrissie and Nick Gaulden had been happy there, promised Chrissie. They had eaten the dark meat of fish-flavoured puffin, and the Camembert-ripe flesh of rotted shark, and little white fresh mushrooms that sprang like manna from the hilltops. They had watched the little fawn and golden Faeroe ponies graze. They had loved one another, and all had been well for a while. Not all of life had been broken crockery and bruises and bailiffs.

‘And he has always adored you,’ said Chrissie Gaulden, as she pegged patiently away at a scarlet bedside rug made of precut Anchor wool. ‘He adored you from the moment he saw you. He loved babies.’

‘He
still
loves babies,’ the young Faro had said, as the wailing of the youngest Gaulden bastard drifted down the uncarpeted wooden stairs. And both women had laughed, the comradely laughter of women on their own.

Ah well, thinks Faro, as she polishes off the contents of her beaker, perhaps it really hasn’t been too bad. She yawns, vigorously. All those conglomerations of people, all those Barrons and Bawtrys, all those Goldsteins and Goldbergs and Gauldens, back in the bombed waste land of Europe. Jews, Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Gypsies—God knows what. God and Dr Hawthorn. And she was the end-product. A miracle, really.

She hadn’t meant it when she’d told Peter Cudworth that she hated her own name. In fact, most of the time, she loved it. Faro was a good name, an original name, and it had served her well at her London comprehensive school. It amused, it was memorable, and now it made a good journalist’s byline. It was a lucky name, taken not only from the isles of the north and a Portuguese resort, but also from a Regency card game. It designated Faro herself as a winner in luck’s lottery. And Gaulden was a good name too. Nick’s parents had done well so wittily to anglicize whatever it had once been. Nick said they’d stolen the name from a manor house in Somerset, but she’d never bothered to check. If so, good on them. Oh yes, it was all OK really. She forgave them all. And, in a mood of forgiveness, she went into the bathroom, brushed her teeth rather forcefully and clumsily, slapped some moisturizer on her moist and resilient skin, and flopped into bed. She was too tired to have a bath, and it was too late, and anyway the pole from the shower curtain was still lying in the tub. She’d fix it in the morning. She lay down, and fell instantly asleep.

She fell instantly asleep, as was her way, and, as was her way, she woke at three in the morning consumed and feverish with panic, terror and remorse. What could she have been thinking of the night before, to have told her life story to a stranger? She was always telling secrets to strangers. A couple of drinks, and she couldn’t keep her mouth shut. Why did she do it? What did Peter Cudworth care that her father was dead? There were so many dead. Dead without hope, dead without purpose, dead without reprieve. Living without hope, dying without hope, dying young, dying in caves, dying of selfinflicted wounds, dying from axe blows to the head, dying of the drink, dying in death camps, dying of history, dying reluctant, dying angry. All, all, dragged to death as at the horse’s tail? What was the point of all the dead? Faro moaned and rocked and put the pillow over her head for comfort. She was going mad. For comfort she bashed her head back and forth under the pillow. Was redemption waiting, now, on the horizon, for the human race? Was death at last to die? Yes, so they claimed. Immortal life was within reach. Cloning, genetic engineering, spare-part surgery, xenografts, then immortality. Nobody shall die needlessly. All shall be saved, and all manner of people shall be saved. Man, at last, has conquered and outwitted death. It’s taken a long time, but he’s done it.

But what, howled Faro, silently, uselessly, into the synthetic foam of her motel pillow, what of the dead themselves? What of the
already dead
? Shall there be a resurrection for them? Shall there be a Harrowing of Hell? Shall they be redeemed, all of them? What of the virtuous heathen? What of those born before the genome? What of those who never had a moment’s happiness? What about the forgotten bits of prehistory? All the hominid mandibles, all the forelimbs and hindlimbs, all the fossils and partial face and cranial fragments of the past? They had suffered pain. Shall Cotterhall Man be redeemed of his pain?

Steve the skeleton lay very quietly through the night in his air-conditioned temperature-controlled casket. His neighbours were Egyptians, a few millennia younger, better preserved, and of a better social class. Whatever they had endured in life was long over. It could never be revived. Not even Dr Hawthorn could reach it with his swab or his needle. Or could he? Is there to be a new hell? And if so, who will come to harrow it?

Faro Gaulden woke the following morning with a bounce and without a trace of hangover or fatigue. This capacity for instant recovery might be seen, perhaps, as one of the more dangerous legacies of her alcoholic father. But one could take a more optimistic view. She was young, she was in excellent health, and she had access yet to hope. She uncrumpled and unfurled herself like a revived flower. Her sap rose quickly. She ran her fingers through her glossy black hair, and it stood on end round her head in a faro-halo like the stiff fronds of a chrysanthemum. She conquered the shower rail, thrusting it back into its bracket amidst a scattering of falling plaster, and bathed in a lavish green gel that fought with and overpowered the pinkish sickly odour of synthetic fruits. She towelled herself energetically with the large white bath sheet, then tackled the coffee equipment. The brew basket and the thermal platter and the reinforced decanter held no terrors for Faro, although she’d never seen anything quite like them in all her travels: she tore with her fluoride-strong white teeth at the impenetrable vacuum sachet of ground Colombian, stoked up what she took to be the machine’s engine, and got it all bubbling in no time. Its red eye blinked, its steel tubes hissed, its hot brown liquid spurted forth at her command. She drank it down, dressed, signed her bill, marched out, leaped into her car, remembered she had forgotten to get the car-park barrier combination exit pin number from the reception desk, parked at the barrier while she went back for it, was hooted at angrily by various early-morning travelling salesmen, waved at them cheerily as though responding to admiring salutations, and was on her way.

What was her way? Back to London, back down the Ml, and back to work. But beyond that, whither? Who cared? She fiddled with her car radio, looking for the beat. She found it, and turned up the volume. A good, clear signal. Knowing her luck, she bet she’d find she’d won those tickets to the Rialto to see the Bother Boys. She put her foot down, and the car in front of her gave way in terror. She put her dark glasses on, and sang along in the fast lane.

Peter Cudworth, rising at eight thirty, looked in the breakfast room for his cousin Faro, but could not see her. Nor was she visible in the foyer, nor waiting in line for the cashier. She was nowhere to be seen. In bed still, he supposed, sleeping it off. He loitered, regretful. He would have liked to say goodbye. But there was no sign or sense of her. As he paid his bill, he asked, boldly, for Miss Faro Gaulden, and got what his Yorkshire kin would have called a funny look. He was told that Miss Gaulden had left an hour ago. This reply made him feel old, and he made his way, soberly, to his hired car.

Miss Gaulden, by this time, was on her mobile talking to her mother Chrissie in Oxfordshire from a petrol station. Faro and her mother speak nearly every day, sometimes several times a day. Faro has forgotten that last night she thought her mother was a heartbroken tragedy queen, and has connected up with the real daytime Chrissie, who wants to know all about the Cudworths. ‘You should have come, Mum,’ yells Faro, over the racket of the garage forecourt. ‘It was hilarious! What? Yes, Auntie Dora’s fine. And I met this lovely cousin from Iowa. What? I can’t
hear
you! No, he’s a Cudworth. Iowa, not Argentina; The Argentine one didn’t show. You should have seen the skeleton. What? Yes, in a cave. Peter Cudworth, his name was. He’s a professor. I can’t hear you! Are you still there? Shit! Can you hear me? Can you hear me? Shit!’

Faro switches off her flat-batteried handset and gets back on the road to London, thinking, as she drives south, of the migration of the grandparents of Peter Cudworth. He had told her that it was an everyday story, a dull story, but nevertheless she finds it full of mystery. How had they managed it? What had made them want to manage it? How had they got their passports and visa papers? How had they known how to get them? Why had they gone, and others not? Why hadn’t depressed Yorkshire emptied itself into Canada? Had they gone to Canada first because it was easier to get into part of the British Empire than into the U.S.? All the way from Leeds to Toronto to New Jersey! She simply could not begin to fill in the links of the chain. Human beings were opaque, amazing, in their leaps, their motivations. And yet there
were
links, reaching backwards into the cavernous recesses of time itself, into the limestone, into the potholes, into the caverns. How could one begin to follow the leaps? Did families remain static for centuries, then suddenly, in an instant, in a generation, mutate? Did whole cultures leap and surge? How many jumped and fatally missed their footing? How many brave attempts were hit on the head by a spade?