The Peppered Moth (30 page)

Nick Gaulden had dreamed of harmony and had created discord. He had wished to gather his family into his ark and to protect it. He had failed.

Yet, had he looked down from that column of smoke, from those black dispersing particles, he might have felt some pleasure and some pride. For they were all there, his women and his children and his grandchildren, a good-looking, striking, disparate brood, chatting quietly and civilly in small groups in the mild autumn air, making their way towards the cars in the parking bays, towards the cars strung bumper to bumper for him along Hoop Lane. From a height, all was peace, fruition, forgiveness, ripeness. Forgotten the quarrels both trivial and tragic, the rows over borrowed books and stolen matches, over bank balances and babies, over precedences and priorities, over infidelities and betrayals: forgotten the violence, the screams, the tears and the bruises, the shaming revelations, the recriminations. All shall be saved, all shall be transfigured.

The warm air was static, breezeless. A winged seed detached itself effortlessly from a tree and spiralled slowly, slowly downwards, so slowly that it seemed to hover and suspend itself as it pondered, arrested, and languidly readopted its downward course. High over Finchley a bird-plane caught the sinking afternoon light and it too seemed to remain stationary, motionless, suspended above the mourners, before curving round and gliding smoothly to the south. An acorn, audibly, fell to the pavement, accentuating the quiet and the hush. Struggle was struck into stillness. So may it be.

Chrissie and Faro decided they would go to the wake after all. ‘Come on, Mum,’ urged Faro, as she fastened her seat belt and switched on the engine of her speedy dark blue Toyota, ‘we might as well give it a whirl. We may never see some of this crowd again.’

‘Just as well,’ said Chrissie, shortly but indecisively.

‘Oh, come on, Christine,’ persisted Faro. ‘They’re not so bad, some of them. And I want to see what Fiona’s house is like, don’t you?’

As Chrissie now owned half of a very handsome house in Oxfordshire, she conceded that she might take the risk. She had already wasted too many years of her life resenting the house in Frognal and the woman in the house in Frognal. All that was over now. She had almost forgotten what it was like: to feel, as she had felt, that she was being flayed alive in public, her skin peeled away, inch by inch, before a mocking crowd. She had survived those humiliating torments of jealousy, and she knew that now she looked not only presentable but also impregnable. She could never attract pity now. She looked like what she was: a semi-retired, well-to-do, happily married professional woman, with an income of her own and a husband with a life of his own. The red of her hair was a deeper shade than nature had given her, her complexion was maintained and skilfully tinted, her hat was well judged, and her expensive well-cut Italian dress was becoming. She had nothing to be ashamed of here. The female Barrons did not age well, but she had at least looked after herself, and, unlike her mother, she had not grown obese. She had never been a beauty, like Serafina, like Stella, but at least she did not look as uncompromisingly strange as Jenny Pargiter or as aged as Fiona McKnight. Whatever had happened to Fiona? Could it be that she too had, simply, grown old?

Chrissie, during the course of the afternoon’s events, had adjusted her first defensive, hostile dismissal of Fiona: Fiona did not look shabby, she merely gave the impression of looking shabby. Fiona looked as though she did not care. Unlike Chrissie, she had let herself go. This was, in itself, interesting, and Chrissie found herself sharing Faro’s curiosity about the house in Frognal that she had never entered. Once, on one dark night, she had stood on the pavement outside, at midnight, weeping noisily and uncontrollably and drunkenly, and gazing upwards at the lighted windows behind which the faithless Nick and the thief Fiona sat. She had nourished fantasies of committing a vengeful suicide on Fiona McKnight’s front steps. She had dreamed of swallowing spirits of salts, right there, and expiring in public agony. Her twisted corpse would have met them in the morning when they came out for the milk. She might have made the local headlines.
FIRST WIFE OF ‘FACE OF THE SIXTIES’ NICOLAS GAULDEN, FOUND DEAD ON DOORSTEP OF SECOND WIFE’S FIFTY-THOUSAND-POUND HAMPSTEAD HOUSE.

Chrissie remembered, dimly, these embarrassing daydreams. What would the house be worth now? Well over a million, no doubt. Yes, Faro was right, it was time to abandon these indulgent revenge fancies, and to go in. She might as well inspect Fiona’s soft furnishings, while the offer was open. She would never have to invite her back.

‘I can’t stay late,’ said Chrissie to Faro, hoping her daughter had not been able to follow this undignified sequence of memory flashes. ‘I told Don I’d be back tonight. He’ll worry if I’m late.’

‘Don won’t mind,’ said Faro, as she rather too pushily negotiated the traffic round the White Stone Pond. Faro was not sure that she approved of her mother’s second marriage, and of her submissive postures in the company of Donald Sinclair. Was it for this that the battle had been fought, those long lonely nights been endured, those risks been taken? For a convenient, conventional second marriage to a rich, clever, institutional old bore?

Actually, Faro liked Donald Sinclair. But she liked to toy with the idea that she didn’t. She didn’t
have
to, did she? She was free to dissent.

‘No, Don won’t mind,’ said Chrissie. ‘He never minds anything. He’s very good at getting his own supper.’

The banality of this response made Faro yelp with contempt. ‘I should bloody well think he is! If he can’t get his own supper by now it’s a pity.’

‘Well, you know, that generation...’ said Chrissie vaguely. She had left a packet of mushroom tortellini in the fridge, and a carton of microwaveable Gorgonzola and walnut and Parmesan sauce. Don was fond of pasta.

‘After all,’ continued Faro remorselessly, ‘it’s not as though you bury your first husband every day of the week. And he was my
father
,:’

‘Yes, darling, I know,’ said Chrissie meekly. She knew she must not repeat the mistake Bessie had made, of forbidding Chrissie to mourn her father. So overcome with self-pity and anger had Bessie been, on Joe’s inconveniently sudden departure, that neither Robert nor Chrissie had been allowed in her presence to show any sorrow for his loss. Bessie had continued to revile him dead, as she had reviled him alive. It had been intolerable.

And yet Chrissie knew she was at times in danger of forgetting that Nick had been Faro’s father. He hadn’t been an ideal father, but nevertheless, Chrissie had said bad things about him, things that should never have been said. A child ought to be allowed to respect its parent, even if, like Nick, he was not respectable. And sometimes she forgot that she herself was Faro’s mother. Faro seemed such a triumphant, confident, careless creature. As though she had come from nowhere.

Bessie, reflected Chrissie, as she and Faro sat in a traffic jam in Heath Street outside the shop window of yet another expensive new boutique, Bessie had been a real bloodsucker as well as a shrew. Women weren’t supposed to think this kind of thing about other women these days, Chrissie knew. Everything had changed since she was a girl. Women good, men bad. That’s how the bleating went nowadays. And in the case of Nick Gaulden you could see there was something in it. He had been a bit of a traitor. On the other hand, none of his women could say they hadn’t been free to choose to say no to Nick. He hadn’t forced anybody. They’d been free to choose, and they’d all chosen him, one after another. Some of them had thrown themselves at him. They’d all wanted a bit of the action. They’d all wanted a slice of pinup boy Nick. They couldn’t take out a retrospective claim for damages, could they? And anyway, they wouldn’t have got anything out of him if they’d tried. You can’t get blood out of a rolling stone. You don’t sue a man in debt. Or if you do, you deserve the nothing that you get.

Lucky for Nick that the Child Support Agency hadn’t been thought up earlier. Lucky for Nick that his women hadn’t been litigious. Lucky for him that they had all loved him so much. The women who had chosen Nick had known what they were choosing, and they had got what they wanted. For a time, at least.

Whereas with Bessie—there had been no end to her demands, her needs. She had never been satisfied.

Chrissie had a long history with Nick Gaulden. She had met him when she was still a girl, before she was twenty. She had her memories. For decades, she had been afraid to look at them, afraid they could still cause her pain. Now that he was gone, now that the story was over, perhaps she would be able to dare to look at them again. They could not be taken away from her now. They were hers. No more pain, no more deceit could corrode or heap earth upon them. What would they look like now, if she tried to excavate them? Would they be worm-eaten, ashen, corrupt? Or would they gleam like buried gold? In the new age after Nick’s death, would she be able to recover him? For her memories of him now were equivalent to all other memories of him. All had lost him. He was equally dead to all.

The wake was a riot. Wine, spirits and reminiscences flowed, as a great red harvest sun swam low in the cream-layered pink and violet sky: monstrous, swollen, presaging a disaster that had already happened. It lit Fiona McKnight’s drawing room with a last lurid glow, then suddenly gave up and sank from sight.

Fiona’s house had a view. It looked out over London. On a clear day, you could see the Crystal Palace on the Surrey shore. Here Nick Gaulden and Fiona McKnight Gaulden had sat, night after night, listening to music on her expensive sound system, watching the sun set, pretending to be a proper middle-aged married couple. For three or four years they had kept it up. Whereas, as Serafina now loudly recalled, most of us lived in basements. Staring at brick walls, into dank areas, into other people’s kitchens.

‘Once I threw a mug at him,’ boasted Serafina, ‘and it went right through the window and across the alley and into the kitchen window next door. Think of that! Those were the days!’

‘You get what you pay for,’ said Joachim Barker, helping himself to a couple of smoked-salmon sandwiches.

Eva Gaulden, who had long lost count of the number and names of her legitimate and illegitimate grandchildren, was listening patiently to Arethusa, who was talking about amniocentesis and prenatal scans. The new technology of childbirth. Arethusa seemed indignant about something or other, but Eva couldn’t work out what it was. ‘Yes, my dear,’ she said, from time to time, as her mind flitted from decade to decade, from migration to migration, from image to image, from face to face. Vienna, Berlin, Dover, London, the Taunton Children’s Home, London, the Finchley Road, Golders Green. It ended at Golders Green. Nick had been born in the sick bay of the Taunton orphanage where she’d been working, and she’d been too busy to pay him much attention. Times had been hard, in the late thirties. But Nick seemed to have found plenty of attention later on in life, so that was all right. ‘Yes, my dear, you’re quite right,’ Eva said, and patted Arethusa’s hand, and left her in midsentence to look for Rudi, to make sure Rudi was still alive.

Stella, ever gracious, was being pleasant to Moira. But Moira did not seem to need her pleasantness. The downtrodden Moira, it emerged, had turned into a psychoanalyst, and now worked at the Tavistock. Stella was astonished. ‘However did you manage that?’ she asked. ‘Didn’t you have to pass exams?’

Tiger was tormenting Aurelius. He wanted to hear about cricket. Aurelius was mad about cricket. Why? What was the point of it? Could Tiger go and see a match with him one day? What was cricket
for
? Was Aurelius a batter or a bowler? Did he play for his school? Why was Lord’s called Lord’s? Who was the fastest bowler in the world? Tiger adored Aurelius.

Faro had been trapped by Eric Mendelsson. Like the Ancient Mariner he had accosted her and forced her to hear his tale. Back he went, over his ancient friendship with Nick, over their rivalries at school, their wartime looting of bomb sites, their truancies, their delinquencies, their failed ambitions. They had been going to do such things, the pair of them. Nick the painter, Eric the poet. (They had published a few pamphlets together, back in the sixties.) Eric was already very drunk, although the night was young: Faro was surprised that somebody who drank so habitually could still get so drunk. And you’d have thought that at a liver-transplant funeral he might have taken things a bit steadier. But no, like the mariner, he was condemned to endless repetition. He was stuck in his groove, in his three-mile-island of North London, in his own personal Spandau, which he paced hopelessly, day in, day out, year in, year out. Nick Gaulden had always been willing to offer him a drink, a joint, a seat by the fire. Eric Mendelsson had hung on, through the changing panorama of Nick’s women: faithful, unrejected, like a black dog, like a familiar devil. While Eric continued to drink more, why should Nick Gaulden try to drink less? Eric droned on, stumbling, slurring, repeating himself. Eric’s speech was slurred even when he was sober. Listening to his drawlings, Faro felt her own youth and health rising irresistibly within her like a fountain: it was hard to keep the lid on all the bubbling within her. She could feel it springing, spurting, its pressure gathering and rising like a jet. She felt herself taking strength even from Eric’s rheumy eye, his crooked teeth, his crooked smile. Clear water, welling upwards, the nub of its crystal surface throbbing and pulsing. Youth, hope,
jouissance!
Alas, poor Eric. How good her Dad had been to him. Good old Dad. She could never have endured the boredom.

Stella Wakefield had moved on from the subject of Moira’s new career, and was now discussing green funerals with a young man called Dennis Rose. Stella wanted to be buried in a shroud of bracken and a coffin of willow beneath an oak tree in Horner Woods. She would rise again in a great clump of golden honey fungus. Dennis Rose did not seem to get the hang of this. He said that there wasn’t room on the planet for that kind of thing. Stella pointed out that it was because the planet was so overcrowded that green funerals were a good idea. They didn’t pollute, they didn’t interfere with the nitrogen cycle. Dennis Rose said that his father was doing his bit for the planet, he was in landfill, he owned a lot of sites up north. Stella said that she believed landfill wasn’t always a good thing—didn’t it create a lot of methane gas? Dennis said all that had changed, that was the bad old days, landfill was ecologically very sound now, and his father’s firm was working in partnership with a land reclamation scheme in South Yorkshire. It was reclaiming and landscaping Hammervale and the Lower Ham Valley, and turning them into a leisure centre, an earth park, a golf course and a field studies centre. Stella said that sounded ghastly to her, could he be serious? Dennis said, had she ever seen Hammervale? Nothing could be more ghastly than Hammervale. Whatever his dad Victor did to Hammervale would be an improvement. Anything would be an improvement. Stella conceded that she had never seen Hammervale. You just go and have a look, before you start talking about greenery, said young Dennis, squarely standing his ground.