The Peppered Moth (31 page)

Serafina, at Tiger’s request, was unwinding her turban. She uncoiled it, length after length, to reveal a neat head capped by close-fitting tight black curls. The contrast was startling. Tiger was impressed. ‘Put it back on again,’ he urged, and Serafina obligingly twisted, wound, coiled and tucked, and behold, the wonderful erection was back in place. She didn’t even have to look. Her fingers knew. It was almost as good as the Indian rope trick, said Tiger.

And where was Jenny Pargiter, the disconcerting giant? She was looming, alone, gazing out over the city, garbed in her blacks. She was keeping her secrets.

Chrissie, the other black widow, found herself talking about plastic coffins to Fiona McKnight. It was Fiona who had raised the subject. Fiona was as sharp as a kitchen knife, as unsentimental as a lemon. Chrissie had always been afraid of Fiona. Because Fiona was cruel and rich and had class. But now, in this Hampstead eyrie, Chrissie felt her fear evaporate:
for Fiona was nothing more nor less than a beady-eyed, clever, dried-up little old woman, with a cackle of a laugh, and a fine collection of bric-à-brac. Fiona had given up the Fine Arts, in which she and Nick had not very profitably dabbled together, and had taken up Bakelite. Did Chrissie know anything about Bakelite? It was fascinating stuff, fascinating. Did Chrissie know that in 1938 someone had invented and designed the Bakelite coffin? Bizarre, what? Fiona had just been up to Doncaster to see an exhibition of the stuff. She was thinking, herself, of opening a new gallery. Plastic, shellac, Bakelite, casein. She was tired of trying to be modern. She was sick of the cutting edge. She thought she’d turn kitsch in her old age. What? Might be fun, what?

‘I had an uncle once who was fond of Bakelite,’ said Chrissie helpfully. ‘He used to manufacture it.’

Fiona found this fascinating, fascinating. Did Chrissie know the trademark? Did Chrissie have any pieces? No, Chrissie didn’t. She didn’t really know anything much about that side of the family at all. But she’d try to find out, if Fiona really wanted her to.

‘You’re married to an archaeologist, aren’t you?’ accused Fiona McKnight. ‘Burial sites, funerary rites, all that kind of thing?’

Fiona was taken with a fit of coughing, which she quenched with neat vodka.

Yes, agreed Chrissie, that was his kind of thing.

‘I met your husband,’ said Fiona. ‘Met him at the Academy. Agreeable chap. Good for you. Never felt like taking the risk again myself. Lost interest in that kind of thing. Not that you could describe Nick as that kind of thing. Bit of a one-off, Nick, wasn’t he?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Chrissie thoughtfully. ‘Maybe he was a type, after all. Quite a rare one. But a type.’

Fiona spluttered, coughed into her handkerchief, reached into her bag, lit up a cigarette.

‘Can’t give it up,’ she said. ‘It was hell, sitting and standing through all that chat and all that guitar music. Without a fag. I thought Eric would never get to the end. Have one?’

‘No thanks,’ said Chrissie. ‘I stopped.’

‘Good for you. Good for you. How did you manage it? You used to be heavy on the draw, like me, didn’t you?’

‘I made myself sick,’ said Chrissie.

Fiona thought that very funny, or so her excessive laughter might have suggested.

‘Rum do, eh?’ she said, when her mirth died down. ‘Poor old Nick. Shall I tell you a secret? I thought I’d rescue him, I thought I’d save him from himself. Go on, laugh, do. And look what happened. Here I am, an old hag, smoking like a chimney and drinking like a fish. Serves me right, what? Did you think you’d save him? Did we all think we could save him?’

‘When I knew him first,’ said Chrissie, slowly and carefully, ‘there was nothing to save him
from.
Or there didn’t seem to be. When I knew Nick he was young, remember. And none of these bad things had happened.’

Fiona’s eyes glittered, too bright in the withering of her too-small pinched white face.

‘And not so many of the good ones, either,’ she said, with companionable malice. ‘We had some fun up here, Nick and I. On our good days.’

And Jenny Pargiter stared out lonely over the city, like the figurehead of a great ship about to slip its anchor.

Christine Flora Barron Gaulden Sinclair sat back in her seat on the last slow train from Paddington and shut her eyes. It had been a long day. The train was taking her back to Oxfordshire, and it was taking her through the stations of Nick’s past. Paddington, Radley, Appleford, Slough, Didcot, Cholsey, Goring, Pangbourne, Reading, Ashton-under-Wychwood, Queen’s Norton. Nick Gaulden and Don Sinclair had both been Oxford men, though Don Sinclair had done more to deserve the title. And now Chrissie lived in a pleasant seventeeth-century house of yellow stone with latticed windows standing just off a village green in the Cotswolds. A pretty, rustic, charming building of character, with many original features, as the estate agents had accurately described it to the Sinclairs. A picture-postcard house. A second home for a second marriage. Bessie Barron had liked it a great deal and had been to stay in it as often as she was invited. More often, in fact.

Bessie Barron had also approved of Donald Sinclair. Nick Gaulden had not been her kind of person at all.

Chrissie shut her eyes, amidst the smell of old upholstery, newsprint, stale coffee and plastic beaker, as the train rattled through Radley. It rattled her backwards, to her first strange and fatal meeting with Nick Gaulden. Watch her as the years peel away from her, as her skin lifts and tightens, her hair reburnishes, her waist dwindles, her hard mouth softens, her eyes widen, her lashes lengthen. There is Chrissie Barron, nineteen years old and a virgin, waiting for everything to happen to her. Nick Gaulden walks into the room, and it begins to happen. He walks up to her, and offers her a cigarette. She accepts. She already has a glass of wine. It is a party, not a funeral, a summer party in a narrow little terraced house in a Cambridge side street. Nick is visiting from Oxford, he tells her. He is reading Greats. She tells him she is at the end of her first year, reading what is known as Arc and Anth. They cannot hear one another very well, for the room is crowded and everyone is shouting. The ash on her cigarette lengthens. He takes it from her, gently, as though it were precious, reaches behind him to a saucer on the mantelpiece, shakes off the ash, and gently, as though it were precious, restores the cigarette to her hand. Their hands touch in the transaction. It is done. That is it. A violent current passes from Nick Gaulden to Chrissie Barron, and both begin to tremble. It is as simple, as irreversible as that. That is how life is engendered.

Transformed into a fountain, a tree, a breeze, a bird? Forget the poetry, forget the dignity of mythology. Chrissie at times has wished that she had been fried to a cinder at that first contact, that she had been frazzled and scorched to death. The adult Chrissie winces in her ageing body as the train grinds into Didcot.

Chrissie had to climb back into college that first party night, for by the time she and Nick parted, the gates were locked. They did not sleep with one another that first night, nor the next, nor the next. It was a courtship, and Nick was a romantic. He liked foreplay. He could make it last. He wooed her with words as well as gestures—words, as she was later to discover, not all his own. She remembers them now. Words are like terrible little metallic containers, like capsules. They preserve what should be forgotten. They endure. When punctured, they release their dangerous, poisonous spores, to reinfect the drying, withering flesh.

For I rather had owner be
Of thee one hour, than all else ever.

John Donne had been all the rage in those days. A poet of the fifties. A lot of people quoted him.

Nick had wooed her with words his own and not his own, with kisses, with caresses, and with hard liquor. For those had been the drinking years, not the drugged years, and Nick had been a pioneer with the whisky bottle. He had hitched eastwards across the counties of Middle England to visit her, arriving, dramatic, on her threshold, with a bottle in a brown bag.

He had deflowered her in her college bed. Chrissie, who has forgotten much, lost in a blur of pain, alcohol, sorrow, age and sheer relentless weighty brain-numbing overloading time, can remember every moment of this long-ago event, every sensation.

The train draws out of Didcot, hesitates, stops. Something is wrong with its engine. An apology comes over the loudspeaker. There will be a slight delay.

A woman’s first sexual experience is frequently disappointing and incomplete. Chrissie Barron’s, unfortunately for her, had been ecstatic. She had left the body and soared upwards. Her fleshly body had lain pinioned beneath Nick’s warm completed weight, and her spirit body had soared upwards, as her blood soaked the sheets. She had been freed of the body through the body. So many times on the verge of initiation, she had at last crossed the threshold and discovered the mystery.

All had been perfect. Both had been awestruck by the simplicity of it. They had been made for one another, they were two halves of the same body, fused into one. And they could do it again, and again, and again. They could come together and achieve this miracle any time, any place. In a bed, in a ditch, in a field.

That summer they had eloped to France, and on to Italy. With a canvas bag full of clothes, and thirty pounds in their pockets. Chrissie had lied to her parents: she told them she was going on holiday with her college friends Ilse and Barbara. Chrissie and Nick had wandered through Europe, drunkenly, in the innocence of the first youth of their passion. Chrissie had been subdued and given over to it. She had been soaked and saturated with sex. She became more and less than human. She took leave of her senses and was enthralled by her senses. And Nick had sworn he would love her, her only, her for ever, in endless, rapturous, hyperbolic protestation. She had drunk in his vows, through France, through the Alps, and down the Adriatic. He had sworn his love in bus stations, in cheap cafés, in wine cellars, in mountain villages, in classical ruins, and in a bedroom full of mosquitoes, where beneath the slowly turning creaking fan the walls had been spattered with their conjoined, commingled blood. Together, forever, he had said. And she had believed him.

Or had she? How could she have done? Even to this day she did not know if she had believed him or not.

No, of course she could not have believed him.

Chrissie Barron, as the disembodied official voice apologizes once more for the delay, finds herself, forty years on, blushing with shame. Of course she had not believed him. She had known, even then, even at the very beginning, even at Cambridge, that he was faithless, that he was sleeping with other women, that he was transported by his own rhetoric, that he was a collector, that there was no way in which she could be the one and only love of his life. Even then, ignorant though she was, she had recognized that the very intensity of his lovemaking signified its duplicity. Yet she had deceived herself, she had pretended not to notice. She had hidden even from him the fact that she had once found another woman’s knickers stuffed down at the bottom of his Oxford bed-sitter bed. Why on earth had she not confronted him, then and there, with those stained purple net pants, and brought the whole thing to an end? She knew the answer. It was because she had not wanted to lose him. She wanted to pretend, even to herself, that they and what they signified did not exist. So she had lied, and lied, and lied. She had stuffed knowledge down to the bottom of the bed and hidden it. And Nick, deceived and deceiving, drunk on words and liquor, had continued to swear undying and exclusive love.

The train had left Didcot and was slowing down again just beyond Goring. It was a very slow train.

And yet, thought Chrissie, she had put up some resistance. She had struggled against his version, his desire for total collusion. The story would have been tidier and more extreme had she succumbed at once, and abandoned all to his dominion. But something in her—some remnant of her sensible, Yorkshire, Bawtry-Barron self—had clung to the idea that she ought to stick it out, to get her degree, and run mad later, when she had some qualifications to fall back on. (Had something in her remembered Joe Barron’s two years as a travelling salesman, and Bessie’s collapse before her part one English B?)

In her last Cambridge summer, her last long vacation, she had made a bid for freedom. She had told Nick that they must part. Had they quarrelled? Not exactly. But she had told him that she would not spend the summer with him. They must have a trial separation. (Did she tell herself that if their love survived this test; then she would, as he was urging, marry him?)

It was an old-fashioned test, a trial by distance. Chrissie signed herself up to spend her vacation on the Faeroe Islands. He would never follow her there. She would be out of sight and out of reach, working on an archaeological dig. She would take herself off, with respectable, serious, hardworking colleagues, students and professionals, and dig in the damp earth.

Bessie and Joe were relieved and delighted, and Joe offered at once to pay for the cost of the exercise. Chrissie said he need not bother, she had got a grant. At that point, her career was still open. Bessie and Joe had not at this point met Nick Gaulden, but emanations from him had reached them, and they had formed the conclusion that he was not a suitable match for their daughter. They had both sensed, though they never mentioned it to one another or to her, that Chrissie was no longer a virgin. They had both decided that handsome Nick Gaulden from Oxford, the Finchley Road and a Taunton orphanage, was not a marrying man. They still, at the back of their liberated minds, perceived of marriage as a woman’s destiny.

Bessie and Joe were wrong. Nick Gaulden pursued Christine Barron to the Faeroe Islands, and claimed her as his bride. Was this what she had intended him to do? Probably.

It had not been easy. The Faeroe Islands are inaccessible. They are not very far away as the gull flies—three hundred and eighty miles from Norway, and only two hundred from Shetland—but they are hard to reach, because not many people want to go there. They were not a popular tourist destination then, and they are not very popular now, even though the world has speeded up so much. They are too cold, too barren, too rocky and too wet, the land of the sheep and the puffin and the whale. Chrissie had liked the idea of them precisely because they were so unwelcoming. Nick Gaulden was a classical scholar, of sorts, and gifted in the Romance languages: he had seduced her in the soft option of the classical Mediterranean. The Nordic scene was not for him, and that was why Chrissie Barron had signed on as a willing hand to attempt an excavation of the supposed tomb and home of Sigmundur, who had expired on a heap of seaweed at the end of the first millennium of Our Lord, in A.D. 1000. If Nick Gaulden’s professed passion lasted for a month’s absence, so be it, she would believe in it and surrender. If not, let him dally with the second-best lady of the purple knickers.