The Peppered Moth (35 page)

They settle down to half a pint while they plan their campaign. Steve suggests they go and have a meal—does she like Indian? There’s a famous vegetarian Indian up Broom Street, if she likes that kind of thing—and he’ll tell her all about it. Then, the next day, they’ll go to see Cotterhall Man in his glass coffin—Steve has made an appointment, they will be expected—and later in the morning he’ll take her to see the Earth Project and the cave. What about that?

Faro sips her Murphy’s and says that it sounds just great. She is suffused with happiness. What fun, says Faro, wiping a little froth of white foam from her upper lip. Vegetarian curry, Cotterhall Man and a cave. What could be more delightful? This is her summer holiday, and she’s being paid for it. She sips her black drink, and Steve drains his amber brew. Faro can’t stop smiling. One couldn’t possibly come to any harm, with a man like Steve Nieman in an Indian vegetarian restaurant in Northam.

Steve is well known in the Star of Asia, and the waiters are sweetly courteous to his attractive guest. They unfold her napkin for her and offer her pickles. The walls glow pink and the lights are dim. Small fish dart around in a large tank. A yellow candle flickers between Steve and Faro in a thickening shroud of wax. The air is full of spices.

Over spinach and eggplant and okra and rice and keema peas and pints of lager, Steve narrates the story of his historic discovery. Although he must have told it all many times before, he enjoys telling it again, and Faro knows she is hearing an uncensored, privileged version. Steve is telling her how it really was. He is doing her that honour. She has his confidence. They are part of the same plot.

Steve reveals himself as a happy-go-lucky amateur. He’d started to take a degree in geology, way back, but hadn’t been much interested in the kind of jobs it seemed to be leading to. So he’d gone off for a year or two to work in a kibbutz in Israel, where he’d learned carpentry. He’d enjoyed it. He’d come home and been attached for a while to a craft commune in Camberwell, then had founded a workshop of his own with his then girlfriend. But he’d found the bookkeeping and the VAT an absolute pain, and when his friend Niall had asked him if he was free to come and work on this Hammervale development he’d jumped at it. There’d been plenty of work going up here, and good-quality, interesting work. Building the exhibition centre, the observatory, the field studies centre, the water house. He’d show her some of it tomorrow. It wasn’t big money, but it was steady, and the work was useful. Reclamation. Making the place into something. It had been a tip before—a whole series of tips. But she would know about that, because her people were from round here, weren’t they?

Sort of, agreed Faro. Her grandparents were Breaseborough people. She had an auntie still living here.

Anyway, said Steve, he’d got to like the area a lot. He’d been here a couple of years now. He wouldn’t say he was settled here, but he liked it. He was a bit of a wanderer, but he liked it here.

And what about the skeleton, prompted Faro.

Steve told her about the skeleton. He’d found it by accident. He hadn’t been looking for anything. He’d just been scrambling around one evening. Fascinating, it was, the landscape round here—old canals, locks, disused pitheads, quarries. And the limestone cliffs. Sort of undiscovered terrain. They’d been told to keep out of the development area, partly because a landfill company had started work before the Trust put a stop to it and bought them out, and it was supposed to be unsafe. But Steve hadn’t been able to resist getting up there to have a look. There was a particularly interesting area called Coddy Holes, just at the bottom of Cotterhall cliff, which had been partly blasted by the landfill—a shame really. The development money had put a stop to all that. It was where the local youth used to go and hang out. They weren’t allowed up there anymore, but Steve hadn’t been able to resist going up to have a nose around. It was just up the far side of the railway and the canal, to the west, on the escarpment. Did she know where he meant? No? He’d love to show her. Though a lot of it looked very different now—some of it had been replanted. Then it was all just raw, ploughed mud and earth, at the bottom, and above, all the old secret places. And he’d gone climbing. It was a beautiful summer evening, almost exactly a year ago, and you know how it is, he kept meaning to turn back, but then he’d see something interesting just up above him, so he’d gone on scrambling up, through the rocks and the undergrowth and the thorn trees, and eventually he’d seen this sort of gap ahead of him, in the limestone. It looked kind of newish, as though something had collapsed during the blasting. But of course he’d gone on, and when he got nearer, he could see there was an entrance to what looked like a cave. Boy’s Own stuff. He had to investigate.

‘Of course you did,’ agreed Faro.

‘Well,’ said Steve, ‘there was a cave. I kind of fell into it. I thought I’d just put my nose in, but the ground gave way in a pile of loose dirt and scree and stones and stuff, and I skidded right down in there. For a moment I thought I’d fucking had it. I thought, what if I go down a fucking mineshaft? That whole area is undermined, you know. It would have been my own fault, wouldn’t it? But it was OK, it didn’t go any further. And there was a cave, a natural cave, quite big enough to stand up in. And there was this chap, lying on a ledge. Pretty well dead, he was. Just bones. But quite a lot of bones. My little landslide had knocked a few bits off him—don’t tell anyone I told you that, I think they all know, but we don’t mention it. But he still looked pretty well complete. Anyway, there he was, just lying there. Where he’d always been.’

‘Wow,’ said Faro.

‘That’s what I thought. Wow. And of course I didn’t know who or what he was, did I? He could have been anything. A dead potholer. A murder victim. How on earth was I to know he’d been there for eight thousand years and was about to become a national treasure? Anyway, there he was. Do you know what I did? I said, “Hello.” Stupid, wasn’t it? But I felt I had to say something.’

Steve grinned, and ran his curry-scented fingers through his thick hair, and appealed to Faro for approval. She granted it.

‘Of course you had to say something. Were you frightened?’

‘No, I was thrilled. I felt he’d be pleased I’d found him. It was a bit of a miracle, you know. They had been going to blow up the whole ridge. He might have ended up as bone-meal, with all the garbage of South Yorkshire on top of him. Actually, I’m not really sure he likes being in the university either. You’ll see what I mean. But perhaps it’s better than being mashed up with a lot of old hamburger cartons and pet-food tins. If you had to choose.’

‘And how did you get out again?’

‘It was easier getting out than in. A bit of a scramble, but nothing too tricky. I’ll show you.’

‘What an adventure,’ said Faro admiringly. ‘And how long did it take them to find out who he really was?’

‘Oh, months and months. Tests and radiocarbon dating and all that stuff. You know, I’ll tell you something. I nearly didn’t tell anyone he was there. I thought there might be trouble. I mean, I wasn’t meant to be up there at all. And I realized I shouldn’t have touched him.’

‘Did
you touch him?’

Steve looked guilty. ‘Yes, I did. I—I sort of patted his head. And it sort of fell sideways.’

Faro choked into her lager. Yes, she would have another pint, why not, well perhaps a half-pint.

‘Did it fall
off
? she then wanted to know.

‘Not right off,’ said Steve, with winning candour.

Faro found Steve’s attitude to his discovery admirable in every way. He seemed so thoroughly human. He spoke of his skeleton not as of a trophy, but as of a fellow human being. This was not unknown amongst the scientists with whom she had professional contact, but most of them, like Dr Hawthorn, were more given to making populist jokes in an effort towards a disarming appearance of humanity. They didn’t really care about the dead. There seemed to be a tenderness in Steve Nieman. It was a relief. She liked it. She liked him.

‘So what did you do next? Did you report him at once?’

‘I didn’t know what to do. I knew I’d have to own up, fingerprints, disturbing the landscape, and all that. Anyway, I was beginning to think he might be a bit of a coup after all, and I might as well claim the credit as well as the blame. But I didn’t know who to report him
to.
The police? The project manager? My mate Niall? In the end I told Niall, and Niall told Charlie Henderson, and Charlie got on to the police, and the police got on to the forensics, and the forensics got on to the university.’

‘And you became a hero.’

‘In a manner of speaking. I got a bit of a bollocking from Charlie Henderson and from my mum. But it all blew over. Everyone’s quite pleased with me now. I’m careful not to give interviews without telling them, because they don’t like that much. And I’m careful what I say.’

‘You’re giving me an interview,’ said Faro.

‘You’re different,’ said innocent Steve, without pausing to think.

‘How do you know?’ asked Faro, but didn’t wait for a reply, because the question had been dangerous, premature and impertinent. ‘You realize,’ said Faro quickly, ‘that he might be my ancestor? If Dr Hawthorn can track back the mitochondria, he might be able to prove it. You might have disinterred the bones of my ancestor.’

‘I didn’t disinter them,’ said Steve. ‘I just happened upon them. They were disinterred—well, exposed, really—by a blast of TNT set off by those greedy buggers from Rose & Rose. What a name, for a firm of methane-gas peddlers! Rose & Rose and coming up roses. They’ve even got a slogan about it for their sites. Cotterhall Man wouldn’t have stood much of a chance if they’d been allowed to carry on with their plan for the region. I’m telling you, he’d have been hundreds of feet deep under the impacted refuse of South Yorkshire. It wouldn’t have been nice for him at all.’

‘Who did you say?’ asked Faro.

‘Who did I say what? Rose & Rose? You know, well-known vandals and mass poisoners. They’ve got craters of garbage on both sides of the Pennines. Did you read about that disaster in Kirkdale? Fifty homes evacuated, and one subsided and fell down the hole and was never seen again. The cat went with it. There was a terrible stink. Poor cat.’

‘Rose & Rose,’ said Faro, picking up her next pint, and nibbling a flake of poppadom. ‘Rose & Rose. Oh dear. I think I’m related to them too. In fact, I know I am. How odd. How embarrassing.’

‘How come?’ asked Steve.

Faro tried to explain. Victor Rose, founder of the Rose & Rose family business, was her father’s cousin, son of her paternal grandfather’s older brother, if she’d got the generations right. She’d never really known him, though she’d met him once or twice at family events—a wedding, an anniversary. And she’d met his son Dennis Rose quite recently, last autumn, at her own father’s funeral. Victor hadn’t been there, as far as she had been able to see, but she and Dennis had had quite a long talk about something stupid—the superiority of the Honda to the Toyota, Japanese takeover bids, that kind of crap. They hadn’t got on to Hammervale and landfill. Though she had known that Rose
&
Rose were into waste management. Bit of a coincidence, wasn’t it, if she was related both to Cotterhall Man and to Rose
&
Rose? Made her a bit of a missing link, didn’t it?

‘Not really,’ said Steve. ‘We’re all descended from Eve. Or Lucy, as we now seem to prefer to call her.’

Faro could tell he was trying to make her feel better, and that he didn’t think much of Rose & Rose, although he didn’t want to offend against kinship by insulting her cousins. She said that she didn’t think much of them herself, and that he could be as rude about them as he liked. Had they really got such a bad reputation?

‘I don’t know,’ said Steve. ‘They’ve got a bad name round here, but that’s largely because people don’t want landfill on their own doorstep, do they? And there are stories. I think they struck some kind of a deal with the council. They’ve started a new tip over by Denvers Main. There was supposed to be something fishy about the sale of that land, but I didn’t follow it.’

‘You know,’ said Faro, ‘they say that there are only three hundred thousand human generations between us and our common ancestor. That if I held hands with my mother, and she with hers, and so on and so on, the line would stretch only from London to Northam before we were linking hands with the common ancestor of ourselves and the chimpanzee.’

‘How ever do they prove that?’    .

‘They don’t. It’s just the sort of illustration that popular science goes in for these days. It may be true. It probably is. It’s like that image of crowding all the population of the world onto the Isle of Man. My mag loves that kind of thing. Five million years’ time span, or something like that. I’m not very good at figures. And it’s only eight thousand years back to your skeleton. You’d be holding hands with him well this side of Potters Bar.’

‘Well,’ said Steve, ‘that means you and I are next of kin.’

Faro smiled. ‘That’s quite nice, really,’ she said.

And she and Steve wandered back together to Faro’s hotel, through the rebuilt streets of Northam, streets which had been bombed back to brickwork and earth during World War Two. Faro’s grandmother Bessie had been evacuated from Northam to Pennington in rural Derbyshire, but Faro had never been to Pennington, though Grandma had sometimes spoken to her of the clever boys of 5B. Steve and Faro were far too young to remember the craters of war, the flapping wallpaper and suspended fireplaces and the valiant blossoming of buddleia and willowherb and such plants as love the rubble of masonry. They did not see the older archaeology of Northam: they saw only the postwar layers of the bold and brutal sixties, the nervous eclectic seventies, the postmodern eighties, the cottage-chateaux-supermarkets of the nineties. They were children of the present. They strolled through the warm night.

‘Have a drink,’ said Faro.

And they sat in the executive bar, and swapped family stories, as Faro had swapped family stories with Peter Cudworth. Faro told Steve of the arrival of the Gauldens in England in the 1930s, and about Eva Gaulden’s struggle to adapt and make ends meet. Steve told Faro that his own family had emigrated from Eastern Europe during the 1880s, and were, unlike the Gauldens, ‘wholly Jewish’—‘whatever that might mean’.