The Peppered Moth (45 page)

Chrissie has left her hotel number with Faro, in case of a Dora health crisis, but Faro does not ring, so Chrissie assumes all is well. She doesn’t ring Faro because it never seems to be the right time of day or night for a round-the-world phone call.

Chrissie likes Sydney. She attends a few sessions of the conference, and spends the rest of her time exploring. She catches a ferry to the suburb where Ivy Barron and Pat Parker had lived, but cannot find their house. It doesn’t matter. She doesn’t need to. She is satisfied that it is a far cry from Breaseborough, and she is satisfied that Ivy Barron had not wasted her life. Ivy had had pluck. This is a beautiful country. Ivy had escaped.

Chrissie sits alone at a quayside fish restaurant, sheltered from the sun by a striped awning. Donald is chairing a talk on Stone Age food technology and the thirty-thousand-year-old Aboriginal grindstones of the Western desert, which will be followed by a luncheon sponsored by Electromix, but Chrissie has heard enough talks and attended enough luncheons. She is happy now, alone, quiet, with her book, and a glass of wine, and a bread roll. She has ordered soup and an unknown fish and awaits their arrival. She watches the traffic of the waterfront, and wonders if Harriet McGough from St Andrews ever married her marine biologist, and if she too is still connected to archaeology. The marine biologist was, if she remembers rightly, from Aberdeen, a city which has been transformed by North Sea oil. Both Scotland and the Faeroes are a long way away, in space and in time. Australia is blessed with a much more pleasant climate. It is surprising to Chrissie that the entire population of the Faeroes has not tried to emigrate to Australia. There is plenty of room for them here. This is a land of sunshine and of plenty.

At the next table to Chrissie sit a couple, a mother and a daughter. They have come from elsewhere, but Chrissie cannot guess their nationality. The child is about ten years old, and mother is in her thirties. She has a broad face, a flaring wide nose, and prominent, uneven, ill-dentisted teeth which sort ill with the expense of her clothing. She is wearing a tailored turquoise costume, and the child is wearing a Scottish pseudo-tartan dress with a white collar, the uniform of expensive children the world over. Both wear strings of pearls. They do not speak. They order a first course, which arrives as Chrissie’s bisque arrives. Both mother and daughter are presented with what the menu had described as a Cold Seafood Platter, consisting of an open clam, half a crayfish and a few prawns in their shells, accompanied by a few fronds of dark olive-green seaweed and half a lemon in a muslin bag. Chrissie spoons down her soup, and mother and daughter, still without exchanging a single word, eat one mouthful each of each platter, and then sit back, pushing their loaded plates away. Chrissie is sorry for them. Have they ordered something they do not like? Have they recoiled from the long red whiskers and cockroach-creatureliness of their choice? The waiter, impassively, removes their almost untouched plates, and returns for Chrissie’s empty bowl. Some time later he returns with Chrissie’s piece of fish, which is surrounded by the seaweed and half lemon of the house, and, for the mother and daughter, yet another seafood platter. It is hot, this time, but it is almost identical to their last servings. A hot half-lobster, a hot clam, a prawn or two and a large chunk of some kind of hash or mash or seafood pie. They survey their meals expressionlessly. Will this go down any better? The mother picks up a long silver surgical skewer, and prods, nibbles and picks. The daughter eats a forkful of hash. Then both lay down their implements, sit back and push away their plates once more.

Are they ill? What is happening?

Chrissie eats up her fish with gross pleasure. It is a solid, firm-textured, well-flavoured fish. She enjoys it. Chrissie was born during the Second World War. Chrissie thinks of how much Bessie had enjoyed her meals in the Queen’s Grill.

Once more the waiter approaches, once more he clears the two adjacent tables, removing the full plates from the one, the clean plate from the other. Chrissie does not bother to look at the menu again, for she has indulged herself too much already, and will have to sleep it off or walk it off. She orders a cup of coffee.

The mother inspects the menu carefully, consults her daughter in the curtest of sentences, and orders dessert.

Chrissie’s coffee arrives, and dessert arrives for her neighbours. Will the child be happy at last, as she receives a glass goblet containing ices white and pink and crimson, and an array of glistening berries black and purple and red? It seems so, for she smiles, briefly, and picks up her spoon. The mother delves into her leather handbag for a camera, and photographs her daughter with her colourful chalice. Click, quick, click, flash, click. The daughter eats a couple of berries, stirs the cream, nibbles at her wafer biscuit and lays down the spoon. The mother does the same. In silence.

The mother beckons the waiter. He brings her the bill. She pays. They leave.

Chrissie is baffled by this episode, he cannot interpret its meaning. Is it the quality of the nullits of the silence between these two that has distressed her, or is the waste of good food? She thinks fondly of Don’s careful habit of preserving every little leftover scrap in cling film in case he can eat it up another day. She thinks of herself and Faro, chatter chatter, natter natter. She thinks of herself and Bessie. At least she and Bessie had talked. Much of the talk had been unpleasant, but they had both made an effort to communicate.

When she returns to the hotel with its high view of botanical garden and harbour, she finds Don in good spirits. The paper on grindstones had been highly entertaining, he says, and it’s a pity she missed it. The lecturer, a small fuzzy-haired Australian woman of Italian extraction, wearing a smart pinstriped suit, had been eloquent on the subject of female labour in prehistory, and she had given a vivid demonstration of the grinding process, which, she claimed, had been tough work. She had been clapped and cheered. Then Don had scored a triumph by claiming that he was entitled to one of the new baby-food mixers that the sponsors were distributing as samples to the female delegates. Why couldn’t he have one too, he had demanded. It was sexist to deny him. Old and white and male he might be, but he had worked hard for his living and sung for his luncheon and he had a right to an electrical ba by-food grinder. He had won his point, and here was the proof. He unwraps it from its gift bag to show her.

At midnight, on their return from a dinner sponsored by Don’s publishers, they pour themselves a postprandial brandy from the minibar and play like children with Don’s little machine. It is a wonder. Light as a leaf, smaller than a Coke can, at the press of a button this handy little plastic gadget slurries up a banana and an overripe nameless exotic fruit from the complimentary fruit bowl. The years of stone grinding are obliterated. Woman is released from labour. The fruits turn into a smooth disgusting yellowish pap. As Don and Chrissie are staring at this muck, wondering if it is their thrifty duty to eat it, or whether they may permit themselves to flush it down the drains into the Pacific Ocean, the phone rings. At this time of night, it cannot be anyone but Faro.

Faro is not ringing about Auntie Dora. Nothing bad has happened—well, nothing very bad. She is ringing to ask for Chrissie’s advice about her Apple. It has refused to speak to its printer, for no reason that she can diagnose. It’s giving her an incomprehensible message that she’s never seen before. She needs to fix it right now because she’s trying to print out an article on the new flu vaccine, and it’s late already, and she’s promised to deliver it in the morning. Help, Mummy, help, bleats Faro. Chrissie talks her through the possibilities. Faro presses this and presses that—Tool Box, Printer, Options, Acrobat, J-connect, Properties, Default, Colorbox. She goes in and out of programs, over the airwaves, through the satellites. In the end, Chrissie suggests she check the ink cartridges. Faro swears they are new. Never mind, check them, says Chrissie. Faro takes them out and puts them back in again, and behold, for no reason whatsoever, the machine begins to work again. Chrissie can hear the printer printing away in Shepherd’s Bush on the other side of the world. Mum, you’re a genius, shrieks Faro, delighted. So happy they are, the mother and the daughter, and Don too is happy, as he reappears from the bathroom in dressing-gown and pyjamas.

He has washed the baby food away. He tasted it, but it was too horrid, and after all, there isn’t a war on, is there?

He has a word with Faro. They sing Chrissie’s praises. He tells Faro about the pinstriped feminist archaeologist and the grindstones. They are all laughing. They will all meet soon, at the weekend. Faro longs to see them. Have they bought her an opal? Have they seen a koala and a duck-billed platypus? Is the sun shining, over there in Australia?

No, says Chrissie, it’s after midnight.

Good God, says Faro. I’m sorry. Is it really? I’d no idea.

Chrissie was not feeling so cheerful when they all met again that weekend at Queen’s Norton. Somewhere up in the underoxygenated recycled air of the sky or in the hygienic vastnesses of Singapore airport she had picked up a flu bug. She sneezed all the way from Shanghai to Heathrow, while her throat began to prickle and her legs swelled. She hoped at first it was just aeroplane fever, but it accompanied her from Heathrow to the Cotswolds, and climbed into bed with her at Queen’s Norton. She lay there, feeling sorry for herself. She didn’t cancel Faro, because it was too late to do so. Faro could take her chance with the influenza. Faro joked over the phone that she hoped Chrissie hadn’t got this new kind of Hong Kong flu which you get from pigs. Did they have pork on the aeroplane? They’ve been assassinating all the pigs of Hong Kong, hadn’t Chrissie read about it? Singapore, not Hong Kong, croaked Chrissie. It’s all the same, said Faro, and not to worry, she’d bring some nice boxed meals from the supermarket with her, and look after her poor old mother. She’d become very good at looking after people. She’s a good nurse, these days, and she was sure Chrissie would make a very good patient.

The truth is that Faro is longing to tell her mother about Sebastian Jones and his wretched pancreas. If she tells all to Chrissie, it will go away, and she will be released from his encumbrance. Chrissie is a bright, strong, cheerful survivor, even though she’s got flu, and she will obliterate the shadow of Sebastian. So Faro tells herself, as she drives along the M40 on a Friday afternoon.

She has made an appointment to call in at the Institute for Molecular Medicine in Oxford on the way, to find out what’s happening to the Cudworth-Hawthorn project, and to get the results of her own swab. The super-mobile Dr Hawthorn is elsewhere, as usual, for he has more important things on his mind than inheritance patterns in South Yorkshire, but she is given a tour of the lab and the test-tubes by Dr Cooper (‘Call me Tom’) who loves all DNA, but the more ancient, the better. He speaks to her of the extinction of the moas and the monophyly of kiwis, of the evolution of the cave bear, of amber and insects, of glues and fungus, of prehistoric Amerindians and the peopling of the Pacific, of Nile Valley populations and mitochondrial polymorphisms in mummies, of the detection of infectious and inherited diseases from ancient human skeletal remains. He shows her slides and maps. She finds it hard to drag him back from the past to the present. He is nearly as past-oriented as Sebastian Jones, although he’s working on the cutting edge of the fashionable field of molecular biology.

‘I want to know about the Cudworths!’ finally cries Faro, and he pulls himself away from the Nile Valley to hunt for the results of the Cudworth Convention in Hammervale. She trails after him, from room to room, until he finds a computer that gives them access to the Breaseborough data. Together, they sit and search the files. Faro, as usual, gets impatient and can’t see why he can’t just tap in the question ‘Faro Gaulden, who is she?’ There can’t be anyone else in the world called Faro Gaulden. There has never been another Faro Gaulden on earth. But she’d better not interfere, she tells herself. Probably everything is coded, for reasons of genetic privacy.

Eventually she pops up. There she is. Gaulden, Faro, Flat 2, Etheredge Gardens, Shepherd’s Bush, London W11, 8XX, e-mail address
[email protected]
. Date, year, place of sample. Tom Cooper scrolls, links and mousehunts her down. And there is the information that they have been looking for. It is as she had known. She is indeed a direct descendant of Cotterhall Man, as were Ellen Bawtry, Bessie Barron and Chrissie Sinclair before her. The sleeping prince in his glass coffin is their ancestor. Her genes had dwelled in Hammervale since the end of the Ice Age.

‘Good God,’ says Faro. ‘I knew it. You should have let me know.’

Tom Cooper scratches his head, blushes engagingly, readjusts his spectacles. He mutters apologetically that letters to all participants would be sent out in the long run, they were just waiting for some of the more problematic findings to be sorted out. Some of the samples, unlike hers, had not been of Quality, Excellent.

Now Faro wants to know who else is directly descended, and Tom obligingly continues his quest. Auntie Dora must be, insists Faro, and Tom brings up Dora’s name, but Dora’s swab is one of those labelled Poor, and its result is not clear. Peter Iowa Cudworth is not related to Cotterhall Man in direct descent, though that does not mean he is not related.

‘Well,’ says Faro, over a cup of polystyrene in the canteen. ‘I call that pretty interesting.’ It was disappointing not to be the last of the Yorkshire Neanderthals—the result seemed to have ruled out that tantalizing possibility—but it was still pretty damn interesting to know where one’s greatest of grandmothers had lived. Tom Cooper agreed. As far as he was aware, nobody had ever tried to track his branch of the Coopers back beyond the middle of the nineteenth century. His great-granny had been born in Islington. Before her, all was obscurity.

Faro drives on towards Queen’s Norton with a folder full of offprints and gene maps. She is looking forward to telling all this to her ailing mother, who may well be appalled by this new evidence. She is feeling more and more cheerful, the further she gets from London. She is resolved, in her heart, that she will break away from Sebastian. All she needs is a little encouragement from her mother.