The Peppered Moth (7 page)

Joe Barron is the baby of the family, the youngest of them all, and it is Joe who is now watching out for Ada and Bessie as they approach the gateposts and high walls of Laburnum House and make their way up its short drive. The walls are surmounted with a nasty boy-proof ridge of sharp-angled black crozzle, a waste by-product of the mining industry: this is decorated with dangerous splinters of broken glass, another product of which there is no shortage. This double defence is intended to prevent boys from breaking into the small orchard and raiding the apple trees and soft-fruit plot. But the house, behind its wall, is not hostile. Its porch is full of scarlet geraniums, and its doors stand open.

There Joe greeted his guests. He was past the blushing stage, and was now quite the young man, in his white shirt and grey flannel trousers. Quite the ‘Anyone for tennis?’ young man—and he was indeed good at tennis, which he played at the club with Ada’s brother Richard, his brother Phil, and Ernie Nicholson from Sprotbrough. But tennis was far from his mind as he ushered the girls into the large drawing room, into the presence of his mother and Ivy. Joe was thought to be sweet on Bessie Bawtry, and Bessie was thought to return his admiration. Nothing serious, of course—they were too young for that. They were just practising.

Mrs Barron presided over her second-best teapot with nervous affability. Flora Barron was only in her fifties, though she thought of herself as an old woman, and looked and dressed like an old woman. Unlike Bessie’s mother Ellen, she was thin, not stout: she was a bony, upright figure, and she sat forward on the edge of the chair, her back stiff to attention. She was dressed in a dark patterned maroon artificial silk which reached nearly to her ankles, for she had not even thought of adopting the shorter skirts of the younger generation. Her chest was flat, and seemed to sink and recede from her prominent collarbones. Her hair was grey and abundant: she wore it scraped back into a large bun, secured by a heavy imitationtortoiseshell clasp and pin. This ornament was, in fact, made of celluloid, as many hair ornaments of the period were. The new plastic technology pierced Mrs Barron’s bun, but despite Bennett’s enthusiasm it had not penetrated many other corners of that predominantly Edwardian drawing room.

Mrs Barron poured tea for Ada and Bessie, for Rowena and Ivy, for herself and Joe. Bessie politely admired the teacups—botanical Spode, with an ornate pink patterning of twining foliage and stylized carnations and roses. Each cup had within its bowl, opposite the sipping lips of the drinker, a passionflower, though Bessie did not recognize it as a specimen of a species she had never seen. Passionflowers were not much cultivated in South Yorkshire. Bessie admired the Spode very much, and thought it in better taste than the Bawtry best, which consisted of a bright and vulgar Crown Derby with too much purple and gold and a lot of random spots. It must be said that Bessie also had a contempt for the Cotterhall-crafted Barron fancy glassware, which she thought horribly common. She was relieved not to find it on the Barron table.

(Where
did
Bessie get these notions? Who
did
she think she was?)

It appeared that Rowena was indeed planning to take herself off to sea on a luxury cruise. This year, next year, sometime. She was off to the Holy Land, though not for any very holy reasons, and would proceed thence through the Suez Canal and back round the Cape. Rowena went to look for the atlas, when the girls showed an interest, and traced her route with a thin white finger, pointing a sharpened manicured nail. It would be a lark. She would fly south like a swallow. On board was a swimming pool, a gymnasium, an orchestra. She had been saving up for ages and ages and ages. Father said he might chip in. Gertie Thomson from Broom Hill was hoping to go too, and they would share a cabin. Would the girls like to see the brochures? Yes, the girls certainly would. Bessie and Ada wiped their fingers delicately on lace-edged napkins, brushing off the crumbs of scone and jam sponge, and took in hand the lovely leaflets with their bathing belles and young men in boaters, and a promotional photograph of the Yorkshire cricket team and their lady wives playing quoits on the deck of the
Ormonde
as they sailed away to Australia.

Even Bessie and Ada, who had not yet reached this level of aspiration, were aware that ocean passages were advertised regularly in the pages of the
Breaseborough and Cotterhall Times
: tickets were available to ‘all parts of the world’ from the
Times
office in Bank Street. You could book yourself from here to there. From the dark hole of Breaseborough itself you could buy your voyage on the White Star Line or the Canadian Pacific, on the
Caronia
or the
Carmania
or the
Empress of Australia
or the captured
Berengaria
(once the German
Imperator).
You could embark for New York, Vancouver, Yokohama, Shanghai, Honolulu, Suva.

Will Rowena really sail away, or was this a daydream, a fantasy? Time will tell. The world was speeding up, and the great ocean liners were competing for custom and cutting their prices, eager to forget the Great War, eager to forget the sinkings of the
Titanic
and the
Lusitania
and the
Waratah.
This was the dawning age of the third-class traveller, now reclassified as a tourist. Steerage was no more. The schoolteacher, the student, the clerk and the shop assistant were being tempted onto voyages where they could simultaneously imitate and make fun of the idle rich. Restlessness was sweeping round the globe like influenza. In a few weeks, you could be in Australia, in New Zealand, on the far side of the pink Empire and the turning globe. Bands would play for you, and artistes would perform for you, and you could dance beneath the silvery moon as you were transported across the tepid tropical oceans. Or that was the idea.

Meanwhile, Joe Barron and the girls would wait for their examination results. All were expected to do well, but Mrs Barron, a kindly, diffident and self-effacing woman, was aware that for Bessie these results were of particular importance. Bessie was to stay on at school that autumn to sit her Cambridge entrance, and she would need a County Major Scholarship to finance her, if she were fortunate enough to get a place. It did not matter much what happened to Joe, for the family business could absorb him whatever happened, and Ada’s family was willing and able to support her through teacher training college. But Bessie had nothing to fall back on. She was on her own, and she had to do well. How would this teacher’s pet fare in open competition with the county and the country? Did she have time enough for study? inquired Mrs Barron. Oh yes, said Bessie, her parents were very understanding. She had her own little corner, her own worktable. She had plenty of encouragement at home, said shy, hard-working, pretty, tender little Bessie Bawtry.

Joe Barron had no intention of spending the rest of his life peddling cheap glass. But he was lying low, waiting for the right moment to confront his father. His father thought education a waste of time—he’d done all right without certificates, and set little store by schooling. In Ben Barron’s view, the universities were overproducing, and creating a generation of idlers. Joe listened, but said nothing, as his mother gently probed Bessie about her prospects. He thought he could count on his mother to take his side if it came to a showdown. Joe was still his mother’s pet. She had nursed him through a dangerous childhood bout of meningitis, and regarded him as her special baby. Mrs Barron did not approve of brother Phil’s motorbike. She would stand by Joe.

Ivy, grumbling slightly, cleared the tea things onto the wooden trolley, and Ada helped her to wheel it away into the back regions. Rowena, in Ivy’s view, never did anything to help. Rowena took out a violent-hued raffia basket of purple and acid-green which she was constructing, and Mrs Barron took up her embroidery—yet another linen tablecloth, which would join its companions in a drawer full of unused linen tablecloths and tray cloths and napkins and cushion covers. Joe Barron went over to the piano, and began to fool around to amuse the girls—‘On wings of so-ong I’ll bear thee,’ he crooned, in his pleasant tenor, as he picked out the notes with two fingers,

Enchanted realms to see
Come, O my love, prepare thee
In dreamland to wander with me
...

‘Oh, belt up, Joe,’ said Ivy fondly, and she pushed him from the crimson velvet piano stool. Seating herself, arranging her skirt, wiping her fingers on her skirt, she took over from him and started them all off on ‘Ye banks and braes of bonny Doon\ Bessie sat silent, for like her mother she could not sing, but she listened sweetly, perhaps a little too sweetly, as Ada, Rowena, Joe and Ivy raised their voices in mock lament and mock Scots accents: ‘But my false lo-over sto-ole my rose, and a-ah he le-eft the thorn wi’ me...'

Bessie glimpsed the banks of the Hammer, starred with white stitchwort and oxeye daisies. She saw white boy-bodies in the eel-dark water. She blinked and banished them.

They hammed it up, the young people, and Mrs Barron, proud matriarch, nodded and smiled.

Picture them there, in that airy but overfurnished Edwardian drawing room, with its low bow window, its stained and frosted and slightly phallic sub-Art Nouveau cock-and-balls grape-and-vine glass panels, its swagged plaster frieze, and its central plaster ceiling rose from which depended an inverted opaque frosted flower-stencilled glass bowl of a lampshade. In the glass bowl reposed a few fly corpses. Add large chairs, antimacassars, cushions, an embroidered firescreen displaying a peacock and lilies. Aspidistras, ferns, a curvaceous green-and-ochre pottery jardiniere. A busy floral carpet of blues and reds, and heavily fringed curtains of a goldish velvet. Occasional tables, highly polished. Bookcases with glass fronts, containing sets of Scott and Dickens, and well-read volumes of Victorian poetry. A tinted print of Cotterhall Castle, a Chinese screen, a sampler, a brass bell from Benares. A cluttered, old-fashioned, cumulative sort of room. The styles of the 1920s had not yet reached the drawing rooms of Cotterhall, and indeed seemed likely to bypass them altogether. There was no place here for the white and the straight and the pale, for the geometric, for the angles of Deco. All here was bulge and fringe. No wonder Rowena Barron was off to the Plain of Sharon and the dashing bounding remittance men of the Cape.

Slender Bessie Bawtry was not daydreaming. She was alert and tense, as she sat neatly on the edge of her chair, leaning slightly forward, listening to Ada’s rendering of ‘Pale Hands I Loved Beside the Shalimar’. Her large periwinkle eyes were attentive, her knees and feet were carefully aligned and clamped together. She was a model of decorum, a little blue-eyed Dutch doll. Her soft straight silver-blond hair fell prettily from a low side parting, and was cropped at the nape of the thin stem of her neck in a short smart fashionably tapering shingle. Why was Bessie so anxious, so carefully censored, why was she sitting so much to attention? Nobody threatened Bessie here, nobody attacked her, nobody criticized her. Why could she not drop her guard for a moment? Why did she not dare to let her mind wander? Was she afraid of betraying some social ineptitude in this superior home? Did she suspect that Rowena thought she might be pursuing eligible brother Joe? Such a vulgarity would have appalled the delicate Bessie.

Ada Marr was stronger, thicker-set, more developed, more confident. She threw her head back as she belted out the Indian love song. There was a touch of the Indian in her dark colouring, and she thought it would be glamorous to have Indian or Spanish blood. Maybe she had: she sometimes voiced this hope to her other close schoolfriend and confidante, Leila Das, daughter of Dr Das of Sprotbrough, who was a bona fide Indian and the only coloured young person within a radius of thirty miles or so. How the Das family had made its way to Sprotbrough God alone knew, but there it was, well settled and respected. Leila did very well at school too, and was, unlike Ada, determined to follow in her father’s footsteps and study medicine. This was not impossible, even in those days: one woman student from Breaseborough Secondary, a Dr Flora Hattersley, had already been practising for a couple of years in Jarrow. Leila had a double obstacle to overcome, of race and sex, but she did not seem to be aware of this.

Rather those hands were clasped round my throat
Crushing out life, than bidding me farewell!

yelled Yorkshire Ada, making eyes as she sang, by way of practice, at Joe Barron. But Joe Barron, handsome, clean-cut, blue-eyed ginger-haired Saxon Joe, had eyes only for pretty Bessie, perched anxious and vulnerable on the edge of her chair. Her neck was so thin it seemed to invite assault. It looked as though it would snap if you touched it. A blow from the side of a man’s hand, and all would be over.

Joe Barron and Bessie Bawtry echoed one another in their fair tones and colouring. Had they evolved together through the centuries from this soil? And if so, would it not show greater genetic wisdom on Joe’s part to pursue his opposite, and to make advances to the swarthy, thick-browed, lightly moustached Ada? In short, to marry out?

Mrs Barron seemed unaware of these dangerous undercurrents as she tapped her foot to the rhythms of the unseemly but drawing-room-accepted music that her younger daughter Ivy was bashing out from the slightly out-of-tune walnut upright with its little mauve pleated silk vest. Mrs Barron was stitching evenly and with satisfaction at a circle of brownish-cream linen trapped in a round wooden frame: she had chosen the transfer, of a Jacobean-style wreath of roses, from the excellent selection in the stall in Northam covered market, and was now filling in a leaf with a particularly delightful shade of moss-green silk. Stitch after stitch, strand after strand, she covered the linen. She could not have said why her embroidery gave her such pleasure. It distracted her from her worries about Phil and the motorbike and the girls. Phil had threatened to race on the Isle of Man. He had threatened to learn to fly an aeroplane. Stitch on, and choose a strand of carmine. Mrs Barron knew the numbers of the colours of all these silks. They repeated themselves in her innocent dreams like a litany.