Free The Peppered Moth by Margaret Drabble Page A

denunciatory finger pointing at South Yorkshire.
    So it was not surprising that Rowena Barron, as she admired her own fine-turned ankles and rounded calves, as she caught the late-afternoon light on her shell-pink nails, should have nurtured strange fantasies of the Promised Land. She would escape from this vale of abomination and dullness, this cesspool of boredom, where there were no dance tunes, and she would set sail for the Land of Milk and Honey, for Cyprus and Damascus, for Salamis and Ashqelon. Aboard a Cunard or a White Star liner, beneath an orange moon, she would swoon and spoon and flirt amidst the scents of cedar and jasmine. Behold, thou art fair, my love: thy two breasts are like two young roes which feed among the lilies. Thou hast ravished my heart, my sister, my spouse: how much better is thy love than wine! A fountain of gardens, a well of living waters, and streams from Lebanon ... How beautiful are thy feet with shoes, O prince’s daughter!
    Little red shoes, perhaps, from Cole’s or Cockayne’s?
    Yes, Rowena had ransacked the Bible for its erotic spoils, she had confounded her own body with the body of the Church. She had searched through
Cruden’s Complete Concordance,
gilt-edged and bound in blue leather, for breasts, of which there were many (though not all of them very attrac tive), and for ankles, of which there were none. Like Bessie Bawtry, even the vain and fun-loving Rowena had been driven to the Bible. For we must find our sustenance where we may.
    ***
    The rain continued to fall upon the garden, and Mrs Barron expressed regret that the young people would not be able to go out to pick the raspberries which were ripe and dropping from the cane. (Bessie glanced at the darkening sky gratefully: raspberries were full of maggots and infested by blue flies and rudely copulating metallic green hoppers, raspberries were soft and squashy and disintegrated in the fingers into little bloody sacs, raspberries stained one’s best dress and got one into trouble. Bessie had had bad experiences with raspberries.)
    The afternoon was turning awkward, as it moved towards evening. The young people did not know how to get out of Mrs Barron’s presence, and she seemed reluctant or unable to release them. Ivy slammed down the piano lid, irritated by her sister’s yawning and stretching, irritated by Bessie’s meekness. Rowena yawned again and picked up her raffia basket. Where were the boys with the motorbikes, where were the big brothers? Rain fell, and raspberries rotted. Silence seeped into the room, and Ada involuntarily looked at her watch: it was twenty past the hour, the time of an angel’s passing. Into the silence, Mrs Barron suddenly said, addressing Bessie, ‘And how’s your sister Dora?’
    Bessie opened her big blue eyes in surprise and turned her head slowly towards Mrs Barron. Nobody ever asked after Dora. What could Mrs Barron possibly want to know about Dora?

How slow life was in the past. How it dragged. How heavily those silences fell. A sermon could last a lifetime, a forty-minute algebra lesson could eke itself out for centuries. A baby, left to cry itself to sleep, as babies so often were, could endure an extended agony of bereavement in half an hour, and a small child could count the seconds through a long nightwatch of terror, and nobody thought to comfort or to care. Hell was on earth, and it was the common lot, and it was to be endured.
    But, in the early years of the twentieth century, things were at last beginning to speed up. Machinery had begun to click and whizz, and in the wake of the Industrial Revolution came movement, displacement for its own sake and global travel. One short generation took the industrialized world from horse and cart and pony and trap to railroad and steamship, and from that point we had galloped onwards, to bicycle and motorcycle and trolley bus and tram car, to motorcoach, motorcar, airship and aeroplane. Movement grew cheaper and cheaper. There was