The Peppered Moth
Margaret Drabble
Language: English
Pages: 384
ISBN: 0156007193
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Nearly a century later Bessie's granddaughter, Faro Gaulden, is listening to a lecture on genetic inheritance. She has returned to the depressed little town in which Bessie grew up and wonders at the families who never left. Confronted with what would have been her life had her grandmother stayed, she finds herself faced with difficult questions. Is she really so different from the South Yorkshire locals? As she soon learns, the past has a way of reasserting itself-not unlike the peppered moth that was once thought to be nearing extinction but is now enjoying a sudden unexplained resurgence.
The Peppered Moth is a brilliant novel, full of irony, sadness, and humor.
the end, Chrissie had cracked, and had offered to take her mother on a cruise. She didn’t offer to take her round the world, as Joe Barron was repeatedly said to have repeatedly and falsely promised to do, but she offered to take her across the Atlantic on the QE2, And Bessie had been pleased to accept. Chrissie regretted the offer as soon as she made it, nay before she made it. She felt she had been coerced and worn down. It had been an act of appeasement. Would Bessie’s aggressions and
Suddenly, she knows that Seb is ill. He has always looked unhealthy, but over the last two months it has turned into something else. Seb is dying. Faro squeezes her foot down gently, eases forward a few inches, then another few yards, then is brought to a halt again. She had sometimes wondered, but now she thinks she knows. She must have been in denial. She must have known for months. What is it? Cancer? Consumption? He looks consumptive, but people don’t have consumption these days, except in
distributors, and a little more money trickled back again—not enough, but a little. Hammervale would soon be forgotten again. The ragwort and the hawkweed would blossom in peace. Dennis Rose’s claims to an environmental conscience had some substance, but Sebastian Jones’s claims to a cancerous pancreas did not. He had been lying to Faro. Faro, returning from the flames, had accused him of lying, and he confessed. He was ill, but not fatally ill. Faro told him he needed to see a psychoanalyst
her in midsentence. Bessie escapes to a cloakroom, and sits in the water closet until someone comes and rattles the door handle. She finds her lonely way to the library, where she lurks behind a bookcase. The titles of the books swim before her eyes. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Punch and the Spectator in bound, unread volumes. Samuel Johnson, Smollett, Richardson. Bessie knows that she is more capable than most of the people in this house of reading those volumes. But what does
second wave of the epidemic, the autumnal wave that claimed Bessie, proved the most severe. It subsided abruptly in November, with the signing of the Armistice—only to swell up again, equally mysteriously, in a third attack, in a final cathartic roundup, in the spring of 1919. To this day experts declare that ‘the extreme violence of the fall wave has never been explained,’ and now perhaps it never will be, though the whole episode continues to arouse curiosity. Seventy years later scientists