When I came to Mrs. Jefferson, the rector’s wife, I recognized her instantly from the waist down. She was a rotund, weatherworn, boot-and-skirt kind of woman who, when she had an opinion, let it be known. She would have thought it rude to ignore me, so, while she took four nuts in her fingertips, she asked what I was going to do when I grew up. I liked Mrs. Jefferson, and of course I would always have answered her, but I had no idea what I wanted to do when I grew up. I’d never thought about it. I was still studying the delicate frosted rim of the glass dish, searching for my answer, when Maud cut across me—she often talked for me—and said, “This one? She’s going to follow in her father’s footsteps.”
Mrs. Jefferson bent down so I had to step back a little to give her room. “So it’s moths then, is it, Virginia?” she asked at my ear level.
Is it? I thought.
“Yes, moths,” Maud answered resolutely from above us.
Mrs. Jefferson straightened and I went on to offer my nuts to a huddle of people by the window.
From that day on everyone seemed to know that that’s what I was going to do. Maud, having said it, had cast the future in stone. Many years later, when Vivi and I were expelled from Lady Mary’s, it was a foregone conclusion, an undisputed assumption by everyone, even me, that I’d become my father’s apprentice.
Vivi was fifteen when she was expelled for pilfering bananas from a box beside the fruit delivery van as it dropped off supplies to the school kitchens. She tried to argue that she simply had them a little earlier than she would otherwise but Miss Randal, the head, saw it differently. Randy had worked out that this must have been a long-term plan, with Vivi timing the delivery each week and taking notes of the man’s progress as he went in and out with boxes. Vivi was not only a thief (Randy said you either are or you aren’t, it’s part of you, like your nose shape) but it was a premeditated heist and there was only a cursory difference between this and a bank robbery (one leading to the other sooner or later). It was all about principle, Randy said. She made Vivi stand up in morning assembly in front of the entire school and say ten times, “I’m a thief.” Vivi thought it was funny but I cried for her in the back row and at the hopeless injustice of it all.
Maud received the letter expelling her lying, thieving daughter on a Monday morning and by lunchtime, having hurtled through much of the West Country’s narrow, high-hedged lanes, she was banging on Randy’s door and making such a fuss that Ruby Morris came running to class 6M to tell me that my mother was trying to kill the staff.
What happened next, and why I was also expelled, I’ll never know the truth of. Maud said she’d been so enraged by the abominable way Vivi had been treated that she’d taken me away too, as a sort of punishment to them, she said. But Miss Randal told me that thieving was inherent and that the same characteristic might possibly show itself in me too, at some point, and it was part of her job to protect the school against the inevitability of future occurrences. When I looked unconvinced she told me that, if I wanted to know the truth, I was only there in the first place because Vivi was there. We’d come as a package, she said, so we’d have to go as one.
I was in her office and she was standing with her right fist on her desk as she spoke, her arm locked straight like a fulcrum for her stocky body, swaying back and forth with the pressure of a long and troublesome morning. Behind her hung a vast print of an oil painting, an elephant charging at full pace out of the canvas, and I was just waiting for it to hurry up and mow her down.
When I told Maud about Randy’s sister package, she went berserk, said it was nonsense, that she’d never heard such tripe, and after that she swore rather a lot whenever Miss Randal was mentioned. Then she lectured me about how clever I was and what a lot I had going for me, which, I have to say, both my parents did frequently. They never seemed to offer the same compliments to Vivi.
What surprised me most was that Maud wasn’t at all cross with Vivi for stealing the fruit in the first place. She said that seeing some bananas in a box outside school kitchens and helping yourself without asking was hardly an expellable crime. She accused Miss Randal of trying to find any excuse to get rid of us. She said the school was prejudiced.
So, according to the school, I was expelled too, but to the family I’d left in protest and in allegiance with my little sister. It’s one of my most glorious memories.
Clive had said we didn’t need any more schooling; we were clever enough as we were, so I knew that, after the long summer, I would at last become Clive’s apprentice.
I haven’t made many active choices in my life—I’m not that sort of a person—and I’ve never resisted anything that life’s thrown at me, or even thought to steer it in a particular direction. I’m one of the lucky ones who are carried along and life falls into place by itself. It was as if my eventual success was printed at the beginning of time in the universe’s voluminous manuscript, a very small part of the wider big-bang/collapsing-star theory. I was always going to be famous, even if I’d tried to resist it. Did I tell you I’m actually quite a famous lepidopterist?
Mrs. Jefferson would never have predicted it. Vivi was supposed to be the one to make something of the life she nearly lost when she was eight, not me. I just fell into it, and now my name will be heard for many years to come, whispered through the corridors of one eminent institution or other, citing my papers or my expertise in practical experimentation, the insight of my deductions or the acuity of my hypotheses. I hope you don’t think me immodest to imagine that those praises would now have spread around the world within the most highly regarded entomology circles, in all the leading universities, societies and other elite academic establishments. Even here, in the small farming community of Bulburrow, they’ve heard of my reputation. I believe that here I am commonly known as the Moth Woman—after my late father, the Moth Man.
Clive did not follow directly in his father-in-law’s footsteps. The way I saw it, Clive was the first of a new breed of lepidopterist. He was
Clive’s goal was different from that of his colleagues. He didn’t care about collections and—between you and me—he didn’t care much for the insects either. Clive wanted to find out how nature worked. He was concerned with all nature, but he had chosen the moth as the subject of his research because, he said, it is an ancient animal whose evolutionary pathway is much older even than that of a butterfly, which, in biomechanical terms, is a lot more sophisticated. He wanted to know how a moth ticked, how all its intricate little processes make the thing live, die, breed, eat, move, molt and metamorphose.
There was a fundamental difference between the way that the collectors and Clive (and those like myself who came after him) studied these insects. Collectors have one goal in common: they are looking for the perfect unadulterated specimen, with flawless markings and anatomical composition. An insect with an aberration, say a spot too few or a spot too many, or any other imperfection or handicap, would be discarded at once. The point is, my sick Privet Hawk caterpillar, the one that I found on my third day of being six, would have been thrown, by a
To find out what makes a moth
5
Clive was going to unpick a moth like a cross-stitch jumper, so while perfect insects weren’t of the slightest interest to him, he became unbearably excited by a Six-spot Burnet with five spots, a wingless Fox Moth or tailless Lobster Moth, a blind Oak Eggar, a tongueless Convolvulus Hawk (which, I should mention, is a frequent deformity in that species). If you could work out, he said, how they’d gone wrong, you’d discover a lot more about how nature worked.
While most lepidopterists concentrated on breeding the perfect insect, Clive concentrated on breeding the perfect freak. Clive and I designed and manufactured more cripples than I can remember. Between our lengthy
