The Sister

Chapter 8 

The Apprentice

My official initiation into the world of entomology, as Clive’s apprentice, in the autumn of the year that Vivi went up to London, was to accompany him to London to give a popular lecture at the Royal Entomological Society. It was called “The Response of the Barred Red to Differing Spectrums of Light.” Clive instructed me on how and when to change the slides, and the cues he would give to let me know when to show an exhibit.

He wasn’t looking forward to the lecture one bit. “Popular” meant that anyone could attend, and Clive didn’t have much time for part-time enthusiasts. He himself, having had no significant further education on the subject —past his chemistry degree—and not working under the auspices of an institution, would also have been labeled an “amateur,” but he liked to think of himself on a par with the academics. It was the only thing Clive was ever snobbish about. He had been given a doctorate and was awarded grants in the same way that university professors were, and although he hadn’t yet made any astounding discoveries, he was well known for publishing a great many papers on wide-ranging subjects, from species dichotomy to the extraction and assaying of a great many of those minor biochemical compounds he’d painstakingly identified.

Clive said amateurs were made up of ex–medical men (who were, at the very least, educated), ex–military men (who were only interested in collecting beautiful specimens to display alongside their medals) and clergymen (who had far too much spare time, were all too often argumentative and dictatorial and at odds with everything— killing and collecting, evolutionary theory, the ferocity of nature). He told me he wasn’t looking forward to the same old questions and arguments from this latter section of the audience, and within twenty minutes of the start, an eager, smooth-faced man with spectacles and a reduced chin challenged him.

“Are you suggesting that the moth has no say in whether it approaches the light or not? It doesn’t make up its own mind, its actions are absolutely determined, and there is no decision-making process?” he said, in a much-rehearsed manner.

“Good afternoon, Rector,” Clive began, and I wondered which one, out of all the rectors Clive had mentioned or Maud had laughed about, this might be. “Yes, I believe that insects are not capable of making a decision,” he said.

“But…but, Dr. Stone, we’ve all seen a caterpillar making single-minded decisions, whether it’s searching for a place to pupate, burrowing an underground chamber, spinning a silken sling or wedging itself into the nook of a rotten tree. Surely, before the preparation for its pupation, it must have decided to pupate,” said the rector.

“No.”

“No?” The rector appeared superficially aghast and looked about the room in a bid to rally support.

“I think you know, Mr. Keane, that I believe it is involuntary,” Clive replied quietly. So it’s Keaney, I thought. I knew all about him. He’d never made a sermon without reference to a moth hunt. He set light traps in his Cotswold church and would stop a service to check them, then enthuse to his congregation.

“Involuntary? What, like the muscles that pump our hearts? You really believe that insects are living automatons? They have no emotions, no sentiment, no interests and no mind?” the rector continued with practiced eloquence and feigned disbelief, his voice rising in volume and tone for crescendoing drama.

“I do,” Clive said, as though it were a vow.

“Not even a conscious purpose, Doctor?”

Clive was on trial. He scratched the stubble on his neck with nervous irritation. “Actually,” he said, “I’m not even sure we have a conscious purpose.” The room broke up with appreciative laughter, but I knew it wasn’t a joke. Clive didn’t make jokes, and certainly not quick-witted, belittling ones like that. He continued earnestly, “Of course we’d like to believe it, to make our existence more meaningful.”

I saw a group of people in the front row lean forward to exchange glances like naughty schoolchildren not understanding why they were having a telling off. I was sitting on a chair up at the front in the shadows beside the projector and took a long look at the entire audience.

Maud had told me once that Clive was a misfit among misfits. She didn’t like these people. She said they adopted pet names and idiosyncrasies to make themselves more interesting. They’d hone the eccentric characteristic they wanted to be known for and, if they were lucky, it soon became synonymous with their name, to be cited in the same breath: “Ah, I know Dr. Toogood, he’s the one who stirs his tea with surgical forceps.” “Oh, of course, Lionel Hester, who pins his moths on his hat when he’s out hunting.”

Maud said they were often under the infuriating illusion that, as eccentrics, they might also be regarded as geniuses, or at least hoped to be mistaken for them. She said she had finally understood their collective affectations when Major Fordingly (who kept a pet seagull) once quoted grandiosely to her: “To distinguish between eccentricity and genius may be difficult, but it is surely better to bear with singularity than to crush originality.” Well, Maud thought, surely not. She said it was better to admit who you were even if it meant admitting you were dull and had a dull little hobby, rather than covering it up in a pathetic attempt at some sort of singularity. Of course, Clive was different. Maud said Clive was the only one who didn’t try to be eccentric and was.

From where I sat in the shadows of the stage, I looked at this room of charlatans and tried to spot any of their fabricated habits.

“So these creatures are just machines to you, are they?” someone from the midst of the bearded auditorium asked Clive.

“By definition not machines, no. They are living. But I believe every action an insect makes is due to a reflex, a taxis or a tropism. Their existence is purely mechanical.”

“So an ant lion chews a struggling ant with no more emotion than a machine mangles a man’s hand?” the chinless rector in the front eulogized loudly and poetically, still trying to elicit emotional outrage in the room.

“Yes.”

The rector stood up to address the entire room.

“A caterpillar has no idea why it’s spinning a cocoon or making a chamber for itself in the ground?” he continued, throwing up his hands with Shakespearean effort.

“Exactly,” Clive replied in a quietly bored tone.

“So if a female moth saw her own larvae, she wouldn’t recognize them as hers or even understand that they belong to her own species or class of animal? She has no parental feelings?”

“Love, you mean?”

“Yes…love.”

“Oh, I don’t know about love,” Clive said, a little more roused. “I think many animals exhibit love for their offspring.”

“Well, there you go,” said the rector, sitting down heavily and slapping his hands on his knees in a show of triumph.

“It’s just that I believe love itself is no more than a mechanical process,” said Clive, once the rector thought his victory was settled.

“But love is an emotion, Dr. Stone,” the rector replied with a certain asperity.

“Yes, and an emotion is merely the symptom caused by a particular chemical being released into your brain and central nervous system, which, in turn, acts on other parts of the brain to elicit this feeling.”

“Your beliefs are more far-fetched even than I thought,” said the poetic rector in a final irate judgment.

I could see Clive was glad that the matter was closed and he could continue with his lecture. He didn’t want to argue with these people. He just knew what he knew, but, unfortunately for him, what he knew had always attracted impassioned opposition.

Afterwards everyone gathered for a drink, to discuss the lecture and to catch up with news of butterflies and moths the country over. I was glued to Clive’s shoulder and he introduced me to everyone we came across. When he led me over to Bernard Cartwright I was relieved, finally, to see someone familiar. Bernard often stayed at Bulburrow—either to discuss his latest research with Clive, on his way down to the West Country for a field trip, or as a family friend for the weekend. Bernard was a proper academic. He was a professor at a London college, and a few months ago he’d isolated a caterpillar hormone, one that initiates molting, so he was now a household name in that very small and exclusive collection of entomology households. He was addressing a group of men as