The Sister

asphyxiated.

At last I heard Bernard’s sonorous voice, not right by my side, but in front of me, a yard or so away. It was unmistakable—he was discussing some sort of water heater he’d had installed in his house, then let out one of his loud distinctive laughs. I opened my eyes sharply and saw him—as I’d thought—two paces in front of me, waving his hands about as he spoke. Both hands. It was only as I looked at him that The Hand That Cupped My Bottom gently dissolved away. I glanced discreetly over my shoulder to check that there was nothing there.

I was still staring at Bernard’s hands when someone else’s passed him a plate of vol-au-vents. Rather than one hand taking one and the other passing on the plate, both hands reached out for a vol-au-vent, and both picked one up delicately between its thumb and forefinger. While holding the surplus fingers aloft Bernard effetely popped them into his enormous mouth, one at a time, and after each I watched him rub the tips of his finger and thumb together to rid them of pastry crumbs. Nausea rose up my throat. Surely those same fussy fingers had been rubbing my bottom. Yet I’d still felt his hand there when I saw it wasn’t. I was a little hot and very confused.

All the way home on the train Clive was silent. When we finally got in, late that evening, Maud gave me a glass of sherry but I couldn’t drink it. With Clive’s gout prohibiting him, I think she would have liked me to have a drink with her, but the last time I’d tried it I hadn’t liked it.

She had made an effort with supper. She’d made pork in cider sauce and put the silver on the table, and I knew she wanted us to sit down and tell her everything about our first lecture together as a scientific team. She had been so excited about it that morning, before we left, and had kept giving me bits of advice and thinking of things I should be ready to expect—listen, don’t talk, keep well back and to the side of the stage so you don’t feel daunted by a room full of people—and I understood she’d be excited to know how it had gone. Now, of course, I can appreciate that we should have given her the time, that we should have sat down and eaten her supper and told her the little details of the day that would help make her feel a part of it, but Clive and I were so weary that we went straight to bed. Maud stopped me as I was going up the stairs.

“Are you sure you won’t have a quick drink?” she asked, pouring herself another.

I shook my head apologetically.

Then she asked me a strange question: “How many of them didn’t have a beard?”

Funny, I thought. “All the men had beards,” I said.

“Oh, I know that,” she said, laughing. “What I really meant was were there any women?”

It was then that I understood the true position of my unchosen career. Not only would it involve a great deal of confrontation and debate, but I would have two ongoing battles: first, like Clive, to be accepted in academic circles without the certificates to prove it, and second, to be a woman in this men-only sphere, even though the famous Bernard Cartwright had welcomed me personally to the team. 

Chapter 9 Another Trap

I want to tell you about what happened four or so years later. It was 1959, the year that changed everything. It was the year of the Plymouth Convention and the year—I’ll never forget it—that Bernard Cartwright threw down his challenge.

But first of all I should tell you about Vivi. While I was busy with Clive and the moths, Vivi had molded herself into a new life in London, sharing a flat with two girls she’d met on her secretarial course. She visited us irregularly, even though Maud was always trying to coax her home, but she wrote every other week. Maud always got to the letters first. She’d fetch the post the instant it arrived, then walk back into the kitchen flicking through the envelopes, hoping to spot Vivi’s handwriting.

After her course, Maud had hoped Vivi would come home and find a job locally, but instead she went to work in a London firm of solicitors. A few months on she’d left and found herself something more interesting, she said, in a newspaper publishing house, but even then she was unsettled. She moved to a doctor’s surgery, and then became personal secretary to a freelance journalist. I lost count, after that, of her different jobs. It seemed to me that each time she came home she’d moved on again, and she always managed to persuade us that the next place would be so much better than the last.

I don’t think Maud had realized when Vivi left home that it would be for good. But Vivi had wanted to make something of her life, and neither a crumbling Dorset mansion nor an attic full of moths was enough. One day, she wrote in one of her letters, she was going to work on a film set, perhaps even at Pinewood, because she’d met someone who knew someone who wanted someone.

During that time Clive and I had formed a remarkable partnership and our research enterprise at Bulburrow was saturated with work and grants. It wasn’t all down to our brilliant teamwork. The fifties, you might remember, were a boom time for experimental science. They saw the invention of the electron microscope and the electronic chip, the widespread use of antibiotics and immunization, Watson and Crick’s double-helical DNA, and then came genetics.

The moth, along with the fruit fly Drosophila, became the experimental animal of the moment, for all the same reasons that Clive had identified twenty years before, and by the late 1950s it seemed as if everybody wanted a little bit of moth. The traditional lepidopterists were swept aside as all the other scientific faculties—molecular biologists, biochemists and, in particular, the new evolutionary geneticists—hijacked the moth for their research. Kettlewell published his now famous illustrations of industrial melanism with the Peppered Moth, and the evolutionary geneticists Sheppard and Fisher used many species of moth to help interpret the laws of inheritance and the chromosomal behaviors that allow for continuous variation. Chemists took over the field, trying to find answers, equations and formulas to the questions that Clive, Bernard and others like them had marveled at for years: identifying the specific compounds that control its life cycle, instigate hibernation or emergence, the molecular events that attract a moth to light, that release volatile oil from a female’s scent gland and the structures in a male that can detect it from a very many miles downwind. These considerations, along with the chemical assaying of every compound—pigments, hormones, pheromones, enzymes, neural inhibitors and stimulators—or, at least, an investigation into how they worked or behaved chemically, were suddenly up for grabs and it seemed like a race to be first there and first to publish.

Obviously Clive and I had a bit of a head start as Clive’s solitary life’s work, often derided in the past for being out on a limb between two scientific fields, was now being ambushed by institutional research looking for big business. We got busy. We published more than ten papers a year, gave twice as many lectures, and the grants rolled in steadily.

Finally I ought to tell you about the Robinsons trap. It was the only other real excitement that happened during those four apprenticeship years. It was Maud who first read about it in one of her subscription magazines, British Countryside, I think. The Robinsons were two brothers from Kent who launched a revolutionary new design of light trap on the market, and it was causing more than a small stir. I remember Maud specifically bringing the magazine up to the laboratory when it arrived with the post. She stood at the end of the workbench and sensationally read out the astonishing leader article: “A Robinsons set on a single night in Hampshire collects more than 20,000 specimens of the Setaceous Hebrew Character, Amathes c-nigrum L., Caradrinidae, along with vast numbers of other species.”

I have never understood why Clive didn’t rush out and buy one then and there but he didn’t seem interested, even though stories of its success were soon to head up every entomological magazine of the season. The Rolls-Royce of moth traps, as it became known, consisted of a mercury-vapor discharge lamp set in a cleverly designed glass bell jar. It worked in a similar way to a lobster pot. From dusk onwards, when most moths are on the wing, they head into the top of the huge bell-shaped jar, attracted by the light, and, once in, they haven’t the wit to get out. The Robinsons trap radically revolutionized the capturing of moths and—more shockingly—altered the current understanding of their national distribution and rarity. Moths that were once thought to be rare were suddenly shown to be abundant and others existed in places they had never before been found. So, you see, the entire bank of national statistics based on more than half a century’s worth of scrupulously gathered distribution data was deemed invalid overnight and the auction rooms, which at the time made a good trade dealing in rare