structure had been designed and muttered disparagingly about any flaws that were instantly apparent to him. Then he set to piecing the thing together before he’d even consulted the instructions. It wasn’t long before he was completely immersed in the assemblage, studying the dynamics and durability of each little part before fitting it into the structure. I began to realize that, in actual fact, Clive was excited. But even then, as he assembled the device, he swore at the ill-fitting bulb and the tiffany of the surround, cheaper than he himself would have used.
Maud offered to fetch him a glass of bitter lemon but I don’t think he heard her. I remember how he stood back, trap partly assembled, almost suppressing a laugh as he said, without taking his eyes off it, “This really is beautiful, beautiful. Thank you, Maud.” He walked round it, at arm’s length, like a dealer checking first the head and then the flanks of a horse he’d acquired. “Look at this. It’s exquisite. Really stunning.” Maud couldn’t have wished for a more effusive reaction or more obvious gratitude, but she went into the kitchen to serve up the supper as if she’d gone off the whole thing.
I followed her in to see if I could help. It was funny to hear Clive next door, muttering half sentences to himself: “Oh, I
Clive was so thrilled with his new Robinsons that, in fact, it turned out to have been a mistake to give it to him before supper. It seemed Maud had worked that out already, the way she called him halfheartedly to the dining table. After we’d sat there for ten minutes it was quite apparent that there was no chance of Clive joining us.
Maud and I sat together and ate. She’d set little posies on the table and dressed it with the family silver as she had years ago. I’d forgotten how good-looking my mother was, even though the dress she wore didn’t suit her age. The neckline was too prim, the waist too pretty and the dainty, lace-trimmed sleeves cut into the baggy skin at the top of her arm, leaving the rest drooping loosely out of it and juddering as she cut up her food. Still, it was easy to see how lovely she’d once been and, even now, I was impressed by how handsome she was with a little effort. She’d given her face some extra color and her eyes were lifted with blue shadowing. She’d pressed her lashes with the lash curler, forcing them upwards, curly and girly. But Maud’s earlier exuberance had subsided. She was quiet and unhungry. She opened a bottle of wine.
Every night I’d ever known, Clive had unfailingly set a moth trap, a simple homemade device, on the slate sill outside the drawing-room window before he went to bed. He called it the Night Watch. It wasn’t for serious collecting, just a daily reference to see which moths had visited during the night, to note what sort of weather and temperature had brought them, or even, in some cases, to forecast weather that was on its way.
The evening that Maud gave him his Robinsons, he set it on the drawing-room sill, replacing the one that had kept the Night Watch for more than a decade. During the night, at times of lighter sleep, I was plagued by anticipation of the rare visitors we would find in this new miracle trap, and in the morning I rushed down first thing to have a look. Clive was already there and he was giving it undue attention. True, the jar was reasonably full, but I could tell in the instant I scanned it that there were no great surprises, no jewels. It might seem insignificant now—as it did to me at the time—but that morning Clive did something I found extraordinary.
Most mornings he scanned the Night Watch quickly, jotted down anything of interest, then released the lot. Very occasionally he found a scarce one worth breeding, or one with a pigment he wanted to assay. Then he’d drop a couple of grams of tetrachloroethane into the jar to sedate them all and pick out the ones he wanted. But that morning he chased around in it with his hands like an amateur, wrecking—I was sure—a number of beautiful specimens. Garden Tigers, Underwings, a Bordered Beauty, Scalloped Oak, some Small Black Arches and several species of Pug were disregarded in the wake of his unfathomable mania. I thought he must be after the Light Crimson Underwing for a source of that iridescent pink, but why not anesthetize the jar first? Instead he spent at least a minute rummaging about, crushing some and damaging others until finally he had hold of a small, unremarkable gray micro-moth that I hadn’t even noticed.
There are nearly one thousand species of larger moth in Britain, but more than three times as many small—and sometimes tiny—micro-moths. Far too many for them all to have names, so that when Clive had hold of that one, at the time I didn’t even know what it was. All I could think was, What an odd calculation to damage lots of beautiful large ones in order to catch such a dull, possibly nameless, tiny one. His strange behavior didn’t stop there. He pinched it neatly through the thorax with his thumb and index fingernails, which is a way of killing that usually you’d use only as a last resort—say, when you’re in the field and haven’t brought any killing fluid with you, or if you’re specifically trying to avoid the side effects of some of the poisons, such as the discoloring of ammonia or the stiffening of cyanide. Pinching is bound to mash the body a bit, and it’s certainly not the way I’d have chosen to kill a little moth like that. I’d have pricked it in the belly with a nitric acid needle.
“It’s
I wasn’t to find out for two more years, on the day that Maud died, why he was so unusually interested in it.
Chapter 10
A week after the convention, Clive received a simple telegram. It was from Bernard, who was, by that time, head of biological sciences at a northern university. It read simply:
YOU DO BRIMSTONE STOP
I’LL DO SWALLOW-TAILED STOP
IT’S A RACE STOP
BERNARD STOP
“Silly games,” Clive tutted, tossing the telegram dismissively into the wastepaper basket in the hall. “He’s supposed to be a professor now,” he added, walking through to the kitchen.
I had thought that would be the end of it so at first I didn’t take much notice. But—now here’s the funny thing—it turned out Bernard understood something about my father that I didn’t: that a challenge of this nature had an irresistible lure for him, that even against all rational judgment and time pressures on our mounting deadlines, he would never ignore it.
A moment after he’d dismissed it as frivolous, I saw Clive scribbling calculations on the notepad he carried with him in his jacket pocket for “observations,” but it was only after lunch, when he laid out his entire stratagem for assaying the Brimstone fluorescence, that I realized he was picking up the gauntlet. He still professed irritation at Bernard’s message, so I can’t think why he decided to waste valuable time and energy on it when we were already up to our necks in the grant-backed research.
To make all this perfectly clear, what Bernard was challenging us to was a race to assay the fluorescent compound in the two species of moth—him doing the Swallow-tailed and us the Brimstone. First we’d need to extract the compound, a fairly simple process of emulsifying the animal with a pestle and mortar and putting the resulting slurry through a series of alcoholic distillations. Assaying the compound would be easy too, if a little laborious: it’s a series of strategically devised chemical tests, the results of which would lead, by a process of elimination, like laboratory Cluedo, to the type of compound we were dealing with, if not to its specific empirical formula. There were lots of tests to do: the murexide test for uric acid; litmus test for pH; chromatography for solvency; hydrogenation, distillation, oxidization and acid/alkali reactions.
So what was the difficult bit of the enterprise? The challenge, as Clive put it, was not in the chemistry but in the cooking. It was a problem of quantities: to get enough of the fluorescing compound to do the assay, Clive had worked out that we were going to need to crush more than twenty-five thousand Brimstones.
So that was it. We went headlong into Bernard’s challenge.
