The Sister

You can’t just set up a light trap night after night and hope you’ll catch lots of Brimstones. By the time the hunting season is over you’d have only a few hundred. We needed thousands, and quickly, and for that some cunning was required. Clive devised an ambitious plan. First, we needed virgins.

Moths share our weakness for sweets and alcohol, and the Brimstone is no exception. If you take the time to make their favorite recipe, mix it in a little treacle and smear it on trees or fence posts, they will come from miles around to feast and, at the same time, get stuck to the treacle, ripe for collection. So Clive went into the pantry and, like a witch at a cauldron, set about mixing together a potion of exquisite attractiveness to Brimstones, whose particular tastes are for wine, fermented bananas and rum. In time he reappeared with a sticky, gloopy pot of sour-smelling treacle.

Clive knew when and where the Brimstones would be on the wing and want a little something sweet. Each morning and night, he consulted his barograph and plotted the hygrometer recordings, patiently awaiting the perfect conditions. Moths won’t come to sugar when the air current is northeast or easterly, or if the atmosphere is not to their liking. For the first three weeks the weather was lazy and calm, too clear, too hot or too dry, but in the middle of the fourth there was a sharp rise in the mercury. It was overcast at dusk, and the night became a little thick and heavy, tight and threatening, hot and thundery, not a breath of wind….

“Tonight,” said Clive, like a conjurer, “but the Brimstones won’t fly ’til ten.”

Just prior to the ten o’clock news on the wireless, we slopped the treacle in strips onto six of the lime trees down the drive, and just after the news we returned to collect fourteen fresh yellow Brimstone females, two pregnant and twelve virgins.

It was the virgins we particularly prized. Back inside, I squeezed their bottoms one by one, and out dripped the most powerful aphrodisiac known to nature. Males will seek it out from up to five miles away, even from within a closed smoke-filled room upwind. It was with this powerful potion that we were going to persuade all the male Brimstones in southwest Dorset to flock here to take part in our experiments.

As well as light traps, which we set along the hawthorn hedges, we hung the scent of virgins in lures all over the grounds and began to collect the Brimstone population of the surrounding countryside. They came each night in their hundreds and each day I had the laborious task of anesthetizing them in batches and sampling through them, gassing the males, saving the pregnant females, which we could breed from, and squeezing the virgins for more potion. It was like a military operation, the mass execution of the local Brimstone population, and I sat from dawn to dusk, for days and weeks, during that long deathly summer, separating those who were to be immediately gassed and those who were of more use to us alive.

That summer Clive and I were both so involved in our work that we’d break for a quick meal at seven, then work long into the night. The autumn that followed was particularly dreary, bringing days when the mist refused to lift, as if a daylong dusk had come forever to the Bulburrow valley. Looking back, I can see how I got caught up in Clive’s unhealthy obsession with his work but—you must believe me—I’m not about to make excuses for the problems that arose from it.

One early autumn day Clive and I were busy killing and counting the second-generation Brimstones from the night before. It had been the best catch of the season, the trap such a shimmer of iridescent yellow it looked as if we had caught a single celestial being, which writhed in protest in its jar. It was while we were jubilantly counting them, more than two thousand in one trap, that we considered showing the result to Maud. That is when, to my disgrace, I worked out that we hadn’t seen her for two days.

Eventually we found her camped in the library. She had moved in, she said, in high spirits. The room stank. The customary smell of old books and beam oil was now suffused with burnt toast, stale breath and pure alcohol. She was lying on the floor in front of the sofa, her head propped up on her hand, her usually temperate hair loose and angry. Various books, with some issues of The Ideal Home, for which she had a subscription, were strewn about. Within her reach there were two plates with crumbs, a yogurt pot and a Kit Kat wrapper. Letters from Vivi were scattered across the floor with an array of varnished gourds usually displayed in a bowl on the window seat. The Hoover was on its side under the window as if it had dashed out of its cupboard in the hall in an independent attempt to help but at the last moment keeled over in horror at the sight of it all. I counted five bottles of Garvey’s sherry at various levels of empty, and seven tumblers. It was just after ten-thirty in the morning.

“Did you discover how to make a moth?” She grinned.

Clive tutted and walked out.

I was shocked. “Not yet, Mummy,” I said, appalled at the state of her and the room and my own selfishness not to have seen what had become of her. A sick thrust of guilt and love and shame and overbearing failure churned through me.

“I’m so sorry, Mummy,” I said, kneeling to hug her. “I’m so, so sorry.” I started to cry, taking her in my arms, and I felt her stiffen a little as if the role reversal was too unnatural for her.

“What on earth are you sorry about, darling?” She giggled, her chin digging into my shoulder. “I really don’t give a damn if you haven’t discovered the divine secret of moths,” she slurred. “I never have,” she whispered. “Just don’t tell Daddy that.” Her elbow slipped, her head hit the floor and she laughed at the ceiling in pure enjoyment.

“No,” I said, straightening up. “I’m sorry about this.” I gestured to the room around me.

“What?”

“Well, the room. And you lying here like this and—”

“You mean all the crap, darling?” she said, with her arms outstretched as she lay on the floorboards. “Oh, we don’t need to worry about that, my love, just a little dust and a sweep and a…you know, we can do it anytime,” she said, breaking into a sort of singsong.

She’d lost sight of herself. What was the point in trying to convey to her what I saw? What a shock the real Maud would have if I could lead her into the room and show her this Maud as I saw her now. Maud, one of the most respectable people in this village. It struck me suddenly that it was partly my fault. The real Maud would have put enough trust in me to ensure it never came to this. I’d failed her, even though she’d always been there for me. I’d let her down because I had been too concerned for too long with my work and my own life to see what needed to be done.

“What’s the time, darling?” she asked, sitting up again.

The shutters were closed and I shouldn’t have thought she knew the time, the day or the year. Maud was not there at all. I checked my watch. “It’s just gone ten-thirty.” I went to open the shutters. “In the morning,” I added.

What happened next came as a bolt from the blue.

“What do you mean by that, Virginia?” Maud barked aggressively at my back. “What do you mean by in the morning?”

I turned slowly. I wanted to say that I hadn’t meant anything by it, but when I opened my mouth nothing came out.

“In the morning,” she repeated, imitating an enfeebled voice. “Don’t you dare patronize me, my girl. Hear me. I won’t stand for that behavior from you. Do you understand?” She was shouting now and had pulled herself up to sit with her back against the sofa.

“Look at me,” she ordered, and stared straight into my eyes in the most frighteningly direct way, a look I’d never seen in her before, her eyes keen, wild and vivid. She pointed at me and went on, “You might think you’ve got all big and clever because you’ve joined Daddy in his work, and you might think what you do makes the world go round, but, Ginny”—she stopped shouting, stayed pointing and deepened her voice so low and gravelly that it shook—“you’ve still got a hell of a lot to learn, my girl, and I don’t want to ever hear you talking to me like that again. I don’t care what you might think I am, or how remarkable you think you are, but you will respect me because I’m your mother. Do you understand? Do—You—Understand?” she repeated, shouting once more.