The Peppered Moth by Margaret Drabble Page A

those, in the nature of the exercise—would not appreciate anything too newfangled.
    Faro Gaulden is glad she came. Unlike most of those here, she is not a local, though she has local roots. She is here with a dual purpose, in part to accompany her Great-Aunt Dora, and in part to find out about Dr Hawthorn’s project, in which she has a professional as well as a personal interest. And she is also here in order to get away from London and from her onetime so-called ex-partner Seb. She will have to ring Seb when she gets back to her hotel room. At least she will have something new to tell him about. Seb has been getting her down horribly of late. She does not know what to do about Seb. She doesn’t know how she could have let him become such a problem to her. She shuts the thought of him from her mind, and concentrates on what is around her.
    The genetic pattern manifested in the clever Dr Hawthorn—thick curly grey hair, slight bones, short stature, a large nose in a small face—does not seem to be repeated anywhere else in the room. Dr Hawthorn must inherit his genius and his physique from the non-Breaseborough branch. On the other hand, the Cudworth-Bawtry type is well represented here. Faro notes the obese, waistless, bosom-heavy, thick-jowled, loose-skinned, round-nosed, double-chinned and stolid Cudworths, and knows that she is of them. She has Cudworth-Bawtry blood in her veins and their DNA throughout her structure. She cannot pretend that she has not got a big bust. Is that what she will look like if she lives to be fifty? God, she hopes not. Pity she ate that second egg sandwich. Faro shuts her eyes for a moment and conjures up the image of her redhaired mother, still a presentable woman, and the memory of her dead and dissolute father, famed as the most handsome man in Europe. Then she glances, sideways, at stout Auntie Dora with her swollen legs. Quite a genetic battle to be fought, between the Bawtry-Cudworths and the Gauldens. Can one
will
oneself to favour one side of the family rather than the other? What would Lamarck have said? In Faro’s case, she has to admit, there is bad blood on both sides. Pity she has to take after any of them. The weight of the flesh, the breeding in the bone. Pity one cannot spring from nowhere, or from fire or wind, like a phoenix or a flower.
    That good-looking Indian in the back row, hiding behind tinted glasses and making notes in his notebook, seems to have sprung more or less from nowhere. He can’t be a Breaseborough man, can he? What is he doing here? Is he a reporter, or a spy? wonders Faro. Or is he an archaeologist from Northam? He looks vaguely familiar, like someone she might have seen on telly. Perhaps he’s a cricketer? Perhaps he’s a Cudworth by marriage?
    The Cudworths are the largest named group in the assembly, for the meeting has been organized by Bill Cudworth, who happens to be the president of the Cudworth One-Name Society. You can’t tell much from looking at Bill Cudworth, as he is almost aggressively nondescript and average. He is Mr Everyman, five foot ten, eleven stone, brown-haired, fairskinned, lightly freckled, round-faced, bespectacled, affable, comfortable, comforting and utterly English, in his grey weekend trousers, his checked Viyella shirt, his sports jacket. He is the respectable essence of respectable Cudworth. Unfortunately, bearing the name of Cudworth does not in itself guarantee one an important place in the new Domesday Book, for, as Dr Hawthorn has tried to explain, he is primarily interested in matrilineal descent, which in Britain at least has little to do with naming. Nevertheless, the Cudworths and their readymade groundwork network will come in very handy for research purposes, and they can all look forward to the day when they will be invited by the Cudworth chapter in Argentina, or requested as guests by the Cudworth Congress in Iowa City.
    Iowa City is represented here today, as those who have consulted the charts and read