The Peppered Moth by Margaret Drabble Page B

the labels have already discovered. Some of the locals have introduced themselves to Iowa Man, who has appeared here in the shape of a curly-headed young-middle-aged Cudworth who teaches business studies at the University of Iowa. He has come here to visit his roots. (He is also here in a professional capacity to explore the possibility of setting up a joint degree course with the University of Loughborough, but nobody here has shown much interest in that. Some of them have been to Loughborough, but they do not speak highly of it. Nothing much goes on in Loughborough, according to the parochial people of Breaseborough, though one of them concedes that it is ‘a nice clean town’.)
    Argentina, in contrast, has not made it to this reunion, for Argentina is a very long way away, almost as far as Australia, and the airfares are a good deal more expensive. Dr Hawthorn has been interested to learn that the legend of the black sheep of the Bawtrys, who emigrated to Buenos Aires, is still remembered here, a century and a half later. He’ll try to catch the Argentinian Bawtrys next time he’s flying through. Australians and New Zealanders are here, but then Australians and New Zealanders are everywhere these days. They seem to spend their lives on the wing, taking after their native albatross, restless, round the world with unshut eye, unable to settle, back and forth, on cut-price tickets bought in bargain bucket shops, trying to find out more about why their ancestors had to get away in the first place.
    A rum mixture of people, in this hot chapel hall. Rum, but not at all random. They are carefully selected. There ought to be some meaning here, if only one could read it. Faro looks around, with an eye for dress codes rather than physique, and notes a quaint variety of English summer wear—.flower-patterned skirts worn with contrasting flower-patterned blouses, lace collars and shapeless cardigans, plimsolls patterned with flowers, scarves patterned with flowers, handbags and tote bags decorated with flowers. The Cudworths seem fond of flowers. Paisley is also in evidence. Faro’s grandma had favoured paisley. Several of them wear what she guesses to be old National Health glasses with identically tinted pinkish-blue frames—does that represent a deep genetic pattern of taste, or merely the stock once favoured by the local optician?
    Dr Hawthorn now tells them that one of the most interesting riddles facing humanity lies not in the future but in the past. ‘How did we get
here
from
there?
This is the question which, in its many aspects, obsesses him, and it must interest them, or they would not be here at all, would they? The future lies in the past, argues Dr Hawthorn. (He speaks very fluently, perhaps too fluently: Faro Gaulden from London and Peter Cudworth from Iowa City, who are more accustomed to listening to public speakers than most of those here today, wonder if there is not perhaps a touch of the charlatan about him, but both, independently—for they have not yet been introduced—dismiss this suspicion as unworthy: the gift of the gab does not necessarily make one a bad scientist, does it?) The very future of our species may lie, repeats Dr Hawthorn, in our correct interpretation, with all the new tools now available, of the data of the past. Where we come
from
is the most interesting thing that we can know about ourselves.
    Some look doubtful at this suggestion. Of more immediate interest to some here is the result of the Yorkshire versus Australia cricket match currently being played at Headingley, or an anticipated pint of beer at the Glassblowers Arms, or a smoke on Castle Hill, or a coupling with some other Bawtry or Barron or Cudworth. Indeed, some may even have been contemplating a coupling with a far-flung Walters in Mexborough, or a Melia in Rotherham, or an Applebaum in Sheffield, or a Woolfson in Wath. They are not all stick-in-the-muds, not all stay-at-home slugabed intermarried untravelled folk. Some