Any Nonpareil?

by Edward Lear, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

At a quarter to seven Aubrey Rix carried the trap out on to the lawn and switched on the light.

It was a Robinson trap, which is a black plastic drum the size of a coal scuttle with a funnel in the lid and a bulb above the funnel, and the bulb was a hundred and twenty-five watts of mercury vapour. For the first minute it gave out nothing but a sulky violet, the colour of a bruise on the second day. Then it warmed, and went through mauve and a cold lilac to its proper working colour, a blue-white with a little green in it, like a milk bottle held up against a winter window. By then it lit the whole of the back garden, the shed, the two damsons, the washing line with one peg left on it, and the dyke beyond the hedge, where the water took the light and kept it.

Moths do not come to the light because they love it. Nobody knows quite why they come. Aubrey had read four explanations in fifty-five years and believed none of them, which he thought was the correct number to believe.

Then he did the posts. He kept the mixture in a Lyle's tin with the lid hammered back on: black treacle, two pounds of dark brown sugar, and a bottle of brown ale left open on the windowsill for a day until it was flat. He painted it on the three fence posts at the bottom of the garden with a pastry brush, at about the height of his chest, in strips the width of his hand. The recipe was Clement's. Clement had added a spoonful of rum, and had said that the rum was the secret, and Aubrey had never once put rum in, because he did not believe it and because it had been Clement's secret and not his.

Across the dyke, in the end house of the new row, an upstairs curtain moved and then was still.

---

In the morning the trap was full of egg boxes, as it always was, because he put them in.

That is the method. You line the drum with cardboard egg trays, and the moths that fall through the funnel creep into the hollows where the eggs would go and sit there, perfectly content, until somebody lifts them out. He sat on the back step with his notebook on his knee and his tea on the step beside him and took the trays out one at a time.

Lunar Underwing, fourteen. A plain moth the colour of a digestive biscuit, with a pale crescent on each forewing, as if it had been stamped by a very small official. Large Yellow Underwing, six, which sat with their wings shut over their backs like men in brown overcoats, and then went off like fireworks when touched, showing the yellow underneath, the yellow of a school sou'wester. Setaceous Hebrew Character, two. Black Rustic, three, blacker than anything else in the box, with a sheen like a wet slate. Sallow, one. Brick, one, which is the colour of brick. Angle Shades, one, folded at the edges like a leaf that had been left in a pocket.

He wrote them all down in the order he found them, with the date, 20.ix.26, and the temperature at dawn, which was nine degrees. Then he wrote Nonpareil — none, as he had written every night since the eleventh of March.

"Is that a spaceship?"

There was a girl at the hedge. She had got her top half through the gap by the elder, and her bottom half was still in the Gedges' garden, so that she looked like a person posted halfway through a letterbox. She was about nine. She had a school jumper on, inside out, with the label sticking up under her chin.

"It's a moth trap," said Aubrey.

"Mum says it's a spaceship. She says it comes on every night and it shines in Lewis's window."

"Who is Lewis?"

"My brother. He's a baby." She considered. "He's not a very good baby."

Aubrey had never in his life known what to say to children, and he had found that the best thing was to show them something. He held up the egg tray. She came the rest of the way through the hedge, and stood beside him, and put her face close to the tray, nearer than any adult would have, and looked.

"That one's a dead leaf."

"That's an Angle Shades."

"And that one's a toffee."

"Lunar Underwing."

"And that's a little man in a coat."

"Large Yellow Underwing. Don't—"

She touched it. It went off, yellow, and landed on her sleeve, and she shrieked, and did not move her arm. It sat there. She looked at it as though she had been given a medal.

Her name was Marnie Gedge. She had not had breakfast, because her mother had been up with Lewis and had fallen asleep on the sofa, and Marnie had not wanted to wake her. Aubrey made her a boiled egg. He cut the toast into soldiers, which he had not done since nineteen sixty-something, and found that his hands remembered it. She ate the egg and four soldiers and asked why the moths had numbers next to them, and he told her, and she said that was a very boring thing to do with moths, and asked if she could do it tomorrow.

---

Mrs Gedge came round that afternoon. She was a thin, tired young woman with her hair pulled back very hard, and she had Lewis on her hip, and Lewis was red and furious about something private. She was perfectly polite. The light came in round the edges of the blind in the baby's room, she said. She was sorry to be a pain. Was there any way.

There was. Aubrey had been afraid she would ask him to stop, and she had only asked him to move it, which was a different and much smaller thing. He moved the trap behind the shed, where the shed was between the bulb and the new houses. He lost, he supposed, a quarter of his light. It was a small problem.

"Marnie says you gave her an egg," said Mrs Gedge.

"I hope that was all right."

"She doesn't eat eggs," said Mrs Gedge, and looked at him for a moment with real curiosity, and went home.

---

The postcards were in a Huntley and Palmers tin on top of the wardrobe. There were three hundred and eleven of them. Aubrey knew this because he had counted them in March, after the telephone call from Clement's son, who had found the address in his father's book and thought somebody ought to be told.

They went back to the autumn of 1974. Before that there had been nothing to send postcards about, because before that Clement Thrower had lived four doors away and come round every evening. They were sixteen in the late summer of 1971, which was the summer they went sugaring in the woods behind Ranworth, two boys on bicycles with a paint tin hanging from the handlebars and a torch with a red rag over the glass, and they had painted every oak along the track and come back at midnight to see what had come to the sugar. A great deal had. Red Underwings, which Aubrey had never seen before, sitting on the bark with their grey forewings shut, so that you saw nothing at all until you put the torch close and they opened, and the red underneath was the red of a pillar box seen in rain. Clement had held the torch. Aubrey had held the notebook. That was how it was settled between them, without anybody saying so, and it had never been unsettled.

What they had wanted, what every boy in Norfolk with a torch and a tin had wanted then, was the Clifden Nonpareil. Catocala fraxini. Blue Underwing. It had bred in the Broads before the war and then it had gone, and after that one came over from the Continent only now and then, by accident, on an east wind, and was written up in the magazines as if it were a royal visit. It was a very large moth, three and a half inches across, with grey forewings mottled like the bark it slept on. The hind wings were black, and across the black ran a broad band of blue. They had never seen it. They had seen a photograph, in black and white, so they had never seen the blue either. They argued about the blue all the way home.

In 1974 Clement went to Sheffield to study metallurgy. He married a girl called Joan who was kind and sensible and liked walking. He had three children. He did not keep a trap any more, because he lived in a flat, and then because he had children, and then because he did not.

But every autumn, and then every season, and then, after Joan died, every week or two, a postcard came. A view of the Peak District, or of the Crucible, or of a cathedral he had been to with the Rotary Club. On the back, in very small upright capitals, what he had been doing, and the weather, and a question about Aubrey's knee or Aubrey's roof. And at the bottom, every time, three hundred and eleven times:

Any Nonpareil? — C.

Aubrey had always answered. He wrote on the backs of postcards of Hickling Broad and Horsey Mill, which the shop in the village sold for forty pence. He wrote what had come to the trap, and the weather, and he never said anything else, and at the bottom he wrote None yet. — A.

He had not been to the funeral. It had been in Sheffield, on a weekday, in the rain, and he had not been sure that he would know anybody, or how he ought to be introduced if he did.

---

Marnie came every morning for a week. She came before school, through the gap by the elder, which was getting wider, and she lifted out the trays herself and called out the names while Aubrey wrote. She did not call out the names in his field guide. She had names of her own, and on the second morning he began writing them in the margin, because they were good.

The Lunar Underwing was a Toffee. The Black Rustic was a Vicar. The Setaceous Hebrew Character was a Mr Smudge, because of the black mark on its forewing, which looks like a thumbprint on a letter. When he told her the real names she did not believe him. Nobody, she said, would call a moth a Setaceous Hebrew Character. It was not a name, it was a sentence.

"There's one called a Merveille du Jour," said Aubrey. "It means the wonder of the day."

"What does it look like?"

"Green. Green with black and white marks, exactly like lichen on a gravestone. It sits on a tree and you can't see it at all."

"That's a stupid name, then, if you can't see it."

On the fourth morning a Merveille du Jour came to the trap. She saw it first, because she was looking for it and he had not been. She did not shout. She went quite still, and held the tray out to him flat on both hands, the way you would carry water, and the moth sat in the hollow with its green turned to the light. It was the green of a willow leaf underneath, which is a green with a great deal of grey in it, with a crust of black and a few dabs of white laid over it as if with the end of a matchstick.

"Wonder of the day," said Marnie. "All right. That's all right."

He made her an egg every morning. She ate it every morning. He did not tell her mother.

---

On the twenty-seventh the wind went round to the east.

It was a cold, dry wind with a smell of the sea in it. He knew what an east wind in late September could bring. Everyone did. And so it was annoying, more than anything, that this was the day that the edges of things began to go silver in the middle of the afternoon.

He had had the Morbids, as his grandmother called them, since he was six, and he had taken his tablets for forty years, and mostly they did their work. But now and then, when he was tired, or when the weather changed, something came loose. First the silver at the edges of things: the edge of a cup, a doorframe, the line of the roof against the sky, all outlined in a thin quick light, the light on the rim of a knife. Then, if he was unlucky, the rest. He was not often unlucky now. He knew what to do. He sat down where he was, which was on the back step, and he put his hands flat on the cold brick on either side of him, and he waited for it to pass, as you would wait for a bird to settle before you draw it.

It passed. It left behind it the tiredness, which was like being filled with wet sand from the feet up. At dusk he nearly did not put the trap out. Then he thought of Marnie lifting out the trays to find them empty, and he got up, and carried it behind the shed, and switched it on. He did the posts. He did them badly, slopping the treacle down the wood, because his hands were not yet quite his own.

At about ten o'clock he went out with the torch to look at the sugar. He did not know afterwards why he had gone; he did not usually look until morning. The wind had dropped. The garden smelt of treacle and of the dyke. On the first post there were two Lunar Underwings and a Large Yellow Underwing with its head down in the sugar, drinking like a pig at a trough. On the second post there was nothing. On the third post, at the height of his heart, there was a piece of bark.

It was a large piece of bark. It was grey, mottled, a little paler at the front edge, and it was very much too large. Then he moved the torch, and it opened.

The hind wings were black, a deep soft black like the inside of a velvet hat. Across each one, in a broad curved band, was the blue.

It was not cornflower, which is too warm, nor sky, which is too thin. It was paler than either, a blue with a little lilac in it and a little grey, the blue of a vein on the inside of the wrist, the blue of a hill a long way off on a hot day. They had argued about it for fifty-five years and they had both been wrong.

It shut its wings. It was bark again.

Aubrey stood with the torch. The silver had come back into the edges of the post. He could see it on the grain of the wood, and on the bright rim of the treacle, and on the outline of the grey wings, and he did not know any more which of these things was there and which was only in him. He had seen lights before that were not there. He had once, at the age of eleven, seen the whole of Hickling church outlined in white fire, and told his mother, and been taken to the doctor in Norwich.

He went inside, and sat down in the kitchen with his hands flat on the table, and waited. When he went out again at midnight there was nothing on the third post but sugar.

---

In the morning he did the trap as usual. Lunar Underwing, nine. Black Rustic, four. Brick, two. Large Yellow Underwing, three. Sallow, one. Feathered Thorn, one, the first of the year, with its antennae like two small ferns. He wrote them down. Then he sat with the pen over the page for a long time.

He wrote Nonpareil — and stopped.

Marnie was late. She came at ten to eight, not through the hedge but round by the road, at a run, and she banged on the front door, which nobody ever used, so that the letterbox rattled.

"There's a big one," she said. "There's a really big one, on our wall."

It was on the back wall of the Gedges' house, just under the gutter, on the warm bricks that faced the morning. It sat with its wings shut, grey on red, quite still, like a piece of bark that had been stuck to a house by a person with a strange sense of humour. Moths of that kind will rest by day on walls as well as on tree trunks, and they will sit there until dusk. You could have walked past it all day.

Mrs Gedge came out in her dressing gown with Lewis and a cup of coffee and stood beside them and looked up.

"Is that what all the fuss is about?"

"Yes," said Aubrey. He could not say anything else just then. He found that he had taken hold of the drainpipe.

"It's grey," said Mrs Gedge.

"It's blue underneath," said Marnie. "Mr Rix says. You have to wait."

Aubrey took a photograph of it with the camera on his telephone, which he did not know how to use, and then Marnie took four more, which were better. He went home, and sat down at the kitchen table, and opened the notebook, and finished the line.

Nonpareil — 1. On sugar, 22.00. Resting on the Gedges' wall, morning. Seen by M. G.

Then he went upstairs and took the tin down off the wardrobe, and took out a postcard of Horsey Mill that he had bought in May and not used, and turned it over. He wrote the date, and the weather, which was fine, with an east wind dropping. At the bottom he wrote:

Yes. — A.

There was nobody to send it to. He put it in the tin, on top of the others, face down, and put the lid on.

---

At school that day, Marnie told her teacher, she had drawn it. She brought the drawing round at four. The moth in the drawing was the size of a dinner plate and its wings were wide open, and she had coloured the band with a felt-tip, a hard bright blue, the blue of a swimming pool on a poster. It was the wrong blue. Aubrey told her it was very good, and did not tell her it was the wrong blue, because she had not seen it yet.

At half past six they stood together at the bottom of the Gedges' garden and looked up at the wall. Mrs Gedge watched from the kitchen window, holding Lewis up so that he could see too, though what Lewis made of it nobody will ever know.

The light went out of the sky slowly, as it does in the Broads at that time of year, the blue draining down into the reeds. The bricks went from red to brown to no colour at all. And at the moment when there was just not enough light left to see it by, the piece of bark on the wall began to shiver. It shivered for a long time, warming itself, the way the old men used to stamp their feet at the bus stop in Stalham in winter.

Then it opened.

Marnie said nothing at all, which Aubrey would remember afterwards as the finest thing anybody had ever said to him. The moth hung there for a second with its wings wide, the black and the blue, the blue that was paler than you would believe and stranger, and then it dropped off the wall and went away over the dyke, very fast, east, into the dark.

"Was that the right blue?" said Marnie at last.

"Yes," said Aubrey.

"Mine's wrong."

"Yes."

She thought about this. "Will you put the light on tonight?"

He went back through the gap by the elder, which was quite wide now, and carried the trap out from behind the shed. He looked at the dark window over the dyke, where Lewis was being put to bed, and then he looked at the window beside it, where Marnie's torch was already shining at him over the water, on and off, on and off, like a signal from a ship, to make quite certain that she can be found.

Later than usual, at a quarter past seven, Aubrey Rix switched on the light.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem septimum Kalendās Novembrēs (26 October 2026), ab Eduardō Lear per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Edward Lear, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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