They were tiny, golden-winged moths. We found them on the walls in the mornings. A visitation. They filled us with a vague sense of generosity. Sharing our house, sharing our home with them. They seemed to like dark places: inside wardrobes, behind furniture, under sofas and armchairs. We guessed their sudden advent was something to do with global warming. And insects were scarce, weren’t they? So, it had to be a good thing. A manifestation of nature. Beautiful in its way.

We tried never to kill anything in those days, cupping daddy longlegs in our hands, waving wasps towards an open window, steering those big garden spiders into a jam jar. We let the birds get to our gooseberries and red currents. Thinking that was fair enough. In the scheme of things. There were worse things to worry about than offering hospitality to a few moths. And they were lovely creatures, resembling stray husks of wheat, as if our house was a granary emptied of its plenty.

I’d just retired and I was trying to get rid of stuff. Liz still had a year to go – and gaol fever. I was shedding books mainly, but old clothes and shoes, too. I noticed that a sports jacket that I used to teach in had started to fray at the cuffs. I might take that to the shop in town where a mother and her daughter carried out clothing alterations. All Seasons. They were both red-haired women. And I’d been a redhead myself before I wasn’t. Now my hair fell off into my lap at the barbers, almost phosphorescent. WTF, as they. Getting older was still a shock at times. A shock of hair. Liz thought that was funny.

Then Liz’s old friend, Shona, came to stay. She recently divorced and feisty as hell if you crossed her after a glass of wine. She was an unreconstructed Glaswegian socialist, which always made us feel slightly guilty, as if what we had now was just the bourgeoise trappings of a neo-liberalist state. Though that didn’t stop her enjoying the wine rack. Callum had been a pain in the arse, so he wasn’t missed and Shona could be very funny on a good day, tilting her specs and telling you how it was. 

So, she examined the jacket and announced that it hadn’t merely frayed. She peered at it through those big glasses she wore. No, no, hell no. It’d been eaten. By moths. She took us through the house, examining the edges of carpets where they laid their eggs, the pin holes under the chairs and settee where the larvae had hatched and eaten their way out, leaving skeins of rolled wool. See? See? There and there. The wee bastards!

We saw, alright. We’d had new wool carpets fitted through the house when we moved in. Now the moths were everywhere and – as Shona impressed upon us – they’ll devour fucking anything. Anything spun from silk, mohair, lambswool. Keratin. Keratin? Human skin and hair. Bits of us which our bodies shed into the house. Which, I must admit, brought us up short. Hoaching, Shona said in her best Jean Brodie accent. Absolutely hoaching. Adding, unconvincingly. I’m afraid. Though she was really just trying to manage the feeling of contentment that trickles through you like cocoa at bedtime at someone else’s misfortune. She’d had the moth and now we had them. If we could benefit from her experience, all well and good. Kismet. A stroke of fate that tickled her sense of schadenfreude.
Overnight, we developed the hearts of killers. We checked the walls each morning where the moths liked to hang out and we exterminated them. They died meekly. We researched them on the Internet and Liz announced that the moth’s official name was tineola bisselliella.

A home wrecker, a clothing muncher, a heart breaker. It had a life cycle, a fondness for dark, humid places. The underside of rugs and carpets. The drawers of cabinets where we kept our pullovers. The interiors of wardrobes where my suits hung. They loved the dark. So they were shy and rarely seen. Like bats or vampires.

We put cedar blocks and lavender among out clothes. Gentle remedies. Shona was unimpressed. Sod that!You need the ultimate weapon with these buggers! We needed hi-tech remedies. Shona came with us to buy those traps that exude the female moth’s pheromones, trapping the lovesick males on a fatally sticky film. There was a reciprocal horror in that. They were destroying our lives, but we got to think of them dying slowly, starving, exhausted, desperate. If a moth can be desperate – it being the quintessentially human emotion we were experiencing. 

We sent off to a specialist supplier for sprays loaded with Moth Kill to treat the house. At the hardware shop, we got moth powder to treat the rugs we’d bought from Turkey. The ‘blonde bombshell’ (Liz’s soubriquet), who ran the shop gave us that knowing look. A look of complicity or maybe shame. 

The moth traps weren’t much good in the end. The moths seemed to have a sixth sense for danger. Or maybe they just didn’t think a wigwam of folded cardboard looked like a night of sexual adventure. When you squashed them on the wall, they left a nasty brown stain that had to be wiped clean. Every morning we checked the carpets for grubs and every morning we found them. Hatching. Hoaching. WTF.

They’d started in the living room and seemed to be ascending, determined angels floating to the upper floors. With Shona in attendance, the grim reaper, we made a start. We moved our bedside cabinets and hoovered, watching as strips of carpet got sucked away from their backing. The moths were in the same league as termites or dry rot. A visitation for some fundamental form of sin, quietly dismantling our house and all the wool and silk and shed skin scales in it. As Shona said: nothing but the best for these bastards! She’d had her house professionally fumigated, but still lived in fear of another visitation. It’s not over till it’s over. Every night was the Feast of the Passover for her. When we waved her off onto the train, she kissed us and sighed. Good luck with the wee problem, eh? And she was gone, leaving us alone and contaminated.

We started the next stage of our fight-back the day after she left, taking out every item of clothing from the house to be shaken and hung in the garden. A strangely exhausting experience, with our neighbours pretending not to look. I threw my teaching jacket away. I threw my uncle Geoff’s 1950’s overcoat away, though you couldn’t tell wear and tear from moth holes there. Finally, we remembered the basket in which we’d stored our winter glovers and bobble hats and found them consumed. That was sickening. We wiped down the edges of the carpets, put on masks and sprayed Moth Kill. Agent Orange in our very own Vietnam. We were fighting for survival. 

We got to a finish on a Friday afternoon. The house stank of chemicals from the sprays. We’d booked a B&B on the east coast for two nights and had our bags packed. We dropped the empty sprays into the re-cycling. Stripped off our face masks, showered, dressed, and got into the car. Liz sniffed, adjusted the rear view mirror and turned on the ignition. Let’s see how they like that! I remembered the flame throwers at Iwo Jima, winkling out Japanese soldiers from dugouts who were dying for their emperor. There was an emperor moth, wasn’t there?

We walked to Craster and Dunstanburgh Castle, exploring the coastal paths. I had my camera and was happy, or at least distracted, taking shots of a new place. We dined out. We queued up for smoked salmon sandwiches, buying Craster kippers to take home. You could smell the smokehouse day and night, fumigating the town. We lay awake picturing the agonies we’d instilled. I thought of Rachel Carson’s, ‘Silent Spring’, a masterwork on the chemical poisoning of the environment. It seemed we might be guilty of more than trying to preserve our home. 

The smell had faded a little when we got back to the house. There were dead moths on all the carpets, lying with folded wings like saints on a sarcophagus. There were grubs too, tiny white embryos that had crawled out to die. We hoovered everywhere. Then we dropped the hoover bags into the bin. Then treated the new hoover bag with moth powder. We’d done our homework, after all. It’s dark and warm and the wee buggers just love it in there. Shona, leaving us a list of precautions before leaving us on the platform. Her lips were compressed in sympathy that just could have been suppressed extasy.

Finally, we paid a visit to the local carpet shop and looked at samples of coir and sisal matting to replace our wool carpets. Then we realised that the house would need decorating whilst we were at it. We found a guy to do that, watching my retirement funds dwindle. We were moving from summer into autumn. We stopped seeing the moths in such numbers. Occasionally one would flutter past us and we’d roll up a newspaper and give chase. We lay awake in a state of existential unease, never knowing if we’d done for them, or if they were lying in wait, ready to hatch from their ninety-day life cycle. We avoided buying any new clothes containing wool. We got Rohan catalogues. We hoovered the mattresses to get rid of skin scales, washed curtains and sofa covers and hung them in the garden where sun was burning off low-lying mist. 

Autumn came in a blaze of beech trees and we seemed to have got the problem under control. Never relax. But we did. Lighting the wood burner, making the house cosy for Christmas when the kids would be home. One day the temperature dropped overnight and we woke to a garden electrified by frost. I opened my wardrobe to find my winter overcoat. A moth fluttered out like a stray snowflake. It settled on my arm as if to tempt me. Jezebel. I flicked it away, then swatted it against the wardrobe doors. It left a familiar brown stain. 

Life began to settle down a little. Liz had gone part-time. Our daughter-in-law, Brenda was pregnant and had about three months to go. Sometimes I slipped over to help Andy paint the house at weekends. Meanwhile, on Friday afternoons, five o’clock became wine o’clock, dialling up our friends on FaceTime, a glass in hand. Checking in on Shona. Aye, I’m alright, hen, no bad. Tilting her glass of wine ironically. Some of our recently retired friends acquired dogs and appeared cradling puppies like babies. Which they were, of course. 

At home, I kept schtum if I saw anything suspicious, quietly consigning stray moths to oblivion. Liz began to feel that they were under control. I could hear her muttering under her breath as she checked the walls and furniture in her reading glasses. Where are you, eh, where the hell? There were positive sign of mothlessness. The dawning of a new era. Taking back control.

I found time to organise my photographic archive on the computer, deleting hundreds of images. I was drowning in our past lives. And here was a box of letters somewhere that bothered me. Letters to each other, letters from our parents when we’d been students. Stuff that I wasn’t particularly keen on our kids seeing. Intimate things, especially now that the idea of actually writing a letter to someone with a fountain pen seemed impossibly stilted. These days you’d post something on Twitter or Instagram. One day, when Liz had gone out for a haircut, I pulled down the loft ladder and ascended into the roof space where we’d dumped the things we had no room for when we last moved house. There was something at the back of my mind. 

The first thing I spotted was my motorcycle jacket and helmet. I’d had a little Honda for a few years when Liz needed the car to get the kids to school. Then there were old trunks, lamp shades, jig saw puzzles, boxes of photographs and children’s games stacked on top of the carpet offcuts we’d put in the attic for insulation. Woollen carpets. Fuck! Moth fodder. I pulled them out one by one, sweating under the low roof, tying them into rolls and driving them to the local waste facility. Liz never went up there, so I decided to say nothing. When she got back with a stylish coiffure cut close into the back of her neck, I was enjoying my first glass of Sauvignon Blanc. She was still a handsome woman.

I kept checking. No moths, thank God. I remembered that they’d seemed to enter the house on the ground floor. Maybe I’d got to the roof space in time. Scorched earth. I didn’t intend to leave them anything to breed in. Like Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow. It was all in War and Peace. I’d read that as an undergraduate, spending the Michaelmas term burning the crepe soles off my suede boots, getting chilblains in front of the gas fire in my student flat. The old mantles glowing in the Victorian hearth. I’d taken Liz there after meals in the Greek restaurant on Mathew Street. Which reminded me about those letters and what they might contain.

I put that off, of course. It would have meant rooting out those old trunks and finding the bundles that we’d tied up. His and hers. We’d well and truly buried them. You couldn’t help thinking of the stacks of letters in attics all over England. All over Europe. The quaint leftovers of a bygone age. An age of tendresse, of restrained passions that were all the more powerful for being held back before they were acted upon. Before the age of instant gratification, of digital loneliness, online bullying, deepfake images, revenge porn. 

That’s probably nonsense, too. All that hand-written stuff was from another era. An archaeological layer for future generations to pore over. My dad had been a self-employed painter and decorator and a lay preacher. He sent me messages torn from his old invoice books with outbreaks of biblical lyricism when we’d done something wrong: Render unto Caesar when he’d lent me money or Behold the lilies of the field, when I was out of a job. The name of the Grand National winner that arrived two days after the race because of his second-class stamp habit. Prophecies that went to ground like mistimed lightning strikes from a dysfunctional deity. He invented the meme a few decades before the Internet came into being. 

That was all difficult to get to. But I did it in the end. One day, when rain was hammering off the roof and Liz was making marmalade in the kitchen, setting her mother’s jam pan on a rolling boil. I shinned up the ladder to the loft and switched the light on. First, I checked the walls. No moths. The trap had caught a few flies and a couple of wasps on its sticky film. I waited a few minutes, enjoying the stillness, the sound of the rain on the roof tiles, wondering if anything would flutter by, but there was nothing. All quiet. 

There were boxes of photographs up there, all neatly labelled with dates. First, the shots I’d taken with an old Kodak Instamatic camera as a kid, processed at the local chemist in monochrome. Then bigger prints when I had access to a darkroom. The art teacher at the FE college had taught me the process. Friday afternoons were slack in those days and I’d switch on the red light, developing the rolls of film I’d taken with our students. Exploring the town and its industrial history. Shooting at the local shopping centre to capture reflections in reflections, spiegel im spiegel, that sense of infinity. 

There was something oddly erotic about working in darkness under a red light. Feeding the film into the developing tank. Printing back-to-front images from the enlarger. Dunking the paper, tilting the developing trays so the fluid washed over the prints. Inhaling the sour smell of developer and fixative. Then those faint outlines rising. The ghosts of the past emerging into the present, until they were fixed and clipped to washing lines strung across the dark room.

The prints finished when I finally went digital, transitioning via a box of photo CD’s which I’d uploaded to my hard-drive. Now everything was on my computer. No photographic paper to enhance the texture of the images, though I still like to shoot in monochrome. Not that I’d done much recently, just a few images of that weekend on the coast which I’d assembled into a photo essay. Fishing nets and lobster pots, smoke dissipating from the smokery chimney, a tangle of ropes, the salt-encrusted chassis of a tractor driven into the sea for cockling. Dunstanburgh Castle, a monument of mortar and ashlar, almost black against a cloud-strewn sky. 

Once, I’d taken a few glamour shots of Liz without much on. Nothing too risqué. A Saturday afternoon, before we had children. I borrowed some lights from the college and set up the living room with the curtains drawn. I didn’t fancy the kids seeing those now. Liz would have forgotten about them. I found them and put them aside, where I could find them easily. There was something poignant about those early shots of Liz and the children. When she was young and freckled from the sun, and they were small and seemed unbearably innocent. That sense of lost time was Proustian. It was hard to fathom. As Barthes observed, each image seemed to have a punctum, pointing to a future that was already past. No wonder I hadn’t found the courage to sort through them properly.

The letters were another matter. When we went to university, we’d bought those old hooped trunks fastened by a hasp and padlock. You could just about lug them onto a train. Before the days of wheeled luggage. We’d kept hold of mine, a little dusty, my initials stencilled in gold letters on the lid. There it was, stacked under the eaves. There was a bin bag of old cotton sheets on top. I put those to one side and slid the trunk into the open space in the centre of the loft where I could lift the lid. 

The hasp was stiff, but I yanked it open. The trunk was lined with patterned paper, like the wallpaper you imagine in old gas-lit parlours. There was a label inside the lid and there was my name and home address in my dad’s writing. The address I’d lived in all my life before getting a ticket out of there. I’m talking about the days of new red-brick universities and maintenance grants. The days when you went to the Army and Navy store and bought a new donkey jacket to last you over three years of study. Days when you worked late in the library because you were struggling to feed coins into the gas meter. Days when you discovered wine and kebabs and pasta and pizzas. That frisson of excitement and social mobility that came with eating out in a restaurant. Social mobility? We’d no idea what that was, except the universe was definitely expanding.

Those days were days of sexual expectation and adventure, sparked by student parties that went on all night, LP’s dropping onto one of those portable record players that we all had back then. When I graduated, I owed the bank less than a hundred quid and I paid that off in a few weeks working as a gardener for the council, which is another story. I took that year out, wondering what to do with my degree. I met Liz and we ended up staying on in Liverpool, crammed into a bedsit in Toxteth. A stone’s throw from the University and still feeling like students. Then we trained as teachers, together…then…then…then. Bollocks! Get on with it. 

The letters were in a carrier bag at the bottom of the trunk. His and hers, just as I remembered. I could hear the radio going downstairs. I closed the lid of the trunk and sat on it to read them. I’d brought a cup of tea up with me, anticipating a long session, but it had already gone cold and separated into grey spirals. I could hear rain, the pattering of claws when the jackdaws touched down. There was a Velux window up there, covered in soot and streaked with bird shit. I opened it a crack to let in some air.

It’s funny how memory works. Just a glance at the handwriting on the letters reminded me of my mum and dad, though it was a bit harder to work out which friends had written to me back then. It seems odd now, but during that first Christmas holiday after the Michaelmas term, we actually wrote to each other, our new friends, still full of that sense of change. Ironically, if that is irony, some of us were also working on the Christmas post to supplement our grants. I remember offering my mum some housekeeping money from my first wage, but she wouldn’t take it. All that handwriting was stored deep in my memory. Script that leaned to the right or the left, the weird handwriting of my left-handed friend Steve who’d died of oesophageal cancer in his thirties. The girlishly rounded script of my mum. My dad’s copperplate that looked as if he’d scribed it with a chisel. 

In the end, there wasn’t much there, after all. There were a few letters from Liz, written in those long university holidays. I read a couple of them and they were pretty tame. Not because we didn’t have feelings, but because a letter was a letter and had a physical form and anyone could read them without a password or fingerprint access or biometric data. If anything, there was something constrained and a little sad about her letters, as if she didn’t know how to express what she felt, so they got diverted into chatty missives about her job in the supermarket or the soft toy factory or the holiday with her parents and sister in Scarborough when it p….d it down all week. In the end, I put them away again, reassured, but maybe disappointed, too. None one wants to think that the love they once felt was nothing special. I’d better go now, I promised to watch TV with my mum…Liz XXX. 

Liz’s pile of letters was a bit bigger than mine and tied up with a blue ribbon. I assumed that was because she kept up with her friends in those early years after graduation. Then having children to talk about, to compare. Or maybe I’d actually written to her more than she had to me. I untied the ribbon and found a couple of my letters fastened with sealing wax. I remembered how I’d found a stub of it in a kitchen drawer at home and melted a blob onto the envelope. The smell was like incense. My mum had used it for fastening the string on Christmas parcels, tying a knot then adding a dab of wax. It had seemed stylish at the time. We’d read English together and those nineteenth century novels were full of heroines melting sealing wax onto their love letters. A scarlet emblem of enduring love, a sign that the letter hadn’t been opened. A symbol of their virginity, as I once wrote in an essay. A stroke of originality, maybe. It got a tick in the margin from my tutor.

I should probably have taken the letters down to Liz as she was spooning the marmalade into jars to cool. But I tied that ribbon back over the past. Maybe what you remember isn’t so remarkable. Maybe what’s remarkable is how vividly you forget. In amongst the letters from her parents and the letters from me and a few letters from friends was an airmail envelope. It has Liz’s name on it and her address. Elizabeth Lawrence. The writing was upright and the mark above the ‘i’ in Elizabeth was written as a tiny circle rather than a dot. The postmark said España, but was so faded that I couldn’t make out anything else. 

Liz had told me that she and her family had started to take holidays in Spain in the ‘70’s. Her dad was a toolmaker and her mum a school secretary, so between them they were comfortably off, and Liz had no brothers or sisters. There was something in the envelope, but it wasn’t a letter. They’d been to the Costa Brava. Roses. We wouldn’t be seen dead there now. All sea and sangria and incipient melanoma. 

I opened the envelope and took out a photograph. It showed Liz and a boy posing at the seafront, leaning on a white iron railing, the sea glittering behind. It was Liz, younger than I’d ever known her. Her blonde hair was cut short, like a boy’s and she was wearing hooped earrings and a pink blouse with short sleeves. She looked as if she’d been in the sun too long, her skin glowing. 

The boy had tousled brown hair and a sardonic expression that was hard to read. His skin was scorched, his shirt unbuttoned, showing a thin silver chain with a crucifix. He looked at the camera with grey-green eyes and he had his arm around Liz, who was looking up at him. She looked excited. She looked happy to be just where she was at that moment. The sun lit the hairs on the back of her neck as she tilted her head up to him, as if they were about to kiss. It was a good quality image, the kind of thing a beach photographer might take. 

I flipped the photograph over and there was a one-line message on the back. We had it, such love! Carlos. In the bottom right-hand corner was an address and telephone number that had smudged a little. Not ‘have’ but ‘had’. There it was. A sixtieth of a second. A moment in time that had a beginning and a future that reached beyond the image. That happy boy and girl back in the 1970’s. Carlos. He must have grown old. Lived. Died. Who knows? In her mind he must still be a boy. The image had an indefinable quality, the way the camera caresses the young. 

Liz must have met him on holiday. He’d have been lounging on the beach or riding a moped the way Spanish boys do. They’d hung out together, imagining that they were in love. She’d gone on the back of his bike with her arms around him, worrying Stan and Evelyn, her parents. Then she came home and he sent on the snap for some reason. For reasons that were blindingly obvious. I wondered if she’d written back. Or called him from a telephone box at the end of the street as dusk was falling on Worcester, England. Then walked home to her house thinking about him. They looked about sixteen or seventeen in the picture. I wondered if they kissed, walked hand in hand on the beach. If they made love one night in the dunes when the sea was whispering. We had it, such love! Or maybe that was just his clumsy English.

I stared at that photograph for a long time, wondering if there’d been a time when Liz looked at me like that. With excitement, with adoration. I wondered whether our first fumbling moments of love making weren’t the first for her. Carlos. She even mentioned his name to me, once. It had been there all the time, somewhere in my mind. Carlos. I thought of the sun setting over the sea in a blaze of orange and scarlet, of the boy and Liz walking on the beach, his arm around her waist. I sat for a long time, listening to the rain on the slates above my head. Then Liz was calling me down for lunch and I was putting the letters back in order and bundling them into the trunk. 

I climbed down the ladder a little stiffly and went to the kitchen, full of the scent of orange zest. There was salad on the table. Two glasses for the Chablis that Liz was taking from the fridge. Maybe this was our time after all. I took the wine from her, unscrewed the cap and poured it. She took a sip. 

– Mmn, not bad. How did you get on?

– Oh, OK, there wasn’t much there in the end.

Carlos. I knew I could never ask. She turned back to get the salad spoons from a drawer. I put my arms around her from behind and nuzzled her ear, feeling her stiffen, then relax. She smelled of marmalade. I unfastened the strings of her apron and threw it on the working top. 

– Come here, gorgeous!

– You daft bugger!

Liz turned and looked at me, giggling, a little quizzical, a little unsure. I leant in to kiss her. A proper kiss that would show that we could still be tender with each other. We could still be grateful for what we had. 

But her eyes looked past me with a sudden flash of recognition. She lunged forward and struck. Her hand slapping the wall above the fridge. Turning to me with a wry smile of recognition, triumph, resignation. 

– Little bastard!

There on the tip of her finger was a crushed moth, its wings broken, a faint brown stain glistening on the wall.