Fiction: The Moth

Fiction: The Moth

A sneak peek at the prologue for a work-in-progress...

Helen Higgins

Oct 31, 2026

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The moth had been throwing itself against the grimy pub window for nearly ten minutes when she killed it. She did so without interrupting him. One moment it was beating its wings against the pane; the next, her fingers had closed around it. It seemed determined to reach something it could neither understand nor possess. She tightened her fist slowly, feeling its small body buckle between her thumb and forefinger.

He was telling her about a student who had accused him of intellectual arrogance. He hadn’t even noticed that she’d extended her arm up to the glass pane for the insect.

“It’s an interesting accusation,” he said, smiling into his Guinness, “because arrogance presupposes a certain degree of self-regard. I’ve never been particularly interested in myself.”

She opened her hand beneath the table. The moth lay in her palm, its wings folded into a shape almost resembling a heart. She wrinkled her nose involuntarily in disgust.

“Have you not?” Lydia murmured, suddenly glancing directly up at him to make eye contact as the dead creature fell from her hand to the floor. She pushed the spike of her heel into its lifeless body absentmindedly, crushing it into the tiled floor, still staring into those dark brown eyes.

He laughed. He’d always liked the way she asked questions. There was something about her attention that made him feel he was being listened to at a level most people couldn’t manage. She didn’t simply wait for him to finish speaking. She appeared to enter his thoughts, examine their foundations before appraising the architecture, and return with something he hadn’t considered. At fifty-eight, he’d begun to mistake this for admiration.

Once, he’d been a beautiful man. He had the photographs to prove it: the young, successful celebrity professor with dark, curly hair falling over his forehead. He’d had a face that seemed to have been assembled from the more flattering parts of several different faces, and eyes that made women feel, briefly, that he’d discovered something singular about them. So he was told, anyway. The photographs were still in his office, arranged among his beloved first editions and framed academic distinctions. He’d never removed them. He considered this an act of historical accuracy, and although he’d never admit it, he got a thrill from the Freshers that would allow their pert mouths to part slightly at seeing him in those images.

Now, though, his hair had thinned at the temples, his own mouth had settled into a permanent expression of scepticism, and the skin beneath his eyes had acquired the bruised appearance of fruit left too long in an ignored bowl. His suits were expensive, bespoke Savile Row tailoring, and his shoes were always immaculate, and his hands were striking in the way that old hands sometimes are: long-fingered, pale, and faintly translucent, like those of a pianist, but these were the only notable qualities about him. There was no ring, though. He wore his wedding ring on a chain beneath his shirt instead.

Lydia knew this because she’d seen it multiple times, and she’d never asked for an explanation before. She’d just assumed there’d been a bereavement.

She’d assumed wrongly.

She knew about the house in Oxfordshire, the wife named Marianne, the two grown children, the photographs taken in Tuscany, the anniversary dinner at Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons, and the Christmas card in which he stood beside a woman with silver-blonde hair and an expression of exquisite, almost pathological patience. She knew the wife’s age, her profession, the name of the village where she lived, and the fact that she had recently undergone surgery on her left knee.

Lydia also knew that this man had spent three nights with her in a hotel in Edinburgh in March, four nights in a rented cottage in the Peak District in June, and multiple afternoons in a university office, where he had kissed her passionately whilst she was pressed against a bookcase. He’d told her that he’d never felt so understood whilst sliding his hands up the inside of her thighs.

She didn’t know what he’d told Marianne to excuse himself.

She did know that she was disgusted with him.

The discovery had taken less than six minutes. She’d entered his name into a search engine, which spat back an institutional biography, an old photograph, an obituary for his father that mentioned the family home, and then a photograph of a wedding, taken twenty-nine years earlier, in which the professor looked almost indecently young, and his bride had looked as though she had been given everything she’d ever wanted.

Lydia had stared at the screen for a long time. She wasn’t heartbroken. Heartbreak was too simple a word for what she’d felt. It suggested an injury, a sudden and involuntary rupture, or something one might reasonably expect to heal.

What she actually felt was closer to humiliation, and humiliation, she’d discovered, was a much more interesting emotion.

“Are you listening?” he asked.

“Of course.”

“I was saying that the problem with young people is that they’ve confused emotional intensity with intellectual seriousness.”

“How dreadful for them.” She cleared her throat before taking a sip of Pinot Noir. She noted that the colour of the wine matched the colour of her manicure.

“Precisely.” He leaned back. “Everything must be felt. Nothing is permitted simply to be understood.”

The pub was almost empty. Somewhere behind the bar, a radio played an old song at such a low volume that the singer seemed to be performing from another room in another building. The sound mixed with the persistent beat of autumnal rain against the window. Lydia wondered whether Marianne listened to music while preparing dinner, whether she still bought his favourite cheese from the deli, and whether she’d ever stood in the kitchen, holding a glass of wine, and suddenly understood that her husband was somewhere else in his mind.

She wondered whether Marianne knew he liked fucking other women.

“Do you believe,” Lydia asked, “that people are capable of knowing themselves?”

He considered this for a moment. It was fractional, but he did at least give her the courtesy of a pause.

“Not entirely. I think we construct narratives that allow us to live with ourselves. Most people are remarkably poor witnesses to their own behaviour.”

“And you?” She raised an eyebrow.

He smiled. “I’m a little better than most.”

She almost laughed. There it was: the small, polished arrogance beneath the self-deprecation. Whoever the student he’d been talking about was, they were right. He could confess to vanity provided he controlled the terms of the confession. He could admit to being selfish, provided the admission was presented as an intellectual observation rather than a moral failing. He’d made a career out of examining human weakness from a position of apparent immunity to it.

She’d once found this quality attractive. Now, she’d seen it for what it was: a locked room in which a frightened little man had installed himself as the presiding judge.

“Do you think,” she asked, “that a person can be evil without knowing it?”

He frowned slightly, but he didn’t pause again. “Evil is an unhelpful word. It suggests a metaphysical category rather than a series of choices.”

“Perhaps.”

“People do terrible things for ordinary reasons. Vanity. Fear. Sexual appetite. The desire to avoid consequences. There’s nothing especially mysterious about it, Lydia.”

“No,” she said. “I suppose there isn’t.”

He took a drink. She watched his throat move.

The extraordinary thing about hatred

, she thought,

was how little it resembled the hatred described in books

. There was no heat in it. No trembling. No theatrical surge of blood. No desire to smash glasses against walls. Her hatred was quiet. It had excellent posture. It knew how to wait. Her hatred was sitting at a small wooden table in a pub whilst it rained outside, listening to this man explain the limitations of human morality while his wedding ring rested against his chest.

She remembered a line from Shakespeare, though not quite accurately: “There is no art to find the mind’s construction in the face.” King Duncan, from Macbeth, if she remembered correctly. She’d always liked that one. She reminded herself to look up the full quote and correct herself. The face was, indeed, a treacherous thing, though. It could appear intelligent, generous, or even kind, while concealing the small, relentless machinery of appetite beneath it.

The professor was still talking.

He told her about a paper he had written in 1998, about a disagreement with a colleague who’d since retired, about the decline of the university and the inadequacy of contemporary scholarship. She’d have been 10 when that was published. He told her that he was considering writing a book.

“A proper book,” he said. “Something that will last. Not like the countless other things I’ve published before.”

She looked at the little crescent of foam on his upper lip.

“How lovely.”

“You sound unconvinced.”

“Not at all. I think you should write it.”

He seemed pleased.

She had learned over the years that men like him responded well to encouragement when it was offered without apparent effort. They liked to feel that their brilliance had been recognised spontaneously, without the indignity of having to request recognition. His arrogance meant that he wasn’t aware of how carefully she’d studied him because he hadn’t realised when her admiration had turned to hostility. He didn’t know that she could identify the moment when his confidence faltered, the fraction of a second before he began to speak more loudly. He didn’t know that she’d noticed his habit of touching his watch when he was anxious, or that he became impatient when a woman knew more than he did about a subject he considered his own.

He didn’t know that she’d been listening to him for months with the same attention he’d mistaken for devotion.

She’d listened to his stories about childhood, his father’s expectations, his first academic appointment, his first TV role, and his disappointments, of course. She’d listened when he spoke of loneliness, which he described as though it were a rare intellectual condition from which he suffered more profoundly than other people.

Initially, she’d believed him, at least in part.

That was the worst of it.

He wasn’t a monster. He wasn’t even particularly unusual. He was just a man who wanted to be admired without being accountable, desired without being inconvenienced, and loved without being required to tell the truth. Most people could relate to that. Pitiful, really. Mostly, he’d wanted the privileges of intimacy without its obligations. She’d found this almost more offensive than cruelty because at least cruelty required some acknowledgement of another person’s existence.

“Shall we have another?” he asked, raising his empty glass.

She looked towards the bar. For a moment, she imagined telling him that she knew everything. She imagined watching his face as he understood. He would tell her that it was complicated. For such an intelligent man, the excuse would be completely unoriginal. It always was.

He’d say that she was important to him.

He’d say that she was different.

With sufficient time, he might even persuade himself that he believed it.

“No,” she said. “I think that’s enough.”

He glanced at his watch. “Of course. Yes, you’re right. I’ve rather lost track of time.”

“Have you?” She smiled as she looked down. The moth had left a small grey mark on her palm. She rubbed it with her thumb until it disappeared.

Outside, the rain had stopped. The streetlights reflected in the wet pavement, turning the road into a long black ribbon. A couple hurried past the window beneath a single umbrella, leaning towards each other as though the weather had made them more intimate.

The professor began telling her about a holiday he and Marianne had taken in Venice, although he naturally neglected to mention that he’d visited with someone else. He spoke of the canals, the architecture, and the extraordinary light. He was clearly elongating the conversation. Stalling for extra time with her. Lydia listened, but she imagined the wife standing beside him on a bridge, her hand resting on his arm. She imagined the hotel room, the restaurant, and the gondolas. She imagined Marianne looking at the man she’d married and seeing, perhaps, a familiar face that had gradually become difficult to read.

He reached across the table and touched her wrist, dragging his fingers along gently whilst the tips danced against her skin. Her immediate response was to want to snatch her hand backwards, but she resisted.

“You’ve gone very quiet.” He looked at her earnestly.

“I’m thinking.”

“About what?”

She turned her hand beneath his, allowing his fingers to settle against her palm. “About how little we know about one another.”

He looked amused. “Oh, I think I know you well. Very well. Intimately.”

She held his gaze, willing herself not to give her true feelings away. For the first time that evening, she felt something close to tenderness. She didn’t feel it for him, exactly, but for the little boy he had once been, or potentially the young man in those photographs in his office who’d been so full of promise.

“Do you?” she asked. “Know me, that is?”

“Of course.”

He smiled at her flirtatiously, and she smiled wanly back.

Lydia then stood and reached for her coat. He looked surprised.

“Shall I walk you home?”

“That would be kind.” She nodded.

Outside, the air was cold and smelled of wet stone. He held the door open for her, then placed a hand lightly against her back as they stepped onto the pavement. She could feel the warmth of his palm through her coat. He began to speak about dinner.

“Maybe next week at a restaurant I’ve been recommended? Do you think we should book a weekend away again? Edinburgh, as you’d enjoyed it so much? Perhaps Cornwall if you fancy something different instead? You decide. I’ll pay.” He said.

Lydia listened with her usual attentiveness.

She, who’d spent the evening saying almost nothing, had already decided there would be no next meeting.

She slowly reached into her handbag, feeling the sharp edge of the blade inside.

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