A God in Ruins

by Kate Atkinson

  She smoothed her fiancé’s sheets, kissed his hand as there was not much face left to kiss and let an orderly know that he was dead. No euphemisms here. Then she returned to her ambulance and went foraging for more casualties.

  She ducked out when a third, a rather shy boy, a captain called Tristan, offered to tie a piece of string around her finger. (“Sorry, it’s all I’ve got. There’ll be a gorgeous diamond for you when this is all over. No? Are you sure? You’d be doing a chap an awfully big favour.”) She had bad luck and would spare him it, Izzie thought—uncharacteristically selfless—which was ridiculous of her given that all those lovely subalterns were pretty much doomed with or without her assistance.

  Izzie never saw Tristan again after her refusal and presumed him dead (she presumed them all dead), but a year after the war ended she was riffling through the society pages when she came across a photo of him emerging from St. Mary Undercroft. He was a member of parliament now and, it turned out, filthy rich with family money. He was beaming at the ridiculously young bride on his arm, a bride who was wearing on her finger, if one looked with a magnifying glass, a diamond that did indeed look gorgeous. Izzie had saved him, she supposed, but, sadly, she had not saved herself. She was twenty-four years old when the Great War ended and realized that she’d used up all her chances.

  The first of her fiancés had been called Richard. She had known very little about him beyond that. Rode with the Beaufort Hunt, she seemed to recall. She had said “yes” to him on a whim, but she had been madly in love with the second of her betrotheds, the one whose death she had been a witness to in the field hospital. She had cared for him and, even better, he had cared for her. They had spent their brief moments together imagining a charming future—boating, riding, dancing. Food, laughter, sunshine. Champagne to toast their good fortune. No mud, no endless awful slaughter. He was called Augustus. Gussie, his friends called him. A few years later she discovered that fiction could be both a means of resurrection and of preservation. “When all else has gone, art remains,” she said to Sylvie during the next war. “The Adventures of Augustus is art?” Sylvie said, raising an elitist eyebrow. No capital letter for Augustus. Izzie’s definition of art was broader than Sylvie’s definition, of course. “Art is anything created by one person and enjoyed by another.”

  “Even Augustus?” Sylvie said and laughed.

  “Even Augustus,” Izzie said.

  Those poor dead boys in the Great War were not so very much older than Teddy. There had been a moment with her nephew today when she had been almost overcome by the tenderness of her feelings for him. If only she could protect him from harm, from the pain that the world would (inevitably) bring him. Of course, she had a child of her own, born when she was sixteen and hastily adopted, an excision so clean and so swift that she never thought about the boy. It was perhaps just as well, then, that at the moment when she felt moved to reach out to stroke Teddy’s hair he had suddenly bobbed down and said, “Oh, look, a slow worm,” and Izzie was left touching empty air. “What a funny little boy you are,” she said and for a moment saw the shattered face of Gussie as he lay dying on his camp bed. And then the faces of all of those poor dead boys, rank upon rank, stretching away further and further into the distance. The dead.

  She accelerated away from this memory as fast as she could, swerving just in time to miss a cyclist, sending him wobbling into the verge from where he yelled insults at the retreating back bumper of the heedless Sunbeam. Arduis invictus, that had been the FANY’s motto. Unconquered in hardship. Terrifically boring. Izzie had had quite enough of hardship, thank you.

  The car flew along the roads. The germ of Augustus in Izzie’s mind already sprouted.

  Maurice, absent from this roll-call, was currently trussing himself up in white tie and tails in preparation for a Bullingdon Club dinner in Oxford. Before the evening was out, the restaurant, as Bullingdon Club tradition demanded, would be wrecked. Inside this starched carapace it would have surprised people to know there was a soft writhing creature full of doubt and hurt. Maurice was determined that this creature would never see the light of day and that in the not-too-distant future he would become fused with the carapace itself, a snail who could never escape his shell.

  An “assignation.” The very word sounded sinful. He had booked two rooms in the Savoy. They had met there before he had gone away, but innocently (relatively) in public spaces.

  “Adjoining rooms,” he said. The hotel staff would know the purpose of the word “adjoining,” surely? How shaming. Sylvie’s heart was thundering in her chest as she took a cab from the station to the hotel. She was a woman about to fall.

  The Temptation of Hugh.

  “The sun whose rays are all ablaze with ever-living glory.” Hugh was singing to himself in the garden. He had emerged from the growlery to take a little after-dinner (if you could call it dinner) stroll. From the other side of the holly hedge that divided Fox Corner from Jackdaws he heard an answering lilt. “Observe his flame, that placid dame, the moon’s Celestial Highness.” Which seemed to be how he had found himself in the Shawcrosses’ conservatory with his arms around Roberta Shawcross, having slipped through the gap in the hedge that the children had created through years of use. (Both he and Mrs. Shawcross had recently taken part in a local amateur production of The Mikado. They had surprised both themselves and each other with the vigour of their unlikely performances as Ko-Ko and Katisha.)

  Sun and moon, Hugh thought, the masculine and feminine elements. What would he have thought if he had known that one day these would be the names of his great-grandchildren? “Mrs. Shawcross,” he had said when he reached the other side of the hedge, rather scratched by the holly. The children who used this short cut were considerably smaller than he was, he realized.

  “Oh, please, it’s Roberta, Hugh.” How unnervingly intimate his name sounded on her lips. Moist, cushiony lips, accustomed to giving praise and encouragement to all and sundry.

  She was warm to the touch. And without corsetry. She dressed in a rather bohemian fashion, but then she was a vegetarian and a pacifist, and, of course, there was the whole issue of the suffrage. The woman was a terrific idealist. You couldn’t help but admire her. (Up to a point, anyway.) She had beliefs and passions outside of herself. Sylvie’s passions were storms that raged within.

  He tightened his hold on Mrs. Shawcross slightly and felt her respond in kind.

  “Oh dear,” she said.

  “I know…” Hugh said.

  The thing about Mrs. Shawcross—Roberta—was that she understood about the war. It wasn’t that he wanted to talk about it—God, no—but it was comforting to be in the company of someone who knew. A little, anyway. Major Shawcross had had some problems when he came back from the front and his wife had been very sympathetic. One had seen some awful things, none of them fit topics of conversation at home, and, of course, Sylvie had no intention of discussing the war. It had been a rip in the fabric of their lives and she had sewn it up neatly.

  “Oh, that’s a very good way of putting it, Hugh,” Mrs. Shawcross—Roberta—said. “But, you know, unless you can do very good invisible stitching there’ll always be a scar, won’t there?”

  He regretted introducing the needlework metaphors. The overheated conservatory was full of scented geraniums, a rather oppressive smell in Hugh’s opinion. Mrs. Shawcross held the palm of her hand against his cheek, gently, as if he was breakable. He moved his lips nearer to hers. Here’s a how-de-do, he thought. He was in uncharted territory.

  “It’s just that Neville,” she began shyly. (Who was Neville, Hugh wondered?) “Neville can’t… any more. Since the war, you know?”

  “Major Shawcross?”

  “Yes, Neville. And one doesn’t want to be…” She was blushing.

  “Oh, I see,” Hugh said. The geraniums were beginning to make him feel slightly sick. He needed some fresh air. He began to feel panicked. He took his marriage vows seriously, unlike some men he knew. He believed in the co
mpromise of marriage, he acknowledged its circumscription. And Mrs. Shawcross—Roberta—lived next door, for heaven’s sake. They had ten children between them—hardly a foundation for adulterous passion. No, he must extricate himself from this situation, he thought, his lips moving ever nearer.

  “Oh, Lord!” she exclaimed, taking a sudden step back from him. “Is that the time?”

  He looked around for a clock and couldn’t see one.

  “It’s Kibbo Kift night,” she said.

  “Kibbo Kift?” Hugh repeated, confused.

  “Yes, I must go, the children will be waiting.”

  “Yes, of course,” he said. “The children.” He began to make his retreat. “Well, if ever you need to talk, you know where I am. Just next door,” he added, rather pointlessly.

  “Yes, of course.”

  He escaped, taking the circuitous route of path and door rather than the vicious gap in the hedge.

  It would have been wrong, he thought, retiring to the chaste safety of the growlery, but nonetheless he couldn’t help but preen a little. He began to whistle “Three Little Maids from School.” He felt rather jaunty.

  And what of Teddy?

  Teddy was standing in a circle in a nearby field, kindly provided by Lady Daunt at the Hall. The members of the circle, mainly children, were moving clockwise, performing a peculiar caper based on Mrs. Shawcross’s fancy of what a Saxon dance might have seemed like. (“Did Saxons dance?” Pamela asked. “You never think of them dancing.”) They held wooden staffs—branches they had foraged from the wood—and every so often stopped and thumped the ground with these sticks. Teddy was dressed in the “uniform”—a jerkin, shorts and hood—so that he looked like a cross between an elf and one of Robin Hood’s (not very) Merry Men. The hood was a misshapen thing because he had been forced to sew it himself. Handicrafts were one of the things Kibbo Kift was keen on. Mrs. Shawcross, Nancy’s mother, was forever getting them to embroider badges and armbands and banners. It was humiliating. “Sailors sew,” Pamela said, in an effort to encourage him. “And fishermen knit,” Ursula added. “Thanks,” he said grimly.

  Mrs. Shawcross was in the middle of the circle, leading her little dancers. (“Now hop on your left foot and give a little bow to the person on your right.”) It had been Mrs. Shawcross’s idea for him to join Kibbo Kift. At the very moment when he had started looking forward to graduating from Cubs to Scouts proper, she had seduced him away with the lure of Nancy. (“Boys and girls together?” a suspicious Sylvie said.)

  Mrs. Shawcross was a great enthusiast for the Kinship. Kibbo Kift, Mrs. Shawcross explained, was an egalitarian, pacifist alternative to the militaristic Scouts from which its leader had broken away. (“Renegades?” Sylvie said.) Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, one of Mrs. Shawcross’s heroines, was a member. Mrs. Shawcross had been a suffragette. (“Very brave,” Major Shawcross said fondly.) One still learned woodcraft, Mrs. Shawcross explained, went camping and hiking and so on, but it was underpinned by an emphasis on “the spiritual regeneration of England’s youth.” This appealed to Sylvie, if not to Teddy. Although she was generally hostile to any idea that had Mrs. Shawcross as its origin, Sylvie nonetheless decided it would be “a good thing” for Teddy. “Anything that doesn’t encourage war,” she said. Teddy hardly thought that the Scouts encouraged war but his protests were in vain.

  It was not just the sewing Mrs. Shawcross had failed to mention, there was also the dancing, the folk singing, the prancing around in the woods and the endless talking. They were in clans and tribes and lodges, for there were a good deal of (supposed) Red Indian customs mixed up with the (supposed) Saxon ritual, making an unlikely hotchpotch. “Perhaps Mrs. Shawcross has found one of the lost tribes of Israel,” Pamela laughed.

  They all chose Indian names for themselves. Teddy was Little Fox (“Naturally,” Ursula said). Nancy was Little Wolf (“Honiahaka” in Cheyenne, Mrs. Shawcross said. She had a book she referred to). Mrs. Shawcross herself was Great White Eagle (“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Sylvie said, “talk about hubris”).

  There were some good things—being with Nancy, for one. And they learned archery with real bows and arrows, not things that they had to make themselves from branches or such like. Teddy liked archery, which he thought might come in useful one day—if he became an outlaw, for example. Would he have the heart to shoot a deer? Rabbits, badgers, foxes, even squirrels occupied a tender place in that heart. He supposed if it were a matter of survival, if starvation were the only option. He would draw the line somewhere though. Dogs, larks.

  “It all sounds rather pagan,” Hugh said doubtfully to Mrs. Shawcross. (“Roberta, please.”) This was in an earlier conversation, before their “incident” in the conservatory, before he had thought of her as a woman.

  “Well, ‘utopian’ might be a better description,” she said.

  “Ah, Utopia,” Hugh said wearily. “What an unhelpful idea that is.”

  “Isn’t it Wilde,” Mrs. Shawcross said, “who writes that ‘progress is the realization of Utopias’?”

  “I would hardly look to that man for my moral creed,” Hugh said, rather disappointed in Mrs. Shawcross—a deterrent he would remind himself of later when his thoughts returned to the scent of geraniums and the lack of corsetry.

  Teddy’s idea of Utopia would not have included the Kibbo Kift. What would it have included? A dog, certainly. Preferably more than one. Nancy and his sisters would be there—his mother too, he supposed—and they would all live in a lovely house set in the green countryside of the Home Counties and eat cake every day. His real life, in fact.

  In turn, the Kibbo Kift produced their own breakaway movement, the less eccentric Woodcraft Folk, by which time Teddy had managed to weasel his way out of the lot of them. At school he joined the OTC and enjoyed the concerted lack of pacifism. He was a boy, after all. He would have been surprised to know that in his sixties, when his grandchildren came to live with him in York, he would spend several months trailing backwards and forwards to a chilly church hall so that Bertie and Sunny could attend a weekly meeting of the Woodcraft Folk group that they were members of. Teddy thought that continuity would probably be a good thing for them, seeing as Viola, their mother, seemed to have provided so little. He gazed at his grandchildren’s innocent faces while they intoned the hopeful words of the “creed” at the beginning of the meeting—“We shall go singing to the fashioning of a new world.”

  He even went on a camping trip with them and was complimented on his “woodcraft skills” by the group leader, who, despite being large, young and black, reminded him a little of Mrs. Shawcross. “Learned in the Scouts,” he said, even all those years later unwilling to admit that he had taken anything from the Kibbo Kift.

  Sylvie paid the cab driver and the hotel doorman opened the door of the cab and murmured, “Madam.” She hesitated on the pavement. Another doorman was already holding open the door of the hotel. “Madam.” Again.

  She moved closer, inch by slow inch, edging her way towards adultery. “Madam?” the doorman said again, still holding the door, perplexed by this slow progress.

  The hotel beckoned. She could see the lush tones of the foyer, the promise of luxury. Imagined champagne sparkling in engraved Bohemian glass, foie gras, pheasant. The dimmed lighting in the room, the bed with its starched hotel sheets. Her cheeks flamed. He would be waiting inside, just beyond the door. Perhaps he had glimpsed her, was already rising to his feet to greet her. She hesitated again, balancing what she was about to be given against what she was about to give away. Or—perhaps a worse outcome—everything would simply remain the same. And then she thought of her children, thought of Teddy, her best boy. Would she risk her life as his mother? For an adventure? A cold thrill of horror quenched the flames of sin. For sin it was, she thought, make no mistake. You did not need a God (Sylvie was an unconfessed atheist) to believe in sin.

  She composed herself (difficult) and said to the doorman, rather haughtily, “Oh, I’m so sorry. I’ve just re
membered another appointment elsewhere.”

  She fled, walking quickly, head held high, a purposeful woman with a decent, civilized destination beckoning her—a charitable committee, even a political meeting, anything but a rendezvous with a lover.

  A concert! The lighted entrance of Wigmore Hall appeared ahead of her—a warm beacon, a safe harbour. The music struck up almost at once, one of Mozart’s Haydn Quartets, The Hunt. Appropriate, she thought. She had been the hind, he had been the hunter. But now the hind had bounded free. Not quite bounded, perhaps, as she was in a rather poor seat at the back of the hall, squashed between a somewhat shabby young man and an elderly lady. But then one always paid a price for freedom, didn’t one?

  She had been a frequent attender of concerts with her father and knew the Haydn Quartets well, but still felt too flummoxed by her narrow escape to hear the Mozart. Sylvie was a pianist herself but she avoided attending recitals these days, they reminded her too painfully of a life that might have been. She had been told by her teacher when she was young that she could go on to “play at concert level” if she took her studies seriously, but then of course the bankruptcy, the great fall from grace, had occurred and the Bechstein had been hauled unceremoniously away and sold to a private buyer. The first thing she had done on moving into Fox Corner was to acquire a Bösendorfer, her wedding present from Hugh. A great solace for marriage.

  The Dissonant came after the interval. As the almost inaudible opening bars struck up she found herself weeping soundlessly. The elderly lady passed her a handkerchief (clean and pressed, thank goodness) to staunch her tears. Sylvie mouthed a thank-you to her. This mute exchange lifted her spirits a little. At the end of the concert the woman insisted that she keep the handkerchief. The shabby young man offered to escort her to a cab. How kind strangers were, she thought. She politely declined her would-be escort, a refusal she later regretted because in her disturbed state she took a wrong turn on Wigmore Street and then another and found herself in a far from salubrious area, armed with only a hat pin with which to defend herself.