“Gulls wheeling and screeching overhead, excited by the fishing boats returning home,” he wrote carefully, before lighting up another Gitane. The sun was below the yardarm (almost) as his father would have said if he were here (how could he not like France?) and it was time for a pastis. He began to think of himself as a loafer, a lotus eater. He had enough money saved to winter on the Côte d’Azur and then perhaps head north and see Paris. “One can’t die without seeing Paris,” Izzie said. Although he did.
Shortly before Christmas a telegram arrived. His mother was in hospital. “Pneumonia, rather poorly, best come home,” his father had written sparely. “Her mother’s lungs,” Hugh said on Teddy’s return. Teddy had never known this grandmother and the legendary lungs that, according to Sylvie, had killed her. Sylvie recovered surprisingly quickly and was home before the year was out. She had not been so very ill, Teddy wasn’t sure it had merited a telegram and for a while suspected some kind of family conspiracy, but “She kept asking for you,” Hugh said, rather apologetically. “The prodigal son,” his father said fondly when he picked him up from the station.
To tell the truth, Teddy was rather relieved to give up the pretence of poetry and after the familiarity of Christmas at Fox Corner it seemed faintly absurd to journey all the way back to France. (And for what? To be a loafer?) So instead, when his father found him a position in his bank he took it. The first day, as he entered the hushed halls of polished mahogany panelling he felt like a prisoner embarking on a life sentence. A bird with its wings clipped, earthbound for ever. Was this it? His life over?
“There, Ted,” Hugh said, “I knew you’d settle to something eventually.”
The war, when it came, was an immense relief for Teddy.
Penny for them?” Nancy said, taking a tape measure from her knitting basket and placing it against his shoulder.
“Not worth it,” he said. Back to the wretched snowdrop.
“The ‘drop’ in snowdrop does not, as many think, refer to a snowflake but to an earring, and one can picture this delicate flower trembling in the ear of some Elizabethan beauty.”
“Strictly speaking, can an earring tremble in an ear?” Nancy said, laying down her needles in her lap and frowning at her knitting. She pulled on her own delicate earlobe to demonstrate the fixity of the small grey pearl therein. “If it were dangling it could tremble.”
She was forensic. She would make a fine High Court judge. She could deliver an opinion that bore no weight of emotion and in the most pleasant fashion. “How cruel you are to me,” she said, laughing. She had hinted before at what she considered the rather “flat” quality of these pieces. It was journalism, Teddy thought defensively, an inert form of writing. Nancy always wanted everyone to find the best in everything.
When they moved to Yorkshire Teddy found himself in an indifferent boys’ grammar school in a smallish woollen mill town, soot-soiled and shoddy, that was quietly dying, and knew from the very first lesson—Romeo and Juliet, “Women, being the weaker vessels, are ever thrust to the wall”—to a class of sniggering thirteen-year-olds that it had been a mistake. He saw the future unravelling before him, day after dismal day. Saw himself dutifully earning money to support Nancy and their as-yet-unborn children who were already weighting him down with responsibility. Saw himself, too, on the day he finally retired, a disappointed man. It was the bank all over again. He was a stoic, it had been beaten into him at school, and he was as loyal as a dog, and he knew he would stick it out, no matter how great the sacrifice of self.
“You fought the war for those boys,” Ursula said when she visited, “for their freedom. Are they worth it?”
“No, not at all,” Teddy said and they both laughed because it was a cliché that they were already tired of hearing and they knew that freedom, like love, was an absolute and not to be parcelled out on a whim or a favour.
Nancy, on the other hand, loved her profession. She was a maths teacher in a grammar school for well-behaved, clever girls, in a pleasant spa town. She enjoyed making them even cleverer, even better-behaved, and they loved her in return. She had lied on application, told the school that she was unmarried (not even a widow), erasing Teddy efficiently from her history. She was Miss Shawcross again. “They don’t like married teachers,” she explained to Teddy. “They leave to have babies, or they are distracted by their domestic life, by their husbands.” Distracted? Of course, the plan was to give up teaching when they started a family, but that was in the lap of the gods and the gods didn’t appear to be in a hurry.
She knew how miserable Teddy was teaching. One of the many good things about Nancy was that she didn’t believe that people should suffer unnecessarily. (It always surprised Teddy how many people did.) She encouraged him to take up writing again—“A novel this time,” she said. She had read the shoebox poems and Teddy supposed her opinion of them was pretty much the same as his. “A novel,” she said. “A novel for the new world, something fresh and different that tells us who we are and what we should be.” The world didn’t seem very new to Teddy, but rather old and weary (as he suspected himself to be), and he wasn’t sure he had anything to say that was worth writing about, but Nancy seemed determined that he would have talent. “At least have a go,” she said. “You won’t know if you can do it until you try.”
And so he allowed Nancy to cajole him into sitting down in the evenings and at the weekends in front of the little Remington that she had found in a second-hand shop. No more “Observations,” he thought. No more thick notebooks. Just get on with it.
He found a title first, calling his debut upon the literary stage A Bower Quiet for Us, taken from Keats’s “Endymion”:
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
“Oh, how he must have longed for ‘health, and quiet breathing,’ ” Ursula said. “And perhaps by imagining it he hoped it would come true.” His sister always spoke sadly of Keats, as if he had only just died. It was an awkward title though, not exactly catchy. “It will do,” Nancy said, “for now at any rate.” He knew her thinking. She believed he needed to be healed and writing might be the physic that did the trick. “Art as therapy,” he had overheard her say to Mrs. Shawcross. His own mother would have derided such a notion. The opening line of “Endymion,” “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever,” was more Sylvie’s creed. Perhaps that would have made a better title. A Thing of Beauty.
Unfortunately Teddy discovered that every character introduced or plot wrestled with was bland or commonplace. The great authors of the past had set standards that made his own attempts at artifice look puny. He could find no engagement with the one-dimensional lives he had created. If an author was a god, then he was a very poor second-rate one, scrabbling around on the foothills of Olympus. You had to care, he supposed, and there was nothing he cared to write about. “But what about the war?” Nancy said. The war? he thought, secretly amazed that she could think that something so shattering in its reality could be rendered so quickly into fiction. “Life then,” she said. “Your life. A Bildungsroman.”
“I think I would rather just live my life,” Teddy said, “not make an artifice of it.” And what on earth would he write about? If you excluded the war (an enormous exclusion, he acknowledged) then nothing had happened to him. A boyhood at Fox Corner, the brief, rather lonely and pointless life of a wandering poet-cum-farmhand and now the quotidian of married life—the log on the fire, the choice between Ovaltine or cocoa, and Nancy’s neat, contained self bundled up in sweaters against the cold. He was not complaining about the latter, he knew he should feel lucky to have it when so many he had known did not.
Oh, teach me how I should forget to think,’ ” a boy whose name he would never remember read out in lifeless tones, and the bell rang, causing the whole class to
rise up like a flock of sparrows and jostle their way out of the classroom door before he had dismissed them. (“Discipline doesn’t seem to be your forte,” the disappointed headmaster said. “I thought being an RAF officer…”)
Teddy sat at his desk in the empty classroom, waiting for a second-year English class to make its appearance. He looked around the dingy room with its scents of India rubber and unwashed necks. The morning sun was shining softly through the windows, the dust of chalk and of boys caught in a beam of sunlight. There was a world outside these walls.
He stood up abruptly and marched out of the classroom, squeezing his way past a gaggle of eleven-year-olds coming reluctantly through the door. “Sir?” one of them said, alarmed by this dereliction of duty.
He was AWOL, driving home on the high back road, thinking he might stop somewhere and go for a long hike to give himself time to think. He was in danger of becoming a drifter, a man who couldn’t stick to anything. His brothers were doing well for themselves. Jimmy was in America, leading a fast, glossy life, “earning big bucks,” while Maurice was a Whitehall mandarin, a pillar of respectability. And here he was, unable even to be a lowly teacher. He had made a vow during the war that if he survived he would lead a steady, uncomplaining life. The vow seemed doomed to be unfulfilled. Was there something wrong with him, he wondered?
He was saved by a motorist who had broken down by the side of the road. Teddy stopped the Land Rover and went to see if he could help. The old Humber Pullman had its bonnet propped up and the man was staring at the engine in the helpless way of the unmechanical, as if through the power of his thoughts alone he might get it working again. “Ah, a gentleman of the road,” the man said, doffing his hat, when Teddy drew up in the Land Rover. “This darn thing’s worn out. Like me. Bill Morrison,” he said, extending a meaty hand.
While Teddy fiddled with the alternator they chatted about the hawthorn trees, in full glorious flush, that lined this particular stretch of road. “The May,” Bill Morrison called it. It lifted his heart to see it, he said. Afterwards, Teddy couldn’t clearly recall this conversation but it had roamed “all over the shop,” as Bill put it, from the place of the hawthorn in English folklore—the Glastonbury thorn and so on—to the Queen of the May and the maypole, and Teddy had told him how for the Celts the tree marked the entrance to the otherworld and that the ancient Greeks had carried it in wedding processions.
“University man, I take it?” Bill Morrison said. Admiring rather than sardonic, although perhaps just a smidgeon of the latter. “Ever tried your hand at writing?”
“Well…” Teddy demurred.
How about lunch then, lad? My treat,” Bill Morrison said as the old Humber coughed back into life. And so Teddy found himself in a convoy of two on the way to a hotel in Skipton for what turned out to be a rather boozy roast beef affair, during the course of which he had his life examined from every angle by Bill Morrison.
He was a large bluff man with a high unhealthy colour who had “cut his teeth” on the Yorkshire Post, a long time ago, and was now a blunt old-fashioned Tory. “Avuncular but sharp,” Teddy reported to Nancy later. His God was a robust Anglican, a Yorkshireman who probably played cricket for the county when he wasn’t sending laws down from the mountain. As time went by, Teddy learned more of Bill’s generous heart and gruff kindness. He liked the fact that Teddy was married (“the natural state for a man”) and teased his war out of him. Bill himself had “survived the Somme.”
He was the editor of the Recorder. It was a surprisingly long time afterwards that Teddy learned that he also owned the Recorder. “Do you know it, Ted?”
“Yes,” Teddy said politely. Did he? A vague recollection, in the dentist’s waiting room, distracting himself from the imminent removal of a rotten tooth, dental care not having been a priority in the POW camp.
“Because I’m looking for someone to write the Nature Notes,” Bill Morrison said. “It’s just a few lines every week—it won’t keep you in bread, let alone bacon, even if you could get your hands on any. We used to have a man did the Nature Notes, went by the by-line Agrestis. That’s Latin. Know what it means?”
“A rustic, a countryman.”
“Well, there you are.”
“What happened to the old one?” Teddy asked, while digesting this unexpected offer.
“Old age took him off. He was an old-style countryman. He was a difficult bugger,” he said affectionately.
Rather shyly Teddy mentioned his own agricultural curriculum vitae, the Northumberland lambs, the Kentish apples, his love of hill and vale and water. The pleasure to be had from the cup and saucer of an acorn, the unfurling frond of a fern, the pattern on the feather of a hawk. The transcendent beauty of the dawn chorus in an English bluebell wood. He omitted France, the solid blocks of colour, the hot slices of sunshine. They would not be to the taste of a man who had fought on the Somme.
Teddy was judged sound, even though he was a southerner.
“There were two men,” Bill Morrison said as they dug into the Stilton. It took Teddy a moment to realize that this was the rather ponderous introduction to some sort of witticism. “One of them was from Yorkshire, God’s own country. The other one wasn’t a Yorkshireman. The one not from Yorkshire said to the other” (Teddy began to lose track at this point), “ ‘I met a Yorkshireman t’other day,’ and the one from Yorkshire said, ‘How’d’ tha know he were from Yorkshire?’ And the one not from Yorkshire” (now Teddy began to lose the will to live) “said, ‘Because of his accent,’ and the Yorkshireman said, ‘Nah, lad, if he’d been from Yorkshire it would have been the first thing he told you.’ ”
“Try putting that in a Christmas cracker,” Nancy said when Teddy attempted to relate it to her that evening after rolling home, somewhat foxed. (“Oh, my, you reek of beer. I quite like it.”) “And you have a new job, on a newspaper?”
“No, not a newspaper,” Teddy said. “Not a job either really,” he added. “Just a few shillings a week.”
“What about the school? You’ll still teach?”
The school, Teddy thought. This morning was already the past. (Oh, teach me how I should forget to think.) He had absconded, he said. “Oh, you poor darling,” Nancy laughed. “And this will lead to more, I know it will, I can feel it in my waters.”
It did. October with its autumn colours, mushrooms and chestnuts and a late Indian summer. November brought “Mother Nature tucking in her charges” for the oncoming struggle, and December was of necessity holly and robins. “Find something heart-warming,” Bill said and so he wrote about how the robin got his red breast.
They were pedestrian pieces but that was fine by Bill Morrison, who wasn’t “looking for erudition.”
Another boozy lunch just before Christmas and he was offered the job of “roving reporter.” The previous incumbent of the post had died during the war. “Arctic convoys,” Bill Morrison said briskly, not wanting to dwell, and he too would be dead soon, he said, if he kept racing around doing the job of two men.
“Are you happy now?” Nancy asked as they hung up the holly and mistletoe they had picked in the woods.
“Yes,” Teddy said, giving the answer perhaps more consideration than the question had demanded.
The blasted snowdrops.
“There are some who consider it bad luck to pick these brave little heralds of Spring and will not let them in the house. Perhaps this is due to their profusion in churchyards.”
Sylvie always picked the first snowdrops at Fox Corner. It was a shame because they wilted and died so quickly.
“The white of the snowdrop and its association with untaintedness has always given this humble flower an aura of innocence (who remembers now the ‘Snowdrop Band’ of young girls of the previous century?).
“There is a German legend—”
“Oh, Lord,” Nancy muttered under her breath.
“What?”
“I dropped a stitch. Go on.”
“—which relates that when God cr
eated all things he told the snow to go and ask the flowers for some colour. All but the kindly snowdrop refused and in reward the snow allowed it to be the first flower of Spring.
“Great music has the power to heal. Germany is no longer our enemy and it is salutary for us to remember her rich store of myth and legend and fairy tale, not to mention her cultural heritage, the music of Mozart—”
“Mozart was Austrian.”
“Yes, of course,” Teddy said. “I don’t know why I forgot that. Beethoven, then. Brahms, Bach, Schubert. Schubert was German, wasn’t he?”
“No, another Austrian.”
“Haydn?” he hazarded.
“Austrian.”
“There’s a lot of them, aren’t there? So—‘her cultural heritage of Bach, Brahms, Beethoven—’ ”
Nancy nodded silently, like a schoolteacher approving a pupil’s corrections. She could just have been counting stitches, of course.
“ ‘Of these Beethoven is—’ ”
“We have rather left the snowdrop behind. Why all this talk of Germans?”
“Because it was a German legend I was referring to,” Teddy said.
“This seems to be about forgiving the Germans though. Have you? Forgiven them?”
Had he? Theoretically perhaps, but not in his heart, where truth resided. He thought of all the men he knew who had been killed. The dead, like demons and angels, were legion.
It was three years since his own war had ended. He had spent the last year hors de combat in a POW camp near the Polish border. He had parachuted out of a burning aircraft over Germany and had been unable to evade capture because of a broken ankle. His aircraft had been coned and shot down by flak on the dreadful raid to Nuremberg. He hadn’t known it at the time but it was the worst night of the war for Bomber Command—ninety-six aircraft lost, five hundred and forty-five men killed, more than in the whole Battle of Britain. But by the time he made it home this was all old, cold news, Nuremberg all but forgotten. “You were very brave,” Nancy said, with the same encouraging indifference—to Teddy’s ears anyway—that she might have afforded him if he had done well in a maths test.
A God in Ruins Page 10