The war now for him was a jumble of random images that haunted his sleeping self—the Alps in moonlight, a propeller blade flying through the air, a face, pale in the water. Well, good luck to you then. Sometimes the overwhelming stench of lilacs, at other times a sweetly held dance tune. And always at the end of the nightmare there was the inescapable end itself, the fire and the sickening hurtle of the fall to earth. In nightmares we wake ourselves before the awful end, before the fall, but Teddy had to be woken by Nancy’s shushing, by her cradle hand soothing him, and he would stare into the darkness for a long time wondering what would happen to him if she failed to wake him one night.
He had been reconciled to death during the war and then suddenly the war was over and there was a next day and a next day and a next day. Part of him never adjusted to having a future.
Beethoven,’ ” he began again doggedly. You could hardly hold Beethoven responsible for the war. He had a sudden memory—himself and Ursula in the Royal Albert Hall—when was that, 1943?—listening to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the Choral, Ursula almost vibrating with the emotional power of the music. He had felt it too, the power of something beyond, something outwith the petty everyday pace. He shook himself, a wet dog.
“Are you all right, darling?”
An affirmative. Just dislodging the war, the awfulness of it all, the overwhelming sadness. Nothing he could convey in words to her.
“And, you know,” Nancy continued, a blithe spirit, “I don’t think people necessarily want to be reminded about the war when they’re reading Agrestis’s Nature Notes. In fact quite the opposite, I imagine.”
“Shall I make cocoa?” he offered, to escape the subject. “Or would you rather have Ovaltine?”
“Ovaltine, please.”
“You’ll ruin your eyes,” he said as he poured the half-frozen milk into a pan and placed it on the trivet over the fire.
“I’m stopping now,” she said, efficiently winding up her different-coloured balls of wool.
The milk rose up suddenly in the pan and Teddy snatched it away from the fire before it could boil over. His face, hot from the flames, made him aware of the burn tissue on his neck. It was just visible above his collar, the skin shiny and puckered pink, a promise of other scars in less visible places.
“Well, Wing Commander Todd,” Nancy said, “time for bed, I think.”
She never used his wartime rank without a kind of mild irony, as if he had pretended to something. He had no idea why she did that, but it made him shrink inside a little.
They retired to Ultima Thule, as they called it, the ice-box that was their attic bedroom. Teddy shivered as he stripped himself of his layers and jumped into bed as if he was plunging into the icy waters of the North Sea.
They soon warmed each other up after the initial shock of polar sheets and frosty air. Lovemaking was vigorous rather than romantic in this kind of weather. (“One is never cold with a husband,” Nancy’s sister Millie wrote from the arid heat of Arizona. “Especially a handsome one like yours!”)
A blizzard had started up and it sounded as if someone was pelting the windows with snowballs. They were a new Adam and Eve, exiled into eternal winter.
Nancy kissed him on the cheek and said, “Goodnight, dear heart,” but Teddy was already asleep.
Nancy blew out the candle by the side of the bed and waited for Teddy’s nightmares to begin.
They must have a baby, she thought. They must have a child to heal Teddy, to heal the world.
1939
Teddy’s War
Innocence
He didn’t hear Chamberlain make his sombre declaration on the wireless because he had chosen instead to take the Shawcrosses’ old dog, Harry, for a walk in the lane. An amble, slow and arthritic, all that the Golden Retriever was capable of nowadays. His eyes were clouded with cataracts and a once-large frame was now gaunt, the flesh shrunk against the bones. Deaf too, like Major Shawcross himself. The two of them, man and dog, had snoozed companionably through the long summer afternoons of 1939, locked together in their silent world—Major Shawcross in his old wickerwork chair and Harry melted on the lawn at his feet.
“It breaks my heart to see him like that,” Nancy said. She meant Harry, although the sentiment extended to her father. Teddy understood the particular poignancy of seeing a dog you had known as a puppy approaching the end of its life. “Intimations of mortality, as Wordsworth didn’t write,” Ursula said. “Oh, if only dogs lived longer lives. We’ve mourned so many.”
The Shawcross girls were all enormously fond of their “old Pa,” an affection that was more than reciprocated by Major Shawcross. Hugh was close to Pamela and Ursula, of course, but Teddy was always rather surprised at the way that Major Shawcross was so free with his feelings, kissing and cuddling “my girls” and often reduced to tears merely by the sight of them. (“The Great War,” Mrs. Shawcross said. “It changed him.”) Hugh tended to reticence, a temperament that, if anything, the war had reinforced. Had Major Shawcross wished for a son? Surely he must have done, didn’t all men? Did Teddy?
He intended to propose to Nancy. Today perhaps. A day of high historical drama so that in the future Nancy would say to their children (for they would surely have them), “You know, your father proposed to me on the day that war broke out.” Teddy felt as if he had been waiting for a long time, too long perhaps. First, so that Nancy, at Newnham, could complete her Maths Tripos, and now for her to study for her PhD. Her doctoral topic was something to do with “natural numbers.” They didn’t seem at all natural to Teddy. He didn’t want to find himself waiting for the war to be over as well, for who knew how long that would be?
Teddy was twenty-five, almost “too long in the tooth” for marriage, as far as his mother was concerned. She was keen for grandchildren, keener than she had been for the ones she already had, courtesy of Pamela, who had “three boys and counting,” and Maurice, who had one of each. “Like fish and chips,” Ursula said. Teddy barely knew Maurice’s offspring and Sylvie reported them to be “rather dull.”
Marrying Nancy seemed inevitable. Why wouldn’t he marry her? “Childhood sweethearts,” Mrs. Shawcross said, affected by the idea of romance. His own mother was less affected.
Everyone presumed it, even Sylvie, who thought Nancy “too clever” for marriage. (“Marriage blunts one so.”)
“And who else could there possibly be apart from Nancy anyway?” Teddy puzzled to Ursula. “She’s by far and away the best person I know. The nicest one too.”
“And you do love her. And you know that we all do.”
“Of course I love her,” Teddy said. (Had it been a question?) Did he know what love was? The love for a father, a sister, for a dog even, yes, but between a husband and wife? Two lives knitted inextricably together. Or yoked and harnessed. (“That’s the point,” Sylvie said, “otherwise we would all run wild.”)
He thought of Adam and Eve, he thought of Sylvie and Hugh themselves. Neither seemed like terribly good examples. “Nancy’s parents’ marriage,” Ursula said. “Isn’t that a good pattern? Major and Mrs. Shawcross are happy. To all appearances, anyway.” But appearance and reality were different things, weren’t they? And who knew the secrets of a marriage?
He had loved Nancy when they were young but that was a different kind of thing, high and clear but childishly innocent. For now we see through a glass darkly.
“Perhaps more to the point,” Ursula said, “how would you feel if you didn’t marry her?” So, yes, he thought, of course he would marry Nancy. They would move to a pleasant suburb, have those inevitable children, and he would work his way up in the bank until one day the staff would perhaps be as deferential to him as they were to his father. Or perhaps not.
It wouldn’t just be the sharp knife of his wife who would be blunted. The future was a cage closing around him. Wasn’t life itself a great trap, its jaws waiting to snap? He should never have returned from France. He should have ceased being indolent, stopped pretending he had
a poet’s soul, embraced the adventurer in himself instead, and pushed on eastwards, explored the extremities of Empire—Australia, perhaps. Somewhere raw and unsettled where a man could make himself rather than being made by those around him. Too late for that. Now it would not be the geography of Empire that would make him, it would be the architecture of war.
They had reached the dairy herd’s field by now and Teddy pulled some stalks of long grass from the hedgerow and cried, “Cush-cow, cush-cow,” but the cows, after the briefest of glances in his direction, remained placidly indifferent. He lit a cigarette and leaned on the gate while he smoked it. Harry had collapsed awkwardly on the ground, his scrawny sides heaving with exertion. “Poor old boy,” Teddy said, reaching down and scratching behind the old dog’s soft ear. He thought about Hugh. Their paths never crossed at the bank but his father would occasionally invite Teddy to lunch at his club on Pall Mall. The stolid world of finance suited Hugh, but for Teddy it was stultifying tedium and, occasionally, downright misery.
His father would retire soon, of course, potter around the garden, doze over the open pages of his Wisden in the garden or the growlery, get on Sylvie’s nerves. That was indeed how Hugh was found, just over a year later, in a garden deckchair, a copy of Wisden open on his lap. Asleep for ever. Even this, the least troublesome of deaths, seemed to exasperate Sylvie. “He just slipped away without a word!” she complained, as if he had owed her more. Perhaps he had.
“Dad was never one to make a fuss,” Ursula wrote to Teddy in Canada on flimsy blue, the ink smudged irrevocably where a tear must have dropped.
Teddy ground out the cigarette stub beneath his foot and said, “Come on then, Harry, we’re going to miss lunch if we don’t get a move on.” The dog couldn’t hear him but he didn’t shift even when Teddy gave him a gentle prod and he feared that he had worn him out completely. He might be a bag of bones but he was still heavy and Teddy wasn’t sure that he could carry the dead weight of the dog all the way home, although he supposed he would have to manage if there was no alternative—needs must. But luckily Harry hauled himself heroically on to four legs and they wended their way slowly back to Nancy’s house.
Oh, stay away, do,” Mrs. Shawcross implored when she caught sight of him at the back door of Jackdaws. She flapped a tea-towel at him as if he were a fly.
Nancy, at home for the long vacation, was in bed, with what had turned out to be whooping cough (“At my age!”), being nursed assiduously by Mrs. Shawcross, who knew that Teddy had also missed out on the illness as a child. “You mustn’t catch it,” she said. “It’s quite horrible in an adult.”
“Don’t go near that girl,” Sylvie warned when he told her that he had offered, in the current absence of a resident dog at Fox Corner, to take Harry for a walk. Too late, he thought.
“That girl” was the girl he was going to propose to, but not today after all, perhaps. “She’s really rather poorly,” Mrs. Shawcross said. “But I’ll give her your love, of course.”
“Please do.”
The various smells of Sunday lunch wafted out of Mrs. Shawcross’s kitchen. Mrs. Shawcross, hair straggling from an untidy bun, looked rather flushed and not a little flustered, but in Teddy’s experience that was the effect that cooking Sunday lunch had on women. Jackdaws, like Fox Corner, had recently lost its cook and Mrs. Shawcross seemed even less suited to the culinary arts than Sylvie. Of Major Shawcross there was no sign. Mrs. Shawcross herself was a vegetarian and Teddy wondered what she would eat while Major Shawcross was enjoying his beef. An egg, perhaps. “Oh, Lord, no,” Mrs. Shawcross said, “the whole idea of eating an egg makes me feel quite squeamish.”
Teddy spotted an open bottle of Madeira on the kitchen table and a little glass, half full of the brown liquor. “War,” Mrs. Shawcross said, her eyes filling with tears, and, infection forgotten, she pulled Teddy towards her in a warm, rather damp embrace. She smelt of the Madeira and of Coal Tar soap, an unlikely, rather unsettling combination. Mrs. Shawcross was large and soft and always a little sad. Sylvie was annoyed by the misbehaviour of the world but Mrs. Shawcross carried the burden of it patiently, as you would for a child. He supposed the war would make that burden heavier.
Mrs. Shawcross placed a hand against her temple and said, “Oh dear, I think I have one of my heads coming on.” She sighed and added, “Thank goodness we have girls. Neville would never be able to face sending a son into battle.”
It seemed more than probable to Teddy that he was already incubating the whooping cough. Mrs. Shawcross didn’t know that Nancy had travelled up to London last week to see him, sneaking into his lodgings beneath the gimlet eye of his landlady and staying the night, the two of them squeezed together in his narrow bed, convulsing with laughter at the noise that the creaking bedsprings were making. They were still novices at that kind of thing. “Rank amateurs,” Nancy said cheerfully. There was passion between them, but it was of the orderly, good-humoured kind. (Of course, one might argue that, by its definition, this was not passion.) There had been a girl or two at Oxford and a couple in France, but sex with them had been more like a bodily function, one that had left him discontented and not a little abashed. The sex act was perhaps not bestial but it was certainly animalistic and he supposed he was grateful to Nancy for domesticating it. Savage desire and yearning romance were probably best kept between the pages of a book. He was his father’s son, he suspected. The war changed this, as it changed everything, introducing him to less civilized encounters. However, Teddy would never be comfortable with terms for describing sex. Prudery or reservation, he wasn’t sure. His daughter had no problem with the vocabulary. Viola screwed, she got laid, she did indeed fuck, and made a point of articulating this fact. It was something of a relief to Teddy when she declared herself celibate at the age of fifty-five.
His lodgings were quite close to the British Museum, a bit of a ramshackle place but he liked it, despite the landlady, who could have given Genghis Khan a run for his money. Teddy had no idea that his furtive night with Nancy would, due to the unforgiving constraints of war and circumstances, be one of the few occasions when they would manage to be intimate with each other until the hostilities were over.
How is poor Nancy?” Hugh enquired when Teddy returned to Fox Corner.
“Bearing up, I suppose,” Teddy said, “although I didn’t actually see her. We’re at war then?”
“I’m afraid so. Come into the growlery, Ted, and have a drink with me.” The growlery was Hugh’s hermitage, a place of safety into which one came only by invitation. “Best be quick,” he added, “before your mother catches sight of you. She’ll be hysterical, I expect. She didn’t take it well, even though we knew it was coming.”
Teddy wasn’t sure why he had decided not to hear war being declared. Perhaps simply because taking a dog for a stroll on a sunny Sunday morning before lunch was a better calling.
Hugh poured two tumblers of malt whisky from the heavy cut-glass decanter he kept in the growlery. They chinked glasses and Hugh said, “To peace,” when Teddy had expected him to say, “To victory.” “What will you do, do you suppose?” Hugh asked him.
“I don’t know.” Teddy shrugged. “Join up, I expect.”
His father frowned and said, “Not in the Army though,” the unspoken horror of the trenches flashing momentarily across his features.
“The RAF, I thought,” Teddy said. He hadn’t actually thought about it at all until this moment, but now he realized that the cage doors were opening, the prison bars falling away. He was about to be freed from the shackles of banking. Freed too, he realized, from the prospect of suburbia, of the children who might turn out to be “rather dull.” Freedom even from the yoke and harness of marriage. He thought of the fields of golden sunflowers. The solid blocks of colour. The hot slices of sunshine.
Would France fall under Hitler’s evil spell, he worried? Surely not.
“A pilot,” he said to his father. “I should like to fly.”
The declaration
of war delayed Sunday lunch. Sylvie was still plucking mint from the garden for the lamb when Teddy went to look for her. She didn’t seem at all hysterical to him, merely rather grim. “You missed Chamberlain,” she said, straightening up from her labours and rubbing the small of her back. His mother too, he thought, getting old. “And I suppose you will have to fight,” she said, addressing the bunch of mint that she was crushing in her hand.
“I suppose I will,” he said.
Sylvie turned on her heel and stalked back inside the house, leaving the aromatic trail of mint in her wake. She paused at the back door and addressed him over her shoulder. “Lunch is late,” she said, rather unnecessarily.
“Is she very cross?” Ursula asked him on the phone later that afternoon.
“Very,” he said and they both laughed. Sylvie had been ferocious about the need for appeasement.
There had been a flurry of phone calls between various permutations of the family all afternoon and Teddy, if he was honest, was getting rather weary of being asked what he intended to do, as if the future of the conflict was on his shoulders alone.
“But you’re the family’s only warrior,” Ursula said. “What will you do?”
“Join the RAF,” he said promptly. The more he had been asked this question over the course of the day, the more certain his answer had become. (What would Augustus do, he wondered? The grown-up one, his counterpart, not the Peter Pan of Izzie’s books.) “And I’m not the only warrior anyway, what about Maurice and Jimmy?”
A God in Ruins Page 11