Of course, he had seen some pretty gruesome things too, in accidents during training, but they were not topics that you mentioned at the Regency Revival table over stewed chicken.
He ferried the dirty dishes through to the kitchen (“Bridget will do that,” Sylvie said sharply, but Teddy ignored her) and caught sight of the chicken carcass sitting on the kitchen table, denuded of its meat. His stomach heaved, taking him off guard.
At his flying training school in Ontario Teddy had witnessed an Anson coming in for an emergency landing. It had gone out on a cross-country exercise but had returned almost immediately with engine problems. Teddy had watched as it approached the airfield far too fast, wobbling all over the place before pancaking on the runway. Its fuel tanks were still almost full and the impact created a tremendous explosion. Most people had run for some kind of shelter at the sight of it. Teddy had thrown himself behind a hangar.
Everyone on the ground appeared unscathed and the fire engines and blood wagons raced out to the flaming Anson.
It was reported that one member of the crew had escaped the pyre, blown out of the aircraft when it exploded, so Teddy joined in the search with a couple of his fellow trainee pilots. They found the lone, lost soul amongst the lilac trees that bordered the perimeter fence. Later they learned it was the instructor who had been on board, an experienced pilot in the RCAF whom Teddy had flown with only yesterday. Now he presented a ghoulish sight—already a skeleton, his flesh almost entirely stripped off his bones from the force of the explosion. (“Flensed,” Teddy had thought, in one part of his brain.) The instructor’s entrails, still warm, were festooning the lilacs. The lilacs were in full bloom, their scent still discernible beneath the noisome stink of butchery.
One of the men searching with Teddy fled, screaming and cursing blue murder. He washed out as a pilot, never flew again. LMF, it was declared, and he left in disgrace to go who knew where. The other trainee pilot with Teddy, a Welshman, stared at the remains and said simply, “Poor bugger.” Teddy supposed his own reaction fell somewhere in between. Aghast at the macabre nature of the sight, relieved he hadn’t been in that Anson. It was his first experience of the obscenities that could be wreaked upon frail human bodies by the mechanics of war, something he supposed his sister already knew.
“That’s for the stockpot,” Bridget said when she noticed him staring at the chicken carcass, as if he might have been planning on stealing it. She was doing the washing-up, standing at the big stone Belfast sink in the kitchen, elbow-deep in suds. Teddy took a tea-towel from a hook and said, “Let me dry.”
“Go away,” Bridget said, which was, Teddy knew, her way of expressing gratitude. How old was Bridget? He couldn’t even take a guess. In his lifetime she had traversed the best of her own, from naivety and even giddiness (“Fresh off the ferry,” as Sylvie always had it) to a weary resignation. She had “lost her chance” in the last war, she said, and Sylvie scoffed and said, “Lost your chance of what? The drudgery of marriage, the constant worry of children? You have been better off here with us.”
“I’m going home,” she said to Teddy, reluctantly relinquishing a dripping dinner plate to him. “When all this is over.”
“Home?” Teddy said, confused for a moment. She turned and stared at him and he realized that he never really looked at Bridget. Or he looked and never saw her.
“Ireland,” she said as if he was stupid, which he supposed he was. “Go and sit down. I have to fetch the pudding.”
And Nancy? What of Nancy? Where is she, we ask? Plucked suddenly from the arcane world of natural numbers a year ago and tucked away in a secret location. When people asked what she was doing she said she was working for a division of the Board of Trade that had moved from London to rural safety. She made it sound so boring (“rationing of home-produced scarce materials”) that no one asked anything further. Teddy had been expecting to see her but she telephoned at the last minute and said, “I can’t get away, I’m so sorry.”
Nearly eighteen months and she was “sorry”? He felt bruised but he was quick to forgive. “She’s so tight-lipped. I don’t know when I’m going to see her again,” he said to Ursula as they “dawdled” in the lane. (“I love that word, I do so little of it these days,” she said.) They stopped and lit cigarettes before they reached Fox Corner. Sylvie objected to smoking in the house. Ursula inhaled deeply and said, “It’s a filthy habit, but not as filthy as war, I suppose.”
“Her letters are extraordinarily bland,” Teddy said, still pursuing the elusive topic of Nancy. “As if the censor was standing at her elbow while she was writing them. It all seems incredibly hush-hush. What do you suppose she’s really doing?”
“Well, something abstrusely mathematical, no doubt,” Ursula said, determinedly vague herself. Her man from the Admiralty was inclined to pillow talk. “I expect it’s easier for her if you don’t ask anything.”
“German codes, I’ll bet,” Teddy said.
“Well, don’t say that to anyone,” Ursula said, thereby confirming his suspicions.
After lunch, Teddy suggested to Ursula that they have a whisky in the growlery. It seemed a good way of marking their father’s passing, something he didn’t feel he had done.
“The growlery?” Ursula said. “I’m afraid the growlery is no more.”
Sylvie, he discovered when he put his head round the door of the little back room, had transformed Hugh’s snug into what she referred to as a “sewing room.” “Lovely and light and airy now,” she said. “It was so gloomy before.” The walls had been painted a pale green, the floor covered by an Aubusson-type carpet, and the heavy velvet curtains had been done away with in favour of some kind of pale open-weave linen. A dainty Victorian sewing-table, previously neglected and relegated to Bridget’s spartan room, now sat conveniently next to a button-back chaise longue that Sylvie had “picked up for a song in a little shop in Beaconsfield.”
“Does she sew in here?” Teddy asked Ursula, picking out a cotton reel from the sewing-basket and contemplating it.
“What do you think?”
They went for a stroll around the garden instead, much of it now given over to vegetables as well as the large chicken coops. Sylvie’s birds were kept under strict lock and key as there was always a fox on the prowl somewhere. The grand old beech tree still stood imperturbably in the middle of the lawn but the rest of the garden, apart from Sylvie’s roses, was beginning to suffer neglect. “I can’t get a decent gardener for love nor money,” Sylvie said crossly. “Oh, war is terribly inconvenient,” Izzie said sarcastically, smirking at Teddy, who didn’t respond as it felt wrong to conspire with her against his mother, even when his mother was at her most annoying.
“I lost my last one to the Home Guard,” Sylvie said, ignoring Izzie. “God help us if old Mr. Mortimer is all that stands between us and the invading hordes.”
“She’s getting a pig,” Ursula said to Teddy as they regarded the incarcerated chickens, purring and crooning with broodiness.
“Who?”
“Mother.”
“A pig?” He couldn’t imagine Sylvie as a pig keeper somehow.
“I know, she’s full of surprises,” Ursula said. “Who knew she had the soul of a black-market racketeer? She’ll be hawking bacon and sausages round back doors. We should applaud her enterprise, I suppose.”
At the bottom of the garden they came across a large clump of dog-daisies—ox-eyes that must have emigrated there from the meadow. “Another invading horde,” Ursula said. “I think I shall take some back to London with me.” She surprised Teddy by producing a large penknife from her coat pocket and began to cut several of the spindly stems. “You would be amazed at what I carry with me,” she laughed. “Be prepared. It’s the Girl Guides’ motto as well as the Scouts’, you know—‘You have to be prepared at any moment to face difficulties and even dangers by knowing what to do and how to do it.’ ”
“It’s different in the Scouts,” Teddy said. “Longer, more detailed in i
ts demands.” More was expected of men, he supposed, although all the women of his acquaintance would have disagreed with that thought.
Ursula always forgot that he had never graduated from Cubs to Scouts. She, of course, had never had to suffer the indignities of the Kibbo Kift.
He elected to go back to London with Ursula, even though he knew it would disappoint his mother, who had hoped to hang on to him for another day. There was a hollow heart to Fox Corner without his father that was dispiriting.
“If we leave now we can catch the next train,” Ursula said, harrying him out of the door, “not that it will bear any relationship to the timetable.”
“We’ve got bags of time actually,” she said when they had said their farewells and had stepped into the lane, “I just wanted to get away. Mother’s difficult to take at the best of times, Izzie’s worse, so the two of them together are insufferable.”
Are you going to stay at my flat?” Ursula asked when the train pulled in to Marylebone and he said, no, he was going to look up an old pal, “Have a night on the town.” He wasn’t sure why he lied, or indeed why he didn’t want to stay with his sister. A nagging need to be unfettered perhaps for one last time.
When they were in the midst of their goodbyes, Ursula suddenly said, “Oh, I nearly forgot,” and after searching through the contents of her handbag she retrieved a small object, silver but dirty with age.
“A rabbit?” he said.
“No, a hare, I think, although it’s not easy to tell. Do you recognize it?” He didn’t. The hare—or rabbit—sat to attention in a little basket. Its fur was chased, its ears sharp and pointed. Yes, a hare, Teddy thought. “It hung from your pram hood,” Ursula said, “when you were a baby. Ours too. I think it came originally from a rattle that belonged to Mother.” The hare had indeed once provided the finial to the infant Sylvie’s rattle, a pretty thing, hung with bells and an ivory teething ring. She had once nearly poked her own mother’s eye out with it.
“And?” Teddy puzzled.
“A good-luck charm.”
“Really?” he said sceptically.
“A talisman. Instead of a rabbit’s foot, I give you a whole hare to keep you safe.”
“Thank you,” he said, amused. Ursula wasn’t usually one for superstition and charms. He took the hare and slipped it casually into his pocket, where it joined the conker she had given him earlier and which had already lost its glossy newness. He noticed that Ursula’s ox-eye daisies, wrapped in damp newspaper, were drooping, almost dead. Nothing could be kept, he thought, everything ran through one’s fingers like sand or water. Or time. Perhaps nothing should be kept. A monkish thought that he dismissed.
“We’re dying from the moment we’re born,” Sylvie had said, apropos of nothing, as she watched Bridget slouching into the dining room with a dish of stewed apples. “Nothing but windfalls,” Bridget announced. Since Mrs. Glover had retired—to live with a sister in Manchester—Bridget had felt obliged to take on her mantle of disapproval. Apparently, Sylvie had sold the best of the orchard’s abundant apple crop—a fruit, the only fruit, that Bridget didn’t harbour suspicions about. (“She grew up in Ireland,” Sylvie said, “they don’t have fruit there.”) Before he left, Bridget had pressed a small, gnarled, rather worm-eaten apple into his hand “for the journey,” and it now nestled warmly in his overcrowded pocket.
Instead of meeting up with his imaginary friend, Teddy made a round of London pubs and got pretty drunk, being stood free drinks by a host of well-wishers. He discovered how attractive an RAF uniform was to girls, although he had tried to avoid the “Piccadilly flak,” which, he knew from his Atlantic crossing with them, was the GIs’ term for the prostitutes who were to be found around the West End. They were bold, brash girls and he wondered if this had been their trade before or if they had sprung up as part of the inevitable baggage train of war.
Eventually, he found himself wandering around Mayfair wondering where he was going to spend the night. He bumped into a girl, “Ivy, pleased to meet you,” who was also lost in the blackout and they made their way arm in arm, until by chance they came across a hotel, Flemings, in Half Moon Street. There had been much leering from the night-porter that they had laughed about as they lay on top of the covers, propped up on pillows, sharing two large bottles of beer that Ivy had procured from somewhere. “Fancy place,” she said, “you must be a rich bloke.” He was tonight, Izzie had given him twenty pounds—blood money for Augustus—and he felt inclined to blow as much of it as possible while he could. No pockets in shrouds, as spendthrift Izzie was wont to say.
Ivy turned out to be a happy-go-lucky ATS girl on an anti-aircraft battery, on leave from a posting in Portsmouth. (“Oops, probably shouldn’t tell you where I’m stationed.”)
The air-raid siren started up but they didn’t go to a shelter. Instead they watched the fireworks provided free of charge by the Luftwaffe. Teddy was glad that he had caught the tail end of the Blitz.
“Bastards,” Ivy said cheerfully as the raiders flew overhead. She was on “the Predictor,” she said. “Operator number three.” (“Oops, there I go again!”) He had no idea what that was. “Get ’em, boys!” she shouted at one point as shells streaked red across the sky. They spotted a bomber caught in a searchlight. This was what it was like to be on the other end of it, Teddy thought, holding his breath, wondering about the pilot in that bomber. In a few weeks it would be him up there, he thought.
The aircraft slipped out of the searchlight and Teddy breathed again.
No funny business now,” Ivy said, stripping down to her petticoat before they finally climbed into the cold bed. “I’m a good girl,” she said primly. She was plain with buck teeth and had a fiancé in the Navy and Teddy considered her safe from his advances, especially as he was quite drunk, but somewhere in the now peaceful night they rolled towards each other in the middle of the sagging mattress and she manoeuvred herself skilfully so that he slipped inside her, still dopey with sleep, and it seemed ungentlemanly to protest. It was brief, the briefest. At best carnal, at worst sleazy. When they woke, both bleary-eyed from the beer, he expected her to be penitent, but instead she stretched and yawned and wriggled around, expecting more. In the grey morning light she looked rough and if she hadn’t known so much about real anti-aircraft fire he might have mistaken her for one of the Piccadilly flak. He berated himself—she was a pleasant girl, good company even, and he was being a snob—but he made his excuses and left.
He paid for the room and asked a man at the reception desk to see about taking a breakfast tray up to “my wife,” slipping a hefty tip across the desk.
“Certainly, sir,” the man said, sneering despite the tip.
Later that day he boarded a train at King’s Cross, bound for an OTU. Operational Training Unit. After that an HCU, Heavy Conversion Unit. “War’s all about acronyms,” Ursula said.
He felt relief when the overcrowded train finally pulled slowly away from the platform, glad to be leaving behind the dirty wreckage of London. There was a war on, after all, and he was supposed to be fighting it. He discovered the little wrinkled apple in his pocket and ate it in two bites. It tasted sour when he had expected it to be sweet.
1993
We That Are Left
“There, that box is done,” Viola said, as if completing something distasteful, like picking up someone else’s dirty litter, when all she had been doing was filling a cardboard box with clean glassware. She was wielding a parcel-tape dispenser as if it were a weapon. She caught sight of Sunny shaking a cigarette out of a packet and before he could strike a match yelled at him, “Don’t light that!” as if he were about to put the match to a fuse on a bomb rather than a Silk Cut. “I’m nineteen,” Sunny muttered. “I can vote, get married and die for my country” (Would he do any of those things, Teddy wondered?) “but I can’t have a quick fag?”
“It’s a disgusting habit.”
Teddy thought about saying, “You used to smoke,” to Viola, but could see that
would just light another kind of fuse. Instead, he put the kettle on to make tea for the removal men.
Sunny collapsed on to the sofa. The sofa, like most of Teddy’s furniture, was being disposed of as it was too big for the flat that he was moving to. It was being replaced by a cheap little two-seater, “for guests,” Viola said, ordering it for him from a catalogue. For himself he had something called a “rise and recline” chair (“suitable for the elderly”) that he had to admit, albeit reluctantly, was wonderfully comfortable. He didn’t like the word “elderly,” it invited prejudice in the same way that “young” had once done.
The majority of Teddy’s possessions were due to be offloaded on charity shops. He was leaving behind more than he was taking. A life accrued and what was it worth? Not much apparently. “Granddad’s got so much crap,” Teddy had overheard Sunny say to Viola earlier, as if it were a moral affront to have hung on to a decade’s worth of bank statements or a calendar from five years ago—reproductions of Japanese bird prints that he’d kept because they were so pretty. “You can take hardly any of this stuff with you, you know that, don’t you?” Viola had said, as if he were a toddler with too many toys. “Do you ever throw anything away?”
It was true, in the last year or two he had begun to lose the thrifty habits he had once had, growing tired of the relentless culling and resolution that the material world demanded. Easier to let it pile up, waiting for the great winnowing of goods that his death would bring. “This is good,” he had overheard his daughter say to Sunny. “It means there’ll be less to clear out when he finally goes.”
Wait until Viola was old, he thought (“older,” Bertie said), and it was her children’s turn to clear out their mother’s “crap”—the dream-catchers and light-up Madonnas (“ironic”), the decapitated dolls’ heads (also “ironic”), the witch balls that “prevent evil from entering the house.”
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