A God in Ruins

by Kate Atkinson

  “Oh, man, yeah,” his father, Dominic, said. “It’s like living in a Dickens novel. Please, sir, can I have more? I remember. And then when you leave to go to boarding school you’ll have to eat the shit that they feed you there.” Boarding school, Sunny thought? He wasn’t going to boarding school, he was going home at the end of the summer holidays, back to the school in York that he hadn’t liked much but now was beginning to feel like a lost paradise. “Oh, don’t be so sure,” his father said. “Now she’s got her claws in you she won’t let you go.”

  Dominic was living above the stable block (“my garret”) and was usually to be found lying on a battered old sofa, surrounded by unfinished canvases. All that remained of the horses was the lingering smell of manure as you walked up the external stone steps to his room. Sunny’s father was in exile (“self-imposed”) from the main house.

  Dominic didn’t seem to eat much either, although he usually had a chocolate bar somewhere that he portioned out between them. He hadn’t been well, he said, “hospital and all that shit,” but now he was a lot better. Every time Sunny went to see him he seemed to be asleep although he claimed to be thinking. There was no use in complaining about anything to him. He was on “heavy-duty prescription drugs,” he said. The little bottles were lined up on the window-sill. “He’s like a sloth,” Sunny’s grandmother said to his grandfather (“Grandpapa”—another mouthful) and although Sunny felt he ought to defend his father there was no getting away from the fact that his grandmother was right. In fact, sloths would get impatient with Dominic. (Sunny had watched a nature programme about sloths with Grandpa Ted.) Grandpapa had no opinion about Dominic. This was because he was “ga-ga,” according to Mrs. Kerrich. “Scrambled eggs for brains.”

  “How can Dominic possibly inherit in that condition?” Sunny’s grandmother rattled on, unperturbed by the one-sided nature of all conversations with her husband—possibly she preferred it that way. “What if he doesn’t pull himself together? That child will be our only hope, God help us.” “That child” wondered at the meaning of these words. He didn’t really feel up to being anyone’s only hope. He was the “last Villiers” apparently. But what about Bertie? “She’s a girl,” his grandmother said dismissively. “ ‘The line ended in daughters.’ That’s what it will say in Debrett’s.” It seemed a good enough place to end to Sunny, but they needed a male heir, his grandmother said, even an illegitimate one. (“He’s a little baaarstard, isn’t he?” Mrs. Kerrich said to Thomas, “in more than one way.”) “We’ll make a Villiers of him yet,” his grandmother said, “but it’s uphill work.”

  The “condition” his father was in was Sunny’s fault apparently. How? Why?

  “Jus ’cos yew exist,” Mrs. Kerrich explained, handing him a dry Rich Tea biscuit. “If young Dominic ’an’t got ’iself involved with drugs an’ your mother and so orn,” she said, “then ’e could have gorn riding every day and married a bootful girl ’oo wore pearls and a twinset, like ’is kind o’ people are s’posed to. ’Stead ’e became”—she made rabbit ears—“ ‘an aaartist.’ And then ’e ’ad the strain orv ’avin’ a child like yew.” Mrs. Kerrich was a bottomless source of information, most of it false or misleading, unfortunately.

  The dogs, divining biscuits, surged into the kitchen and boiled around their legs beneath the table. There were three of them, slobbery things, some kind of spaniel, interested in no one but themselves. Snuffy, Pippy and Loppy. Stupid names. Grandpa Ted had a proper dog called Tinker. Grandpa Ted said Tinker was as “steady as a rock.” His grandmother’s dogs were always giving Sunny secret little nips with their nasty teeth and when he complained to her she said, “What did you do to them? You must have done something to them, they wouldn’t bite for no reason,” when that was exactly what they did.

  “Orf yew go, yew ’orrible ’ounds,” Mrs. Kerrich said to them, words that had no effect on them at all. They weren’t even properly house-trained and left what his grandmother indulgently called “little sausages” all over the Persian rugs, which had “seen better days.” (“Disgustin’,” Mrs. Kerrich said.) The whole house had seen better days. It was falling down around their ears, according to his grandmother, whose scratchy voice could be heard shouting from another part of the house, “Snuffy! Pippy! Loppy!” and the dogs swirled out of the kitchen as fast as they’d entered. “I’d ’ave the lot of them put down if they was mine,” Mrs. Kerrich said. Sunny suspected that she didn’t just mean the dogs.

  Sunny was much better behaved than the dogs and yet was treated much worse. How could that be fair?

  One of the servants’ bells in the hallway started to ring. The bells clanged horribly as if the person on the other end who was ringing them was furious (although, actually, they usually were). “Oh, my giddy arnt, there’s ’is lordship again,” Mrs. Kerrich said, heaving herself out of her chair. “Summoned by bells.” (She said this every time.) His lordship—again not a lord, but “Colonel Villiers.” Sunny’s grandfather (supposedly) rarely moved from his armchair by the fire. He had pale-blue rheumy eyes and tended not to speak so much as to make a sound somewhere between a bark and cough, like a seal, that Sunny’s grandmother and Mrs. Kerrich seemed to have no trouble interpreting but Sunny had enormous difficulty translating into recognizable English. Whenever Sunny was anywhere near his grandfather he would grab him and hold on to him, frequently pinching him at the same time, and bay into his ear, “Who are you?”

  Sunny wasn’t at all sure what the answer to this question was. He wasn’t Sunny any more, apparently. His grandmother said she couldn’t bring herself to call him such a silly name. “Sun” was even more ridiculous and so she said from now on he was called Philip, which was his ga-ga grandfather’s name.

  “Oh, man,” his father said wearily when Sunny went to inform him that he was called Philip now. “Just let her call you anything she wants. It’s easier than fighting her. What’s in a name anyway? It’s just a label they hang round your neck.” It wasn’t just his name, his grandmother had taken him into Norwich and kitted him out in completely new clothes so that he no longer wore his clownish stripy hand-knitted jumpers and dungarees but instead sported khaki shorts and “smart” sweatshirts, and his jelly sandals were replaced with old-fashioned Start-Rite ones. Worst of all, she had taken him to a “gentleman barber” who had sheared and shaved his long locks into something called a “short back and sides” that transformed his appearance completely. He truly was no longer himself.

  He didn’t tell Grandpa Ted about this new identity, sensing it would lead to more questions than he was capable of answering. There was a weekly phone call. His grandmother stood next to him while he fumbled with the big awkward telephone receiver in his hand and “had a little chat” with Grandpa Ted. Unfortunately, the strangely threatening presence of “Grandmama” prevented Sunny from shouting out the truth about how wretchedly miserable he was. He wasn’t very good at “chatting” and so on the whole gave monosyllabic answers to Teddy’s questions. Was he enjoying himself? Yes. Was it nice weather? Yes. (It was usually raining.) Was he getting enough to eat? Yes. (No!) And then Teddy usually finished by saying, “Do you want to speak to Bertie?” (Yes) and, as she was as hopeless at “chatting” as Sunny was, there followed two minutes of silence while they listened to each other’s adenoidal breathing until his grandmother said impatiently, “Give the telephone back to me,” and ordered Bertie on the other end to return the receiver to her grandfather. Then his grandmother put on a nicer voice and said things like, “He’s so settled here now, I think he should stay a little bit longer. Yes, all the fresh country air, and being with his father. And, of course, it’s what dear Viola wants.” And so on. Dear Viola? Sunny thought, unable to conceive of a scenario that contained both “Grandmama” and “Dear Viola” in the same room.

  Sunny wished that he knew a code or had a secret language in which he could have conveyed his distress (Help me!) but instead he said, “Bye bye, Grandpa,” even as he felt something horrible (grief
) rising up from his (pretty empty) stomach.

  “Stockholm syndrome,” Bertie said. “You began to identify with your captors, like Patty Hearst.” This was 2011 and they were sitting at the top of Mount Batur, watching the sunrise. They had hiked up here by flashlight before dawn. Sunny had been living on Bali for two years by then. Before that he had been in Australia and before that in India for years. Bertie had visited him several times, Viola never.

  Bertie would have fared better at Jordan Manor. She knew how to please but she also knew when to rebel. Sunny had never really learned how to do either properly.

  “They were like vampires,” Sunny said to Bertie. “They needed an infusion of fresh blood. No matter how tainted.”

  “Do you suppose they were as bad as you remember?” Bertie asked.

  “Worse, much worse,” Sunny laughed.

  They had, basically, kidnapped him and now they were holding him prisoner against his will. “Do you fancy a little holiday with your dad?” Grandpa Ted had asked him. It was the summer holidays. It seemed a lifetime since they had left Devon and the commune at Adam’s Acre. Devon had grown into a golden memory, undoubtedly fed by his sister’s infant utopian fantasies of geese and red cows and cake. Sunny had hoped they might all live with Grandpa Ted when they moved to York but his mother said, “Not likely,” and after a couple of weeks she had rented a dingy little terraced house and put him in “the Steiner school,” which he hadn’t liked but would willingly go back to now.

  “You can get to know your other grandparents,” Grandpa Ted said, with what was clearly a hearty, false kind of enthusiasm. “They live in a big house in the country, dogs and horses and so on. It might be nice to visit them for a couple of weeks, what do you say?” The horses had been got rid of a long time ago and the dogs would eat him if they got the chance. “They’ve a maze as well,” Teddy said. Sunny thought he said that these previously unknown grandparents were “amazed,” which didn’t surprise him. He was pretty amazed too, to find himself being packed off to stay with them. He had no free will, he knew that. Viola had inculcated that into him—“You don’t get to say what you want to do,” “You’ll do what I say, not what you want,” “Because I say so!”

  “Not my idea,” Sunny overheard his grandfather say on the phone to some invisible caller, “but his mother’s very keen on it.” This was after his mother had abandoned them, of course, “to stand up for her beliefs,” she said. What did that mean? Weren’t her children as important as her beliefs? Weren’t they the same thing? She had gone to Greenham Common. Bertie said it sounded like a fairy-tale place (until Bertie went there herself). Bertie thought everything sounded like a fairy-tale place. Viola was “embracing the base” there, whatever that meant. “She could try embracing her children,” Sunny heard Teddy grumble.

  His grandmother and Dominic had arrived in a big old car and as they climbed out Grandpa Ted whispered in Sunny’s ear, “That’s your grandmother, Sunny,” although he hadn’t met her before either. His grandmother was wearing a shabby fur coat that looked as if it were made from rat skins and her teeth were as yellow as the daffodils in his grandfather’s garden. She seemed ancient, but looking back later Sunny reckoned she couldn’t have been much more than seventy. (“People were older in the past,” Bertie said.)

  “Daddy!” Bertie shouted, barrelling past Sunny and throwing herself into their father’s arms, surprising Sunny, not to mention Dominic, with her puppy-like eagerness. “Hey,” their father said, taking a step backward as if his daughter might be attacking him.

  “Hi, Ted,” Dominic said to Teddy once he’d identified Bertie for who she was. “How’s it going?”

  Teddy invited them in for a cup of tea. “And I’ve made a cake, a Victoria sandwich,” he said, and their new grandmother frowned at the idea not only of cake but of a man making it.

  And then that was it. Tea drunk, cake eaten—or not—and Sunny was bundled into the back of the car with three very resentful dogs and the next thing he knew he was in Norfolk and his supposed grandmother was telling him that he needed to start growing up. He was only seven! He didn’t need to grow up for years yet! It was so unfair.

  He gave a final miserable sniffle into his pillow. He had trouble getting to sleep every night and when he did sleep he would wake with a sudden start and find himself surrounded by all kinds of sinister objects that loomed out of the dark at him. In the safer light of day he could see them for what they were—the junk, piled up over the years, that a resentful Thomas had left behind when he was ordered to clear out the room for “the boy”—a frayed basketwork cradle, a broken cot, a partnerless ski, a huge lampshade and, worst of all, a wooden tailor’s dummy that Sunny could swear edged closer, inch by terrifying inch, as the night wore on, as if it were playing a malevolent game of statues. “Oh, man, ‘the nursery,’ ” Dominic said, “what a hell-hole. If I had kids I’d give them the nicest room in the house.”

  “You do have kids,” his kid said.

  “Oh, yeah, well, right, you know what I mean.”

  Not really, Sunny thought.

  It was always cold in the nursery, even though it was summer. There were water stains on the walls and a piece of the wallpaper had peeled off and was hanging like flayed skin. The single window, speckled with black mould, was jammed shut or Sunny might have tried to climb out and escape down a drainpipe—the kind of thing that Augustus did in books.

  Grandpa Ted had these books, loads of them, called The Adventures of Augustus, which had been written all about him apparently by his aunt. Viola had read a couple of them to Sunny. Augustus got up to all kinds of naughty things but everyone seemed to think that was all right, sort of, but if Sunny so much as dropped a pea from his plate he was the worst boy in the world as far as his grandmother was concerned. It wasn’t fair.

  He wished Bertie was here. She would have snuggled in bed with him and kept him warm. She was good at cuddling, so was Grandpa Ted. No one in Jordan Manor ever touched him unless it was to pinch or smack or, in the case of the dogs, bite. His grandmother favoured a wooden twelve-inch ruler on the back of his legs. “It was good enough for Dominic,” she said. (“Yar, an look ’ow ’e tuuurned out,” Mrs. Kerrich said. Not that Mrs. Kerrich was against corporal punishment. Far from it.) He wet the bed quite a lot, which he’d done at home as well, but here it was Mrs. Kerrich who had to deal with the bed sheets and she never stopped reminding him that he was “a little pisser,” and when she was really annoyed she made him sleep in the cold damp sheets the next night as well.

  Mouldering books and Victory puzzles had also been carelessly left behind in the nursery. Sunny did his best with them. He was a terrible reader but he was very good at jigsaws, although there were only so many times that you could gain satisfaction from making “Anne Hathaway’s Cottage” or “King Arthur on Dartmoor.”

  The nursery was still littered with the debris of Dominic’s childhood and Sunny was forever standing on a rogue toy soldier or skidding on a Dinky car and he gathered these little treasures into an old shoebox. He had held on to (against all the odds) the little silver hare that Grandpa Ted had given him, but he wished he had the comfort of his stones. There was some gravel on the driveway but that was hardly enough. His best pebble, the one he had found on the beach just before they left Devon, had been taken from him by his grandmother. (“Dirty thing.”) If he’d had his stones he could have left a trail like Hansel and Gretel did and then found his way back home. Or Bertie, his Gretel, could follow the trail and find him and release him from his cage and push “Grandmama” into an oven and burn her to ashes. He fell asleep with this happy thought in his head.

  The “vexed question” of educating him arose. Mrs. Kerrich said to Thomas that she didn’t see why he couldn’t just go to the local school. “Not good enough for a Villiers,” Thomas said. My name’s Todd, Sunny thought, Sunny Todd, not Philip Villiers. How long before he forgot this? Mrs. Kerrich said she thought “the son and heir” was backward so her ladysh
ip didn’t need to get her knickers in such a twist about his education. “I’m not backward,” Sunny muttered. Mrs. Kerrich said, “Speak when you’re spoke to, young fellow my laaad.” Mr. Manners shook his head in despair at Thomas and Mrs. Kerrich’s lack of breeding.

  Mrs. Kerrich was right, the local primary was out of the question for his grandmother, the very words “state school” made her shudder. He wasn’t old enough for the boarding school that Dominic had attended. “Yet,” his grandmother said. Not until his eighth birthday. Eight seemed awfully young, even from the view of a seven-year-old. “Yeah,” his father said. “I was miserable there, but not homesick. You can’t be homesick for somewhere like here, you can feel sick when you’re in Jordan Manor but it’s a relief to be out of it.” This was quite a lot of words for Dominic. He was coming “out of hibernation,” he said, throwing off his torpor. “Stopped taking the medication and all that shit. Seeing things clearer now. Need to get away from here.”

  “Me too,” Sunny said. Perhaps they could run away together. Sunny had a vision in his mind of the pair of them walking along a country road, carrying their belongings in red-and-white spotted handkerchiefs knotted on to sticks. Perhaps a little dog trotting by their side.

  “They don’t know anything about children,” his father said. “You have no idea what it was like growing up here.”

  I do know what it’s like, Sunny thought. I am growing up here.

  “They believe in deprivation, that’s the problem, they think it’s character-building when in fact it’s quite the opposite. Of course, really, I was raised by a nanny. She was worse than the lot of them put together.” Sunny had no idea what a nanny was. The only nanny he knew about was the goat that he remembered from Devon. She had smelt horrible and always tried to eat your clothes if you got too close to her. It seemed unlikely that his father had been brought up by a goat, but Sunny was beyond surprise these days. “Yeah,” Dominic said, drifting away on the memory. “Nanny was a real cunt.”