An avenue of elms must have once provided a magnificent guard of honour for the long drive that led to Jordan Manor, but now all that was left were the stumps of the diseased trees. The same tragedy had struck at Ettringham Hall over a decade ago, but they had replanted with oaks. It seemed to Teddy that to plant an oak was an act of faith in the future. He would like to plant an oak. He had returned to Ettringham Hall many years later, in 1999, on his “farewell tour” with Bertie. The Hall had become a “country house hotel.” They had a drink in the “Daunt Bar” and ate a not-bad meal in the restaurant, but stayed in a cheaper B&B in the village. It was hardly a village any more. Fox Corner and Jackdaws had been surrounded by a new estate of expensive detached houses. “Footballers’ houses,” Bertie said. They had been built on the meadow. The flax and larkspur, the buttercups and the corn poppies, red campion and ox-eye daisies. All gone.
The changes made Teddy sadder than he had expected, and Bertie too, because it was a place she had never known and never could know and yet in some way she understood that it had made her the person she was. She wanted to knock on the door of Fox Corner and ask the current owners if they could come in, but there were electronic gates with security cameras on them and when Bertie pressed the buzzer no one answered. Teddy was enormously relieved. He didn’t think he would have been able to step back over the threshold.
Dutch elm disease,” Teddy explained to Bertie as they drove towards Jordan Manor. “It’s killed all the elms.” “Poor trees,” she said. Unlike at Ettringham Hall, the felled elms had not been replaced by any new planting and the resulting scene was dismal, as if there had been a war fought in the grounds. The air of neglect was palpable long before they reached the front door. Viola must have overestimated the Villierses’ wealth. It would cost a fortune just to repair the roof on a place like this.
Perhaps, Teddy castigated himself, if he had brought Sunny here himself he would have realized how dilapidated the Villierses were in both home and character, but instead Dominic and his mother had driven to collect him one afternoon at the beginning of the school holidays.
“Antonia,” Teddy had said amicably, putting a hand out to shake, and she had given him a cold limp claw in exchange and said, “Mr. Todd,” without actually looking at him.
“Ted, please,” Teddy said.
“Antonia” was wearing a handful of diamond rings, grey and cloudy with dirt. He had given Nancy a little diamond ring when Viola was born—nothing flashy—and she said it was illogical to have an engagement ring when they were already married (“post facto”), but they had never been properly engaged during the war and he wanted her to have a token of his faith in their future together. Despite her scepticism she said it was a lovely gesture. She cleaned the ring every week with a brush and toothpaste so that it always sparkled. He had kept the ring for Viola and gave it to her on her twenty-first birthday but he couldn’t recall ever seeing her wearing it.
And Dominic, it became apparent during the course of the afternoon, had either taken some kind of hallucinogen—LSD, Teddy supposed—or was as mad as a hatter. “Cake!” he said, rubbing his hands together when Teddy laid out slices of the cake on a plate. “How about that, Ma?” he said, taking three slices off the plate and wandering away, leaving Teddy and Antonia to fend for themselves in the conversation stakes.
“Tea, Antonia?” Teddy offered, not unaware how calling her by her first name riled her. It seemed important to him, however, that she reconciled herself to their equality as progenitors of the small squirming child who was reluctantly suffering their company.
Sunny and Bertie had disappeared almost as soon as their visitors had alighted from the car and Teddy had to cajole Sunny into returning to the living room. The boy was a terrible fidget and within minutes his newly introduced grandmother was saying “Sit still” to him and “Stop bouncing around on the sofa.” Teddy knew then that it was a mistake to let him go with her, but nonetheless he had, hadn’t he?
“How do you take your tea?” he asked politely and Antonia said, “China, weak with a little lemon,” and Teddy said, “Sorry, I’ve only got Rington’s English Afternoon Blend. Loose though, not tea bags.”
“I must go and see that the dogs are all right,” Antonia said, standing up abruptly and putting her cup and saucer down, tea untouched. “They’re in the back of the car,” she added when Teddy looked blankly at her. He hadn’t noticed any dogs and he said, “Dogs,” to Sunny, who perked up a bit at the idea. Sunny liked dogs. “Why don’t you go with your granny and see her dogs?” Teddy said, noticing that she flinched at the word “granny.”
Yet still he had let the boy go with her!
“Mea culpa,” he murmured as he and Bertie drew up outside the front door of Jordan Manor. No sign of life, no dogs, no Antonia, no Sunny. Teddy sighed and said, “Let’s hope someone’s got the kettle on, Bertie.” It was hardly likely to be Antonia.
When she had gone to see to her dogs, Teddy had gone looking for Dominic and found him in the back garden with Bertie and Tinker. The roses were in full bloom—Teddy had several splendid ones against a sunny wall—and Dominic had picked one, a wonderful cerise Belle de Crécy. A “bed of crimson joy,” Teddy had thought when he planted it, and hoped no invisible worm would eat its dark secret heart, even though he knew that was a metaphor on the part of Blake rather than some kind of horticultural caution.
Bertie glanced at the plucked rose and said to Teddy, “Is that all right?” She seemed to be monitoring Dominic rather anxiously, her first flush of enthusiasm at seeing him having worn off. Teddy wondered if she was remembering how unpredictable her father’s behaviour had been when she lived with him. Tinker was sitting alertly next to Bertie, glued to her side, as if he might be called to action at any moment.
“Yes, of course,” Teddy said. “He’s welcome to it. It’s such a beautiful flower, isn’t it?” he said to Dominic, who appeared to be completely captivated by the rose, which he was holding no more than an inch from his face.
“Yeah,” Dominic said, “incredible.”
“It’s called Belle de Crécy,” Teddy said helpfully.
“I mean, look at it, man, really look at it. Imagine if you could get inside it.”
“Inside it?”
“Yeah, ’cos it’s like… a universe in there. There could be whole galaxies hiding in there. It’s like when you travel through space—”
“Do you?” Teddy asked.
“Yeah, sure, we’re all travelling through space. And you go down a wormhole, you know?”
“Not really.”
“The meaning of the rose,” Dominic said. “It could be the clue. Wow.”
“Why don’t you come back inside, Dominic?” Teddy said. Before you disappear inside that rose and we lose you for ever, he thought. It was like listening to the prattling nonsense of an idiot. And still he had let Sunny go with them! “Come and have more cake, Dominic,” he said in the tone of voice you might bribe a rabid child with.
At that moment the patio doors opened (sliding, double-glazed, Teddy had only recently had them installed and was very pleased with them) and three yapping dogs rushed headlong into the garden. Tinker, lulled into a false sense of security by the meaninglessness of Dominic’s conversation, was caught off guard when he found himself suddenly surrounded by a trio of yipping, snarling guests.
“Snuffy! Pippy! Loppy!” Antonia shouted from the patio. Teddy and Tinker exchanged glances and Teddy said, “It’s all right, boy,” in as reassuring a voice as he could muster. He wouldn’t have packed his own dog off with the Villierses, and yet he had sent his grandson.
“I don’t want to go,” Sunny said when they were standing by the car, Dominic putting his small suitcase in the boot. He clutched on to Teddy’s hand and Teddy had to prise himself free as gently as he could. “I’ve got something for you,” he said, reaching into his pocket and producing the little silver hare that had once hung from his cradle, according to Ursula. He put it in Sunny’s own po
cket and said, “That kept me safe all through the war. Now it will keep you safe, Sunny. And it’s only for a couple of weeks. You’ll enjoy it when you get there. Trust me.” Trust me! Teddy had betrayed all trust by sending him off with those people. He watched the car drive away with a heavy heart. Bertie cried and Tinker gave her hand a comforting lick. Something was wrong, but the dog had no idea what. Now they were journeying to right that wrong. They were going to rescue Sunny.
They climbed out of the car. Teddy stretched and said, “Getting too old for this lark,” to Bertie. “Old bones can’t sit for long without seizing up.” There was a stiff bell-pull instead of a doorbell that Teddy had to yank hard for any result. They could hear a faint ringing somewhere beyond the fortress-like front door. No footsteps of anyone rushing to open it. It was a house in mourning, Teddy supposed.
Dominic had been dead for three weeks before Antonia saw fit to inform Teddy. His regular phone calls to Sunny had gone unanswered during that time and he was wondering about driving down when finally she telephoned and said there had been “a tragedy.” For one terrible moment Teddy thought she meant Sunny, so when she said that Dominic was dead he almost laughed with relief, not quite the right response obviously, but he managed to say, “Dominic?” Drugs, he supposed, but Antonia said “a terrible accident” and wouldn’t, “couldn’t” elaborate. “I really can’t talk about it.” Why on earth hadn’t she told him sooner? “I have lost my only child,” she said coldly. “I have better things to do than telephone all and sundry.”
“All and sundry?” Teddy spluttered. “Bertie’s Dominic’s daughter.” And Sunny, he thought, how on earth was poor Sunny coping?
He had fretted over how to break the news to Bertie. In the end it wasn’t so much her father’s death that troubled her as the existential problem of his current whereabouts. Nowhere, Teddy thought. Or perhaps he was in the mystic heart of the rose. He plumped for reincarnation as the best child-friendly answer to the conundrum. Her father might have become a tree, he suggested. Or a bird? She settled on a cat. Teddy supposed there was something cat-like about Dominic, mostly his knack for falling asleep. “Will he be a kitten?” Bertie asked. “Or a cat?”
“A kitten, I suppose,” Teddy said. That seemed logical.
“If we find him,” Bertie said, frowning, “should we keep him as a pet?”
“Probably not,” Teddy said. “Tinker might not like it.”
And what of poor Sunny all this time?
He had started school “before his father was even cold and in the ground,” as Mrs. Kerrich put it. Even her lard-hardened heart was softened—slightly—by the way Sunny was expected to get on with things as if nothing had happened. He lasted three days at the school before his grandmother was asked to take him away. “He’s almost feral,” his housemaster reported to her. “Biting, kicking, screaming, fighting everyone in sight. He took quite a chunk out of Matron’s hand. You would think he was raised by wolves.”
“No, by his mother—much the same thing, I suspect. He’s never been disciplined, I’m afraid.” His grandmother turned to Sunny—yes, this conversation was taking place in his presence, Mr. Manners cringing at his side—and said, “Anything to say for yourself?” What could he say? He’d been bullied horribly from the moment he stepped through the door of the school. They had made jokes about his father’s death, about his accent (not posh enough), about his ignorance of “the Three Rs,” whatever they were, about anything they could find to use against him. They had harried him from pillar to post, pinching and shoving and giving him Chinese burns. They pulled his grey flannel shorts down around his ankles—twice—in the toilets, and once one of the boys had waved a ruler about and said, “Stick it up his bum,” and was probably only prevented from doing so by Matron putting her head round the door and saying, “Now, boys, enough fun and games.” (“That’s the normal rough and tumble of a boys’ school,” the housemaster said.)
And all the time his mind was swamped by what had happened on the level-crossing (he had learned that was what it was called). He had managed to wrench himself out of his father’s grip at the last moment, but the rest was just a blur of overwhelming noise and speed. He had flung himself away from the engine and didn’t see what happened to Dominic, although it wasn’t hard to guess. From his perspective on the ground he could see down the track, see that the train, far, far in the distance, had come to a halt. He didn’t think he was actually hurt, a bit of scrape and graze, but he decided just to stay there and pretend to be asleep. The consequences of what had just taken place were going to be too awful to deal with.
A policeman had picked him up and driven him to the hospital. If he closed his eyes Sunny could still feel the thick material of the policeman’s uniform when he had leaned his head against his chest. “You’re all right, sonny,” the policeman said and Sunny wondered how he knew his name. He loved that policeman.
“I know it’s terrible, what happened to his father,” the housemaster continued (It happened to me too, Sunny thought), “and I believe he died a hero” (his grandmother gave a mute, restrained nod, accepting this as a compliment), “but you know this kind of boy…” The sentence went unfinished, leaving Sunny wondering what kind of boy he was. Wicked, obviously, that seemed to go without saying. He had killed his father, apparently. How? How had he done that? How?
“Cors yew knows yew was with your dad when ’e died,” Mrs. Kerrich said. “An’ if yew ’adn’t been with ’im ’e wouldn’t ’ave been there, would ’e? Orn that level-crawsin’. An’ ’cos ’e saaarcrificed ’iself for yew, didn’t ’e? T’save yew from that darn train.”
Really? Sunny thought. This didn’t tally with his own fragmented, anguished memory of events, but then what did he know? (“Nothing,” his grandmother said.) This, apparently, was the version of the accident that the inquest had settled on. His father had pushed him out of the path of the train. The traumatized train driver (who was on permanent sick leave because of the “incident”) reported that “It all happened so fast. A man—Mr. Villiers—appeared to be struggling with a small boy on the level-crossing. The man—Mr. Villiers—seemed to be trying to pull them both out of the path of the train. He managed to push the boy to safety but he didn’t have enough time to save himself.” Mr. Villiers was to be commended for his heroic selflessness, the coroner said.
“HERO DAD dies saving son,” it said in the local paper. At work, Teddy had sent a junior to look up the microfiche and found the newspaper account of the accident as well as a report on the inquest. Unmanned level-crossing, three-thirty down train to Norwich, and so on. Dominic Villiers, local artist. His son was known to have behavioural problems and was “fascinated by trains,” Thomas Darnley, local gardener and handyman at Jordan Manor, the boy’s home, said.
“Dear God,” Teddy said.
The true verdict—that Dominic had killed himself while out of his mind on a cocktail of LSD and defective brain chemicals, that he had tried to take his son with him, was never proposed, although as far as Teddy was concerned this was infinitely more likely than Sunny’s father being unable to move quickly enough to avoid a speeding train.
Poor Sunny, never to know the truth, to live with the burden of guilt all his life, or at least until he became a Buddhist and sloughed off the past.
(“You were seven years old!” Bertie said. “How could you possibly have been to blame?”)
“We’ll keep him at home,” his grandmother said to the housemaster.
“In chains, I hope,” the housemaster laughed.
He wet the bed every night now and he often wet his pants during the daytime. He seemed to have no control over his body or his mind. It was frightening. They “engaged a tutor”—a Mr. Alistair Treadwell—whose method of teaching was simply to repeat things more loudly each time until he lost his patience. Mr. Treadwell spent a lot of his time talking to Sunny about “injustice” and how “the case against him” had been “trumped up” by someone with a grudge. He was never even
alone with the child, he said. But once your reputation was questioned, that was it.
They had lessons at the dining-room table, which was as big, if not bigger, than Teddy’s actual dining room. Mr. Treadwell ate egg sandwiches for lunch and then breathed his eggy breath all over Sunny in the afternoon. Sunny usually fell asleep and when he woke up Mr. Treadwell was reading a fat book (“Tolstoy”). Sunny was “practically unteachable,” Mr. Treadwell told his grandmother. “Didn’t you learn anything at your last school?” he was always asking him. “Not any of the basics? The Three Rs?” Apparently not. Steiner didn’t teach the basics until you were over six and Sunny had spent his days drawing with wax crayons and singing songs about dwarves and angels and blacksmiths, the mysterious trinity of the Three Rs still a distant threat on the horizon.
And then one day while they were doing what Mr. Treadwell called “simple arithmetic” but which Sunny found far from simple, Sunny realized that he needed the toilet, but Mr. Treadwell said, “Get to the end of this sum first, please,” so that by the time he got to the end of the sum—or rather by the time Mr. Treadwell had given up on ever getting the correct answer out of him—it was becoming clear to Sunny that he was never going to make it. The nearest toilet was the “downstairs cloakroom” which was still miles away, and he set off running awkwardly and almost knocked himself out when he turned a corner and ran into his grandmother.
“I need to go,” he said.
“Haven’t you forgotten something?” she said. He started to panic because he couldn’t think what it could be and he really, really needed the toilet. What had he forgotten? “Please—thank you—I’m sorry, Grandmama,” he said, desperately throwing everything he could think of at the question.
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