A God in Ruins

by Kate Atkinson

  Once or twice she had been to Sunny’s early-morning meditation class, which was less crowded but even more difficult.

  “Don’t think, Viola,” Sunny said.

  How could anyone not think?

  “Don’t not think either.”

  “I think, therefore I am,” Viola said, clinging doggedly on to an outmoded Cartesian universe. If she stopped thinking, she might cease to exist.

  “Just let go,” Sunny said.

  Let go? Of what? She had nothing to hold on to to begin with.

  And then! The flowing river, the calling birds, the mechanical insects, the chattering monkeys all finally did their job and her mind stopped working and it was the most unbelievable relief.

  In the car, on the way to Sunny’s class, her phone surprised her by ringing. It was the nursing home.

  The end was nigh. She had been waiting for her father to die so her life could begin, but as we could all have told her it doesn’t work like that. She knew that anyway. Really.

  The Buddha asked a Shramana, ‘How long is the human lifespan?’ He replied, ‘A few days.’ The Buddha said, ‘You have not yet understood the Way.’ He asked another Shramana, ‘How long is the human lifespan?’ The reply was, ‘The space of a meal.’ The Buddha said, ‘You have not yet understood the Way.’ He asked another Shramana, ‘How long is the human lifespan?’ He replied, ‘The length of a single breath.’ The Buddha said, ‘Excellent. You have understood the Way.’ ”

  The words flowed over Viola. She had no idea what they meant. She had taken Sunny’s class as usual. She saw no reason not to. It would be tomorrow morning before she would be able to get on a flight back to Britain. She waited until Sunny had Namasted everyone, the eat-pray-love brigade behaving as if he was bestowing a blessing on them before they trooped reluctantly out into the heat and humidity of the early evening. Viola stayed.

  “Viola?” Sunny said and smiled solicitously at her as if she were an invalid. “The nursing home called,” she said. “My father’s dying.”

  “Grandpa Ted?” Sunny’s brow furrowed and he bit his lip and for a moment she saw the shade of a younger Sunny. “Are you going back?”

  “Yes. Although I expect Bertie will get there long before me. Are you going to come?”

  “No,” Sunny said.

  There were many things Viola could have said at this point. She had thought of all of them while gazing at the forest, the sacred river, the birds, “I’m sorry” being foremost, but instead she told him about the dream.

  “And then you turned to me and you were smiling and you said, ‘We did it, Mum! Everyone got on the train.’ ”

  “I don’t think it was about the train.”

  “No,” Viola agreed. “It was how I felt when you spoke to me.”

  “Which was?”

  “Overwhelmed by love. For you.”

  Oh, Viola. At last.

  Bertie had brought a copy of The Last Chronicle of Barset with her and sat at Teddy’s bedside reading to him. She knew it was one of his favourite books and she supposed it didn’t matter much whether or not he could understand the words because it might be soothing for him to hear the familiar rhythms of Trollope’s prose.

  He made a little sound, not speech, but something, as if he was confused. She put the book down on his bedspread and held one of his fragile, clawed hands in hers. “It’s Bertie Moon here, Grandpa,” she said. The flesh on his hands was like melted tallow and the veins were great blue ropes. His other hand was held up at a right angle and he waved it around gently as if he was asking to be excused. Which he was, she supposed.

  He was a baby once, she thought. New and perfect, cradled in his mother’s arms. The mysterious Sylvie. Now he was a feathery husk, ready to blow away. His eyes were half open, milky, like an old dog, and his mouth had grown beaky with the extremity of age, opening and closing, a fish out of water. Bertie could feel a continual tremor running through him, an electrical current, the faint buzz of life. Or death, perhaps. Energy was gathering around him, the air was static with it.

  Teddy was fighting F-Fox, trying to keep her flying straight and level. She wanted to give up. The bomb-aimer—Clifford—appeared by his side and said the fire had prevented him from getting to the rear-gunner. Teddy knew nothing about the boy except that he looked terrified out of his mind and Teddy thought he had been brave to go and help the rear-gunner—Charlie—who he also knew nothing about. The only thing Teddy could think at that moment was that those boys had to be saved. He told Clifford to jump, but he had lost his parachute and Teddy said, “Take mine. Take it, go on, jump!” and Clifford hesitated but obeyed his captain and took the parachute and disappeared through the escape hatch.

  He was St. George and England was his Cleolinda but the dragon was overpowering him, burning him up with its fiery breath. There was a curtain of flames behind him. He could feel them beginning to scorch his seat. The intercom was no longer working and he didn’t know if the rear-gunner had got out or not so he carried on wrestling with F-Fox.

  The room was lit by just one dim lamp. It was nearly midnight and the nursing home had been overcome by sleep, disturbed only by the occasional shriek of terror that sounded like a small animal being attacked.

  Her grandfather was dying of old age, Bertie thought. Worn out. Not cancer or a heart attack or an accident or a catastrophe. Old age seemed like a hard way to go. There were long gaps between each rasping breath now. Sometimes he seemed to panic and say something and Bertie squeezed his hand and stroked his cheek and murmured to him about the bluebell wood she had never seen and the people she had never met who would be waiting for him. Hugh and Sylvie, Nancy and Ursula. Of the dogs, of the long sunny days. Was that where he was bound? To long sunlit days at Fox Corner? Or eternal darkness? Or just nothing, for even darkness had a quality to it whereas nothing was truly nothing. Were Spenser’s bright squadrons of angels waiting to welcome him? Were all the mysteries about to be revealed? They were questions that no one had ever answered and no one ever would.

  She fed him scraps from her ragbag because words were all that were left now. Perhaps he could use them to pay the ferryman. Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold. The world is charged with the grandeur of God. Full fathom five thy father lies. Little lamb, who made thee? Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie. On that best portion of a good man’s life, his little nameless unremembered acts of kindness and of love. Farther and farther, all the birds of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

  The air rippled and shimmered. Time narrowed to a pinpoint. It was about to happen. Because the Holy Ghost over the bent world broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

  Moments left, Teddy thought. A handful of heartbeats. That was what life was. A heartbeat followed by a heartbeat. A breath followed by a breath. One moment followed by another moment and then there was a last moment. Life was as fragile as a bird’s heartbeat, fleeting as the bluebells in the wood. It didn’t matter, he realized, he didn’t mind, he was going where millions had gone before and where millions would follow after. He shared his fate with the many.

  And now. This moment. This moment was infinite. He was part of the infinite. The tree and the rock and the water. The rising of the sun and the running of the deer. Now.

  The trumpets sound the end of the revels. The baseless fabric begins to disintegrate. The stuff that dreams are made of starts to rend and tear and the walls of a cloud-capped tower tremble. Little showers of dust begin to fall. Birds rise in the air and fly away.

  Sunny is sitting on the veranda of the room he rents, meditating in the dark before dawn. He is moving out soon. His Australian girlfriend, also a yoga teacher, is six months pregnant and has already gone back to Sydney. Sunny is going to join her there in a few weeks. He’s going to accompany Viola to the airport later this morning and see her on the plane and before he says goodbye to her he will give her the gift of this knowledge to take home with her. His other gift to her will be the little silver hare that he
has kept all these years. Against the odds. “For luck. For protection.” His Australian girlfriend is the Buddha. She is carrying the Buddha inside her.

  He takes in a sudden breath as if he has been asleep and has woken suddenly.

  An alarming crack appears in the gorgeous palace. The first wall shivers and crumbles. The second wall buckles and falls, stones tumble to the ground.

  Viola is drinking her coffee, waiting for the dawn, waiting for the mist to lift from the river and the birds to start calling. She’s thinking about her mother. She’s thinking about her children. She’s thinking about her father. She is overcome by the pain of love. The birds commence their dawn chorus. Something is happening. Something is changing. For a moment she is gripped by panic. Don’t be afraid, she thinks. And she isn’t.

  The third wall comes down with a great crash, sending up a cloud of dust and debris.

  Bertie is holding her grandfather’s hand, willing him to feel her love because isn’t that what everyone would want to be the last thing that they feel? She leans over and kisses his hollow cheek. Something tremendous is happening, something catastrophic. She is going to be a witness of it. Time starts to tilt. Now, she thinks.

  The fourth wall of the solemn temple falls as quietly as feathers.

  He could no longer fight F-Fox. The aircraft was mortally wounded, a bird shot out of the air. Ah! bright wings. He heard the words quite clearly as if someone in the cockpit had spoken them. He had made it to the coast. Beneath him the moon glinted off the North Sea like a thousand diamonds. He was reconciled to this moment, to this now. The noise in the aircraft had ceased, the heat from the flames had disappeared. There was just a beautiful, unearthly silence. He thought of the wood and the bluebells, the owl and the fox, a Hornby train trundling around his bedroom floor, the smell of a cake baking in the oven. The skylark ascending on his thread of song.

  F-Fox fell with Teddy still inside her, a blaze of light in the dark, a bright star, an exaltation, until her fires were finally quenched by the waves. It was over. Teddy sank to the silent sea-bed and joined all the tarnished treasure that lay there unseen, forty fathoms deep. He was lost for ever, only a small silver hare to keep him company in the dark.

  And with a massive roar the fifth wall comes down and the house of fiction falls, taking Viola and Sunny and Bertie with it. They melt into the thin air and disappear. Pouf!

  The books that Viola wrote vanish from bookshelves as if by magic. Dominic Villiers marries a girl who wears pearls and a twinset and drinks himself to death. Nancy marries a barrister in 1950 and has two sons. During a routine examination, her brain cancer is discovered and successfully removed. Her mind is less keen, her intelligence less bright, but she is still Nancy.

  A man, a doctor, standing on Westminster Bridge turns away after the Jubilee barge, Gloriana, has passed beneath the bridge. For a moment he thinks someone is standing beside him but there is no one there, only a fluctuation in the air. He feels as if he has just lost something but can’t imagine what it might be. An Australian yoga teacher on Bali worries that she will never find someone to love, never have a child. An old woman called Agnes dies in Poplar Hill nursing home, dreaming of escape. Sylvie overdoses on sleeping tablets on VE Day, unable to come to terms with a future that doesn’t contain Teddy. Her best boy.

  Across the world millions of lives are altered by the absence of the dead, but three members of Teddy’s last crew—Clifford, the bomb-aimer, Fraser, the injured pilot, and Charlie, the tail-end Charlie—all bail out successfully from F-Fox and see out the rest of the war in a POW camp. On their return they all marry and have children, fractals of the future.

  Fifty-five thousand, five hundred and seventy-three dead from Bomber Command. Seven million German dead, including the five hundred thousand killed by the Allied bombing campaign. The sixty million dead overall of the Second World War, including eleven million murdered in the Holocaust. The sixteen million of the First World War, over four million in Vietnam, forty million to the Mongol conquests, three and a half million to the Hundred Years War, the fall of Rome took seven million, the Napoleonic Wars took four million, twenty million to the Taiping Rebellion. And so on and so on and so on, all the way back to the Garden when Cain killed Abel.

  All the birds who were never born, all the songs that were never sung and so can only exist in the imagination.

  And this one is Teddy’s.

  1947

  Daughters of Elysium

  The hawthorn in the lane was just coming into blossom and Ursula said, “Oh, look, the hawthorn’s flowering. Teddy would have loved to see that.”

  “Oh, don’t,” Nancy said, the tears starting. “I can’t believe he’s gone from this world for ever.” They walked, arm in arm, Lucky running backwards and forwards, excited to be in the lively warm air. “I wish we had a grave to visit,” Nancy said.

  “I’m glad we don’t,” Ursula said. “Now we can imagine him as free as the air.”

  “I can only imagine him at the bottom of the North Sea, cold and lonely.”

  “Of his bones are coral made,” Ursula said.

  A tremulous “Oh” from Nancy.

  “Those are pearls that were his eyes.”

  “Stop, do stop, please.”

  “Sorry. Do you want to walk across the meadow?”

  Look!” Nancy exclaimed, letting go of Ursula’s arm and pointing towards the sky. “There. A lark—a skylark. Listen,” she added in a thrilled whisper, as though she might disturb the bird.

  “Beautiful,” Ursula murmured.

  In thrall to the skylark, they watched as it soared, flying further and further away until it was no more than a speck in the blue sky and then it was just the memory of the speck.

  Nancy sighed. “Sometimes I wonder,” she said, “about reincarnation. I know it’s absurd, but wouldn’t it be wonderful if Teddy came back as something else—as that skylark, say. I mean we don’t know, do we? That could have been Teddy saluting us, letting us know that he’s all right. That he still is in some way. Do you believe in reincarnation?”

  “No,” Ursula said. “I believe we have just one life, and I believe that Teddy lived his perfectly.”

  And when all else is gone, Art remains. Even Augustus.

  The Adventures of Augustus

  ~ The Awful Consequences ~

  ISN’T THAT Augustus?” Miss Slee whispered in Mr. Swift’s ear. Quite a loud whisper, the kind that makes people in surrounding seats turn and look at you with interest.

  Mr. Swift’s features were impassive although he couldn’t quite suppress a slight shudder at the spectacle before him. Miss Slee leaned further forward in her seat to catch Mrs. Swift’s attention. “That is Augustus, isn’t it?” she persisted, in an even louder whisper. “Your son, ” she added. It didn’t really qualify any longer as a whisper. More of a shout. Mrs. Swift’s expression remained inscrutable. The rest of the audience were as transfixed as Augustus’s parents by the scene unfolding before them on the stage of the village hall.

  “England Through the Ages” had reached the Armada, and Elizabeth I was giving her rousing speech to the troops at Tilbury. Gloriana had commandeered Boadicea’s chariot—a makeshift sort of affair—and was brandishing a trident that had been borrowed from Britannia. These two noble emblems of womanhood (played by Augustus’s sister, Phyllis, and Lady Lamington from the Hall) had not volunteered their possessions and were standing at either side of the stage glowering at Gloriana.

  The rest of the pageant players were gamely carrying on, despite the fact that half the scenery had collapsed and several dogs were wandering aimlessly around on the stage.

  The vicar, sitting on the other side of Mrs. Swift, said to her, “But I thought Mrs. Brewster had taken on the role of Queen Elizabeth. Who is that on stage?”

  Gloriana’s red wig had slipped down to one side and, having no proper costume, she had wrapped herself in a Roman centurion’s cloak. Again, an item not voluntarily relinquished by said
centurion. Her surprisingly grubby knees were visible beneath the cloak and there was what looked to all intents and purposes to be a catapult in her pocket.

  “You’re doing jolly well, you lot,” this dishevelled Gloriana yelled in a rather unqueenly way. “Killin’ all these spaniels and stuff.” “Spaniards,” Mrs. Garrett could be heard hissing from the side of the stage. Gloriana brandished Britannia’s trident high and shouted, “Now let’s go and kill the rest of ’em!” A marauding horde of children poured on to the stage, roaring and shouting and in some cases squeaking. The dogs barked excitedly at the sight of them. Some—nay, many—of those children had previously been of good character but now seemed to have come under the hypnotic spell of Gloriana. As, apparently, had many members of the audience, who were viewing her with open-mouthed horror.

  “Are the children supposed to be the Spaniards?” the vicar asked Mrs. Swift. “ ‘Invading hordes,’ ” he said, consulting the programme notes.

  “I’m not sure I know who anyone is supposed to be any more,” Mrs. Swift said, distracted by the hideous sight of the red wig slipping further down her son’s face.

  “Are they the same children,” the vicar puzzled, “who were also the Saxons and the Vikings and the Normans? It’s hard to tell now that they’re all covered in green paint. What do you suppose that represents? England’s green and pleasant land?”

  “I doubt it,” Mrs. Swift said and gave a little cry of alarm as Boadicea’s chariot, not robust to begin with, suddenly collapsed and Gloriana toppled ingloriously to the stage, taking the remaining scenery with her. A small West Highland terrier ran on stage and with excellent timing snatched the red wig in its mouth and ran off with it, accompanied by some off-stage shrieking.