A God in Ruins

  He disliked profligacy, whereas Viola failed to see why it was such a sin. There was no need to throw things out if they were still working. (The Voice of Reason.) You could re-use yoghurt tubs and tin cans for seedlings, make stale bread and cake into puddings, mince leftover scraps of meat. (Who had a mincer any more?) Old woollen jumpers were cut up and used to stuff cushions. Anything that moved was made into jam or chutney. When you left a room you had to turn off the light and close the door. Not that Viola did. She never had paper to draw on as a child but was always given the unused bits of wallpaper rolls. (“Just turn it over, it’s perfectly good.”) Vinegar and newspapers were used to clean windows. Everything else went out to the compost bin or the birds. Her father removed the hair from hairbrushes and combs and put it out for the birds to line their nests with. He was overly preoccupied with garden birds.

  He wasn’t mean, she would give him that. The house was always warm—too warm, the central heating cranked up high. And he gave her generous pocket money and let her choose her own clothes. Food was plentiful. She used to despise the fact that nearly everything came from the garden: fruit, eggs, vegetables, honey. Not the chickens, chickens came from the butcher. He couldn’t kill a chicken. He let them die of old age, which was ridiculous because he became overrun with old chickens.

  She had spent endless summer hours in the garden like a peasant in the fields, hands sticky from picking redcurrants, blackcurrants, raspberries. Scratched by gooseberry bushes, stung by wasps, bitten by grass mites, disgusted by slugs and worms. Why couldn’t they shop in brightly lit supermarkets, choose colourful packets of ingredients, shiny fruit and vegetables that came from far away and were picked by other people?

  Nowadays, if she was honest with herself—which she rarely was, she knew—she missed all those meals she had hated at the time. Her father had commandeered Nancy’s old cookbooks and made Sunday roasts and apple pies, hot-pots and rhubarb crumbles. “Your dad’s fantastic,” everyone used to tell her. Her teachers loved him, partly because they had loved Nancy, but also because of the way he’d taken over the role of mother. She didn’t want him to be her mother, she wanted Nancy to be her mother.

  (“We were early adopters of the Green movement. I was brought up in a self-sufficient household, very ecologically minded. We grew our own produce, we recycled everything, we were really ahead of the times when it came to respecting the planet.” Teddy was very surprised to read this in a Sunday-colour-supplement interview not long before he left Fanning Court for the nursing home.)

  Her father read Silent Spring when it was first published, just after her mother’s death. A library copy, of course. (Had he ever actually bought a book? “But we should support the public libraries or they’ll cease to exist.”) He used to bore her rigid by reading out passages aloud. That was when he became obsessed with garden birds. There were several of them now on the bird feeder, different kinds. Viola had no idea what any of them were.

  She returned to the kitchen—now empty of everyone, thank goodness—and started hauling dishes out of the cupboards and putting them in boxes, dividing things between the boxes destined for Fanning Court and those for the charity shop. (Who needed four covered vegetable dishes or even one soup tureen?)

  Everything in the kitchen seemed to bring back memories. The Pyrex dishes reminded her of the cottage pies and rice puddings that had been cooked in them. The horrible tumblers, in a crinkly green glass that had made everything they held look contaminated, had contained the milk she had drunk every night before bed—accompanied by two Rich Tea biscuits, as basic a biscuit as it was possible to devise, when she had craved something more interesting—a Club, a Penguin. Her father’s insistence on an unadorned bedtime biscuit seemed to say everything about his austere morality. (“I’m thinking of your teeth.”) Oh, and that Midwinter-pattern crockery brought on a fit of melancholy. A whole life could be contained in a dinner-service pattern. (A good phrase. She tucked it away.) One day this would all be “vintage” and Viola would be very annoyed that she had packed it off to Oxfam without a backward glance.

  Her father seemed so old-fashioned, but he must have been like new once. That was a nice phrase. She tucked that away for later use as well. She was writing a novel. It was about a young girl, brilliant and precocious, and her troubled relationship with her single-parent father. Like all writing, it was a secretive act. An unspeakable practice. Viola sensed there was a better person inside her than the one who wanted to punish the world for its bad behaviour all the time (when her own was so reproachable). Perhaps writing would be a way of letting that person out into the daylight.

  She dropped a Midwinter milk jug and it broke into several pieces. “Fuck,” she said, more quietly than she’d intended.

  Teddy had let Viola arrange for a couple of the bulkier pieces in his house to be shipped off to auction, where they had fetched, in her words, “a pittance.” Nancy’s piano, Gertie’s sideboard. Precious objects. The piano was out of tune and neglected, played by no one now. Viola gave up her lessons (she had little aptitude) after Nancy died.

  When Teddy thought about Nancy he often pictured her sitting at the piano. He thought about her every day, as he thought about so many others. The dead were legion and remembrance was a kind of duty, he supposed. Not always related to love.

  He recalled—near the end—walking into this room and seeing Nancy playing the piano. Chopin. He had been reminded of Vermeer, one of his paintings in the National Gallery—a woman in a room, a virginal—he couldn’t remember exactly, it was years since he had been up to London. Woman Interrupted at the Piano, he thought when he saw Nancy. He could imagine her living in one of Vermeer’s cool, uncluttered interiors. The reading of the letter, the pouring of the milk. Order and purpose. She had looked up from the piano as he entered the room, surprised, as if she had forgotten his existence, and wearing that cryptic expression she had sometimes as though she had been lost inside herself. The secret Nancy.

  He had felt an awful wrench when the removal men had taken the piano. He had loved Nancy, but perhaps not in a way that suited her. There had probably been someone else out there in the world who would have made her happier. But he had loved her. Not the high romance of passion or chivalry, but something more robust and dependable.

  And Gertie’s sideboard, he was sad to see that go too. It had belonged to the Shawcrosses originally, had lived in the dining room at Jackdaws. It was a Liberty Arts and Crafts piece, out of fashion for many years but coming back now, although not soon enough for Viola, who had always regarded it as ugly and “depressing.” Fifteen years later, in 2008, she saw the twin of Gertie’s sideboard—perhaps the sideboard itself—on the Antiques Roadshow and was furious that she hadn’t “hung on to it” given the price it was valued at. “I would have kept it,” she said to Bertie, “but he insisted on getting rid of it.” The older Teddy got the more Viola simply referred to him as “he,” as if he was a patriarchal god who had blighted her life.

  “Where’s that old carriage clock of yours?” she asked suddenly, casting her eye around the now almost denuded living room. “I don’t remember seeing it when we were packing.” The clock had been Sylvie’s, and her mother’s before that. It had gone to Ursula on Sylvie’s death and Ursula had left it to Teddy, and so it had zigzagged its way down the family tree. “You know,” Viola said with a faux nonchalance, “if you don’t want it I’ll take it off your hands.” She was the worst kind of liar—transparently untruthful and yet completely convinced of her ability to deceive. If she needed money why didn’t she just ask him? She was always looking to be given things, a cuckoo rather than a predator. It was as if there was something hungry inside her that could never be filled up. It made her greedy.

  The clock was a good one, made by Frodsham and worth quite a bit, but Teddy knew that if he gave it to Viola she would sell it or misplace it or break it and it seemed important to him that it stayed in the family. An heirloom. (“Lovely word,” Bertie said.) He liked
to think that the little golden key that wound it, a key that would almost certainly be lost by Viola, would continue to be turned by the hand of someone who was part of the family, part of his blood. The red thread. To this end, he had given the clock to Bertie the last time she visited him. He should have given her Gertie’s sideboard too, it would have suited the Arts and Crafts cottage where she lived with her twins and the good man she married—a doctor whom she met by chance on Westminster Bridge, the week of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. Years later, after Bertie married and moved to this cottage in East Sussex, she had the clock valued for insurance and discovered that it was worth a whopping thirty thousand pounds. Every time Viola came to visit, Bertie had to hide her little golden nest-egg and muffle its chime. Teddy had been in the earth for two years by then and never saw Bertie’s Arts and Crafts cottage, never saw the clock continuing to count down time on her mantelpiece.

  “Have you already packed the clock?” Viola asked accusingly.

  Teddy shrugged innocently and said, “Probably. It’ll be at the bottom of a box somewhere.” He loved Viola as only a parent can love a child, but it was hard work.

  We’ll probably have to give this place a lick of paint before it can go on the market,” Viola said. “But the estate agent said it should sell quite easily.” (She had talked to his estate agent? Behind his back?) “And then you’ll have a bit of an income to live out your days on.” That’s what he was doing from now on, wasn’t it? Living out his days. That’s what he’d always done, of course, what everyone did, if you were lucky.

  “New home,” Viola said. “A fresh start. It will be…” She sought a word out of the air.

  “Challenging?” Teddy offered. “Distressing?”

  “I was going to say energizing.”

  He had no desire for a fresh start, and he doubted that Fanning Court was ever going to feel like a home. It was still a new building, still smelling of paint and fire-proofed furnishings. The flat that Teddy had bought was one of the last in the complex to be sold. (“You were very lucky to get it,” Viola said.) At least he wasn’t moving into a flat where someone had just died and been shipped out. These places were “one out, one in,” weren’t they? “No, this is just a staging post, Teddy,” one of his (few remaining) friends, Paddy, said. “The stations of the cross.” Teddy had tipped the balance, he knew more dead than living now. He wondered who’d be the last man standing. He hoped it wasn’t himself. “Next stop’s the nursing home,” Paddy said. “Me, I’d rather be put down like a dog than go to one of them.” “Me too,” Teddy agreed.

  The public spaces of Fanning Court were decorated in a bland palette of pinks and magnolias and the walls of the corridors were hung with inoffensive Impressionist prints. It seemed doubtful that anyone ever looked at them. Art as wallpaper. “Lovely, isn’t it, Dad?” Viola said to him with a forced kind of optimism when they were first shown round. “It feels a bit like a hotel, doesn’t it? Or a cruise ship?” When had Viola ever been on a cruise ship? She was grimly determined that he was going to like Fanning Court.

  The tour was conducted by the warden, a woman called Ann Schofield, who said, “Call me Ann, Ted.” (Call me Mr. Todd, Teddy thought.) “The Warden,” like something from Trollope. And now he was to be a bedesman in Fanning Court—an almshouse for a new age. Not that Ann Schofield bore any relationship to Septimus Harding. Busty and bustling, her slow Midlands accent (“a Brummie and proud of it”) belied a determined kind of energy. “We’re a happy family here,” she said, rather pointedly, as if Teddy might turn out to be the black sheep.

  She led from the front. She had an enormous backside and Teddy chided himself for his lack of gallantry but you couldn’t help but notice. “The Fat Controller,” Bertie called her when she first visited him in Fanning Court. She had loved the Thomas the Tank Engine books, loved all books. She was in her first year up at Oxford, at the same college that Teddy had attended—co-educational now. Studying the same subject too. She was his legacy, his message to the world.

  They went first to the residents’ lounge, where a little knot of people were playing Bridge. “See, Dad,” Viola whispered. “You like playing cards, don’t you?” (“Well…” Teddy said.)

  “Oh, we have every kind of activity here,” Ann Schofield said. “Bridge—as you can see—dominoes, Scrabble, carpet bowls, amateur dramatics, concerts, a coffee morning every Wednesday…” Teddy tuned out. His leg was getting crampy, he wanted to get home, have a cup of tea and watch Countdown. He wasn’t a big TV watcher but he liked quizzes—decent ones with quiet, middle-aged audiences. He found them comforting and challenging at the same time, which at his age was more than enough.

  The tour wasn’t over. Next stop was a hot, damp laundry room full of huge machines and then the (rather smelly) “refuse store,” with its industrial-sized bins that could have swallowed an “elderly person” whole if they weren’t careful. “Lovely,” Viola murmured. Teddy glanced at her. Lovely, he thought? She looked slightly manic. Then a “kitchenette” where they could make themselves “hot beverages” when they were “socializing together” in the residents’ lounge. Wherever they went people smiled and said “Hello” or asked him when he was moving in. “New friends for you,” Viola said brightly.

  “There’s nothing wrong with my old ones,” Teddy said, his feet beginning to drag.

  “Well, apart from the fact that most of them are dead.”

  “Thanks for reminding me.”

  “All right?” Ann Schofield said, glancing back at them, sensing dissension in the ranks.

  A woman hirpled along the corridor towards them with the aid of a walking frame. “Hello, coming to join us, are you?” she said cheerfully to Teddy. It was a bit like a cult. Teddy was reminded of that television programme from the Sixties that Viola had liked to watch. The Prisoner. His heart sank. This was to be his prison, wasn’t it? A prison with a warden.

  More women—everywhere, in fact. Once he had moved in he realized that nearly all of the “residents” were women. They liked him, women always did. Of course he was still pretty spry then, and competent, and the women belonged to a generation that could be impressed if a man simply knew how to flick a switch on a kettle. He set quite a few frail hearts a-flutter in Fanning Court but had done his best to neatly sidestep romance and intrigue, for although it was all pleasantries on the surface, beneath the magnolia paint the place seethed with gossip and cattiness. Teddy, still a good-looking man in his eighties (especially if you were a woman in your seventies), unintentionally provoked all kinds of heightened emotions.

  “I suppose men are in short supply at my age,” he said, excusing some incident of spiteful behaviour.

  “At my age too,” Bertie said.

  Come along, Ted,” Ann Schofield said. “Plenty more to see.” “Plenty more” was a bit of garden, planted in municipal style. Some benches. A car park.

  “Oh, I don’t think he’ll be bringing his car,” Viola said.

  “Oh, I think he will,” Teddy said.

  “Really, Dad, you’re getting on a bit for driving.” (She wanted his car, he supposed. Hers was always breaking down.) Viola liked having this kind of argument in a public arena with an audience who could see how reasonable she was being and how unreasonable her other family members were. She used to do it with Sunny all the time. Drove the poor boy mad. Still did.

  “Oh, lots of residents have cars,” Ann Schofield said, letting Viola down.

  The flat itself would have fitted into his grandmother’s drawing room in Hampstead. Teddy hadn’t thought about Adelaide in a long time and surprised himself with a vivid memory of her, dressed in long Victorian black even in the Twenties, complaining about her boisterous grandchildren. What a long, long way they had come from those days.

  Once, he remembered, on a particularly tedious visit, he and Jimmy had crept upstairs to investigate her bedroom, a place that was strictly off limits to them. He remembered her wardrobe, an immense contraption, lined inside with p
leated silk and reeking with the competing scents of camphor and lavender, underpinned by the perfume of decay. The two of them had climbed inside, their faces brushing rather unpleasantly against Adelaide’s strange outmoded clothes. “I don’t like it in here,” Jimmy whispered. Neither did Teddy and he stepped out first and accidentally knocked the door so that it swung shut. It took a while to get it open again as the handle had a rather odd mechanism.

  When Jimmy finally tumbled out his shrieks of terror summoned the whole household. Adelaide was furious (“Wicked, wicked boys”), but he remembered Sylvie holding her hand over her mouth so that Adelaide couldn’t see that she was laughing. Poor Jimmy had never liked confined spaces after that. He had been a Commando during the war, had landed on Sword Beach and skirmished his way across the ravaged remains of Europe after D-Day before slogging out the endgame, attached to the 63rd Anti-Tank Regiment. How he must have hated the cramped insides of tank destroyers. He had been with the 63rd when they liberated Bergen-Belsen, but he and Teddy had never spoken about that, had barely spoken about the war. He wished they had.

  Until he found out about Jimmy, one unexpected day just after the war had ended, Teddy’s picture of queers had been the fairies and pansies he saw about Soho. He hadn’t considered such men capable of the kind of brutal courage that Jimmy must have had.

  Jimmy was long gone, to a fast-growing lymphoma in his fifties. When he was given the diagnosis he drove his car off the road and over a precipice. Flamboyant in life, flamboyant in death. He lived in America, of course. Teddy hadn’t gone to the funeral, but he went to a local church and sat silently with his thoughts at the same time that Jimmy was being buried on the other side of the Atlantic. A few days later a flimsy blue airmail letter had drifted through his letter-box like a rare leaf. In it Jimmy had made his farewells. He wrote that he had always loved and admired Teddy and what a good brother he had been. Teddy didn’t think this was true at all. If anything he had been quite derelict in his fraternal duties. He had never asked about Jimmy’s homosexual life (hadn’t wanted to know, really) and had always thought (condescendingly, he was ready to admit now) that his profession—in advertising—was rather trivial. He had felt similarly disappointed when Bertie took a job in advertising, which as far as he could tell was just encouraging people to spend money they didn’t have on things they didn’t need. (“It is,” Bertie agreed.)