A God in Ruins

  “Grandpa?”

  Decapitated. Her head cleaved off by the blade. He heard the shrill scream of a WAAF, louder than the ungodly sound of the wounded aircraft tearing the runway up. The bomb-aimer was killed in the crash, the navigator aboard already dead, hit by flak somewhere over the Ruhr. It seemed secondary. WAAFs were running towards Hilda, screaming and crying, and Teddy ordered them to go away, to get back to the Waafery and stay there, and he went out and picked up the head. It seemed wrong to expect anyone else to do it. The wheel of her bicycle was still spinning.

  That’s what it was, a head, not Hilda any more. You couldn’t think of it as having anything to do with plump, cheerful Hilda. The next night he took Stella to a dance at a neighbouring squadron, but nothing ever came of it.

  “Grandpa?”

  “Lots of awful things happen in a war, Sunny. It doesn’t help to remember them. Best to avoid morbid thoughts.”

  Are you looking for someone?” Sunny asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t they have, like, a map?”

  “Probably,” Teddy said. “But look, I’ve found him.”

  He stopped in front of a headstone that read Flight Sergeant Keith Marshall RAAF. Bomb-Aimer and said, “Hello, Keith.”

  “He’s not buried with his crew,” Sunny said, embarrassed to be with a man talking to the dead, even though they were the only people in the cemetery.

  “No. The rest of us were OK. He was killed when we were attacked on our way back to the airfield from the Big City—that’s what we used to call Berlin. Sometimes intruders—Germans—hid in the bomber stream on the way home. That was a mean trick. He was my friend, one of the best I ever had.”

  “Any others you want to look for?” Sunny asked after a few minutes of heroically repressed impatience.

  “No, not really,” Teddy said. “I just wanted to let Keith know that someone’s thinking about him.” He smiled at his grandson and said, “Home, James. And don’t spare the horses.”

  “Eh?”

  It was growing winter-dark by now and Sunny said, “I’ve never driven at night.”

  “Always a first time for everything,” Teddy said. Of course, sometimes the first time was the last time too. The journey back was a bit hairy but Teddy was determined to remain calm to bolster Sunny’s confidence. To Teddy’s surprise, Sunny asked, “So what was it you did? You flew a bomber? You were the pilot?”

  “Yes,” Teddy said. “I was the pilot of a Halifax bomber. The bombers were named after British towns—Manchester, Stirling, Wellington, Lancaster. Halifax. Of course, it was the Lancasters who got all the glory. They could fly higher and carry heavier bomb loads, but actually by the end of the war when the Halifaxes had their Bristol engines fitted they could match the Lancasters. We loved the old ‘Halibag.’ The Lancasters were the celebrities after the war and we turned out to be the bridesmaids. And you were more likely to survive in a Halifax if you had to get out in a hurry. The Lancasters had this ruddy big spar in the middle and—” Sunny suddenly swerved across two lanes of traffic. Luckily the road was almost empty. (“Oops.”) Teddy didn’t know whether he was trying to avoid something or whether he had nodded off to sleep. Teddy supposed he’d better shut up. Nancy’s voice came back to him from long ago. Let’s talk about something more interesting than the mechanics of bombing. He sighed and murmured, “Thermopylae,” to himself.

  “Eh?”

  When they finally got home Teddy said, “You did very well, Sunny. You’re going to make a very good driver.” Best always to praise rather than criticize. And he had done well, after all. Sunny made bacon sandwiches (he was showing definite signs of improvement on the kitchen front) and they ate them in front of the television, with a glass of beer each to celebrate their safe return. For the first time in decades Teddy thought that he needed a cigarette. He resisted the temptation. He was exhausted and fell asleep on the sofa before either the beer or Noel’s House Party had finished.

  Perhaps he should have moved back to the countryside when Viola fledged and left for university. Not far, the Hambledon Hills maybe. A little cottage. (He thought fondly of Mouse Cottage.) But instead he had stayed and plodded on, because something told him that this was the life that had to be lived out. And he liked York, liked his garden. He had friends, he belonged to a few clubs. He was a member of an archaeological society and went on digs with them. A ramblers’ club, an ornithological group. He preferred solitary pursuits, and being a member of a group seemed rather dutiful, but he could do dutiful and somebody had to or the world would fall apart. He hadn’t considered that working on a provincial newspaper was the most taxing job in the world, but nonetheless was surprised by how much time he suddenly had free when he retired. Perhaps too much.

  What about these?” Viola asked, indicating the bookcase that held The Adventures of Augustus. “Do you think there’s some second-hand value in them? I mean they went out of fashion years ago. They’re all dedicated to you—I suppose that detracts from their value. There’s a full set though, so someone might be interested in them.”

  “I’m interested in them,” Teddy said.

  “But you’ve never liked them,” Viola said. “You haven’t even read them.”

  “Yes, I have.”

  “They’re in pristine condition.”

  “That’s because I was taught to take care of books,” Teddy said. So had Viola been, of course, but she was a filthy reader. Food and drink, cat sick, heaven knows what else all over the pages of her books. She was always dropping them in the bath or leaving them out in the rain. When she was a child she used to hurl them like missiles whenever she was angry. Teddy had been clipped on the forehead more than once by Enid Blyton when Viola was small. The Land of Far-Beyond had almost broken his nose. He wouldn’t be surprised if she still threw things. Teddy supposed she had so much anger because she had lost her mother. There he went with the cod psychology again. (“I’m angry because I have a mother,” Bertie said.) Sylvie had never subscribed much to theories of childhood trauma. People came as they were, she said, all packeted up, complete, waiting to be unwrapped. His mother’s generation seemed wonderfully free of guilt.

  Teddy fetched an empty box and started putting Augustus into it. Years since he’d opened one. Izzie wrote the last one in 1958. They hadn’t sold for a long time, not since the war really. Augustus’s heyday had been between the wars. Augustus Edward Swift floruit 1926–1939. Of course, poor old Augustus was finished long before Izzie died in 1974. Teddy’s version of him lingered on, rearing his head occasionally. Was he an old man now, being dragged, kicking and screaming, into sheltered housing, a fag hanging out of the corner of his mouth? Stained trousers and whiskery chin?

  Teddy went to visit Izzie a few days before she died. She was pretty doolally by then. It was hard to conjure her up now, she was an impression, the greedy red mouth, the perfume, the affectations. She had wanted to adopt him at one point. Would his life have turned out very differently or would it have developed in much the same way?

  In her will Izzie left the copyright for Augustus to Teddy. It was worth virtually nothing. The rest of the estate, which mainly comprised the house in Holland Park, went to “my granddaughter,” a woman in Germany whom they had never heard of. “For reparation,” it had said in the will.

  Pamela and Teddy and Pamela’s daughter, Sarah, had sifted through everything in the house after Izzie’s funeral. A nightmare of a job. They had found a Croix de Guerre at the bottom of her jewellery box. It seemed so unlikely. These twin mysteries, the German granddaughter and the Croix de Guerre, summed up the impenetrable nature of Izzie. If Ursula, with her detective soul, had still been alive she would have got to the bottom of both. Teddy had been uninterested (he felt guilty about that now) and it wasn’t long before Pamela was showing the signs of early-onset Alzheimer’s. Poor Pammy, she spent years living a grey half-life. So the ambivalence that was Izzie was never solved, which was exactly how she would have liked it.

/>   He packed the studio portrait that Cecil Beaton had taken of Izzie after her first flush of success. It made Izzie look like a film star, artificial and full of manipulation. “But glamorous,” Bertie said. “Yes, I suppose so,” Teddy said. He gave her the photograph the first time she visited him in Fanning Court. “But it was my mother who was the beauty,” he said. Sylvie’s corpse, he remembered, in the open coffin for viewing. The years had fallen from her face and Bea had clutched his arm, just the two of them, as if they were at a private exhibition (they were, he supposed). Why Bea? Where was Nancy that day? He couldn’t remember. Bea gone too now, of course. She had been close to his heart, perhaps closer than she knew. Dear God, Teddy thought, stop thinking about dead people. He packed the Beaton in with the Augustuses (“Augusti” perhaps) and taped the box shut. “They’re coming with me,” he said decisively to Viola.

  “Where’s Sunny?” Viola puzzled.

  Yes, where is Sunny?

  I have seen a large dog fox several times recently but it was a hot afternoon and no doubt, like most creatures, it was lying low in the shade. The fox has an unfortunate reputation. A crafty thief, often a charming one in fable and fairy story, its name is a byword for low (and occasionally high) cunning. A moral outlaw, a trickster and sometimes downright malevolent. The Christian Church often equated the fox with the devil. In many churches across the land you will find images of the fox in priestly robes preaching to a flock of geese. (There is a fine woodcut in the Cathedral at Ely.) The fox is a subtle outlaw, a devilish predator without conscience, and the geese a flock of innocents…

  He was in the attic, where, unbelievably, there were even more boxes of crap. The atmosphere up here was thick with neglect. There was a box full of this stuff—mouldy, flimsy paper, crammed with single-space faded typing. Some of it was incomprehensible so probably poetry, Sunny concluded.

  It was like a neglected museum in the attic, all dust and rust. Sunny didn’t like the atmosphere in museums but he liked the idea of collecting, liked all those trays of butterflies and insects, cabinets of rocks. He liked the Augustus books, although he wouldn’t have said so. Not the insides so much, just the uniform outsides. They each had a number on their spines so that if you lined them up they counted from one to forty-two. When he was little he collected stones, pebbles, bits of gravel from the road, anything. Sometimes, still, he felt the urge to pick up a stone and put it in his pocket.

  A fine dust, like grey talcum, was dislodged every time he took the papers out. He read slowly, his lips forming each word as if he was deciphering a foreign language.

  The stable where the Holy Family were taking refuge for the night had but a small fire which was on the verge of going out. A robin—one of the many small creatures who had come to rejoice at the advent of the Messiah—seeing how cold the infant was, placed himself in front of the weak fire and fanned the flames with his wings. In doing so he burnt his breast which for evermore would be red as a sign of gratitude.

  There were lots of these. At the end of each one was typed “Agrestis.” Whatever that meant. Different topics each time—“truffling for primroses,” “the welcome return of spring,” “the golden pomp of daffodils,” “an otter and her kits, sleek with water,” “the snowdrop in purest white array.” Hares—“the Celtic messengers of Eostre, the goddess of spring”—that were boxing in a field. Hares boxed, Sunny puzzled? Competitively?

  Another fusty box full of buttons and old coins. A shoebox with photographs. He recognized hardly anyone in the photographs. A lot of them were small black-and-white ones dating from prehistory as far as Sunny was concerned. In the Seventies they changed to colour. Some little square snaps of him and Bertie in Grandpa Ted’s garden, fading to yellow. They were dressed in primary-coloured outfits that made them look like clowns. Thanks, Viola, he thought bitterly. No wonder he was bullied as a child. Himself and Bertie standing in front of a flower-bed with Tinker seated between them. His heart gave a little twitch. He had cried when his grandfather told him that Tinker had been put down. He took the photo and put it in his pocket.

  There was another box, small and rusty, and when he opened it he found medals inside. His grandfather’s presumably, from the war. Also a small gold caterpillar. A caterpillar? A little card, soft with age—a “Caterpillar Club membership,” it said, made out for “W/C E. B. Todd.” Another membership card, different, for the “Goldfish Club” for “P/O E. B. Todd.” What did all these mysterious letters mean? What were all these weird clubs that Grandpa Ted was a member of? He could just make out the typed lettering on the Goldfish Club membership card, “escaping death by use of his emergency dinghy, February 1943.”

  Sunny thought about the outing they’d had to Harrogate when Grandpa Ted was laid up with his hip. He hadn’t said so, but Sunny had enjoyed it. He had appreciated the orderliness of the gravestones in the cemetery. He had had to walk away at one point and leave Grandpa Ted in his wheelchair because he had felt tears starting. All those dead guys, it was so sad. They were his own age, doing something noble, something heroic. They were lucky. They’d been given history. It wasn’t going to happen to him. He was never going to be given the chance to be noble and heroic.

  It made him feel angry. He took the medals out of the tin and slipped them in his pocket along with the purloined photograph.

  The war was interesting actually, all that stuff about the bombers. Perhaps Sunny would read a book about the war. Maybe then he could talk to Grandpa Ted about it without feeling like an idiot. His grandfather was a hero too, wasn’t he? He’d had a life. Sunny wondered how you went about getting one of those.

  He climbed awkwardly down the ladder from the attic and dropped a box on the floor. Viola made a great show of choking on the dust. “You know I’m allergic,” she said crossly.

  “There’s a whole load more stuff up there,” Sunny said.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Viola said to Teddy. “You’re a hoarder, Dad.”

  Teddy ignored her and said to Sunny, “You didn’t come across a box that had my medals in it when you were up there, did you?”

  “Medals?”

  “From the war. I haven’t set eyes on them in years. I was thinking of going to an RAF reunion dinner, thought I could take them along.”

  Sunny shrugged and said, “Dunno.”

  “Can we get on, please?” Viola said.

  That’s everything loaded on to the van,” Viola said. “You just need to do an idiot check before it leaves.”

  “A what?” Teddy said.

  “An idiot check,” Viola repeated. “You know, look round, make sure you haven’t left anything behind.”

  Only my life, Teddy thought.

  1951

  The Invisible Worm

  Viola delayed her appearance on the world’s stage. Teddy and Nancy had been married for five years with no sign of a baby and had almost given up hope. They considered adopting. They would soon be too old, a humourless woman at the council-run adoption agency said, and babies were scarce at the moment (as if they were seasonal). Did they want to put their names down?

  “Yes,” Nancy said, more eagerly than Teddy had expected. The humourless woman, a Mrs. Taylor-Scott, was sitting behind a cheap government-issue desk. Teddy and Nancy sat on uncomfortable chairs in front of her, being grilled. (“Rather like naughty pupils,” Nancy said.)

  “If there’s a ‘shortage,’ ” Nancy said, “then we don’t mind if it’s a coloured baby.” She turned to Teddy and said, “We don’t, do we?”

  “No,” he said, caught on the hop. This wasn’t something they had ever discussed. It had never even crossed his mind that their baby wouldn’t be white. On one op in the war he’d taken an odd bod, a rear-gunner who was from Jamaica, black as coal. Couldn’t remember his name, only that he’d been nineteen years old and hopping with life until he was hosed out of the rear-turret on a return from the Ruhr.

  “I don’t mind,” Teddy said, “although I might draw the line at green.” It was,
he knew, a feeble attempt at humour. He imagined not telling Sylvie of this plan, of watching her expression the first time she peered in the crib and saw a little black face looking back at her. He laughed and Mrs. Taylor-Scott gave him a doubtful look. Nancy reached across and gave his hand an encouraging squeeze. Or perhaps a warning. They did not want to appear mentally unhinged.

  “Accommodation?” Mrs. Taylor-Scott said, writing something illegible on their application form in her cramped hand.

  They had left Mouse Cottage behind now and were living a few miles further into the dale, in a rented farmhouse called Ayswick, on the outskirts of a small village that had a little school, a pub, a shop, a village hall and a Methodist chapel, but no church. “Everything we need,” Nancy said, “although perhaps not the chapel.” Half a century later the pub was a “gastro pub,” the school had turned into a pottery, the shop was a café (“all home-made on the premises”), the village hall was an art gallery that also sold the usual tourist bric-a-brac of tapestry kits, calendars, “spoon rests” and sheep-themed ornaments, and the Methodist chapel was a private house. Most of the remaining cottages were second homes. The tourists came, in coachloads sometimes, because the village had been used as the backdrop of a television series that was set in the nostalgic past.