A God in Ruins

  They went “home” to have Viola christened. “Why do we still call it that when we have a perfectly good home of our own?” Nancy mused. “I don’t know,” Teddy said, although he knew that in his heart Fox Corner would always be home.

  The godmothers—aunts Bea and Ursula—pledged to reject the devil and all rebellion against God and afterwards they celebrated at Jackdaws with cream sherry and a Dundee cake, Sylvie, needless to say, very put out that they weren’t next door at Fox Corner.

  Teddy gave Nancy a ring, a small diamond solitaire, to mark Viola’s safe passage into the world. “The engagement ring I never gave you,” he said.

  Viola grew, the pupa fattened but not yet turned into a butterfly. Nancy returned to work when Viola herself started at the village primary school, taking a part-time job in a nearby expensive private Church of England boarding school for girls who had failed their Eleven Plus but whose parents couldn’t countenance the social humiliation of a secondary modern.

  The farmer had offered to sell them Ayswick and they had applied for a mortgage to buy the old farmhouse. Life seemed as if it would go on in much the same way for ever, Teddy was not ambitious and Nancy seemed contented until one day in the summer of 1960, when Viola was eight years old, she decided she wanted to upheave them.

  Living in the country was all very well, she said, but Viola would soon need more, a good secondary school that wasn’t an hour’s bus ride away, friends, a social life, and it was hard to find those “in the middle of nowhere.” And the farmhouse was too big, impossible to keep clean, it cost a fortune to heat, the plumbing was from the Dark Ages. And so on.

  “I don’t think they had plumbing in the Dark Ages,” Teddy said. “I thought you loved it because it had character.”

  “You can have too much character.”

  This ambush had been a complete surprise. They were sitting up in bed at the time, both reading their library books, a sedate conclusion to what had been, for Teddy at any rate, a rather tedious day, covering a local agricultural show for the Recorder. There were only so many well-groomed sheep and intricate vegetable displays that a man could take an interest in. Rather to his despair, he had been dragooned into adjudicating the Victoria sponges in the WI tent (feeling rather like a novelty judge at a beauty contest). “As light as a feather,” he declared the winner, falling gratefully back on cliché.

  It was the school holidays and Nancy had wanted to visit an optician for a check-up and as it was such good weather Teddy said he would take Viola along to the agricultural show with him. Viola, of course, didn’t really like farm animals. She was nervous around cows and pigs, even sheep made her anxious, and she screeched if a goose came anywhere near (an unfortunate incident when she was smaller). “But there’ll be other things going on,” Teddy said hopefully, and there was indeed a flower show that Viola said was “nice,” although—despite Teddy’s warnings—thrusting her nose into vase after vase of sweet peas brought on her hay fever. The sheepdog trials, however, were “boring” (Teddy had to agree on that one) but the Young Farmers’ coconut shy was a success and she spent a lot of money at it for little return, throwing wildly and with no aim. Eventually Teddy had to step in and lob a few balls and win a goldfish so that she didn’t come away empty-handed. There was also a pony show which, despite an avowed aversion to horses, she enjoyed watching, clapping enthusiastically whenever anyone managed to hop over the small jumps.

  In the WI tent Viola was treated like a pet—all the WI women knew Teddy well and fed her far too much cake. Fed Teddy far too much cake as well. Viola was like Bobby, their yellow Labrador—she would keep on eating until someone told her to stop. Like Bobby, too, she was a little on the plump side. “Puppy fat,” Nancy said. For Viola perhaps, but not for Bobby, long past puppyhood now. Moss, their excellent collie, died not long after Viola was born and placid Bobby had been chosen to be the faithful and uncomplaining companion of Viola’s childhood.

  By the end of the afternoon Viola was crotchety with heat and tiredness. That, mixed with the cake and the copious amounts of orange squash she had drunk, made for a lethal combination and Teddy had to stop the car twice on the way home so that Viola could be sick on the grass verge. “You poor thing,” he said, trying to give her a cuddle, but she squirmed out of his arms. Teddy had hoped for a relationship with his daughter that would be like the one that Major Shawcross had had with his daughters, or perhaps the slightly more restrained one that Pamela and Ursula had enjoyed with Hugh, but Viola had no space left in her heart for him, Nancy occupied it all. After they lost her, Nancy occupied even more space in Viola’s heart. His daughter was consumed with bitterness towards a universe that had taken her mother and left her with the poor substitute of her father.

  Viola slept the rest of the way home, leaving Teddy to worry about the goldfish (already named Goldie by Viola) in the suffocating heat of its plastic prison.

  I want a pony,” Viola declared to Nancy when they got home, and when Teddy said quite reasonably, “But you don’t like horses,” Viola burst into tears and shouted at him that ponies weren’t horses. He didn’t argue the point. “She’s over-tired,” Nancy said as Viola flung herself down on the sofa in a fit of—rather histrionic—sobbing. “Whither the famous Todd stoicism?” Nancy murmured. “Sensitive” was how she described their thin-skinned daughter. “Over-indulged,” Sylvie would have said. Teddy rescued the goldfish from being squashed beneath Viola’s puppy fat. “It’s all right, darling,” Nancy said to Viola. “Come on, let’s get you a little bit of chocolate, that will cheer you up, won’t it?” It would and it did.

  Teddy took the goldfish through to the kitchen and set it free from the bag, watching it slither into a washing-up bowl of tap water. “Not much of a life, is it, Goldie?” he said to it. Teddy was an early member of the Goldfish Club, although he rarely gave this fact much thought. There was a little cloth badge somewhere, a fish with wings, a result of having ditched in the North Sea. It was during his first tour and sometimes he wondered if he couldn’t have made a better job of it, made those last few miles to land instead of thudding his Halifax on to the sea. It had been a horrible affair. Well, good luck to you then.

  He made a mental note to go to a pet shop tomorrow and buy a bowl for Goldie so that the fish could spend the rest of its life swimming round and round in solitary confinement. He could, he supposed, buy a companion for it but that would simply be doubling the misery.

  Lying in bed that night, Teddy could feel that he was paying the price for all that WI cake—stuck uncomfortably somewhere beneath his ribs.

  “Poor you,” Nancy said. “Shall I get you some Milk of Magnesia?” She used the same tone of voice, he noticed, that she employed to quell Viola’s pain and distress (a little bit of chocolate). He declined her offer of the Milk of Magnesia and returned to his book. He was reading Born Free, Nancy was reading Iris Murdoch’s The Bell. He wondered if their books said something about themselves.

  He couldn’t concentrate, however, and snapped the book shut rather more forcefully than he had intended. “So you want us to move?” he puzzled.

  “Yes, I think I do.”

  When Viola was born Teddy and Nancy had enthusiastically discussed the robust rural childhood they intended for her—imagining her climbing trees and jumping ditches, rambling around the countryside with just a dog for company. (“A bit of neglect never does any harm,” Nancy said. “You could argue it did us good when we were children.”) Viola, it was revealed by the passage of time, was not a country child. She was quite happy to be sequestered inside all day, reading a book or listening to the little Dansette record player they had bought her (Cliff Richard, the Everly Brothers) with Bobby lying lazily on the carpet at her feet. Both dog and child had long since come to an agreement about not tramping and jumping. Perhaps Nancy was right. Viola would fare better in the suburbs.

  And anyway, perhaps a change would be good for all of them, Nancy said. Teddy felt no need for change, he was quite con
tent to be in “the middle of nowhere” and had thought Nancy was too. “Good for us?” he said. “In what way?”

  “More stimulating. More to do. Cafés, theatres, cinemas, shops. People. We can’t all be content with truffling out the first primrose of spring or listening for larks.” (She wasn’t content? The Discontented Wife, like a Restoration comedy, Teddy thought. A rather poor one. He couldn’t help but think of his mother.) “You used to be content with ‘truffling primroses,’ as you put it,” he said. He rather liked the phrase, more poetic than was Nancy’s wont, and he put it aside for Agrestis’s use. As the years had gone by his alter ego had taken on shape and character in his mind—a hardy countryman, cap on head, pipe in hand, a down-to-earth man, yet nonetheless attendant upon the whims of Mother Nature. Teddy occasionally felt himself wanting in comparison to this sturdy counterpart.

  There was a time when the discovery of a bird’s nest or, indeed, the first primrose would have delighted his discontented wife. “But none of us are the same people we once were,” she said.

  “I am,” Teddy said.

  “No, you’re not.”

  “Are we having an argument?”

  “No!” Nancy said, laughing. “But we’re in our forties now, plodding along…”

  “Plodding?”

  “It’s not an insult. I’m just saying that maybe we need to shake ourselves up a bit. You don’t want life to pass you by, do you?”

  “I thought this was about Viola, not us?”

  “I’m not suggesting we emigrate to the other side of the world,” Nancy said. “Just as far as York.”

  “York?”

  Nancy climbed out of bed, saying, “I’m going to fetch you that Milk of Magnesia anyway. All that cake has clearly made you grumpy. That will teach you to be so charming to all those WI ladies.” As she passed by his side of the bed she ruffled his hair affectionately, as if he were a little boy, and said, “I’m only saying we should think about it, not that we should necessarily do it.”

  He smoothed his hair down and stared at the ceiling. Plodding, he thought. Nancy returned from the bathroom, shaking the contents of the blue glass bottle. For a moment he feared that she was going to spoon-feed him the Milk of Magnesia but instead she handed it to him, saying, “There you go, that should do the trick.” She climbed back into bed and returned to her book, as if the subject of changing their lives had been satisfactorily debated and decided.

  He took a swig of the chalky white medicine and switched off his bedside light. As was so often the case, sleep was evasive and his thoughts turned to Agrestis, who was working on a column about water voles.

  Although of the order Rodentia this charming little fellow (Arvicola terrestris) is often wrongly called a water rat. That much-loved character Ratty in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows is actually a water vole. A short-lived creature in the wild, it has a mere handful of months to fulfil its time on earth, although it has proven to be much longer-lived when in captivity. There are around eight million water rats, living—like Grahame’s Ratty—in burrows in the river banks, as well as ditches and streams and other waterways…

  Not long before he left Fanning Court for Poplar Hill Care Home, when he was already well over ninety (“living in captivity” clearly having prolonged his life), Teddy read an article in the Telegraph (by then he was employing the aid of a magnifying glass to see the print). The article stated that there were barely a quarter of a million water voles left in Britain. He felt angry on their behalf and introduced the subject, rather vigorously, at the weekly coffee morning, somewhat to the disconcertion of the residents. “Farmed mink,” he explained, “escaped into the wild and usurped the voles. Ate them.”

  One or two of the older female residents in the communal lounge had hung on grimly to their mink coats, mothballed in the flimsy melamine wardrobes of Fanning Court, and were not inclined to sympathy towards the innocent water vole. “And, of course,” Teddy pursued, “we’ve destroyed their habitat, something humans are very good at.” And so on. If they had been paying attention, and many were resolutely not, there would have been nothing that the Fanning Court residents would not have learned about the water vole (or indeed the tetchy subject of global warming) by the end of this lecture.

  Teddy’s crusade for a small neglected mammal did not go down well over the Nescafé and the chocolate bourbons. (Nor his feelings about the humble hedgehog and the brown hare, “and when did you last hear a cuckoo?”) “Tree-hugger,” one of the male residents—a retired solicitor—muttered.

  “Really, Dad,” Viola said, “you can’t harangue people.” Apparently, the Fat Controller, Ann Schofield, had asked Viola to “have a word” with Teddy about his “belligerent” behaviour. “But we’ve lost nearly ninety percent of the water-vole population in thirty years,” he protested to Viola. “That’s enough to make anyone feel belligerent. Although not a patch on how annoyed the water voles must feel, I imagine.” (“You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone,” Bertie said. “As the song goes.” Teddy didn’t know what song but he understood the sentiment.) “Don’t be silly,” Viola said. “And I think you’re a bit old to be embracing causes.” Wildlife took its chances in his daughter’s harsh Darwinian universe. “All this obsession with ecology isn’t doing you any good,” Viola said. “You’re too old to be getting so worked up.”

  Ecology, Teddy thought? “Nature,” he said. “We used to call it Nature.”

  At the time of this “flying visit” to Fanning Court, Viola was already campaigning for Teddy to move to a nursing home—she had brought a handful of leaflets with her. He had taken a fall a couple of days ago, not a bad one, his legs had given way and he had gone down like a collapsed concertina. “Stuck on my bloody arse,” he said gruffly to Ann Schofield when she came in (yes, he had been near one of the red cords, and yes, he had pulled it). “Language, please!” she reprimanded, as if he were a delinquent child, when only yesterday he had overheard her when she thought she was alone in the laundry room addressing a truculent door on a washing machine with the words, “Why don’t you behave, you little fucking shit?” An invocation made all the more scrappy somehow by her Birmingham accent.

  He had managed—with minimal help from the Fat Controller (“against Health and Safety regulations, I have to call the paramedics”)—to get on to his knees and from there on to the sofa and was perfectly fine apart from a couple of bruises, but this was “proof positive” to Viola that he couldn’t manage “independent living.” She had harried him out of his house and into Fanning Court. Now she was trying to shuck him out of here and into a place called Poplar Hill. He imagined she wouldn’t be satisfied until she’d badgered him into his coffin.

  She fanned out the nursing-home leaflets, the one for Poplar Hill placed significantly on top of the pile, and said, “At least take a look.” He gave them a cursory glance—photographs of happy, smiling people with full heads of grey hair and, as he pointed out to her, not a hint of shit and piss and dementia.

  “Your language is terrible these days,” Viola said primly. “What’s happening to you?”

  “I’ll be dead soon,” he said. “It’s making me bolshie.”

  “Don’t be silly.” She was dressed very smartly, he noticed. “I’m on my way somewhere.”

  “Somewhere?” She had always hated explaining, it was part of her closed-off character. He had passed her in the street once, when she was a teenager. She was with friends from school and she had looked right through him when she passed. A son called Hugh would never have done such a thing.

  “Somewhere?” he repeated, trying to needle her into elaboration.

  “They’re making a movie out of one of my novels. I’ve got a meeting with the execs.” The offhand but deliberate way she said the words “movie” and “execs” made them sound like she was indifferent when she clearly wasn’t. There had been a film of her second novel, The Children of Adam. It had been an inferior sort of film—British; Viola had given h
im a DVD. Not that the book was much cop to begin with. Not that he would ever have said that to her. He had found it “very good,” he told her.

  “Just ‘very good’?” she frowned.

  Good Lord, he thought, wasn’t that enough? He would have been more than pleased with a “very good” if he had ever finished his attempt at a novel. What had it been called? Something about sleeping and quiet breathing, it was a quote from Keats, that much he remembered, but which poem? He could sense the clouds gathering in his brain. Perhaps Viola was right, perhaps it was time to give up, check into God’s waiting room.

  Her first novel, Sparrows at Dawn (what a terrible title!), had been about a “clever” (or annoyingly arrogant) young girl being brought up by her father. It was clearly meant to be autobiographical, a message of some sort to him from Viola. The girl was relentlessly badly done by and the father was a doltish martinet. Not what Sylvie would have called Art.

  “Which one?” he asked, gathering his thoughts, pushing the clouds out of the way. “Which novel are they making into a film?”

  “The End of Twilight.” And then, impatiently when she caught him looking blankly at her, “It’s the one about the mother who has to give up her baby.” (“Wishful thinking on her part,” Bertie said.) She made a show of looking at the heavy gold watch on her wrist. (“Rolex. It’s an investment really.”) He was unsure whether this ostentatious gesture was meant to remind him of her busy life or her success. Both, he supposed. She was a more streamlined version of herself these days, dieted and coiffed, her hair ten different shades of blonde that Teddy had never seen before. No more henna, no more droopy clothing. All the velvets and sequins she’d held on to into middle age had gone and now whenever he saw her she was dressed in tailored suits and neutral colours. “The Children of Adam changed my life,” he read in a copy of Woman’s Weekly left in the communal lounge that he had been idly leafing through, looking for recipes promised on the cover for “Cheap and Easy Suppers.” “Prize-winning author Viola Romaine talks about her bestselling early novel. ‘It’s never too late to pursue your dream,’ she tells us in this exclusive interview.” And so on.