A God in Ruins

  Sylvie had brought cake too, a rather solid affair with caraway seeds that stuck in their teeth. She had made it herself. Having learned to cook late in life Sylvie was still baffled by the science of it. Nancy sliced the cake and served it on the old biddy’s mismatched plates.

  “Now if you had had a proper wedding,” Sylvie said, “you would have wedding presents—a china tea service, for example—so that you didn’t have to serve your guests from such a rum assortment of crockery. Not to mention all the other necessities of married life.”

  “Oh, we get by just fine without the necessities,” Nancy said.

  “You’re becoming more like your mother,” Sylvie said and Nancy replied, “Thank you. I’ll take that as a compliment,” which riled Sylvie even more. Sylvie, of course, had never quite got over being denied a wedding by Teddy and Nancy. They had “sneaked away,” in her words. “Not exactly the kind of photographs you can put in a silver frame, are they?” she sighed, when she scrutinized the tiny snaps Bea had taken on the day on her old box Brownie.

  “The cake is delicious,” Nancy said in an effort to mollify Sylvie, but was distracted by a large bee that dropped from exhaustion on to the rug and became entangled in the fibres of wool. Nancy encouraged it on to the palm of her hand and carried it over to the hedge, where she sought out a shady patch for it.

  “It will die,” Sylvie said to Teddy. “They never recover. They’re worn out by hard work, they’re the Methodists of the insect world.”

  “Yet the instinct is to save,” Teddy said, regarding Nancy fondly as she tended to the bee, insignificant in the greater order of things.

  “Perhaps sometimes we shouldn’t,” Sylvie said. “It’s so hot,” she added, fanning herself with a napkin. “I’m going inside. And the cake is not delicious. Nancy was always a good liar.”

  They had had no suspicions of winter when they moved into Mouse Cottage. They were still talking of getting a flock of leghorns and learning beekeeping, of digging over the neglected garden and planting potatoes “the first year” to turn over the soil. “Eden raised,” Nancy laughed. There had even been talk of a goat. None of these things had come to pass by the time the long dark nights closed in on them. They had been too taken up with each other, grasshoppers enjoying the summer, rather than ants preparing for the winter. They were both immensely relieved that they had never got as far as the goat.

  It was difficult now to remember those first summer evenings—the stored heat of the day beneath the eaves, the worn cotton curtains billowing idly at the wide-open casement. They made love when it was still light, fell into an ecstasy of sleep and woke to make love again at dawn. They never saw the dark. Now they had an old grey horse blanket tacked up at the window and lived in terror of draughts. There was ice on the window panes, both inside and out.

  “It’s no better here,” Ursula wrote from London. They picked up their post from a makeshift box at the end of the track. They had left for work by the time the post was delivered and, never having witnessed the heroics of their postman, could only imagine them. Their own efforts seemed epic enough. They had bought an old Army Land Rover at auction with some of Izzie’s (very generous) wedding-present money. Her standard gift for family weddings was a set of fish knives and forks, but she handed Teddy a large cheque over afternoon tea at Brown’s. “Augustus owes you,” she said. Augustus, who had never grown as Teddy had, who had remained irresponsible and endlessly culpable. Teddy occasionally wondered what Augustus would be doing if he had grown. He imagined that this fictional doppelgänger—Gus—would now be hanging around Soho in the grimy aftermath of war, frequenting disreputable pubs and clubs. A more interesting story surely than Augustus and the Disappearing Act, the latest offering in the Augustus oeuvre which had made it through the snow two days ago and was sitting unread on top of Nancy’s piano. “In which Augustus joins a local magic circle and wreaks his usual mischief,” it said on the back of the jacket.

  “Even this eternal winter must end,” Nancy said. “And we have the snowdrops as proof. You did see them, didn’t you? You weren’t just making it up for your column?”

  He was surprised that she would think such a thing. “Of course not,” he said. He was beginning to wish he had never seen the dratted snowdrops, let alone chosen them as his subject. He was looking forward to March with its abundance of birds and buds. There would be no shortage of topics for Agrestis in the spring. He took a log from the basket and placed it on the fire. It spat out a glittering shower of sparks on to the hearth rug. They both watched with interest to see if any of them would catch but they sputtered harmlessly and died.

  “Why don’t you go on?” Nancy said.

  “Sure?”

  “Yes.” Her eyes firmly on her knitting. (Nancy was always a good liar.)

  “Some say the snowdrop was first brought to these lands by the Romans, others say that they were first cultivated by monks (or perhaps nuns), and indeed in many of Shakespeare’s ‘bare, ruined choirs’ they can be found carpeting the ground in profusion in Spring. Yet somehow it feels like a flower that is native, that has been here since the dawn of time, the very essence of Englishness.

  “One legend of the snowdrop’s origins tells how when Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden they were sent into what seemed to them to be the punishment of eternal Winter and that an angel, taking pity on them, turned a snowflake into a snowdrop as a sign that Spring would return to the world.”

  A yawn again from Nancy, perhaps less well concealed.

  “I’m only looking for corrections to mistakes,” Teddy said. “You don’t have to like it.”

  She looked up from her knitting and said, “I do like it! Don’t be such a sensitive soul. I’m just tired, that’s all.”

  “Those of us enduring this unforgiving Winter can perhaps sympathize only too readily with our biblical forebears. Candlemas in the Catholic calendar is the Feast of the Purification of Mary—”

  “It’s quite wordy, isn’t it? Don’t you think?”

  “Wordy?” Teddy said.

  Before the war he had fancied himself as something of a poet and had a couple of poems published in obscure literary magazines, but on a visit home to Fox Corner during the war he had looked through these antebellum offerings, kept in a shoebox beneath his childhood bed, and saw them for what they were—the amateur scribblings of an immature mind. In style they relied on vague, tortuous metaphors, nearly always in an attempt to describe his response to nature. He was drawn to the grand Wordsworthian sweep of hill and vale and water. “You have a pagan soul,” Nancy had once told him but he didn’t agree. He had the soul of a country parson who had lost his faith. But it didn’t matter now, for the great god Pan was indeed dead and war had long ago killed Teddy’s desire to make poetry.

  After graduating from Oxford he had applied to stay on and do an MPhil, putting off the time when he would have to find a career. In his heart of hearts he still wanted to be a train driver but he supposed that was out of the question. He would have been very surprised (and thrilled too) if someone had told him that five years later he would be training to be a pilot.

  He had settled on Blake’s poetry for his research, for what he thought of as his “opaque simplicity” (“What on earth does that mean?” Sylvie said), but when it came to it he was too restless and abandoned Blake after a term and went home to Fox Corner. He was tired of the analysis and dissection of literature, “like an autopsy,” he said to Hugh, who had invited him into the growlery for a glass of malt and a “little chat” about his future.

  “I would like,” Teddy said thoughtfully, “to travel around a bit, to see the country. And perhaps a little of Europe too.” By “the country” he meant England rather than the whole of Britain, and by “Europe” he meant France, but refrained from saying so as Hugh had a rather baffling prejudice against the French. Teddy tried to explain to his father that he wanted to respond directly to the world. “ ‘A life of the senses,’ as you might say. To work on
the land and write poetry. The two are not contradictory.” No, no, not at all, Hugh said, Virgil and The Georgics and so on. A “farmer poet.” Or a “poet farmer.” Hugh had been a banker all his life, which was most certainly not a life of the senses.

  From the age of twelve Teddy had worked on Ettringham Hall Farm in the holidays, not for the money—he was often unpaid—but for the pleasure of hard labour in the fresh air. (“I can’t think of anything worse,” Izzie said. She had found him helping out in the milking-shed on a visit to Fox Corner and had almost got herself crushed by a cow.) “In my heart I’m not an intellectual,” he said to his father, knowing this was a stance that would appeal to Hugh, who did indeed nod in sympathy. And to be connected to the land, Teddy said, isn’t that the most profound relationship of all? And out of this would come writing that wasn’t just the dry product of the intellect (another nod from Hugh) but was felt, on the pulses. Perhaps even a novel. (How callow he had been!)

  “A novel?” Hugh said, unable to stop his eyebrows from rising. “Fiction?” Sylvie was the novel reader, not Hugh. Hugh was a man of his time. He liked facts. But Teddy was one of Hugh’s favourite children. Both Hugh and Sylvie had secret listings for their children, not so secret in Sylvie’s case. They were similar—Pamela came in the middle, Maurice at the bottom, but it was Ursula, low on Sylvie’s list, who was closest to Hugh’s heart. Sylvie’s favourite, of course, was Teddy, her best boy. Teddy wondered who she had preferred before he came along. None of them, he suspected.

  “Well, you don’t want to get stuck,” Hugh said. Did his father feel stuck? Is that why he offered Teddy twenty pounds and told him to go and “live life a little”? Teddy refused the money—it was important that he make his own way, wherever that was—but he felt enormously grateful for this show of support from his father.

  Not surprisingly, his mother did not give her blessing. “You want to do what?” Sylvie said. “You have a degree from Oxford and you want to wander around like a troubadour?”

  “A minstrel,” Hugh said. “A thing of shreds and patches.” He was a great Gilbert and Sullivan fan.

  “Exactly,” Sylvie said. “Tramps go from farm to farm looking to be hired for work. Not the Beresfords.”

  “He’s a Todd, actually,” Hugh said (unhelpfully). “You’ve become a tremendous snob, Sylvie,” he added, even more unhelpfully.

  “I’m not thinking of doing it for ever,” Teddy said. “A year perhaps and then I’ll settle on something.” He was still thinking about Sylvie’s word “troubadour” and how attracted he was to that (very unsettled) idea.

  And so he went. He sowed cabbage seed in Lincolnshire, spent the lambing season in Northumberland, helped bring in the wheat harvest in Lancashire, picked strawberries in Kent. He was fed by farmers’ wives at big farmhouse kitchen tables and slept in barns and sheds and dilapidated cottages as the year turned and, during the warm summer nights, in his old canvas tent, somewhat mildewed, that had seen him through Cubs and Kibbo Kift. Its most memorable adventure was yet to take place when in 1938 the tent accompanied Teddy and Nancy on a camping holiday to the Peak District, during which they (finally) ceased to be friends and became lovers.

  “Not both?” Teddy puzzled.

  “Well, of course,” Nancy said and Teddy realized that he had known Nancy too long and was too familiar with her to suddenly “fall in love” with her. He loved her, of course, but he wasn’t in love and never had been. Would he ever be, he wondered?

  But that was in the future. Now he was in a sheep barn on lambing watch, reading Housman and Clare by the light of a Tilley lamp. He had been attempting poems, almost entirely about landscape and weather (the shoebox poems) that even he found tedious. There was no poetry to be had in sheep, or even lambs for that matter. (“The little shivering gaping things”—he had always been repelled by Rossetti’s “The Lambs of Grasmere.”) Cows yielded nothing but milk. Not for Teddy, Hopkins’s “skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow.” “I worship Hopkins,” he wrote to Nancy from somewhere south of Hadrian’s Wall. “If only I could write like him!” He was always cheerful in letters, it seemed like good manners, when in fact he was in despair at his own cloddish verse.

  Izzie came to visit him, briefly, staying in a hotel on Lake Windermere where she stood him an expensive dinner and plied him with alcohol and questions to “lend some authenticity” to Augustus Becomes a Farmer.

  The year turned quickly. The early apple harvest in Kent gave birth to an ode to autumn that would have shamed Keats (“The apples, the apples, rosy and fair / not yet touched by the fingers of frost…”). He was not yet ready to renounce either poetry or husbandry and boarded a ferry at Dover, a new unsullied thick notebook in his bag. Disembarking on the foreign soil of France he headed due south, for the vineyards and the grape harvest, thinking of Keats’s beaker of blushful Hippocrene, although the Hippocrene was in Greece, not France, wasn’t it? He hadn’t considered Greece. He rebuked himself for the (large) omission from his itinerary of the cradle of civilization. He rebuked himself again later for having missed the wonders of Venice, Florence and Rome, but at the time he had been happy to sidestep the rest of Europe. In 1936 it was a troubled land and Teddy felt no need to experience its political upheavals. In later years he wondered if he had been wrong, if he shouldn’t have faced up to the evil that was brewing. Sometimes it takes just one good man, Ursula said to him during the war. Neither of them could think of an example from history, “except the Buddha perhaps,” Ursula offered. “I’m not convinced by the reality of Christ.” There were plenty of instances where it had taken just one bad man, Teddy said gloomily.

  Perhaps there would be time for Greece. After all, his deadline (“a year perhaps”) was self-imposed.

  By the time a late Sauternes harvest had finished he was “as brown and strong as a peasant,” he reported in a letter to Nancy. His French, too, had gained the coarse fluency of the peasant. After a day’s picking he was ravenous and gorged on the huge evening meals that the domain provided for their workers. At night he pitched the old canvas tent in a field. For the first time since his childhood at Fox Corner he slept the dreamless sleep of the dead or the innocent, helped by the copious amounts of wine that accompanied meals. Sometimes there was a woman. He never wrote a word.

  For the rest of his life he would be able to close his eyes and conjure up the sight and smell of the food he had eaten in France—he had relished the oily garlickyness of the stews, the artichoke leaves dipped in butter, the oeufs en cocotte—eggs baked in the oven inside huge beef tomatoes. A saddle of roasted lamb quilted with cloves of garlic and sprigs of rosemary, a work of art. These were tastes that were foreign—in every way—to the bland English palate. Cheese, sour and strong; the desserts: flaugnarde with peaches, clafouti with cherries, tarte aux noix and tarte aux pommes and a Far Breton—a kind of prune custard tart that to the end of his life he dreamed about eating again and never did. “Prunes and custard?” Mrs. Glover said doubtfully when he returned.

  Mrs. Glover left Fox Corner soon after Teddy’s return, driven away perhaps by his requests for French regional cooking. “Don’t be silly,” Sylvie said. “She’s retired to live with her sister.”

  Then there was breakfast, of course, taken at the big table in the domain kitchen. Not the gruel-like porridge ladled out at boarding school or the unsurprising egg and bacon of Fox Corner. Instead he sliced open half a freshly baked baguette, wadded the inside with Camembert and dipped it into a bowl of scalding strong coffee. He forgot all about this way of greeting the day when he returned home and then, decades later, when he was living in sheltered accommodation at Fanning Court, it came back to him suddenly and, inspired by the richness of the memory, he bought a baguette from Tesco’s (“baked on the premises”—yes, but from what?) and a small round of unripe Camembert, and poured his morning coffee into a cereal bowl rather than the usual mug. It was not the same. Not at all.

  As winter approached he moved on south—“I’m lik
e the swallow,” he wrote to Ursula—until he was stopped by the sea and rented a room above a café in a little fishing village, unspoilt, as yet, by visitors. Every day he sat at a table in the one and only café, a jacket and a scarf all he needed to defend himself against the Riviera winter, and smoked Gitanes and drank espresso from thick little white cups, his notebook on the table in front of him. By lunchtime he had moved on to wine, with bread and fish straight from the sea and grilled over wood, and by the time the sleepy afternoons had taken hold he was ready for an aperitif. He was living a life of the senses, he told himself, but deep down he suspected he was shirking his life and felt accordingly guilty. (He was English, after all.)

  “L’Ecrivain Anglais,” the villagers called him, rather fondly as he was the first poet to visit them, although artists were ten a penny in that part of the world. They were impressed by his colloquial French and his dedication to his notebook. He was glad that they couldn’t read his paltry offerings. They might have lost some of their admiration for him.

  He decided to be more methodical in his approach to Art (Sylvie’s capital letter). Poems were constructs, not simply words that flowed willy-nilly from the brain. “Observations” he had written as a heading at the beginning of the notebook, and the pages were filled with pedestrian images—“The sea is particularly blue today—Sapphire? Azure? Ultramarine?” And “The sun glints off the sea like a thousand diamonds” or “The coastline seems composed of solid blocks of colour and hot slices of sunshine.” (He was rather pleased with that.) And “Madame la propriétaire is wearing her funny little green jacket today.” Was there a poem to be had from Madame la propriétaire, he wondered? He thought of the fields of lavender and sunflowers he had seen on his sojourn, all harvested now, and sought out images—the “imperial spikes” and “golden discs of Helios turning to worship their god.” If only he was an artist—paint seemed less demanding than words. He felt sure that Van Gogh’s sunflowers hadn’t given him as much trouble.