A God in Ruins

by Kate Atkinson

  “I heard they take drugs and dance naked in the moonlight,” the farmer said. (True, although it wasn’t as interesting as it sounded.)

  The farmer had failed to spot Bertie before he drove away. She was still sitting on the verge, waving politely at the retreating rear end of the Morris Minor.

  Bertie wished he had taken her home with him. She had spied through the farmer’s five-barred gates and admired his neat fields—the burnished cows and the fluffy white sheep that looked as if they had just been washed. She had seen the farmer in his battered trilby on his red storybook tractor trundling up and down those same neat fields.

  She and Sunny had once wandered, unsupervised, into the farmyard and the farmer’s wife had given them cake and milk and called them “poor mites.” She had taken them to see the big red cows being milked (a wonder!) and then they had drunk the milk while it was still warm, standing right there in the dairy, and then the farmer’s wife had let them feed the big white geese that cackled and honked with excitement so that Bertie and Sunny had broken into hysterical giggles as the geese milled around them. It had been wonderful until the moment Viola, like a dark cloud, appeared to take them home and started hyperventilating at the sight of the geese. She hated geese, for some mysterious reason.

  Bertie had managed to rescue a feather and had brought it home with her as a talisman. This visit had the quality of a fairy tale for her and she very much wished that she could find her way back to the magic farmhouse. Or be taken there in an old Morris Minor.

  Really hungry, Mummy.”

  “You’re always hungry,” Viola said brightly, trying to show by example that it was not always necessary to whine. “Try saying, ‘Mum! I’m hungry, is there anything to eat, please?’ What would Mr. Manners think?”

  Mr. Manners, whoever he was, dogged Sunny’s life, especially when it came to food.

  Everything Sunny said came out as a complaint, Viola thought, his name an ironic soubriquet if ever there was. She was continually trying to get him to take a more cheerful tone. “Put a sparkle on it!” she would say, making jazz hands and an exaggerated happy face. When she was at school, at the Mount in York, they had a drama teacher who used to do this. The girls thought it was a ridiculous idea, but now Viola could see the value of sounding chirpy even when you didn’t feel like it. You were more likely to get what you wanted, for one thing. And for another, your mother wouldn’t want to strangle you every five minutes. Not that she followed her own advice. It was a long time since Viola had put a sparkle on anything. If ever.

  “I’m hungry,” Sunny said more vehemently. He had a way of baring his teeth when he was angry that was horrible. He was a biter, too, when he really got going. Viola still shrank in horror from the memory of the visit they had made to her father last year, trekking north for Sunny’s birthday. No Dominic, of course, he didn’t do stuff like family. “Family?” her father puzzled. “He doesn’t do ‘stuff’ like family? But he has a family. You. His children. Not to mention his own family.” Dominic was “estranged” from his parents, something Teddy had a lot of trouble with.

  “No, I mean traditional stuff,” Viola said. (Yes, “stuff” is a very overused word in Viola’s vocabulary.) If he hadn’t been the father of her children, Viola might have admired Dominic for the way he was so easily able to absolve himself of all obligation simply by asserting his right to self-fulfilment.

  Sunny had already been working himself up to a tantrum by the time he was helped by his grandfather to blow out the candles on his cake. Viola had made the cake that morning in her father’s kitchen and then pricked out “Happy Birthday, Sunny” in Smarties on the top of it, but with so little skill that her father thought it was Bertie who had done the decoration.

  “When are we going to have the cake?” Sunny whined. He had had to suffer (they had all had to suffer) his way through a stodgy wholemeal macaroni cheese that Viola had made, which was not birthday fare as far as Sunny was concerned. And besides, it was supposed to be his cake.

  “Mr. Manners wouldn’t like to hear that tone,” Viola said.

  Who was this Mr. Manners, Teddy wondered? He seemed to have usurped parental authority.

  Viola cut the cake and placed a slice in front of Sunny, who then, for no reason that Viola could discern, shot forward like a viper and bit her forearm. Without thinking, she slapped his face. The shock catapulted him into silence, a second stretched to infinity, as the room held its breath, waiting for the apoplectic shrieking to begin. As it duly did.

  “Well, he hurt me,” Viola said defensively when she saw the look on her father’s face.

  “He’s five years old, for God’s sake, Viola.”

  “He has to learn to control himself.”

  “So do you,” her father said, picking up Bertie as if she might be in need of protection from further maternal violence.

  “Well, what did you expect?” Viola said sharply to Sunny, masking the shame and remorse she felt at her own deplorable behaviour. The shrieking had turned now into howling, fat tears of anguish and distress smearing Sunny’s already chocolate-caked face. She tried to pick him up, but as soon as she put her arms around him and lifted him his body spasmed into a rigid board that made him impossible to hold on to. When she put him back on the ground he started to kick her.

  “You cannot go around kicking and biting people and not expect consequences,” Viola said, as prim as an old-fashioned nanny, betraying no sign of the messy stew of emotions that occupied her insides. She could feel a demon writhing inside her. The demon often spoke through the pruny lips of Prim Nanny. Mr. Manners took a timid back seat to Prim Nanny.

  “Yes, I can!” Sunny roared.

  “No, you can’t,” Prim Nanny said calmly, “because a big policeman will come to the house and take you away to prison and lock you up for years and years.”

  “Viola!” her father said. “For God’s sake, get a grip. He’s a little boy.” He held out a hand to Sunny and said, “Come on, let’s go and find you a sweetie.”

  He was always the voice of reason, wasn’t he? Or The Voice of Reason in Viola’s mind, awarding her father the capital letters of the Old Testament. Always nagging at her back. She wilfully failed to recognize it as the apprehensive murmur of her own conscience.

  Viola, left alone at the table, now burst into tears. Why did everything always end up like this? And why was it always her fault? No one ever cared about how she felt, did they? No one made her a birthday cake, for example. Not any more anyway. Her father used to, but she hadn’t welcomed his handmade offerings and had lusted after the kind of birthday cakes you saw in the windows of Terry’s or Bettys, cake shops that faced off against each other on two sides of St. Helen’s Square, like a warring couple.

  For her fiftieth birthday Viola ordered her own cake from Bettys, Terry’s having long since left the battlefield. “Happy Fiftieth Birthday, Viola” traced delicately in lilac on white, because despite heavy hints Bertie had failed to understand how significant reaching a half-century was. Viola had outlived her mother by more than three years, which was not a competition that she had particularly wanted to win. By then her mother had receded into an ephemeral past from which she couldn’t be recovered. The more Viola forgot her mother, the more she missed her.

  She told no one about the fiftieth birthday cake and ate it all herself. It lasted for weeks although it was very stale towards the end. Poor Viola!

  She picked all the orange Smarties off Sunny’s cake. They had been made in a factory—all of them, not just the orange ones—on the other side of town. Viola had been on a school tour of Rowntree’s factory and seen the colours being tumbled together in what looked like cement mixers made of shining copper. At the end of the visit they were all given a free box of chocolates. Viola’s were never eaten because when she came home she threw them at her father. She couldn’t remember why now. Because he wasn’t her mother probably.

  She took the dirty cake plates through to the kitchen and put them
in the sink. Through the window she could see Sunny and Bertie in the garden with their grandfather, who was showing them the daffodils. (“Millions of them!” Sunny said excitedly when he came running in.) Viola gazed at her children, kneeling amongst the flowers, their faces shining with reflected gold. They were laughing and chatting to her father. The sight made her feel incredibly sad. She felt as if she had been on the outside of happiness her whole life.

  Hungry!” Sunny bellowed at her. Viola, whose eyes remained on the sea, as intent as a lighthouse keeper looking for a wreck, reached behind into her rucksack and fumbled blindly around in its depths before producing the paper bag that contained the sandwiches left over from earlier—uncompromising things made of dense home-made rye sourdough with a filling of Tartex and limp cucumber. Sunny raged at the reappearance of this unattractive feast. “I don’t want that!” he shouted, throwing the sandwich back at her. His aim was terrible and the sandwich was snatched up and devoured by a pleasantly surprised Labrador that happened to be passing by.

  “I’m sorry?” Viola said, in that tone of voice which indicated that she was very far from sorry.

  “I want something nice,” Sunny said. “You never give us anything nice.”

  “I want never gets,” Viola said. (Not true of the Labrador, Sunny thought.) Prim Nanny had come with them to the beach apparently. She offered the sandwich to Bertie, who was digging a series of holes. Bertie said, “Thank you, Mummy,” because she enjoyed the way her compliance made her mother pleasant to her. “You’re welcome,” Viola said. Sunny growled at this blatant pantomime of manners, performed, he knew, just to make him feel bad. It was like when they played Happy Families (too young for the irony of it) and if you didn’t say “please” and “thank you” every single time you lost Master Mouse or Mrs. Robin, even though you had simply forgotten. “I hate you,” he muttered to Viola. Why was she never nice to him? “Nice” was Sunny’s ideal. One day his utopian vocabulary would be wider but for now he would settle for nice. “I hate you,” he said again, more to himself than his mother.

  “La-la-la,” Viola said. “I’m afraid I can’t hear you.”

  He took a deep breath and shouted as loud as he could, “I hate you!” People turned to look.

  “I think there’s some people out to sea who didn’t hear you,” Viola said in that pretending-to-be-unruffled way she had that made Sunny want to destroy her. The cold weapon of sarcasm was an evil trick perpetrated by his mother against which he had no defence. A tempest brewed in his squally heart. He might explode. That would serve his mother right.

  Just give in to her, Sunny, Bertie thought. You never win. Ever. She carried on digging serenely, one hand manoeuvring her short-handled little spade, the other holding the sandwich, which she had no intention of eating. After she’d dug placidly for a while she shifted her bottom along and started another hole as if she had a plan in mind, although the plan didn’t go beyond digging as many holes as possible before the day was done.

  Bertie had been christened “Moon”—not christened, “named,” in a “naming ceremony,” a ritual devised by Dorothy and held at night in the woods behind the house with the whole commune present. Viola handed her newborn peacefully sleeping baby to Dorothy, who raised her up to the moon as if Bertie was an offering, and for one surprising moment Viola had wondered if her daughter was going to be sacrificed. Bertie held “the privilege” of being the first baby born in the commune, Dorothy said. “We give you the future,” she said, addressing the moon, who remained non-committal about the gift. It began to rain and Bertie woke up and started to cry.

  “Now we must feast!” Dorothy declared as they headed indoors. Not on the baby, but on its placenta, fried by Jeanette with onions and parsley. Viola declined her portion—it seemed like cannibalism, not to mention utterly disgusting.

  And, yes, Sun and Moon, those really were their names.

  Luckily, Bertie had been given her grandmother’s name as well. “Moon Roberta?” Teddy said, trying to keep his voice expressionless on the telephone when informed of this. “That’s unusual.”

  “Well, you don’t want to be called the same thing as everyone else, do you?” Viola said. “There are enough Sophies and Sarahs in the world. You want something that makes you stand out as different.” Teddy tended to believe the opposite, but kept his counsel. It didn’t last long. Sun soon became Sunny and Bertie avoided being Moony by refusing to answer to any lunar version of her name until most people forgot it was on her birth certificate, her birth registered very reluctantly by Dominic who thought it was demanded by a “totalitarian bureaucracy,” which was the same reason he and Viola weren’t married.

  The only person whom Bertie permitted to remember her parents’ lunacy was her grandfather, who sometimes called her Bertie Moon, which Bertie found oddly comforting.

  She finished another hole, if a hole can ever be said to be finished, and dropped the sandwich in it.

  Viola gave Sunny the rucksack and said, “There’s a satsuma in there. Somewhere.” Her son snarled at the idea of a satsuma.

  “Oh, stop bellyaching, will you?” Viola murmured, too intent on the sea to be properly irritated with him.

  (“Why did you have children?” Bertie asked, later in their lives. “Was it just the biological imperative to breed?”

  “That’s why everyone has children,” Viola said. “They just dress it up as something more sentimental.”)

  Viola wished she had binoculars. The sun glinting off the water made it hard to make out anything clearly. There were a lot of people in the sea and from this distance they all looked pretty much indistinguishable, just shapes bobbing around in the blue like lazy seals. She had terrible short sight but was too vain to wear her spectacles.

  Sunny retreated temporarily from the battle and returned to collecting pebbles. He loved pebbles. Rocks, stones, gravel, but sea-smoothed pebbles were best. He couldn’t believe what a rich source this beach was. He probably wouldn’t even be able to collect all of them.

  “Where’s Daddy?” Bertie asked, looking up suddenly from her digging.

  “Swimming.”

  “Where?”

  “In the sea, of course.”

  Near to where she was sitting Viola noticed a driftwood stick, bone-white and brittle, poking up like a skeletal fingerpost from the sand. She took it and idly started to sketch symbols in the dry sand—pentagrams and horned moons and the maligned swastika. She had recently taken up the study of magic. Or “Magick.”

  “What do you mean—like sawing a woman in half?” a bewildered Teddy asked.

  “Ritual Magick. There’s a ‘k’ on the end. Witchcraft, the occult, paganism. The Tarot. It’s not tricks, it’s deep earth stuff.”

  “Spells?”

  “Sometimes.” Said with a modest shrug.

  She had read the Tarot last night with Jeanette. The Sun, the Moon, the Fool, one after the other—her family. The High Priestess—Dorothy obviously. The Tower—a disaster, a new beginning? The Star—another baby? God forbid, although Star was a nice name. How long had Dominic been gone? He was a good swimmer but not so good that he could stay out there this long.

  The sun glared down brightly. For Magick you needed the night, a glittering candle guttering in the dark, not this over-exposure. Viola threw away the stick and sighed at the heat. She had so far removed her boots, jacket and skirt and headscarf and was still wearing more clothes than anyone else on the beach. She was down to an antique petticoat and a mismatched long-sleeved bodice, fussy ribboned things trimmed with broderie anglaise which she had found in a second-hand shop. Unknown to Viola, the petticoat had originally belonged to a shop girl who had died of consumption and who would have been shocked and not at all pleased to see her undergarments on display on a beach in Devon.

  Viola gave up on her sea-watch and rolled another cigarette. She loathed the seaside. Every summer when she was small, when they were still a proper family, they had gone to cold, wet beaches for their oblig
atory summer holiday. Purgatory as far as Viola was concerned. It must have been her father’s idea. Her mother had probably wanted to go somewhere warm and sunny where they could enjoy themselves, but her father had the kind of Puritan streak that would consider a beach by the North Sea to be good for a child. She sucked furiously on the roll-up. Her childhood had been warped by his reasonableness. She lay back on the sand and stared at the cloudless sky while contemplating the unbearable tedium of her life. This in itself soon grew tedious and she sat up and pulled a book out of the bottomless rucksack.

  She had never been without a book for as long as she could remember. An only child never is. Literature had fuelled her childhood fantasies and convinced her that one day she would be the heroine of her own narrative. Throughout her teens she inhabited the nineteenth century, roaming the moors with the Brontës, feeling vexed at the constraint of Austen’s drawing rooms. Dickens was her—rather sentimental—friend, George Eliot her more rigorous one. Viola was currently rereading an old copy of Cranford. Mrs. Gaskell did not feel at home in Adam’s Acre, where the reading matter ran from Hunter S. Thompson to Patanjali’s Sutras with not much in between. Viola sat on the hot sand, twirling a lock of hair around her finger, a long-time habit that annoyed everyone except Viola herself, and wondered why she hadn’t worked harder at university instead of being led astray by Dominic and lying around smoking dope. She could have been a lecturer herself by now. A professor even. The sun flared on Mrs. Gaskell’s bright white pages and Viola suspected that she was about to get a headache. Her mother had, basically, died of a headache.

  This short entente was broken by Sunny reversing his decision about the satsuma, but instead of eating it he threw it at Bertie, an action which led to a violent shouting match between the two of them, halted only by the diversionary tactic of giving them money to go and buy ice-creams. There was a van up on the promenade and Viola watched them tramping along towards it until she couldn’t make them out any longer. She closed her eyes. Five minutes’ peace, was that too much to ask?