A God in Ruins

by Kate Atkinson

  Viola was in her first year at a brutalist concrete-and-glass university when she met Dominic Villiers, an art-school drop-out still hanging around the fringes of academic life. He was the scion (Viola had to look the word up) of a semi-aristocratic family. His legendary drug use, his public-school background and the wealthy parents he had rejected in order to live in painterly squalor all gave him a certain cachet. Viola, desperate to rebel and throw off her provincial middle-class chains, by proxy if nothing else, was attracted to his infamy.

  Dominic was also very good-looking and she was flattered when, after circling around her for several weeks, he finally pounced (albeit lethargically, if one can pounce lethargically) and said, “Come back to mine?” No etchings on offer in his squalid flat, but plenty of large canvases that looked as if they’d had primary colours simply thrown at them. “You can tell?” he said, impressed that she understood his technique. Viola, philistine that she was, couldn’t help thinking, But I could do that.

  “Do they sell?” she asked innocently and received a patient lecture about “subverting the exchange relationship between producer and consumer.”

  “You mean by giving stuff away?” she said, baffled. As an only child she never gave anything away.

  “Hey,” he said laconically when he turned round from appreciating his own art and saw her lying naked on his grubby sheets.

  He lived off benefits, which was cool, he said, because it meant the “Stalinist state” was paying for him to produce art.

  “The taxpayer, you mean?” Teddy said. Viola had delayed taking her “beau” (Teddy’s word, he had searched for something innocuous) home for a long time, afraid that her father’s quietly conservative views and the orderly restraint of his house in York would reflect badly on her. She thought with distaste of her father’s garden, neat rows of salvia, alyssum and lobelia in red, white and blue. Why not just plant a Union Jack? “It’s not patriotism,” he protested. “I happen to think that those colours go nicely together.”

  “Gardens,” Dominic said.

  Teddy waited for the rest of the sentence but it never came. “You like them?” he prompted.

  “Yeah, they’re great. My people have a maze.”

  “A maze?”

  “Yeah.” Dominic, to his credit, prided himself on his egalitarianism. “Dukes or dustmen,” he said, “it’s all the same to me,” although Viola suspected that he knew more dukes than dustmen. His “people,” as he referred to them, lived in the depths of Norfolk and were of the hunting, shooting, fishing tribe, vaguely related to royalty “on the wrong side of the blanket.” Viola had never met them, the estrangement still firmly in place even after the birth of Sunny and Bertie. “They don’t want to meet their grandchildren?” Teddy said. “That’s very sad.”

  Viola had been relieved. She suspected that she would never measure up in the eyes of his “people.” Why exactly was he alienated from them, Teddy asked? “Oh, you know, the usual—drugs, art, politics. They think I’m a waster, I think they’re fascists.”

  “Well, he’s a good-looking chap at any rate,” Teddy said, searching for something complimentary to say as he and Viola washed the pots together after a ham salad and an apple crumble that he’d made that morning. Teddy was “handy” in the kitchen (“Even though I say so myself”). Dominic was having “forty winks” in the living room. “Tired, is he?” Teddy said. Viola had never seen her father asleep, not even a catnap or a deckchair snooze.

  When Dominic woke up, Teddy, unable to think of anything else (somehow he couldn’t imagine Dominic playing board games), got out the photo albums in which his daughter’s awkwardness was displayed at various ages and in varying degrees. Viola was never good in front of a camera. “She’s much prettier in real life,” Teddy said.

  “Yeah, very sexy,” Dominic said, leered even. Viola preened a little. Her father, she noticed, grimaced at Dominic’s remark and all that it implied. Get used to it, she thought. I’m a grown woman now. (“I screw therefore I am,” she had written in the front of her Penguin Classics copy of Descartes’s Discourse on Method, pleased with her iconoclasm.)

  She was the next in a long line of girlfriends and she was never sure why Dominic had stopped at her. Not stopped—merely paused, it turned out. “But you’re the one I always come home to,” he said. Like a dog, she thought, but not without satisfaction.

  They were both, essentially, very lazy people and it was easier to stay together than it was to pull themselves apart.

  Viola managed to struggle her way through her finals and came away with an undistinguished third, a mashed-up degree of philosophy, American studies and English literature. “It’s an irrelevance anyway,” she said. “Life’s about living, not about paper qualifications.” She told no one how wretchedly disappointed she was at her results and chose not to attend her graduation ceremony, it being “meaningless lip-service to the established hierarchy.”

  “You might regret it in the future,” Teddy said.

  “You just want a photograph of me in a cap and gown to put on the wall and show off,” she said irritably.

  Well, what would be so wrong with that, Teddy wondered?

  You’re not going to get married then?” Teddy asked tentatively when Viola told him she was pregnant with Sunny.

  “No one gets married any more,” she said dismissively. “It’s an outmoded bourgeois convention. Why would I want to be handcuffed to someone for the rest of my life just because an authoritarian society demands it?”

  “Oh, it’s not so bad,” Teddy said. “You grow used to the ‘handcuffs,’ as you put it.”

  When Sunny was born they were living in a squat in London with ten other people. They shared the kitchen and bathroom and had one room they could call their own, which was crammed with Dominic’s paintings as well as all the baby paraphernalia that Teddy had funded when he realized that no one else was going to buy it. He was alarmed that Viola seemed to have no idea what having a baby involved. “You’re going to need a cot,” he told her, “and a little baby bath.”

  “It can sleep in a drawer,” Viola said, “and I can wash it in the sink.” (“Yeah,” Dominic concurred, “that’s how poor people have always done it.”) Keep it in a drawer? It? Teddy dug into his savings and sent them a cot and a pram and a bath.

  Dominic hardly ever finished a painting. Occasionally, despite his avowed rejection of the capitalist economy, he tried to sell one, but he couldn’t even give his art away. Viola wondered if one day they would be found buried beneath a mound of his canvases. The result was that they had no money. Dominic refused to ask his family for anything. “It’s very noble of him, sticking to his principles like that,” she told her father. “Very,” Teddy agreed.

  Squatting was the logical thing to do, she explained to her father. “Regarding the earth as a commodity that you can own when it’s something that we all share in common…” The argument—someone else’s, not hers—ran out. She hadn’t slept properly in weeks. Sunny caterwauled through the small hours as if in paroxysms of grief for his lost clouds of glory. (He never would truly recover from this theft.) Her father turned up on the doorstep of the squat one day, saying, “I didn’t wait for an invitation. Otherwise I didn’t know when I would get introduced to the little chap,” which was obviously a criticism of her for not hauling the baby and his retinue of stuff on to a train when she could hardly put one foot in front of the other.

  Teddy had brought a bunch of flowers, a box of chocolates and a pack of Babygros. “Mothercare,” he said. “It’s new, have you been? I wish we’d had clothes like this when you were a baby. It was all fiddly matinée jackets and bootees. A layette, that’s what we used to call it. Are you going to keep me on the doorstep?

  “So this is a ‘squat,’ eh?” he said as they squeezed their way past bicycles, mostly broken, and cardboard boxes in the hallway. (“Oh, I was a radical, an anarchist even,” Viola declared in later years. “Lived in a squat in London—exciting times,” when in fa
ct she was cold and miserable and lonely a lot of the time, not to mention being paralysed by motherhood.)

  Teddy took the train back north the same day and lay awake all night worrying about his only child and her only child. Viola had been a lovely baby, just perfect. But then all babies were perfect, he supposed. Even Hitler.

  A rural commune?” Teddy said, when Viola had told him about the next arrangement.

  “Yes. Communal living. That means avoiding the destructive effects of the capitalist system and trying to find a new way of being,” she said, parroting Dominic. “And anti-establishmentarianism,” she added for good measure. It was the longest word she knew and she had heard it bandied around at university, although its meaning remained vague to her. (“The Church?” Teddy puzzled.) “Straight society is morally and financially bankrupt. We live off the land,” she said proudly.

  “ ‘True freedom lies where a man receives his nourishment and preservation, and that is in the use of the earth,’ ” Teddy said.

  “What?” (Pardon, Teddy thought. That was what she had been taught as a child.) “Gerrard Winstanley,” he said. “The True Levellers. The Diggers. No?”

  He wondered what else Viola had managed not to learn. Teddy was intrigued by all those radical idealistic movements that sprang up around the Civil War, wondered if he would have joined one if he’d been alive then. You see the world turned upside down. (“A lament, not a rejoicing,” Ursula had chided him, long ago.) They probably all spouted the same kind of nonsense that Viola did. The Kibbo Kift were their natural heirs, he supposed. “The peaceable kingdom and all that,” he said to Viola. “The desire for the restoration of paradise on earth,” he persisted. “Millenarianism.”

  “Oh, that,” she said, finally hearing something she recognized. She had seen The Pursuit of the Millennium on someone’s bookshelf. She resented how much stuff her father knew. “We’re interested in cosmic evolutionary development,” she said airily. She had no idea what that meant.

  “But you’ve never liked the countryside,” Teddy puzzled.

  “I still don’t,” Viola said. She wasn’t exactly thrilled about these new living arrangements, but then anything had to be better than the shambles that was the squat.

  The commune occupied a rambling old farmhouse in Devon, most of the acreage sold off but enough left for them to grow their own food and keep goats and chickens. That was the theory anyway. Since the Middle Ages it had been called Long Grove Farm, but when Dorothy bought it at auction, “for a song,” mainly because that remaining acreage was swamp, the good land having been bought by a neighbouring farmer (yes, he of the Morris Minor and the yard full of geese), Dorothy renamed it Adam’s Acre. A hand-painted sign in rainbow colours declaring this new name was nailed to the gate at the entrance to the farmyard. No one, not one single person in the locality, used this new title.

  The commune had been going for five years when they arrived, joining three other couples all in their twenties—Hilary and Matthew, Thelma and Dave (Scottish) and Theresa and Wilhelm (Dutch). Viola had trouble remembering their names. As well as Dorothy there were three other single people—an American woman in her thirties called Jeanette and Brian, a teenager who seemed to have run away from home. (“Cool,” Dominic said.)

  And finally there was Bill, an old guy in his fifties. He’d been a mechanic in the RAF and Viola said, “Yeah, my dad was in the RAF during the war,” and he said, “Oh, really? Which squadron?”

  “No idea,” she shrugged. She had never talked to her father about the war and anyway it was years ago. Her indifference seemed to disappoint Bill. “I’m a pacifist,” she told him.

  “We all are, dear,” he said.

  She really was, she thought crossly. She’d gone to a Quaker school, for heaven’s sake, and had taken part in an anti–Vietnam war demonstration in the course of which she had tried hard to get arrested. Her glory years were still ahead of her—Greenham, Upper Heyford—but she had long been treading the path of righteous indignation. Her father had flown planes, dropped bombs on people. He’d probably been responsible for the firebombing of Dresden—Slaughterhouse-Five had been on her syllabus at university. (“It was only the Lancasters who bombed Dresden,” Teddy said. “So? So?” his daughter said. “You think that absolves you?” “I’m not asking for absolution,” Teddy said.) War was evil, Viola thought, but was rather cowed by Bill’s lack of interest in her opinion. Apparently he didn’t want absolution either.

  Dominic was happy because he had a studio, an old whitewashed cowshed out the back, and Viola was relieved that she no longer had to co-exist with his paintings.

  Their numbers were augmented by a continual stream of visitors coming mostly from London for the weekend. There were always complete strangers sleeping on floors and sofas or sitting around smoking dope and talking. And talking. And talking. And talking. They were supposed to “contribute” by helping with gardening or general maintenance but that rarely seemed to happen.

  Dorothy was the queen bee, of course. Everything was supposed to be shared and held in common but she still retained the deeds to the farmhouse, and owned the van, their only means of transport, plus the whole enterprise had been her idea. She was in her sixties, wore kaftans and wrapped her hair in long silk headscarves, and went around with a beatific smile on her face that could be very irritating if you yourself weren’t feeling beatific. She was an old crone as far as Viola was concerned, almost as old as her father. She had been an unsuccessful actress but then had “followed a man” to India and came back without him, bringing back “enlightenment” instead. (“How is she enlightened?” Viola muttered to Dominic. “I don’t see any sign of it. She’s like everyone else, but worse.”)

  Dominic had been vetted for his suitability for the commune but Viola didn’t meet Dorothy until she moved in. Dorothy, she noticed, liked the sound of her own voice and made Viola feel as if she was back at university. “Adam’s Acre,” Dorothy said grandiloquently, “is a place where all that is possible is made possible. Where we can explore our artistic nature and help others find theirs. We are continually moving towards the light. Tea?” she asked in the manner of a duchess, startling Viola, who had begun to nod off, as she always did in lectures.

  Dorothy passed Viola a thick mug of some sludgy bitter concoction. “Not tea as you know it, I expect,” Dorothy said and Viola wondered if she was trying to drug her or poison her. (“You’re so paranoid,” Dominic said.) She shook her head when Dorothy said, “Scone?” holding out a plate to her that was piled with what looked like cobblestones. There was a hiatus while Dorothy chewed her way through a mouthful of one of these pavers. “You will find,” she continued eventually, “that we are a loose gestalt of powerful individuals who chance to be moving in the same direction. Towards a transcendental understanding.”

  “OK,” Viola said cautiously, having no idea what the words meant that were falling from Dorothy’s crumb-covered lips. There was transcendental meditation, obviously, she had done that, and she had studied the Transcendentalist movement in American literature, ploughed her way through Walden and Emerson’s Nature, but they didn’t seem to have much to do with Dorothy’s sage-burning and unholy chanting (like a depressed gorilla).

  “To make it work, we must all contribute,” Dorothy said. Must we, Viola thought wearily? She was hugely pregnant with Bertie and was still lugging Sunny around in her arms.

  Lacking any special skills, she was assigned to general tasks—cooking, cleaning, baking bread, working in the garden, milking the goat “and so on.” “Housework, basically,” Viola said. She had marched in a Wages for Housework protest when she was at university, even though she had never done any, and she wasn’t very happy about doing any now. Or doing things for other people instead of doing them for herself, which seemed to be what living in a commune meant. There were also “light gardening duties,” which meant digging over the heavy red soil that was full of thistles in the borders around the lawn at the back. She was spared �
�the agricultural work,” as Dorothy termed the growing of puny root vegetables and worm-eaten cabbages. The Diggers, she thought miserably when she was out in the rain, trying to slice her way through the mud with a wonky spade. She had become a Digger, if not the Digger, as no one else ever seemed to be involved in this particular, not inconsequential task—the borders were enormous.

  And they were in the middle of nowhere. Viola had never liked the countryside, it was a cold, muddy place, full of endless discomforts. When she was little they had lived in an old farmhouse too, in the middle of nothing but landscape, and she could remember her father continually nagging her to go outside and “get some fresh air,” to accompany him on walks to look for birds, trees, nests, “rock formations.” Why would anyone want to look for a rock formation? She remembered how pleased she’d been to move to York, to a semi-detached house with central heating and fitted carpets. A short-lived pleasure, of course, for what was a house without a mother?

  The commune ran a stall at a monthly market in town where they sold stuff they had made—heavy loaves of bread that looked like missiles you could have hurled from catapults. Then there were the multicoloured candles that smelt rank and melted in distasteful puddles. And the pottery, of course. Wilhelm had a kiln which was the source of the thick mugs and plates that they used. There were also the wicker baskets that they all took a hand at weaving. Like blind people, Viola thought when asked to learn. It was the life of an unpaid eighteenth-century servant, she thought, with basket-making thrown in. And she had to look after the children because, despite all the talk about shared tasks, none of them were keen on Sunny, for which she could hardly blame them. Money was held in common, in a kitty, and she couldn’t remove a penny without having to justify the expenditure. One day, Viola thought, she was going to run away and take the kitty with her and spend it on Coca-Cola, chocolates, disposable nappies and all the other things that were condemned by the commune.