A God in Ruins

by Kate Atkinson

  They had married in the autumn of ’45, in Chelsea Register Office with no guests other than a sister each—Ursula and Bea—who acted as their witnesses. Teddy had worn his uniform, but not his medals, and Ursula had begged one of Izzie’s pre-war Paris gowns off her without telling her why and Bea had helped Nancy to alter it so it was less glamorous and more suited to austerity. Bea had been to Covent Garden that morning and bought some big mop-headed, rust-coloured chrysanthemums that she’d tied up artfully for a bouquet. The flowers went beautifully with the oyster silk of the dress. Bea had been a student at St. Martin’s before the war and out of all the Shawcross girls she was the one with the most artistic nature, although Millie would have contested that furiously. Teddy still thought of them as girls, even though Winnie, the eldest, was forty now.

  Neither Teddy nor Nancy had been able to contemplate a big wedding so soon after the war. “And who would give me away?” Nancy said. “It would be so sad not to be on my father’s arm.” Major Shawcross had died, not unexpectedly, a few weeks previously.

  Teddy thought he knew Nancy—before the war he did know her—but now she was a continual surprise. He had imagined that in marriage he and Nancy would cleave to each other and become one—in some vague biblical sense of the word—whereas in fact he was constantly aware of the difference between them and she frequently unbalanced him when he had expected—hoped—her to root him.

  They had been childhood sweethearts, or so everyone told them. “How I dislike that expression,” Nancy said on the eve of their modest wedding. They were having a drink in a rather shoddy, near-deserted pub off Piccadilly, chosen because of its proximity to the college where they were both doing an accelerated teaching qualification.

  Teaching had formed part of their vision of a wholesome life after the war. It was Nancy’s vision really, Teddy had simply gone along with it, unable to think of anything else. He had no intention of returning to banking—his insufferable occupation before the war—and he could no longer be a pilot. The RAF had no call for the dozens of men—hundreds, probably—who wanted to stay on after the war and continue to fly. The country was done with them. They had given everything and then they were suddenly set adrift. Gratitude was no longer the order of the day. In this atmosphere teaching seemed as good an option as anything to him. Poetry, drama, the classic novels, it was a field that he had loved once. Surely he could rekindle that love and communicating it would be a good deed, wouldn’t it?

  “I should say,” Nancy said enthusiastically. “And the world needs art now more than ever. It can teach us when man clearly cannot.” Not maths then? “No, maths can’t teach us anything. It is itself.”

  Teddy didn’t believe art (“Art,” he thought, acknowledging his mother) should be didactic, it should be a source of joy and comfort, of sublimation and of understanding. (“Itself,” in fact.) It had been all these things to him once. Nancy, however, tended towards pedagogy.

  The honest schoolteacher imparting knowledge, Nancy said, brightly entertained by the idea. They were the very people who would, in their own small way, be making a better future for the world. She had joined the Labour Party and steadfastly attended earnest, dreary meetings. The Kibbo Kift had prepared her well.

  They were in the pub because Nancy said she wanted to make sure that Teddy wasn’t suffering from “pre-wedding jitters” and that he was “completely certain” that he wanted to go ahead with the wedding. He wondered if it might be the other way round and that she was hoping he would set her free at the eleventh hour. They were drinking an unexpectedly good cognac that, when he discovered that they were to be married the next day, the landlord had procured from beneath the counter for the “lovebirds.” It seemed unlikely to have had a legal provenance. Sometimes Teddy wondered if everyone had done well out of the war except for those who had fought in it.

  “Courage, mon ami,” Nancy toasted, in honour of the brandy’s homeland. Did she feel that they needed courage?

  “The future,” he answered, chinking her glass. For a long time, during the war, he hadn’t believed in a future—it had seemed like an absurd proposition—and now that he was living in this “afterward,” as he had thought of it during the war, it somehow seemed like an even more absurd proposition. “And to happiness,” he added as an afterthought, because it was the kind of thing one should say, if only for luck.

  “It’s rather like ‘he married the girl next door,’ ” Nancy continued to grumble. “As if we had no choice in the matter, as if we were destined.”

  “But you were the girl next door,” he said, “and I am marrying you.”

  “Yes,” she said patiently, “but we’re making a choice. That’s important. We’re not just sleepwalking into something.” Teddy thought perhaps he was.

  They had known each other from childhood, if not as sweethearts then certainly as the closest of friends. When he left Fox Corner for boarding school Nancy was the only person who wasn’t family that was in Teddy’s prayers every night. Please keep my mother and father safe (he learned that no one called their parents “Mummy” and “Daddy” at boarding school, even in their silent prayers) and Ursula and Pamela and Jimmy and Nancy and Trixie. After Trixie’s death and her replacement by Jock this was amended to and Jock and keep Trixie safe in heaven. And, yes, dogs were family. Maurice usually made the list as a guilty afterthought, if at all.

  “You don’t have to go through with it,” he said to her. “I wouldn’t hold you to anything. After all, everyone got engaged during the war.”

  “Oh, what a goose you are,” she said. “Of course I want to marry you. Are you sure that you want to marry me? That’s the question. And only ‘yes’ or ‘no’ will do for an answer. No fudging the issue.”

  “Yes,” he said, quickly and quite loudly so that the pub’s two other patrons—an old man and his even older-looking dog—were startled out of their torpor.

  The war had been a great chasm and there could be no going back to the other side, to the lives they had before, to the people they were before. It was as true for them as it was for the whole of poor, ruined Europe. “One thinks,” his sister Ursula said, “of the great spires and towers that have been toppled, the Altstadts with their little narrow cobbled streets, the medieval buildings, the Rathauses and cathedrals, the great seats of learning, all reduced to mounds of rubble.”

  “By me,” Teddy said.

  “No, by Hitler,” Ursula said. She was always keen to lay blame at Adolf’s feet, rather than the Germans in general. She had known the country before the war, had friends there, was still trying to trace some of them. “The Germans were victims of the Nazis too, but one can’t say that too loudly, of course.”

  Ursula had flown on a “Cook’s tour” at the end of the war and had witnessed at first hand the desolation, the still-smouldering ruins of Germany. “But then one thinks of the crematoria,” she said. “One thinks of poor Hannie. The argument always seems to end at the concentration camps, doesn’t it? Auschwitz, Treblinka. The terrible evil. We had to fight. Yet we must move on. And there can never be any going back anyway, war or not.” (She was the family philosopher.) “We can only ever be walking into our future, best foot forward and all that.” This was when people still believed in the dependable nature of time—a past, a present, a future—the tenses that Western civilization was constructed on. Over the coming years Teddy tried, in the manner of a simple layman, to keep up with theoretical physics, via articles in the Telegraph and an heroic struggle with Stephen Hawking in 1996, but admitted defeat when he came across string theory. From then on he took every day as it came, hour by hour.

  Ursula had been dead for decades by then, subtracted from time altogether. But in 1947 time was still a fourth dimension that could be relied upon to shape everyday life and for Ursula that meant working in the civil service, as she would for the next twenty years, leading the decent, quiet life of a single professional woman in post-war London. Theatre, concerts, exhibitions. Teddy had always th
ought his sister would have a great passion of some kind—a vocational calling, a man, certainly a baby. He had looked forward to being an uncle to Ursula’s child almost more than he had to his own potential fatherhood (which, if he was honest, he faced with some trepidation), but his sister was nearly forty and so he supposed she would never be a mother now.

  Teddy thought of his wife and his sister as two sides of the same shining coin. Nancy was an idealist, Ursula a realist; Nancy an optimist with a lively heart, while Ursula’s spirit was freighted with the grief of history. Ursula was forever cast out of Eden and making the best of it while Nancy, cheerful and undaunted, was sure her search for the gate back into the garden would be successful.

  Teddy sought out involved imagery, like “a hound looking for a fox,” to quote Bill Morrison.

  Nancy looked up from her Fair Isle and said, “Go on. Carry on with your snowdrops.”

  “Are you sure?” he said, sensing a certain lack of enthusiasm.

  “Yes.” Said with determination, possibly grim.

  “My friends in the south of England have yet to spy one, but here, perversely, in these hardy northern climes, Keble’s ‘first-born of the year’s delight’ have begun to poke their frail heads through the blanket of snow. (Perce-neige, the French aptly call them.) But perhaps my favourite name for this little spring flower is the pretty ‘February fairmaids.’ ”

  He was Agrestis, his nom de plume, and these were his monthly Nature Notes, a short column for the North Yorkshire Monthly Recorder. Known by everyone simply as the Recorder, it was a small magazine, both in format and aspiration, with a strictly local circulation, apart from the few copies that were sent abroad every month, all to Commonwealth countries and (so he was led to believe) one war bride living in Milwaukee. They were all emigrants, Teddy supposed, people who found themselves in exile from this part of the world with its sheep-auction tallies and reports from WI meetings. How long, he wondered, before the bride in Milwaukee began to feel that her native county was as alien as the moon?

  A woman in Northallerton—no one at the magazine had ever met her—posted in recipes as well as the Handy Hints and the occasional knitting pattern. There was a crossword (not cryptic, not at all), readers’ letters and articles about the area’s beauty spots and places of historical interest, and pages of dull advertisements for local businesses. It was the kind of publication that hung around in the waiting rooms of doctors and dentists until it was months, occasionally years, out of date. Not including the woman in Northallerton, the Recorder had a staff of precisely four—a part-time photographer, a woman who dealt with all the administration including Notices and Advertisements and subscriptions, the editor, Bill Morrison, and now Teddy, who did everything else, including the Nature Notes.

  They had moved to Yorkshire because Nancy thought it would be a place where they could lead a good, simple life, a country life, surrounded by nature, which was how man—and woman—was meant to live. Again, the Kibbo Kift had done its work. Neither of them could abide the grim, battle-scarred face of the capital, and Yorkshire, Nancy said, seemed a long way away, less affected by mechanization and war. “Well…” Teddy said, thinking of the bombing of Hull and Sheffield, of the monolithic soot-blackened factories of the West Riding and, most of all, the brutal windswept airfields on which he had been stationed during the war and where the better part—perhaps the best part—of his life had been lived inside the freezing noisy shell of a Halifax bomber.

  “You liked it in Yorkshire, didn’t you?” Nancy said, in the casual way someone might say, “Shall we go to the Lakes this year? You like it there, don’t you?”

  “Like” was hardly the word that Teddy would have used for a time in his life when every day was fragile and seemed as if it might be his last on earth and the only tense was the present one because the future had ceased to exist even though they were fighting so desperately for it. They had thrown themselves wholesale at the enemy, every day a new kind of Thermopylae. (“ ‘Sacrifice,’ ” Sylvie said, “is a word that makes people feel noble about slaughter.”)

  But, yes, it was true, he had liked Yorkshire.

  They had talked for a while about emigrating. Australia or Canada. Teddy had done his initial pilot training in Canada and had enjoyed the friendly people, the easy-going ways they had. He still remembered a trip they had gone on to pick peaches, like a dream now in this winter. He had travelled around France before the war too, even more evanescent than any dream, but France had been a young man’s fancy, not a place for a married Englishman in 1947. In the end, they concluded, they had fought the war for England (“Britain,” Nancy corrected him), and it seemed wrong to abandon the country in this new hour of her need. It was perhaps a mistake, he thought in later years. They should have taken the five-pound passage and left, joined all those other disgruntled ex-servicemen who realized that Britain in the gloomy aftermath of war felt more like a defeated country than a victorious one.

  Nancy found an old farm cottage to rent in a dale that was on the cusp of moorland. It was called Mouse Cottage (“How very fey,” Sylvie said), although they never found out why for they never, to their surprise, saw a single mouse the whole time they lived there. Perhaps it was called that because it was so tiny, Nancy said.

  There was a cast-iron range, with a fire and oven built in, and a back boiler to provide hot water. (“Thank God,” they both said frequently, fervently, in this cold.) They often made a supper of just toast, scraped with their rationed butter, holding the bread on a brass fork in front of the fire, rather than face the icy blasts that blew through the small scullery that had been tacked on to the back of the cottage at some point in the past. On to this scullery had been attached something more like a shed than a room, in which there was a washbasin and a half-bath, its brass taps blackened and its worn enamel streaked with rust. No wireless, no telephone and an outside privy that meant in this weather an understandable reliance on the unsavoury chamber-pot. It was their first home together and Teddy thought he already understood how fondly they would think of it in the future, if not necessarily now.

  They had rented it fully furnished, which was just as well as they had no furniture of their own apart from an upright piano that they had managed to cram into the downstairs room. Nancy was a good pianist although nowhere near as good as Sylvie. The previous owner had apparently died in situ and so they were now availing themselves of some poor old biddy’s cups and saucers, cushions and lamps, not to mention the brass toasting fork. They presumed a woman because although the curtains and loose covers on the chairs were a worn linen in a Jacobean pattern that could have been favoured by either sex, the cottage was dotted with crocheted blankets and tatted mats and framed cross-stitch pictures of gardens and crinolined ladies that all spoke of an old woman. They thought of her as an invisible benefactor. Their bedding, at least, had not last embraced a corpse as Mrs. Shawcross had raided her laundry cupboard for “spares.”

  They had taken on the lease in May, in blossom time, bamboozled by balmy skies. (“That’s a lot of ‘b’s, lad,” Bill Morrison said. “I bet there’s a word for that.” “ ‘Alliteration,’ ” Teddy said and Bill Morrison said, “Well, try not to.”) “Goodness,” Sylvie said when she visited. “Quite primitive, isn’t it?” They made corned-beef sandwiches and Sylvie had brought eggs from her chickens and cucumber pickles and they hardboiled the eggs and made quite a good picnic, sitting on an old rug, flattening the overgrown grass of the garden. “You’re going backwards,” Sylvie said. “Soon you’ll be living in a cave and bathing in the stream.”

  “Would that be so bad?” Nancy said, peeling an egg. “We could live like gypsies. I could grub around in hedgerows for berries and sell pegs and lucky charms from door to door and Teddy could catch fish and shoot rabbits and hares.”

  “Teddy won’t shoot anything,” Sylvie said decisively. “He doesn’t kill.”

  “He would if he had to,” Nancy said. “Can you pass the salt, please?”

>   He has killed, Teddy thought. Many people. Innocent people. He had personally helped to ruin poor Europe. “I am here, you know,” he said, “sitting next to you.”

  “And,” Nancy continued, visibly warming to the idea, “our hair would smell of woodsmoke and our babies would run around naked.”

  She said it to annoy Sylvie, of course. Sylvie, duly annoyed, said, “You used to be such a bluestocking, Nancy. Married life has quite changed something in you.”

  “No, the war changed something in me,” Nancy said. There was a brief silence as the three of them contemplated what that “something” might be.

  He had lost Nancy to the Official Secrets Act during the war. She had been unable to tell him what she was doing and he had been incapable of telling her what he was doing (because he didn’t want to) and their relationship foundered on ignorance. She had vowed to tell him when the war finished (“Afterwards, I’ll tell you everything. I promise”), but by then he wasn’t terribly interested. “Cryptology and codes and so on,” she confessed, although of course he had guessed this long ago, for what else could she have been doing?

  No one else who had worked at Bletchley during the war talked about what they had done and yet Nancy was quite prepared to break her oath so that there would be “nothing between us.” Secrets had the power to kill a marriage, she said. Nonsense, Sylvie said, it was secrets that could save a marriage.

  Nancy was willing to unpack her whole heart to him, but Teddy had chambers that he never opened. He was not so honest about his own war—the horror and the violence, not to mention the fear, seemed an immensely private thing. And there was his own infidelity, too. Nancy admitted to having “had sex” (a crude phrase to Teddy’s ears) with other men when she thought he was dead, rather than in a POW camp, whereas he had been unfaithful without the excuse of thinking her dead.

  She never asked, he supposed that was the beauty of her. And he couldn’t see what good could come from confession. He had considered it, in that shoddy little pub the night before their wedding. He could have made a clean breast of his sins and shortcomings, but really in the end it was nothing and Nancy, too, would consider it nothing and that might be the worst of it.