A God in Ruins

by Kate Atkinson

  “Maurice will avoid any danger, you’ll see,” Ursula said. “But Jimmy, I suppose… oh dear. I still think of him as the baby, I can’t imagine him with a weapon in his hand.”

  “He’s almost twenty,” Teddy felt it necessary to point out.

  Lunch was a subdued affair. There were only the three of them—four if you counted Bridget, in the kitchen, which they didn’t. They ate the lamb with potatoes and some rather stringy runner beans from the garden and afterwards Bridget plonked down an oval dish of rice pudding on the table and said, “It’s dried up, thanks to those ruddy Germans.”

  “At least now Bridget will have someone other than Mother to blame for the woes of her world,” Ursula said when Teddy reported this remark to her on the phone. “It’s going to be bloody, you know,” she added sadly. Ursula seemed privy to a lot of information. She “knew” people, of course, including a senior man in the Admiralty.

  “How is your Commodore?” he asked her, rather cautiously as Sylvie was about.

  “Oh, you know—married,” Ursula said lightly. “Judge not that ye be not judged,” she had said when she confided in him about this affair. Teddy had been startled at the idea of his sister as a scarlet woman, as the other woman. By the end of the war there was nothing about men and women that surprised him. Nothing about anything really. The whole edifice of civilization turned out to be constructed from an unstable mix of quicksand and imagination.

  There was another large whisky after lunch and then another before supper and both Teddy and Hugh, neither of whom were drinkers, were a little worse for wear by the time Teddy left for London. Back to the bank in the morning, he thought, but in his lunch hour he would find a recruitment office and sign up and the world would turn perhaps not upside down, as the old Civil War ballad would have it, but certainly a few notches in easement.

  “That ‘ballad’ was a lament, not a rejoicing,” Ursula said. She could be almost as particular as Nancy sometimes. “Christmas was killed at Naseby fight.” His sister was not yet a puritan—the war would make her one.

  Sylvie kissed him goodbye on the cheek, very cool, and turned away, saying that she wouldn’t say goodbye because it was “too final,” and Teddy thought how histrionic his mother could be if she set her mind to it. “I’m catching the seven-twenty to Marylebone,” he said to her, “not going off to die.”

  “Not yet.”

  Hugh gave him a paternal pat on the shoulder and said, “Don’t pay any attention to your mother. Take care of yourself now, Ted, won’t you?” It was the last time he would be touched by his father.

  He made his way along the lane to the station through the twilight and by the time he had taken his seat in a second-class carriage Teddy realized that it was not Hugh’s whisky that was making him feel so woozy and feverish but Nancy’s whooping cough. The disease delayed his attempt to enter the war for several wretched weeks and even then when he tried to register he was sent away and told to wait. It was well into the spring of 1940 before he picked up an envelope from the hall table of his lodgings, which, when opened, proved to be a buff-coloured directive from the Air Ministry telling him to report to Lord’s Cricket Ground for an interview. The summer before he went up to Oxford, his father had taken him to Lord’s to see the first All-India test match. It seemed strange that this, of all places, was to be where he would be admitted into war. “England won by one hundred and fifty-eight runs,” his father recalled when he told him of the venue. And how many runs would it take to win this war, Teddy wondered?—even at this stage of his life inclined to mutilate metaphor. Although in fact it took exactly seventy-two runs not out—the number of sorties he had flown by the end of March 1944.

  There was a new lightness to his step as he walked to work. He paused to stroke a cat sunning itself on a wall. He tipped his hat to an elegant woman who, clearly charmed, smiled in response (rather invitingly, especially for this time of day). He stopped to smell a late lilac hanging over the railings around the gardens of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Wordsworth’s “glory and the dream” were not entirely forgotten, he thought.

  The familiar scent of polished wood and brass assailed him as he entered the bank. No more, he thought, no more.

  Nearly two years later, a pair of wings on his uniform, and his training with the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan in Canada behind him, Teddy had returned, sailing back from New York on the Queen Mary. “How lovely,” Izzie said, when informed of this. “I’ve had some marvellous times on board that ship.” Teddy didn’t bother to inform her that the liner was now a troopship for the American forces that he had been squeezed on to (“down with the bilge water”) and that the men—half of whom were seasick for the entire voyage—were packed tighter than the proverbial sardines in a tin. They felt as vulnerable, too, as they made the Atlantic crossing in foul weather without a convoy, the liner being considered fast enough to outrun German U-boats, something that Teddy was not convinced about. “Yes, the food was wonderful,” he said sardonically to her (although it was when compared to the meagreness of rationing). He didn’t know whether or not she had caught his tone. It wasn’t always easy to tell with Izzie.

  He had had a couple of days’ leave between returning from Canada and joining an Operational Training Unit. His sister had managed to get away from London to Fox Corner for lunch. Izzie herself was “loitering” there, uninvited, according to Sylvie. The tally for the autumn of ’42: Pamela had evacuated herself to the middle of nowhere although she would soon return; Maurice spent most of his time in a Whitehall bunker; Jimmy was training with the Army in Scotland. Hugh was dead. How could that be? How could his father be dead?

  Compassionate leave had been arranged for Teddy and the Navy (in the person of Ursula’s man at the Admiralty, although Teddy never knew this) had found him a berth on a merchant ship sailing in convoy, but at the last minute the order was rescinded. “You would have missed the funeral anyway,” Sylvie said, “so there wouldn’t have been much point.”

  “I’m surprised,” Maurice said, “that in the midst of war someone would have considered it a significant request.” “Maurice,” Ursula said, “is one of those people who rubber-stamp dockets—or not—and draw red crosses through application forms. Exactly the kind of person who would rescind a compassionate-leave request.” Maurice would have been very annoyed to be considered junior enough to rubber-stamp anything. He signed. A fluid, careless signature from his silver Sheaffer. But not in this case.

  Whoever had done the rescinding was to be thanked. The convoy had been attacked by U-boats and the ship that Teddy had been designated to sail in had gone down with all hands. “Saved for a higher purpose,” Ursula said.

  “You don’t believe that, do you?” Teddy asked, alarmed that his sister might have caught religion.

  “No,” she said. “Life and death are completely random, that much I have learned.”

  “Completely. One learned that in the last war,” Izzie said, lighting a cigarette even though she had eaten hardly any of the stewed chicken that Sylvie had cooked for lunch. Sylvie had killed the bird this morning to “celebrate” the return of “the prodigal son.” (Again, he thought. Was this to be his role in life? The eternal prodigal?) “Hardly prodigal,” Teddy said defensively. “I’ve been learning to fight a war.”

  “Yet, lo, we have killed the fatted chicken to welcome you back,” Ursula said.

  “More like an old boiler,” Izzie said.

  “Takes one to know one.” From Sylvie, of course.

  Izzie pushed her plate away and Sylvie said, “I hope you’re going to finish that. That chicken died for you.” Ursula gave a little yelp of derision and Teddy winked at her. Yet it seemed wrong to be happy without Hugh here.

  Izzie had decamped across the pond the minute war was declared but had returned by the time Teddy sailed back into port in Liverpool, claiming “patriotism” as a higher moral duty than safety. “Patriotism,” Sylvie said witheringly, “contains the word ‘rot’ within
it. You came home because your marriage was a disaster.” Izzie’s famous playwright husband was “having affairs left, right and centre in Hollywood,” Sylvie said. At the word “affairs” Teddy glanced across the Regency Revival dining-room table at Ursula, but she was keeping her eyes on the plate of sacrificial chicken in front of her.

  Sylvie had quite a flock of hens now and did a good bartering trade in the village with her eggs. The spent birds usually ended up on Fox Corner’s dining table when they had stopped pulling their weight on the egg-laying front. “LMF,” Ursula said, and when Sylvie looked blank added, “Lack of Moral Fibre. Waverers. When the nerves get the better of men in the services, but they call it cowardice.”

  “I saw a lot of that in the trenches,” Izzie said.

  “You weren’t in the trenches,” Sylvie said, always irritated when Izzie referred to her experiences in the last war. As they all were, to some extent. Only Hugh, surprisingly, had had some tolerance for “Izzie’s war,” as he referred to it. He had come across her once, during the horror of the Somme, at an advanced dressing station not very far behind the firing line. He was confused at the sight of her. She seemed to be in the wrong place—she belonged in the drawing room at Hampstead or in an evening gown, flirting and teasing some helpless man. The memory of her “indiscretion,” as he preferred to think of it—her scandalous affair with an older married man and the subsequent birth of an illegitimate baby—had been all but blotted from his mind by the mud. And anyway, that was a different Izzie to this one. This Izzie was dressed in some kind of uniform beneath a dirty apron, blood smeared across one cheek, carrying something foul in an enamel pail, and when she caught sight of him she gasped and said, “Oh, look at you, you’re alive, how wonderful! I won’t kiss you, I’m awfully filthy, I’m afraid.” She had tears in her eyes and at that moment Hugh forgave his sister for many future, as yet unmade, mistakes.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked, full of gentle concern. “Oh, I’m a FANY,” she said carelessly. “Just helping out, you know.”

  “The men were in the trenches,” Sylvie persisted, “not a few genteel lady volunteers.”

  “The First Aid Nursing Yeomanry were not genteel ladies,” Izzie said, unruffled. “We got our hands very dirty. And it’s a terrible thing to label a man a coward,” she added quietly.

  “Yes, it is,” Ursula agreed. “Not so bad for a chicken though.” Teddy laughed, finding refuge in humour. He was terrified of being found wanting in the coming fight. “She chickened out,” he said, indicating the chicken on Izzie’s plate, and both he and Ursula tilted towards hysteria. “What children you are,” Sylvie said crossly. Not really, Teddy thought. They were the ones who were going to have to stand fast to defend Sylvie and her chickens, Fox Corner, the last remaining freedoms.

  The contents of his sister’s letters to him in Canada had been sparse (“the Official Secrets Act, and so on”), but reading between the lines he gathered that she had had a pretty awful time of it. Teddy had not yet been tested in battle, but his sister had.

  She had been right about the war, of course, it had indeed been “bloody.” In the luxuriously warm safety of plush Canadian cinemas he had eaten his way through bags of popcorn while he watched, in horror, newsreels of the Blitz attacks on Britain. And Rotterdam. And Warsaw. And France had indeed fallen. Teddy imagined the fields of sunflowers ploughed into mud by tanks. (They weren’t, they were still there.)

  “Yes, you’ve missed a lot,” Sylvie said, as if he had entered a theatre late for a play. His mother was now apparently very au fait with the events of the war and surprisingly bellicose, which was easy, Teddy supposed, from the relative comfort of Fox Corner. “She’s been seduced by the propaganda,” Ursula said, as if Sylvie wasn’t there.

  “And you haven’t?” Teddy said.

  “I prefer facts.”

  “What a Gradgrind you’ve become,” Sylvie said.

  “Hardly.”

  “And what do the facts say?” Izzie asked, and Ursula, who knew a girl in the Air Ministry, didn’t say that Teddy’s chances of surviving his first operational sortie were, at best, slim, and that his chances of surviving his first tour were almost non-existent, but instead said brightly, “That it’s a just war.”

  “Oh, good,” Izzie said, “one would so hate to be fighting an unjust one. You will be on the side of the angels, darling boy.”

  “Angels are British then?” Teddy said.

  “Indubitably.”

  Has it been very bad?” he had asked Ursula when he met her off the train that morning. She looked pale and drawn, someone who had been indoors too long, or in combat perhaps. Was she still seeing her man from the Admiralty, he wondered?

  “Let’s not talk about the war just now. But yes, it has been pretty awful.”

  They made a detour to visit the churchyard where Hugh was buried. From within the church they could hear the thin voices of the Sunday-morning congregation straining over “Praise My Soul, the King of Heaven.”

  Hugh’s grey headstone with its seemingly bland inscription—Beloved father and husband—was still harsh in its newness. The last time Teddy saw his father he had been tangible flesh and now that flesh was rotting in a hole beneath his feet. “Best to avoid morbid thoughts,” Ursula counselled, advice that would stand him in good stead for the next three years. For the rest of his life, in fact. Teddy found himself thinking what a decent human being his father had been, the best of all the family really. The grief caught him unawares.

  Beloved father and husband—it’s so sad, not bland at all,” Bertie said. It was 1999, nearly sixty years by then since his father had died. Teddy’s own life already felt like history. Bertie had asked him what he would like to do for his eighty-fifth birthday and he said he would like to have a little expedition around “old haunts,” so she hired a car and they took off from Fanning Court on what Bertie called a “road trip” and what Teddy called a “farewell tour.” He did not expect to survive much beyond the millennium and thought this would be a good way to round off a life and a century. He would have been surprised to know that he still had another decade and more ahead of him. It had been a strange and lovely trip, full of feeling (“We ran the gamut,” Bertie said afterwards) and genuine sentiment rather than just nostalgia, always a bit of a cheap emotion in Teddy’s opinion.

  By then, Hugh’s headstone had been softened by lichen and the inscription was growing quietly less legible. Sylvie was buried elsewhere in the same churchyard, as were Nancy and her parents. Teddy had no idea where Winnie and Gertie were but Millie was here, home to roost at last after a lifetime of never settling long in one place. All these people, he thought, tied to Bertie by a thin red thread, yet she would never know them.

  Pamela and Ursula, like Bea, had opted for cremation. Teddy had waited for the bluebells in the wood to flower before scattering Ursula’s ashes amongst them. The dead were legion.

  “Best to avoid morbid thoughts,” he said to Bertie.

  “What would you like on your headstone?” she asked, despite this admonishment. Teddy thought of the endless white acres of the war cemeteries. Name, rank, number. He thought of Keats, “Here lies one whose name was writ in water,” an epitaph that Ursula had always found so tragic. Or Hugh himself, who had once said, “Oh, you can just put me out with the dustbin, I won’t mind.” And written in stone on the war memorial at Runnymede, the names of the dead who had no grave at all.

  Something had changed. What? Of course—the big unruly horse chestnuts that used to shade the dead on one side of the churchyard were all gone now and small flowering cherries had been planted tamely in their stead. The old stone wall that had previously been obscured by the horse chestnuts was visible now, cleaned and newly repointed.

  “A woodland burial,” he said. “No name, nothing, just a tree. An oak if you can, but anything will do. Don’t let your mother be in charge.”

  Death was the end. Sometimes it took a whole lifetime to understand that. He thoug
ht of Sunny, journeying restlessly in search of the thing he had left behind. “Promise me you’ll make the most of your life,” he said to Bertie.

  “I promise,” Bertie said, already at twenty-four knowing it was unlikely she would be able to do so.

  Love Divine, All Loves Excelling” announced that the Sunday service was reaching its end. Teddy wandered amongst the graves. Most of the people in them had died long before his time. Ursula was picking up conkers from the stand of magnificent horse chestnuts at the far end of the churchyard. They were enormous trees and Teddy wondered if their roots had intertwined with the bones of the dead, imagined them curling a path through ribcages and braceleting ankles and fettering wrists.

  When he walked over to Ursula he found her examining a conker. The spiky green shell had split, revealing the gleaming, polished nut inside. “Fruit of the tree,” she said, handing it to him. “Media vita in morte sumus. In the midst of life we are in death. Or is it the other way round? There’s something magical, isn’t there, about seeing something brand new, something just entering the world, like a calf being born or a bud opening?” They had seen calves being born at the Home Farm when they were children. Teddy remembered feeling queasy at the sight of the slippery membrane, the cauled calf looking like something that had already been parcelled up by a butcher.

  The morning-service congregation began to spill out of the church into the sunshine. Ursula said, “You used to love playing conkers. There’s something quite medieval about little boys and their conkers. Flails—is that what those spiky weapons on sticks were called? Or is it morning stars? What a nice name for something horrible.” She rambled on. Teddy could tell she was in a mood for diversion, as a remedy against the awfulness of the war, he supposed. Ursula, he thought, knew what happened on the ground during a bombing raid. Teddy could only imagine and imagination was going to have no place in his world from now on.