A God in Ruins

by Kate Atkinson

  “I have to go,” she said, standing up abruptly, swinging her handbag on its heavy gilt chain. “You have to start considering a nursing home, Dad. ‘Care home’—that’s what they’re called these days. Money’s not an issue. I’ll help out, of course. This one here”—she tapped the Poplar Hill brochure with a pink-varnished fingernail—“is supposed to be excellent. Think about it. Think where you would like to go.”

  Fox Corner, he thought. That’s where I’d like to go.

  Teddy didn’t fight Nancy’s sudden desire to move and when the job came up on the Yorkshire Evening Press he applied and a few weeks later they moved to York. (It was swift, like an incision.) Nancy easily found part-time work in the maths department at the Mount, a Quaker school, and returned to the relief of educating clever, well-behaved girls. Viola took up a place in the junior school. Nancy liked the Society of Friends, she said, it was the nearest Christianity could get to agnosticism.

  Teddy knew York from the war. Then, it had been a mysterious maze of dark, narrow streets and snickets. It had been a place to go drinking and dancing, carousing in Bettys Bar or shuffling girls around the De Grey rooms, a place of fumbled kisses with willing girls in the tenebrous blackout. In the light of peace York was a less veiled city, its history on show everywhere. He liked it more in the daylight yet it remained a place of secrets, as if whenever one layer had been unearthed another one was waiting to be discovered. One’s own life seemed puny against the background of so much history. It was a strange comfort to think of how many had gone before, how many had been forgotten. It was the natural order of things.

  The house they bought—a solid semi in the suburbs—wasn’t the kind that Teddy had ever imagined living in. Unlike Mouse Cottage and Ayswick, it had no name, only a number, which suited its bland anonymity. No “character” at all. The new Nancy, the one who didn’t go about truffling primroses, embraced it—“sensible and practical,” she called it. They installed central heating, fitted carpets and modernized both kitchen and bathroom. It had no aesthetic virtues whatsoever in Teddy’s eyes. Sylvie would have been appalled, but she had already been dead for two years by then, felled by a stroke while she was pruning her roses. They always used the possessive pronoun—the roses belonged to no one but their mother. Now they didn’t even exist—“dug up,” according to Pamela, by the new owners of Fox Corner. “The trick, I suppose,” Ursula said, “is not to mind.” But he did. And so did she.

  For months after they moved to York, Teddy would wake in the morning and feel a pang of sorrow as he listened to a subdued suburban dawn chorus competing with the low rumble of traffic from somewhere—the A64, he guessed. He missed having a wild green world on his doorstep—no rabbits or pheasants or badgers in York, only peacocks in the Museum Gardens. He didn’t see another fox until the mangy urban species started raiding the bins around the back of Fanning Court. Teddy sneaked leftovers out to them, covert charity that left Ann Schofield reeling with horror. They were vermin, she said. (“She’s the vermin,” Bertie said. Sometimes Bertie reminded him of Sylvie—the best of her, at any rate.)

  The new house had a generous back garden and he bought a Reader’s Digest book on gardening. A garden, as far as Teddy could see, was nature tamed and constrained by artifice. His wings had been clipped, like Tweetie, the blue budgerigar that Viola had insisted on for her birthday. “A robin redbreast in a cage,” Teddy murmured when Nancy returned home from the pet shop with the bird. “I know, I know,” she said, “puts all heaven in a rage. But budgerigars are bred for captivity. It’s a shame, but they don’t know anything else.”

  “That must be a great consolation to them,” Teddy said.

  Their other little POW, the hapless Goldie, did not survive the house move. In Blake’s litany of wrongdoing there was nothing about a goldfish in a bowl, but he would surely not have approved. Viola was upset at the sight of the pale, floating corpse and Teddy rooted out his old Goldfish Club badge and showed it to her. “Imagine him with wings,” he advised, “rising up to heaven.”

  Tweetie proved to be a misnamed bird, never uttering a single chirp in his whole short life, most of which he spent either pecking listlessly at his cuttlefish bone or paddling from one foot to another on his wooden perch. Better perhaps, Teddy thought, in a fleeting moment of identification with the morose creature, to be Icarus and embrace the fall.

  Away? Again?” he said, making an effort to sound casual.

  “Yes, again,” she said lightly. “That’s all right with you, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, of course,” Teddy said. “It’s just…” He hesitated, not sure how to give voice to his misgivings.

  This would be the third time Nancy had been away in as many months, each time to visit one of her sisters. Firstly, she had gone down to Dorset to help Gertie move house, and this was quickly followed by a trip to the Lakes with Millie. (“Wordsworth’s cottage and so on.”) Millie was leading a rather rackety life in Brighton and was “between husbands” at the moment. “She probably needs a sympathetic ear,” Nancy said.

  Nancy claimed to be “a homebody,” not even keen on decamping for their annual seaside holiday. Every summer, the three of them, “the family triumvirate” as Nancy called it—according Viola equal power with her parents, Teddy noted, although really they were not so much a triumvirate as a tiny tyrant and her two dedicated attendants—took a dutiful holiday on the east coast—Bridlington, Scarborough, Filey. This was for Viola’s benefit rather than their own. “Bucket and spade,” Nancy said, that was all a small child needed, and persisted heroically in this belief as the triumvirate sheltered, shivering, in the lee of hired windbreaks or took refuge in damp and steamy tea-shops after eating the liver-sausage sandwiches that their boarding-house landlady packed up for them every morning.

  It was less of a holiday and more of an endurance test. “Can we go home yet?” was Viola’s constant refrain, echoed silently by Teddy. They stayed in boarding houses from which their dog was exiled and so it was at these times that Viola’s stark status as an only child was most apparent. She wasn’t very good at playing by herself and even less so with others.

  A wind-whipped Yorkshire coast wasn’t Teddy’s idea of a holiday. The North Sea was the graveyard of many of the incorporeal dead at Runnymede, the sea-bed littered with the rich and strange. Two of the worst nights of his war had been spent helplessly floating on its uncharitable waves. (Well, good luck to you then.) When Viola was a bit older, Nancy said, they would go further afield—Wales, Cornwall. “Europe,” Teddy said. The solid blocks of colour. The hot slices of sunshine.

  Yet now Nancy was proposing a visit to Bea in London. (“Just a couple of nights, take in a show, maybe an exhibition.”) It was late, nearly bedtime, and she was still marking homework. Teddy could see columns of fractions that were meaningless to him. “Show me your workings,” Nancy wrote in neat red pen and then paused and looked up at him. She always wore such a frank, guileless expression, it invited confession, promised absolution. He imagined her pupils adored her.

  “Well, anyway,” Nancy said, “I thought I would leave for London on Wednesday evening and be back on Friday. Viola will be at school while you’re at work and after school she can go home with her friend—Sheila—and wait for you to pick her up.” (How detailed this scheme was, Teddy thought. Wouldn’t it be easier for everyone if she simply visited Bea at the weekend?) “You don’t mind holding the fort, do you? And Viola will love spending some time alone with you.”

  “Will she?” Teddy said, somewhat ruefully. Viola, nearly nine now, still doted on her mother, while Teddy seemed to be merely a parental necessity.

  “I won’t go if you don’t want me to,” Nancy said. What a polite conversation this was, Teddy thought. What if he said, “No, don’t go,” what would she say then? Instead he said, “Don’t be silly, why wouldn’t I want you to? Of course you should go, no earthly reason why not. And I can reach you at Bea’s if there are any problems.”

  “I’m su
re you won’t need to,” Nancy said and added casually, “and we’ll be out a lot, I expect.”

  When Nancy had been in the Lakes there had been no telephone in the cottage that Millie had rented. When she had helped Gertie move house the new telephone had not yet been connected. “If there’s a dreadful emergency,” Nancy said breezily, “or some terrible accident occurs” (it was tempting fate to refer to such things so glibly, Teddy thought), “you can put out one of those announcements you hear on the radio. You know—the police are trying to contact—whoever—believed to be in the Westmorland area. Please get in touch, and so on.” Forty years later, when he was living in Fanning Court, Viola gave him a mobile phone and said, “There, now you’ll never be out of touch. If you have another accident” (she meant the broken hip, she never let him forget this mishap, as if it had exposed a great flaw in his character) “or get lost or something.”

  “Lost?”

  He never learned how to use the phone. The buttons were too small, the instructions too complicated. “Old dog, new tricks,” he said to Bertie. “And anyway why would I want to be ‘in touch’ all the time?”

  “There’s nowhere for anyone to hide these days,” she said.

  “In the imagination,” he offered.

  “Even there,” Bertie said grimly, “you’re not safe.”

  Good,” Nancy said. “I’ll go on Wednesday then. That’s settled.” She started stacking the homework jotters tidily on top of each other. “All finished. Why don’t you heat up the milk for some cocoa?” She gave him a quizzical smile and said, “Is everything all right? We don’t have to bother with cocoa, if you don’t want.”

  “No,” he said, “it’s fine. I’ll do it.” Show me your workings, Nancy, he thought.

  When Nancy had been unreachable in Dorset, helping Gertie to move house, Teddy had been surprised when the phone rang and it was Gertie herself (although her phone was supposedly not yet connected). A woman not given to preamble, she said, “You know that big oak sideboard in my dining room, the Arts and Crafts one that used to be in the dining room at Jackdaws?”

  “The one with copper hinges and the De Morgan tiles?” Teddy said. Clearly, he did know it.

  “That’s the one. There’s no room for it in this new house—no room for hardly anything,” she added cheerfully and Teddy remembered how much he liked Gertie and why. “Anyway,” she carried on, “I know you’ve always admired it and so I thought you might like to have it. I can stick it on a van, one of those part-load ones, it shouldn’t cost too much. Otherwise I’m afraid it might have to go into a sale.”

  “That’s very kind of you. I’d love it, but,” he added doubtfully, “I’m not sure that we have room.” He thought wistfully of Ayswick and how handsome the sideboard would have looked in the big farmhouse kitchen, but here, within the blandly ordinary walls of the York semi, it would surely look quite out of place. He was surprised by a sudden pang of desire—it was a piece of furniture that he remembered well from the Shawcrosses’ house. From the past. “What does Nancy say about it?”

  “I’ve no idea,” Gertie said. “Why don’t you ask her yourself?”

  “Can you put her on?”

  “Put her on?” Gertie said. “What do you mean?”

  “Put her on the phone.”

  “Can I put her on the phone?” Gertie sounded baffled.

  “She’s there with you,” Teddy said, wondering how they had achieved such a cross-purpose with each other.

  “No, she’s not,” Gertie said.

  “She’s not in Lyme Regis? With you? Helping you move?”

  There was an awkward silence before Gertie said cautiously, “No, not here.” Teddy sensed that she was anxious that she might have betrayed Nancy in some way and his first instinct (curiously) was to save Gertie from the flap she was getting into, so he said genially, “Oh, don’t worry, I’ve got mixed up. I’ll chase her down and get back to you. The sideboard is a lovely offer, by the way. Thank you, Gertie.” He got off the phone quickly, needing to review this odd information. I’m going down to Lyme to give Gertie a hand with her house move. It was hardly a statement that was open to misinterpretation.

  If there had been something that Nancy had not wanted him to know, something that had necessitated her pretending to be in Dorset with Gertie, then surely she must have a reason? He knew she could lie with grace when necessary but Nancy was not furtive, in fact quite the opposite. Sometimes he felt that the intimacy of their marriage had been based on her breaching the Official Secrets Act. When she returned from “Dorset” he asked her nothing, other than “How was the move?” to which she replied, “Good, all went well.”

  “Gertie’s new house is nice, is it?”

  “Mm. Very nice,” she said rather vaguely and he left it at that, not wishing to seem as if he were interrogating her. Instead he would wait and see if something developed from this omission. Adultery was not high on his list of suspects, he found it almost impossible to consider Nancy as the sort of wife who would hoodwink a husband. He had always thought of her—still thought of her—as irreproachable, scrupulous in both thinking and doing the right thing. Nancy was not the sort to feign innocence. But then nor was she the sort to misdirect. If she had lied to him it must be a lie based on utilitarian principles. Perhaps there was a surprise hidden at the heart of this sleight of hand—a birthday treat or a family reunion? With Sylvie dead and Fox Corner sold it seemed there was nothing left to shepherd the whole Todd family together any more. Teddy and his more stalwart siblings—Ursula and Pamela—never seemed to be together in the same place at the same time, except at funerals. No weddings—there didn’t seem to be weddings any more, why was that? “It’s because we’re between generations,” Nancy said. “It’ll be Viola’s turn soon enough.”

  Viola was the solitary arrow they had shot blindly into the future, not knowing where she would land. They should have aimed better, Teddy thought as he watched her (having sidestepped marriage to Dominic, the father of her children) finally tying the knot in Leeds Town Hall to Wilf Romaine—a botched-up job of a marriage if ever there was one. “He enjoys a drink, doesn’t he?” Teddy said cautiously the first time Viola introduced him to “my new man.” “If that’s a criticism,” Viola said, “—and when have you ever done anything but find fault with me?—you can go and shove it where the sun doesn’t shine.” Oh, Viola.

  When Nancy left next, to meet up with Millie in the Lake District, Teddy vowed to himself not to check up on her like some tawdry private detective. No birthday treat or family reunion had revealed itself since her return from Dorset but that was not proof of anything underhand. He resisted picking up the phone and calling Millie’s flat to see if Millie was there, but his unease must have infected Viola, who spent the whole fretful time that Nancy was absent nagging, “When is Mummy coming back?” It gave him a legitimate reason, he argued rather speciously with himself, for chasing up his discontented wife.

  “Oh, hello there, Teddy,” Millie drawled carelessly. “Haven’t spoken to you in ages.”

  “You’re not in the Lakes with Nancy then?” he said baldly, finding himself suddenly angry. Justifiably, surely? There were a couple of beats of silence before Millie said, “Just got back. In fact I’ve just seen her on the train home to you.” She was an actress, never so good on the stage as she was now, he thought. It made no sense that Nancy would have gone all the way down to Brighton before returning home, but he had no way of proving that this was what she had done. Or not done. Teddy had never experienced jealousy before, he realized, as the tawdry private detective reared his ugly head and said, “And so how were the Lakes, Millie? What did you do exactly?”

  “Oh, you know,” she said easily. “Wordsworth’s cottage and so on.”

  Did Millie not relate this conversation to Nancy? She certainly seemed blithely unaware that he had doubted her when she declared her intention to visit Bea. (Were all of her sisters conspirators in deception? Even good-hearted Gertie and solid, m
atronly Winnie?)

  Teddy felt not forbearance but paralysis. He couldn’t ask Nancy what was going on (the obvious thing to do) because the answer would either be a lie or a truth he didn’t want to hear. So he “plodded” along (the word seemed to haunt him), although now he found everything sullied by suspicion. He brooded forensically on every nuance in Nancy’s behaviour. There was, for example, something decidedly clandestine about discovering her in the hallway one evening, leaning against the Anaglypta-papered wall, murmuring into the phone and then cutting the conversation short when she caught sight of him. “Who was that?” he asked, as if it was a matter of indifferent interest to him. “Just Bea, just idle gossip,” she said. Or the way that she was eager to be the first to pick up the post in the morning before she cycled off to school with Viola. Was she expecting something? No, not at all.

  He had come across her on more than one occasion wearing a preoccupied frown on her face or staring into the middle distance when she was stirring a sauce or making a lesson plan. “Sorry, miles away,” or “Bit of a headache,” she would say—she had become a victim of migraines in the past few months. Sometimes, too, he caught a fleeting expression of pain on her face when she looked at Viola. Torn between feelings for lover and child, he supposed. Betraying one’s husband was bad enough, but to betray one’s child was a different matter.

  He didn’t believe that she was intending to visit either London or Bea. In his imagination—by now quite lurid—his scarlet wife was conducting her debauched trysts somewhere nearby, holed up perhaps in a sordid hotel on Micklegate. (A wartime memory of his. A local girl. A regretfully dissipated encounter.)