A God in Ruins

by Kate Atkinson

  “What’s that?” Sunny asked.

  “A really bad person.”

  A solution” was found by his grandmother. A local prep school, a day school—Thomas would drive him to and fro every day. (“Oh, he will, will he?” Thomas said.) “Not a terribly good school, actually,” his grandmother said. “But that means we won’t be so embarrassed by Philip’s behaviour.” What behaviour? He was as meek as a mouse these days.

  “I’m going to school here,” he said to Grandpa Ted in the weekly phone call.

  “I know,” Teddy said, sounding almost as miserable as Sunny felt. “Your mother’s cooked it up with Antonia. I’m going to try and do something about it, all right? Until then you’re just going to have to be a stoic, Sunny.” Sunny had no idea what a stoic was but it clearly wasn’t pleasant.

  The few days before he was due to start school the weather was lovely, as if it had made a point of waiting until there was hardly any time to enjoy it. Sunny played in the overgrown neglected grounds all day long. It was boring on his own and he’d pretty much exhausted his capacity to be a solitary medieval jousting knight, Robin Hood or a jungle explorer. So it was a relief when his father said, “Let’s have an adventure, shall we, Phil?”

  Sunny felt that he might have had enough of “adventure.” He had accidentally wandered into the maze a few days ago—he was “officially banned” from it by his grandmother, but as he didn’t even know what it was it was hard to avoid it. It was a terrifying place, completely overgrown, and he had turned back almost immediately—but too late! He was already lost, beset by thorns and hedged in by privet. It was dark by the time Thomas came looking for him, whistling for him as if he were a dog. Sunny had fallen asleep amongst the harsh roots of the hedge and was woken by Thomas flashing a torch on his face and giving him a little kick with his boot to encourage him to get up.

  “Why did you do that when you were expressly told not to?” his grandmother shrieked. No care from anyone for the terror he had suffered, of course. He was pretty much used to that by now, so when his father said “adventure” a little voice inside advised caution. It was a word that usually promised much from his father but tended to deliver little. The opposite was usually true with Grandpa Ted.

  “Yes, get him out of the way for the day,” his loving grandmother said.

  For several days now Dominic had been painting, working all hours, night and day, splashing paint on canvas. “Inspired,” he said. “Doing some brilliant shit.”

  Dominic shocked them all one morning by bounding down to breakfast, a meagre meal at the best of times, and calling cheerfully for “Your finest bacon and eggs, Mrs. Kerrich!” when she sidled in with her usual pot of watery porridge. She left griping, “Oh, Gawd, ’ere we go again. ’E’s on the up.” Neither bacon nor eggs appeared, which was no surprise to Sunny, who knew the state of the pantry better than most as he spent a lot of time smuggling himself in there to scavenge for food. Slim pickings, the odd pickled onion or cold potato. Sometimes he ran his finger nervously round the inside of the marmalade pot. Mrs. Kerrich was like a hawk.

  Dominic seemed to forget immediately about the bacon and eggs and instead lit up a cigarette. His grandmother smoked a lot as well, the whole of Jordan Manor had a faint wash of yellow to the walls. Dominic’s eyes were bloodshot and he was as jumpy as a frog. “Come on then, Phil,” he said before Sunny had a chance to spoon his porridge into his mouth. “Let’s get going.”

  They had walked for hours, sustained by one messy, half-melted Mars bar that Dominic pulled apart and shared. He had taken a couple of little pink pills early in the walk, showing them in the palm of his hand to Sunny and debating with himself whether or not to give a bit of one to him. “Like maybe just a quarter of a tab?” he mused. “Because to trip as a kid, imagine what that would be like.” In the end he decided against it because he would just get “a bad rap” from “the she-wolf.”

  They drank water from a rather green-looking pond that Dominic said was a magic source of water and contained, deep down, a toad with a ruby in its forehead. “If you look closely you can see it.” Sunny couldn’t, to his father’s disappointment. They set off again, his father still rambling on about the toad. Sunny was exhausted by now. It didn’t feel much like an adventure.

  “I’m tired,” Sunny said. “Can we stop for a bit?” He was worried about how they were going to get back to Jordan Manor. Not walk all the way surely? They had come miles and his legs were getting shaky with tiredness. If Grandpa Ted was here he would have given him a piggy back and said, “Oof, I’m getting too old for this.”

  “It’s good exercise for you,” Dominic said, striding on. “Come on.”

  Sunny’s face was burning. He knew he was supposed to be wearing a hat and sun cream. He was very thirsty and they hadn’t passed any more ponds, green or otherwise. It struck Sunny that he wasn’t with someone who was actually responsible for him. His father wasn’t really a grown-up, was he? A little spear of fear stabbed him in his tummy. He wasn’t safe out here.

  They came to a wood, which was a relief because it provided a bit of shade, and Sunny found some wild raspberries which were horribly sour but at least they were food.

  They had to keep stopping all the time so that Dominic could admire the leaf of a fern or rhapsodize about a bird singing. “Can you hear that? Jesus Christ, can you hear that, Phil?” When he found a gigantic toadstool growing on a tree he dropped to his knees and stared at it. The toadstool kept him enraptured for what seemed like hours and Sunny said, “Can we go, please?” because his tummy was hurting, probably from the sour raspberries, but Dominic started leaping about and shouting, “Omigod, omigod, I can’t believe I didn’t see it—toadstools! Toad stools—the toad with the ruby in its forehead—the two are connected!”

  “Because it’s a stool for a toad?” Sunny hazarded.

  “Because the toad is the king of the toadstools—that’s the secret. That could change everything. We have the secret knowledge. Gnostic.”

  “Nosstick?”

  “Yeah. Oh, man.”

  And so it went on for quite a lot longer. Sunny thought about lying down and covering himself with leaves like a small woodland animal. He could have a nap and then maybe when he woke up he’d find himself back at Jordan Manor, or, even better, Grandpa Ted’s house. But no, they trudged on.

  Out of the wood and back into the torture of the hot sun. Dominic had stopped talking, in fact his whole mood seemed to have shifted and slipped into something darker. He was muttering to himself, but the words didn’t really make any sense.

  They were walking down a lane now, lined by big hedges, and then suddenly the lane stopped and they came out on to a small road. It was very hot on the road and Sunny’s feet were so sore he didn’t think he could walk any more. There were two white gates on the road. There was a big red circle in the middle of each gate and a little lamp on top of each of them that wasn’t lit because it wasn’t dark. They walked through the open gates and Sunny realized that they were on a railway. At last, something exciting. Was there going to be a train? Could they wait for it? “Of course,” Dominic said. “That’s probably why we were led here.” By whom, Sunny wondered? The king of the toadstools? He didn’t question this, he was just relieved that his father seemed happy again.

  Sunny had never come across a level-crossing before. He loved trains. Grandpa Ted took him to the railway museum in York all the time. He said he’d loved trains too when he was a boy.

  Sunny was expecting that they would cross over the tracks, but Dominic sat down right in the middle of the road between the two white gates and started to roll a cigarette. Sunny hovered uncertainly next to him. Sitting down on a road, especially one with railway tracks crossing it, didn’t seem like a terribly good idea, even to a seven-year-old, but on the other hand his legs and feet couldn’t take much more.

  The tracks were embedded in wood where they crossed over the tarmac and his father patted the wood next to him and said, �
�Relax, have a seat.” He lit his roll-up and discovered a flattened bag of completely melted chocolate buttons in his back pocket and looked at them in astonishment. “Wow,” he said. “Purple.”

  Sunny sat, less reluctant now that he’d seen the chocolate, and the wooden part of the road wasn’t too hot. He could see all the way along the railway track in both directions. “Cool, huh?” Dominic said. “Like a lesson in perspective. Do you know about perspective?” He didn’t.

  “You’ve got to paint something smaller the further away it is. It took people, like, thousands of years to work that out.”

  Sunny’s leg touched one of the metal rails and he gave a little yelp because it was so hot. “Yeah, the sun, man,” Dominic said. “It’s hot. Like, and you’re the sun, right?” His father wasn’t really speaking sentences, Sunny thought, just jumbled thoughts. “And toad and Todd! Can’t be a coincidence that the two words are so similar, can it? Ra. Apollo. They would have been cool names too, but we called you Sun. Our Sun.” (Or perhaps he said “son.” Sunny’s name always led to confusion.)

  “I’m Philip now,” Sunny reminded him. He was covered in melted chocolate, which was exactly the kind of thing that got you into trouble with “the she-wolf” but he was too sleepy now to care. He began to nod off, leaning against his father’s thin, agitated body. “And with parallel lines, like the railway track, then you have to have a vanishing point.” Sleep seemed like the most delicious thing. Dominic’s incoherent thoughts—sun worship, perspective, toadstools—faded pleasantly away.

  He was woken up by bells ringing and lights flashing and saw that the two white gates were moving slowly, closing off the road. Were they going to be trapped? Finally the gates clanged noisily shut. “Wow,” Dominic said. “This is going to be amazing, you don’t want to miss it.” Sunny suspected that he did and he tried to stand up, but Dominic pulled him back down. “Trust me, Phil, you’re going to want to see this. Oh, man—look, it’s coming. See the train? See it? Unbefuckinglievable.”

  Dominic stood up suddenly, yanking Sunny to his feet.

  The small object that was far away—the three-thirty from King’s Cross to Norwich, as it would be explained later at the inquest—was growing larger and larger, its perspective changing by the second. “Stay, stay,” Dominic urged as if Sunny was a dog. “What’s wrong with you? Don’t you want to experience this? It’s going to be mind-blowing. Now! Aargh!—” No, not exactly “aargh”—that was something Augustus would have said, not a man being hit full in the face by an express train.

  Rightio, this must be it,” Teddy said. In the back of the car Bertie slurped the dregs from her juice box and looked around with interest.

  A sign affixed to one of the pillars of the arched sandstone gateway announced “Jordan Manor” and beneath that another sign said, “Private.” Teddy wondered if this was a biblical Jordan or if it referred to someone’s name. A few years ago he would have considered Jordan to be a surname. He had known a WAAF called Nellie Jordan during the war (and, no, not in a biblical way), but apparently nowadays it was used as a Christian name—there was a Jordan (a boy) in Bertie’s class at school. There was also, along with the usual clutch of Hannahs and Emmas, a Saffron and a Willow (both girls), and a Dharma (a pale, skinny child whose gender Teddy had never been able to determine). In Sunny’s class there had been a girl called Squirrel. At least it was a name that couldn’t be shortened, that was something that had occupied Nancy when they had named Viola. “Will people call her ‘Vi,’ do you think? I do hope not.” As the years rolled on Teddy found himself occasionally wondering about Squirrel. Did she change her name or, somewhere in the adult world, was there a teacher or a solicitor or a housewife who answered to “Squirrel”?

  Any of the aforementioned professions seemed unlikely, given the kind of school it was. Rudolf Steiner—“child-centred education,” according to Viola, unlike Viola herself, who was not really very child-centred at all. And now she was a recusant and had approved the Villierses’ choice of a local fee-paying prep school for poor Sunny. It was bad enough that she had more or less washed her hands of him but she had also separated him from his sister. Teddy could imagine only too well the pain he himself would have felt if at the tender age of seven he had been deprived of Ursula and Pamela. And what if the Villierses changed their mind about Bertie? Would Viola let them have her too?

  “Dom’s parents can give Sunny all kinds of advantages,” Viola said to Teddy. “He’s the Villierses’ heir, after all, and Dom’s been reconciled to the family. He’s moved back, in fact, and he’s working on his paintings.” Teddy had a tendency to forget that Dominic was an artist, perhaps because he was so spectacularly unsuccessful at it. “And you must agree it would be good for Sunny to have a father back in his life again.” And so on, endlessly justifying her decision to abandon her child. Money, and her need for it, was at the root of it all, Teddy suspected.

  Of course, the original proposal had been for “a couple of weeks” in the school holidays and Teddy hadn’t realized that there might be a longer-term plan afoot. Now it seemed that Sunny was to remain with the Villierses (“For ever?” Bertie said, a look of horror on her face). He was a sensitive child and it seemed quite wrong to Teddy’s mind to uproot him like this and expect him to flourish with people who were more or less strangers to him. Without mentioning it to Viola, Teddy had been to see his solicitor and set in motion an appeal to the family courts for custody of his grandchildren. He wasn’t too hopeful about the outcome, but someone had to be their champion, surely?

  The impressive cast-iron gates to Jordan Manor were wide open and they drove through unimpeded. It had taken longer to drive to Norfolk than Teddy had calculated. He had never been here before, to the rump on the map of England. They had been on a single-track road for the last tortuous half-hour, stuck behind slow-moving farm vehicles and recalcitrant sheep. Their provisions were more or less used up. They had sustained themselves on the journey with cheese-and-pickle sandwiches on white bread, salt-and-vinegar crisps and KitKats—all of which were strictly forbidden by Viola, who had left “dietary suggestions” (“nothing with a face”) with Teddy for Bertie and Sunny—meals such as “millet-and-spinach casserole” and “noodle-and-tofu bake.” He could cope with them being vegetarians (“I don’t eat dead animals, Grandpa Ted,” Bertie said), it was an admirable regime in many ways, but not with Viola’s edicts from on high. “My house, my rules,” Teddy said. “And that means no budgerigar food.” He remembered buying sprays of millet for Viola’s budgie, Tweetie. Poor bird, he thought, even all these years later.

  The vegetarianism, the Steiner school, the traipse across town to Woodcraft Folk meetings, Teddy was willing to comply with all of these if it meant that Viola allowed them to stay safely beneath his roof. He had been wrong to let Sunny go to the Villierses. Viola had swanned off down south to demonstrate against cruise missiles and when Teddy had mildly suggested that her duties as a parent, and a single one at that, might trump the need for world peace, she said that was the most ridiculous thing she’d ever heard as she was trying to secure the future of all the children in the world, which seemed a bit of a tall order for one person. The last time she had gone down to protest she had taken Sunny and Bertie with her and camped at Greenham Common for several days. The children begged not to go again—“cold” and “hungry” seemed to be the words that summed up their experience and they had been frightened by the Thames Valley police on horseback treating women like football hooligans. Next time, Viola said, she was hoping to get arrested. Teddy said most people went through their lives hoping not to get arrested, and Viola said he didn’t understand non-violence and did he ever think about the thousands of innocent people he had bombed during the war? She was a mistress of non sequiturs. “That’s got nothing to do with it,” Teddy said, and Viola said, “It has everything to do with it.” (Did it? He no longer knew. Ursula would have had an answer.) In the end Teddy said, “Sunny and Bertie can stay with me,” and Viola
looked like Atlas might have looked if someone had said to him that it was OK, he could put the world down now.

  That was several months ago and they had settled into a routine. Love had always seemed to Teddy to be a practical act as much as anything—school concerts, clean clothes, regular mealtimes. Sunny and Bertie seemed to agree. They had previously been subject to Viola’s whimsical mothering (“I was a terrible mother!” she cries gaily, Mother and Baby magazine, 2007. “You were,” Bertie agreed).

  Teddy still had the chickens and bees at the time and the children loved both. They played outside a lot. Teddy hung a swing from the branch of one of the big pear trees at the bottom of the garden. They had expeditions into the countryside around York, to the water lilies in Pocklington, to Castle Howard and Helmsley, to the Dales in lambing time, to Fountains Abbey, to Whitby. The North Sea seemed less forlorn in the company of Bertie and Sunny. They loved hiking along ferny trails or having picnics on the purple moors. They were vigilant for adders, butterflies and hawks. (Were they really Viola’s children?) Teddy was retired now and the children filled a lot of the spaces in his life. And he filled a big space in theirs.

  He started to make long-term plans. Perhaps he should move them to a state school, join them up for Cubs and Brownies rather than Woodcraft Folk, and then, out of the blue, Viola phoned and gave these new instructions for Sunny. Teddy had baulked at the idea of Sunny going to Jordan Manor, but what could he do? Viola was the one with all the rights. All this time, Viola had given the impression that she was living at the peace camp and only when she returned months later did he discover that she had gone off with Wilf Romaine after some big CND demo in Hyde Park and they had been “shacked up,” as she put it, in Leeds ever since. The first he knew of it was when she said, “I’m getting married next week, do you want to come?”