“Excuse me,” she said.
“OK,” he said.
“No, excuse me.”
“Yes, OK.”
“You forgot to say ‘excuse me.’ ”
But it was too late, he had to do a number two, right this second. He made a snap decision as to which would be the lesser of two evils—shorts on or off. What would Mr. Manners do? Not dirtying his shorts seemed the decent thing to do, so he followed the dogs’ example and squatted on the carpet.
His grandmother screamed as if she’d been confronted by a murderer. “What are you doing?”
“A shit,” he said, in the frenzy of the moment reaching for the word that his mother frequently used (“call a spade a spade”).
“A what?” She didn’t seem to be able to get her breath and reached to some ornamental thing (a jardinière actually) for support, sending it crashing to the ground. The commotion brought both Mrs. Kerrich and Thomas running.
“Yew filthy narsty little braaat,” Mrs. Kerrich said.
But the dogs did it! “Little sausages,” he said, appealing to his grandmother. Mr. Treadwell had arrived by now. It was incredibly embarrassing having all these people gathered around in this situation.
“You are the most disgusting boy who ever lived,” his grandmother shouted at him and he shouted right back, “And you’re a cunt!”
Whump! Somebody (Thomas, it turned out later) hit him and sent him skittering across the floor and spinning into the nearest wall.
He was sent to his room. “No supper for yew, li’ul Lord Fauntleroy,” Mrs. Kerrich said. “Yew’ll be lucky if you’re ever fed again.” His head was horribly sore where it had smashed into the wall. He wished he’d been run over by the train.
He was fed again. Mrs. Kerrich brought him a bowl of porridge the next morning and advised him to stay in his room and “lie low today,” which was where he was, lying very low indeed, when Teddy and Bertie arrived at Jordan Manor.
Eventually, after much pulling on the bell, the front door of Jordan Manor creaked suspiciously open.
Mrs. Kerrich led them down a long hallway. From the state of the hall, and the occasional glimpse through the open doors of the rooms that led off it, the neglect in the house was clear. “A touch of the Miss Havishams,” Teddy murmured to Bertie. They were taken into an enormous drawing room, occupied only by the now rather shrunken figure of Antonia. The Colonel was parked in the leaking conservatory as after Dominic’s death no one had the patience for him.
“Sorry to drop in unannounced, Antonia,” Teddy said.
They were all too tired to get home that night, so Teddy stopped off at a farmhouse that did B&B and then set off bright and early the next morning. “To market, to market to buy a fat pig,” Bertie said as Teddy started the car engine. It seemed to take even longer on the way back and both Bertie and Sunny slept soundly for the last part of the journey, curled up like kittens on the back seat of Teddy’s car.
Teddy had expected to have a bit of a fight on his hands with Antonia, but she’d given Sunny back without a struggle. “Take him,” she said, “you’re welcome to him.” Sunny had a nasty bruise on the side of his head and Teddy said to her, “I ought to call the police,” but he was really just glad to get Sunny out of that place.
Teddy put his hand out to touch Sunny and he flinched. Teddy tried again more slowly, as you would with a nervous dog, palm downward, and capped Sunny’s shorn head in his hand and felt his heart break for the boy.
The Colonel died the following summer but Antonia carried on rotting away for many more years. Social Services got involved and Thomas and Mrs. Kerrich were prosecuted for stealing from her. (“It were only li’ul things,” Mrs. Kerrich said in her defence.) They had also tried and failed to get her to change her will in their favour (she was ga-ga too by then, as if it were catching). Her will was still made out to Dominic when she died, so Bertie and Sunny inherited everything. Probate took years—shades of Bleak House in more ways than one, Teddy thought. By the time Jordan Manor was sold and death duties were paid they were left with a few thousand each. Bertie bought a new car and Sunny gave his money away to an orphanage in India.
As if by some instinct both children woke up when they rounded the corner into Teddy’s street. “Home again, home again, jiggety-jig,” Bertie said sleepily as Teddy parked the car in the driveway.
He had left Tinker with a neighbour and when she opened her front door and said, “Hello there, Ted, did you have a nice time?” Tinker nosed his way politely past her legs to greet them. Sunny’s heart was so full he could hardly speak and when Teddy said, “How about we go inside? I know I need a cup of tea and I’m sure you’d like some milk and cake, wouldn’t you, Sunny? I made your favourite—chocolate,” Sunny thought his heart would burst and spill over with happiness. “Yes please, Grandpa Ted,” Sunny said. “Thank you, thank you very much, thank you,” and Teddy said, “No need to thank me, Sunny.”
1943
Teddy’s War
A Thing of Beauty
He caught the scent of the last of the wild roses on the warm, dusty breeze. There were already many quite large hips on the bushes that were entangled with the hedgerow, but a few late blooms still lingered in the heat of the dog days. The dog paused momentarily and raised its nose to the sky as if it too was savouring the dregs of this sweetness.
“Rosa canina. Dog roses,” Teddy said to the dog, as if it might appreciate the name. “Dog days,” he added for good measure. The dog had no way of naming things for itself and so Teddy had dutifully taken it upon himself to lexiconize the world for it.
They were two old dogs out for a walk and they both had the hollow look around the eyes that went with age or ordeal. In reality, Teddy had no idea how old the dog might be, but he knew it had experienced a bad time during the Blitz and Teddy, at the age of twenty-nine, was an ancient (“the old man” he had heard himself called, affectionately) compared to the rest of the crew. The dog was called Lucky, which it was. Named by his sister (“an awful cliché, sorry”) after she had rescued it from the streets of beleaguered London. “Thought your squadron might like a mascot,” she said.
The last time he had taken a dog for a walk in the lane was before the war—Harry, the Shawcrosses’ dog. Harry died when Teddy was training in Canada and Nancy had written, “Sorry for the ‘radio silence.’ I couldn’t put pen to paper for a while, just writing the words ‘Harry has died’ made me so sad.” Her letter had arrived the same day as the telegram informing him of Hugh’s death and although it was a lesser grief he nonetheless had space in his heart for sorrow at the news.
Lucky ran ahead and started barking, transfixed by something in the hedgerow—a vole or a shrew, perhaps. Or nothing at all—he was a city dog and the countryside and its inhabitants were a mystery to him. He could be spooked by a low-flying bird but remain indifferent to four Rolls-Royce Merlin engines roaring overhead. They should have had Bristol Hercules engines on the Halifaxes to begin with, that was what they were designed for, and the Merlins had never performed as they should have done. At least the Halifaxes had had their tail-fins modified, thanks in part to good old Cheshire, who had pressed the powers-that-be to change the old triangular tail-fins that could cause you to go into a lethal stall if you had to corkscrew, but unfortunately they still had the Merlins. Teddy supposed that someone—someone like Maurice in the Air Ministry—had made the decision to put the Merlins in. Economy or stupidity or both, as the two usually went hand in hand. The Hercules—
“Oh, please, darling,” Nancy said, “let’s not think about the war. I’m so tired of it. Let’s talk about something more interesting than the mechanics of bombing.”
Teddy was silenced by this remark. He tried to think of something more interesting, and couldn’t. Actually, the Halifax engines had been the prelude to an anecdote that he knew Nancy would want to hear, but now something cantankerous in him decided not to offer it up to her. And of course he wanted to talk about the war and “the me
chanics of bombing”—that was his life and was almost certainly going to be his death, but he supposed she couldn’t understand that, locked away as she was in her ivory tower of secrets.
“Well, we can talk about what you do all day long,” he said, rather meanly, and she held his hand tighter and said, “Oh, you know I can’t. Afterwards, I’ll tell you everything. I promise.” How odd it must be, Teddy thought, to believe in an afterwards.
This was a couple of days ago and they had been strolling along a seaside promenade. (“Sea,” he said to an ecstatic Lucky.) If you could manage to ignore the trappings of coastal defence all around them (difficult, admittedly) it might have seemed a normal activity for a couple on a summer’s day. By some miracle Nancy had managed to synchronize her leave with his. “A tryst!” she said. “How romantic!” Teddy had gone straight from debriefing after a raid on Gelsenkirchen—and the customary bacon-and-egg reward for staying alive during an op—to the train station, from whence he had undertaken an interminable journey to King’s Cross. Nancy had met him on the platform and it had seemed romantic, in the way of films and novels anyway (although the first thing that came to mind was Anna Karenina). It was only when he caught sight of her eager face that he realized he had forgotten what she looked like. He had no photo of her, which was something he thought that he really ought to rectify. She had put her arms around him and said, “Darling, I’ve missed you so much. And you have a dog! You never said.”
“Yes, Lucky.” He had had the dog for a while now. He must have forgotten to mention it to her.
She crouched down and made a fuss of the dog. Perhaps slightly more of a fuss than she had made of Teddy, Teddy thought. Not that he resented that.
He had expected they would stay in London but she said it would be “nice to get away” for the night (she seemed intent on forgetting the war) and so they had crossed town to another station and taken a train to the coast. She had booked a room in a large hotel (“guest-house landladies are far too nosy”) and had come prepared with a wedding ring (“Woolworth’s”). They discovered that the hotel was full of naval officers and their wives, although it was mostly the landlocked wives as the officers seemed to be busy elsewhere, doing whatever it was naval officers did when they were ashore. Teddy had felt rather self-conscious in his RAF uniform.
One of the officers’ wives had come up to him while he was waiting in the bar for Nancy to appear and, touching him on the forearm, said, “I just wanted to tell you that I think you chaps are doing a splendid job. It’s not all about the Senior Service, even though they think it is, of course.” Teddy had never thought it was—as far as he could see, the bombers were the only ones taking the war to the enemy—but he smiled and nodded politely and said, “Thanks.” He felt more pressure from her hand on his arm and smelt her gardenia scent. She took out a cigarette case and said, “Would you like one?” and she was just leaning in to catch the flame from his lighter when Nancy appeared, looking lovely in pale blue, and the officer’s wife said, “Gosh, is this your wife, aren’t you a lucky man? Just cadging a light,” she added for Nancy’s benefit and drifted rather gracefully away.
“That was well done,” Nancy laughed. “She saved herself with the manner of her exit.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, darling, don’t be naïve, surely you understood what she was after?”
“What?”
“You, naturally.”
Yes, of course he had known that, and he wondered what would have happened if he had been on his own. He supposed he would have gone to bed with her. He was continually surprised by how forward the war had made women and he was in a state of mind that made him easy prey. She had lovely shoulders and a certain panache, as if she knew her own worth.
“She would have eaten you alive,” Nancy said. She was presuming, he noticed, that he wouldn’t have liked that. Or that he wouldn’t have been up to it somehow. “I’ll have a gin, please,” she added.
“You look lovely,” Teddy said.
“Why, thank you, kind sir. And you look very handsome.”
Nancy had been right, he admitted rather grudgingly to himself, it was nice to get away. He woke early and found that his arm was trapped awkwardly beneath her body. The bed sheets smelt of her lily of the valley, more wholesome than cloying gardenia.
The seagulls must have woken him. They were making a dreadful racket but he rather liked their rowdiness. He realized what an inland life he had been living since the war began (flying over the North Sea in the dark didn’t really count as “seaside”). The light had a quite different quality too, even the little that had found its way through the gap in the heavy brocade curtains. They had rather a good room, French windows opening on to a wrought-iron balcony and a sea view. Nancy said that she had paid “a king’s ransom” for the room and they had only got it because a rear admiral didn’t need it for the night. She was very au fait with naval ranks, much more so than Teddy, who had an airman’s contempt for the other forces. Naval codes, he thought, that must be what she was working on.
The dog, attuned to his every breath, had woken up at the same time. They had made a bed for it overnight in a drawer that they had pulled from the dressing-table and padded with a spare blanket foraged from the wardrobe. “Gosh,” Nancy said, “that looks more comfortable than our own bed.” Teddy—absurdly in his own eyes—felt self-conscious about making love to Nancy with the dog in the same room. He imagined it regarding them with perplexity if not downright alarm, but when he had glanced over at the drawer in the middle of the “act” (“Is everything all right, darling?” Nancy asked) the dog appeared to be fast asleep. Discretion being the better part of valour.
He suspected that the well-appointed drawer had indeed provided a better night’s sleep than the rear admiral’s mattress, a lumpy horsehair thing that was almost as hard as the RAF “biscuits.” When he woke Teddy felt as stiff and cramped as if he’d just spent nine hours in a Halifax. Nancy had been right again—she generally was—he would not have been up to the attentions of the naval officer’s wife last night. He was far too exhausted to have survived her arachnoid charms.
Before Lucky could wake Nancy by jumping up on the bed, something he was allowed to do in Teddy’s quarters, he extricated himself from the sheets and slid his feet noiselessly to the floor. The windows had been left wide open all night and he slipped between the curtains and out on to the balcony, stretching his arms above his head and filling his lungs with the clean air. There was a salty smack to it that felt like a relief. The dog joined him and he wondered what it made of the view. “Sea,” he reminded it. Two nights ago his new aircraft, Q-Queenie, had made an emergency landing at Carnaby. Carnaby was on the coast and equipped with an extra-large runway to catch the poor crippled strays limping home across the North Sea, as well as those, like Q-Queenie, who were simply lost in the murk. Carnaby was equipped with “FIDO,” an acronym whose meaning Teddy had forgotten, only that it was something to do with fog. The runway was limned with fuel pipes containing thousands of gallons of petrol that could be ignited in case of fog to guide the lost and wounded home.
When he was safely returned to his own airfield Teddy had found himself telling the dog, his own Fido, about Carnaby, thinking it would be interested because of the name. That was the moment at which he realized that he had possibly become unhinged. He laughed at the memory now and scratched the top of the dog’s head. What did it matter? The whole world was unhinged.
The balcony had suffered in the sea air, large spots of rust showed through the white paint. The whole country was in a state of disrepair. How long, Teddy wondered, before it became irreversible, before Britain crumbled away in rust and dust?
He didn’t hear the discreet knock on the door that signalled the tray of morning tea they had ordered the night before and was surprised when Nancy stepped on to the balcony next to him and handed him a cup and saucer. She was wearing serviceable cotton pyjamas, “not really honeymoon wear,” she said.<
br />
“Is this a honeymoon?” Teddy asked, sipping the tea, already cooling in the morning air.
“No, but we should have one, don’t you think? First we would have to get married, of course. Shall we? Get married?”
“Now?” Teddy said, rather thrown. For a moment he thought perhaps she had arranged it as a surprise, a special licence in a local church, and he half expected a crowd of Todds and Shawcrosses to burst into the room, spouting congratulations. He thought of Vic Bennett who had never got to his wedding and what a knees-up it would have been, despite Lillian’s condition. He felt guilty about the fact that he had not stayed in touch and knew nothing of Vic’s child. Edward. Or a girl, perhaps. Lillian and the child would go on, but Vic was being slowly erased day by day until the time would come when no one would remember him. He said you were the best man he’d ever known. Vic should have lived longer, Teddy thought, he would have come to know many who were better.
“No. Not now. After the war.”
Ah, the afterward, Teddy thought. The great lie. “Yes,” he said. “We should, of course. Is that it? Are we engaged? Do you want me to get down on bended knee?” He laid the cup and saucer down on the balcony and dropped on to one knee, the dog a curious witness to this behaviour, and said, “Nancy Roberta Shawcross, may I have your hand in marriage?” (Is that what one said?)
“I should be delighted,” she said.
“Do we need to buy a ring?”
She held up her ring finger and said, “This one will do for now. One day you can buy me a diamond.” They married with the Woolworth’s ring. “Sentimental value,” she said when he placed it on her finger in the Chelsea Register Office after the war.
It had been a small wedding and later Teddy wondered if they shouldn’t have made more of a fuss. Ursula and Bea took on the roles of guests, bridesmaids and witnesses. Ursula brought Lucky with her, a red ribbon bow tied on his collar, and said, “Here’s your best man, Teddy.”
A God in Ruins Page 29
