“I think it’s perhaps something we don’t have a name for,” Teddy said. “We want to name everything. Perhaps that’s where we’ve gone wrong.”
“ ‘And whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.’ Having dominion over everything has been a terrible curse.”
Afterwards—because it turned out that there was to be an afterwards for Teddy—he resolved that he would try always to be kind. It was the best he could do. It was all that he could do. And it might be love, after all.
1960
His Little Unremembered Acts of Kindness and of Love
It had begun with a headache, a terrible one, in the middle of the school day. This was before they moved to York and Nancy was still teaching at the secondary modern in Leeds. A wretched Monday in winter, a raw east wind and precious little daylight. “A bit under the weather,” Nancy said when Teddy remarked over breakfast that she looked “peaky.”
At lunchtime she went to the sickroom and the school nurse gave her a couple of aspirin, but they had no effect and she had to abandon teaching the first period of the afternoon and instead took up residence in the sickroom. “Sounds like a migraine,” the school nurse said authoritatively. “Just lie down in the dark and rest.” So she did, on the sickroom’s uncomfortable little camp bed with its scratchy red blanket, the usual occupants of which were teenage girls with period pains. After half an hour or so she struggled to a sitting position and vomited all over the red blanket. “Oh, God, I am so sorry,” she said to the nurse.
“Definitely a migraine,” the nurse said. She was the maternal sort and after cleaning up she patted Nancy’s hand and said, “You’ll soon be as right as ninepence.”
She did feel a bit better after being sick and was well enough to drive home to Ayswick—rather cautiously—before the end of the school afternoon, although it felt as if a swarm of bees was busy inside her head.
When Nancy arrived home, Viola was already there with Ellen Crowther. Mrs. Crowther was the local woman they had employed to pick up Viola from the village primary school and wait with her until one or the other of them returned from work. Mrs. Crowther’s own “brood” was grown and gone but she had a husband, who was a farmhand, and an ancient father-in-law (“the old man”), both of whom sounded more demanding than any child, even Viola. She was a witchy-looking woman, thinning black hair scraped into a knot and a twisted expression due to some childhood palsy. Despite these attributes she seemed rather characterless, worn away by service and obedience. “Do you like Mrs. Crowther?” Nancy once asked Viola and Viola gave her a puzzled look and said, “Mrs. who?”
Usually by the time Nancy got home Mrs. Crowther was ready to leave, wrapped up in headscarf and brown belted gabardine mac, and out of the door like a greyhound from a trap before Nancy had time to say “hello.” Her husband (and perhaps the old man too) seemed to be a stickler for punctuality, particularly when it came to tea being on the table. “I’ll get a row if I’m late” were Mrs. Crowther’s usual words as she dashed off.
Arriving home earlier than usual, the bees still diligently at work in her head, Nancy must have entered the house more quietly than she realized as neither Viola nor Mrs. Crowther noticed her. Even Bobby the dog failed to greet her. Viola was sitting at the big farmhouse table reading Bunty, holding a ham sandwich in one hand while twirling a lock of hair around a finger on the other—a surprisingly irritating habit that they had been unable to break her of. Mrs. Crowther was writing what looked like a shopping list in a stubby joiner’s pencil on the back of an envelope, a cup of tea to hand. Nancy felt oddly affected by this domestic tableau. The peaceful ordinariness of it, perhaps—the knitted cosy on the teapot, the way Mrs. Crowther was stirring the sugar in her cup without taking her eyes off her shopping list. The frown of concentration on Viola’s face as she assiduously ate her way through her sandwich while lost in this week’s adventure of “The Four Marys.”
For a moment, as she stood unseen in the doorway, Nancy experienced a sudden, odd sense of detachment. She was invisible, an observer, looking in on a life that she was somehow barred from. She began to feel dangerously untethered, as if she might simply float away at any moment and not be able to get back to where she belonged. She started to feel panic, but at that moment Viola looked up from her comic and spotted her. “Mummy!” she exclaimed, her face lighting up. The spell was broken and Nancy crossed the threshold and entered the safety of the kitchen, the old Aga throwing out comfort and warmth to welcome her.
Mrs. Crowther said, “Goodness, you gave me a fright standing there. For a minute I thought you were a ghost. You’re as white as any ghost would be,” she added (as if she was familiar with spirits). “Are you feeling all right? Here—sit down. Let me pour you a cup of tea.”
“I had a migraine at school,” Nancy said, sinking into a chair at the table. The bees moved restlessly in her head, behind her eyes. Mrs. Crowther poured the tea and before Nancy could protest she stirred three spoonfuls of sugar into the cup.
“Hot sweet tea,” Mrs. Crowther said. “Just what you need.” It was strange being ministered to by someone who was normally a blur of gabardine in the hallway. (Mrs. Crowther proved to have unsuspected reservoirs of small talk.) “Thank you,” Nancy said, enormously grateful for the tea, even with its heavy charge of sugar.
“You’re home early,” Viola said. She was suspicious of any change in routine, disliking spontaneity. Was it because she was an only child? Or simply a child?
“Yes, darling, I am.” When the tea was drunk, and, on Mrs. Crowther’s recommendation, she had eaten a Rich Tea biscuit to settle her stomach (“Works a treat, doesn’t it?”), she said to Mrs. Crowther, “I know it’s an imposition, but would you mind hanging on until my husband gets home? I think I might go and lie down.”
She must have fallen fast asleep. When she woke it was dark, but the bedroom door was open and the light was on in the hall. The bees were silenced, gone to find a new queen. The clock by the bed said nine o’clock. She felt thick-headed but much better.
“Hello, you,” Teddy said when she came downstairs. “Mrs. Crowther told me you had a migraine, so I let you sleep.” (Nancy wondered if Mrs. Crowther had been given “a row” from her husband and the old man.) “I gave her a bit extra for hanging on. I said this morning that you looked peaky—that must have been why. Shall I fry you a chop for your supper?”
She didn’t have another migraine, just a few more headaches than normal, nothing as startling as that day in the sickroom. “I expect your job is rather taxing,” the optician said when she visited him to discover why she was occasionally seeing a wave of light in her left eye, a little shimmering line of gold that was actually rather pretty. “Optical migraine,” he said, peering into her eye, so close to her that she could smell the peppermint he had taken to mask (not very successfully) the oniony smell of his lunch. “You don’t necessarily experience pain with them, dear.” He was quite elderly, the avuncular sort, and had practised for years in their small local town. There was nothing, he said reassuringly, that he didn’t know about eyes.
“And sometimes when I’ve been writing a lot on the blackboard,” Nancy said, “my eyesight goes a bit blotchy, like Vaseline rubbed on glass, and I can’t read or write properly.”
“Definitely an optical migraine,” he said.
“I had a proper migraine recently,” she said, “and a few more headaches than usual.”
“There you go then,” he said.
“My mother used to have headaches,” she said, recalling her mother dragging herself up the stairs to her darkened bedroom, her sad, uncomplaining smile when she said to them, “One of my heads, I’m afraid.” That used to make them laugh (not when she was in pain, they were not cruel daughters). “The Hydra,” they called her affectionately. “But a nice one,” Millie said. “A lovely, darling Mummy Hydra.”
Later, Nancy wondered if she had sensed something, a kind of premonition, that had motivated her to choo
se that particular evening to suggest uprooting the three of them and moving into town, where life would be easier and more convenient. As she left the optician’s, however, armed with a prescription for reading glasses (“Just the age you’ve reached, dear, nothing to worry about”), the thought uppermost in her mind was the pot of tea and the toasted teacake that she was going to treat herself to in the café around the corner before setting off on the rather arduous cycle home. It was a hot day and Teddy had the car. He was going to an agricultural show, a reluctant Viola in tow. She was awfully tired, Nancy thought, but the tea would buck her up.
It did, and as she was sorting out her change for a tip for the waitress she was struck with the thought that the only thing that was happening to her—to her and Teddy (and even Viola, although less urgently)—was that they were simply growing older. Otherwise their lives stayed the same. They were treading water, plodding along in a rut. Why shouldn’t they do something different, shake themselves up a little?
Plodding?” Teddy said, a fleeting spasm of distress taking hold of his features. They were in bed—cocoa and library books, and so on—a good definition of “plodding” in anyone’s lexicon, Nancy supposed. She remembered Sylvie saying, “Marriage blunts one so.”
“It’s not an insult,” she said, but Teddy didn’t look convinced.
One weekend, not long after they had made the move to York, Nancy was taking the Sunday roast from the oven when, with no warning at all, her left arm gave way and the pan and its contents clattered to the floor. Teddy must have heard the noise because he came rushing through to the kitchen and said, “Are you all right?”
“Yes, yes, fine,” she said, surveying with dismay the carnage of lamb and potatoes, not to mention the hot fat that had splattered everywhere. “Not burnt?” Teddy said anxiously. No, she reassured him, not burnt. “I’m a clumsy dolt, I really am.”
“I’ll fetch a cloth.”
“I suppose that I’m used to the Aga in the old house and I just—I don’t know—misjudged something. Oh, the poor lamb,” she added sadly, as if the joint was an old friend. “Do you think we can salvage it—scrape it up off the floor and pretend nothing happened?” The leg of lamb seemed to have crusted itself in every last bit of grit and dirt on what Nancy had previously thought was a clean kitchen floor. She silently berated herself for her sluttish housewifery. “Could we wash it under the hot tap? We wouldn’t have let it go to waste during the war. We still have carrots,” she added hopefully. “And mint sauce.”
Teddy laughed and said, “I think I’d better heat up a tin of beans and scramble some eggs. I can’t see Viola eating carrots for Sunday lunch.”
There had been other little things, numbness and tingle in that rogue left arm, more headaches and another awful migraine that started on a Friday evening and didn’t clear until Monday morning. It prompted her into visiting their new GP, hoping for a prescription for strong painkillers. After some rather odd tests—walking in a straight line, moving her head in different directions, as if testing her for drunkenness—the GP said he wanted to refer her to the hospital. He was the youthful partner of an older doctor in the practice and was eager not to make mistakes. “But no need for alarm,” he said. “You’re probably right about it being migraine.” No hurry either, apparently, and by the time the appointment card for the specialist came through the letter-box Nancy thought the hospital must have forgotten about her. She had told Teddy none of this. There seemed no point in worrying him. (He was a worrier, Nancy wasn’t.) She supposed the results would be vague and she would end up like her mother, having “heads.” She doubted she could suffer as patiently.
It was perfect spring weather on the day of Nancy’s hospital appointment and when she left school at break time (“Back by lunchtime”), she decided to walk to the hospital. If she planned her route she could walk part of the way on the Bar Walls and enjoy the daffodils, recently come into flower and now in their “golden pomp”—a phrase she recalled from an old column of Agrestis. Teddy had been “enraptured” by the wild daffodils he had encountered unexpectedly on a woodland walk a couple of years ago.
Teddy had, so far, kept on his Nature Notes. It was a short piece once a month, he argued (to himself), and he could easily drive out to the countryside—they could all go, take a picnic, a pair of binoculars. “It’s not quite the same, I know, as being in the middle of it—‘the middle of nowhere,’ ” he added rather pointedly, “but needs must. Until the Recorder can find someone to replace me.” They did find someone, a year later—a woman, in fact, although the new Agrestis never admitted to this change in his sex. But by then it was of no consequence to Teddy, very little was, and he left Agrestis behind without a backward glance.
The daffodils growing on the grass slopes beneath the Bar Walls were truly lovely. There were none in the garden in the new house for some reason (surely everyone had daffodils?) and Nancy determined that she must talk to Teddy about planting some. Lots of them (a host, in fact) in a great Wordsworthian drift. He would like that. To her surprise, he had taken to gardening, perusing seed catalogues and drawing up plans and sketches. Nancy gave him free rein, although he continued to consult her—“How do you feel about gladioli?” “What about a small pond?” “Peas or beans or both?”
It was when she had come down from the walls at Monkgate Bar and was waiting to cross the road at the traffic lights that a black curtain suddenly descended and covered her left eye. More of a blind than a curtain—she had never thought before about where the word came from. Her own personal blackout. She sensed disaster. “Struck blind”—it felt biblical, although Monkgate was hardly the road to Damascus.
She managed to find a bench nearby and sat quietly waiting to see what would happen next. A revelation of faith? It seemed unlikely. If she had gone completely blind she would have called out for help, but the loss of only one eye didn’t seem cause enough to involve complete strangers. (“That’s ridiculous,” Millie said when she told her. “I would have been screeching my head off.” But Nancy was not Millie.) After ten minutes or so of sitting on the bench in a kind of quiet contemplation, the blackout blind lifted—as quickly and mysteriously as it had fallen—and the sight in her eye returned.
“Nerves scrambled or something,” she said to the consultant when she eventually arrived at the hospital. “I suppose it was jolly good luck I wasn’t driving, or cycling for that matter.” She found herself chatty with relief, the crisis past, the biblical disaster averted. “Well,” the consultant said, “let’s get you checked out thoroughly anyway, shall we?” He was neither youthful nor maternal nor avuncular and had very little to say on the subject of migraines.
Oh, and then it all just went on so quickly, like some awful express train that wouldn’t stop. They did more tests, and X-rays. They were vague with her, unsure about what they were seeing, they said. She was married, wasn’t she? Why didn’t she bring her husband along to the next appointment? “Not if they don’t give me a diagnosis,” she said to Bea on the phone. “They’re being cagey with me for no good reason.” She knew what happened with bad cases. They told spouses, siblings, even friends, anyone but the patient, so that they could “go on living a normal life.” She’d known a WREN at Bletchley Park—Barbara Thoms—down-to-earth type, one of the cogs in the wheel. The many wheels. Nancy had been a bigger wheel, a decoder, one of the boys. Normally she wouldn’t have had much to do with a lowly cog but they had both been county netball players, had tried, and failed, to get a team going at Bletchley. (Nancy had been a Half Blue at Cambridge.) Nancy had had her own table by the end of the war, was deputy head of the hut. She had known them all—Turing, Tony Kendrick, Peter Twinn. She had loved that world, occluded, secretive, self-sufficient, but she had always understood that it was temporary, that “normal service would be resumed.” Would have to be resumed.
Poor Barbara developed a cancer, “very rapid, incurable.” A woman’s cancer, too embarrassing for her less down-to-earth mother to go into deta
il over. Mrs. Thoms had told someone Barbara worked with and pretty soon all the girls in Barbara’s section knew. Everyone except for Barbara. They were sworn to secrecy by Mrs. Thoms because that was what her doctors had advised, “so as not to cast a shadow over what’s left of her life,” she explained to them. The poor girl kept on working until she couldn’t go on any longer and then went home, to die, still in ignorance, still waiting in hope to be cured.
She had almost forgotten about Barbara when Mrs. Thoms wrote and said she was dead and buried. “A quiet funeral. She never knew what was wrong, that was a comfort.” Pah! Nancy thought. If she had some horrible disease that was going to kill her she didn’t want to be kept in the dark, she wanted to know. In fact she would have it the other way round—she would know and her nearest and dearest wouldn’t. Why should Teddy and Viola live beneath the “shadow”?
“You need to see someone in Harley Street,” Bea said to her. “I’ve still got a few connections in the medical world.” Bea had been married to a surgeon after the war but it hadn’t lasted (“I don’t think I’m cut out for marriage”). “I’ll find out who’s best in the field, someone who won’t mess you about. But you should tell Teddy, Nancy.”
“I shall, I promise.”
She had nearly died when she gave birth to Viola and had felt somehow that she was “proofed” against disaster. Perhaps that was why it had taken her so long to chase this thing down. And all the time it was chasing her. And her mind, of all things. If only it could have been a breast, an arm, an eye. Even if it had meant an early death, at least she would have been able to keep her mind to the end. Sometimes, when she found herself mired in the twin duties of marriage and motherhood, she thought how her life had been compromised by love. Viola coming out of the womb on a wave of anger, Teddy always putting on a cheerful front, pretending that he wasn’t brooding inside.
A God in Ruins Page 33
