When they first moved into this house there had been a lovely lilac that graced the front garden, but Teddy had chopped it down when it was in full scented flower in the first April. “But why?” she said, but then saw the look in his eyes and realized it was something from the war—the great fall from grace—and he was unlikely to explain it. Teddy’s war was the one enigma that she would never decode. But it was the 1960s, for heaven’s sake, she sometimes thought, finding herself losing patience. She was tired. She seemed to spend a good deal of her time chivvying and encouraging people—Teddy, Viola, her pupils. It was rather like being the captain of the netball team that she had once been.
Teddy was not the only one who had sacrificed precious years. She had gained a First in Parts I and II of the Tripos at Newnham, she was a Wrangler, graduated with a double first in Mathematics in ’36, was awarded the Philippa Fawcett Prize and then had been plucked, recruited to go to the Government Code and Cypher School in the spring of 1940. She had given up a brilliant career for the war and then given it up again for Teddy and Viola.
I’m going down to Lyme to give Gertie a hand with her house move.”
“All right. That’s good of you,” Teddy said.
“It’s just packing the light stuff, crockery and ornaments and so on. Only a couple of days. I thought it would be nice to spend some time with her, just the two of us.”
The day after she returned home there was a card from Gertie, a watercolour of violas on the front of it—“Our mother’s favourite flower, of course, as you know.” No, she had forgotten, and yet she had named her daughter Viola. It had been for Shakespeare, not her mother. How could a daughter forget such a thing? Or, at any rate, not consciously remember. What would her own daughter forget in time? Nancy felt a sudden sense of desolation. She wished her mother was still here. This would be how Viola would feel without a mother. It was unbearable. Hot, painful tears welled up in her eyes. She brushed them away and told herself to pull her socks up.
She continued with Gertie’s card—“I just thought I should drop you a quick note,” she wrote. “Teddy phoned looking for you while you were ‘here,’ I hope I fudged enough, made out I was a complete dimwit. Are you sure, darling, you shouldn’t tell him what’s happening? (Not interfering, just saying.) Much love, G. PS. Did you come to a decision about the sideboard?”
You should tell him,” Millie said, “you really should. I mean I covered for you awfully well, saying I’d just put you on the train and everything and what a wonderful time we had in the Lakes, but Teddy’s going to find out, one way or another.”
It was her sisters not her husband that Nancy had turned to, little flurries of communication between different permutations of them. She could burden her sisters but she couldn’t burden Teddy. He wasn’t naïve, he probably suspected something, but she wasn’t going to tell him until it was definitive. At heart she would always be a mathematician, her faith in absolutes. And if the worst came to the worst, then the less time he had to suffer knowing the better.
“You have to tell him, Nancy.”
“I will, Millie, of course I will.”
She may not have been in Dorset or the Lakes, but Nancy was most certainly in London with Bea. Not, it was true, taking in a show, maybe an exhibition, but sitting on the sofa in her sister’s rather bohemian Chelsea bedsit, nursing a glass of whisky. Ursula, sitting next to Nancy, had brought a bottle with her. “I thought we would need something stronger than tea,” she said.
“I always have gin,” Bea said. She had been divorced for some time now from her surgeon husband. She worked at the BBC and was happy being single, she said.
Millie arrived in a fluster and out of breath from rushing up the stairs. “I got lost,” she said. “Sorry.”
“Whisky or gin?” Bea offered. “Or tea?”
“I’m tempted by all three, but gin, please. A stiff one.” She glanced over at Nancy but continued to address Bea. “I need it, don’t I? It’s bad, isn’t it?”
“Very bad,” Bea said, her voice pitchy.
“Completely bad?” Millie was using a funny clipped accent, either trying not to give way to emotion or imagining herself to be a character in a play or a film, one who was putting on a stiff upper lip—Celia Johnson in Brief Encounter came to mind. The call of duty, the moral imperative of doing the right thing. Nancy admired it and yet something in her now rebelled. Run away, she thought, forget duty. She imagined herself fleeing down Bea’s steep, narrow staircase and out into the street, along the river, on and on until she had outpaced the dread thing on her heels.
A glint in Millie’s eye and a little tremor in her hand as she took the glass of gin reassured Nancy that she wasn’t play-acting.
“I am here,” she said to her. “You can ask me.”
“I don’t think I want to ask you,” Millie said. “I don’t think I want to know.” The glint turned into a tear that rolled down her cheek and Bea pushed her gently towards a chair and then sat on the carpet at her feet.
“Well, it is true,” Nancy said calmly. “It’s been confirmed and I’m afraid it is completely bad, as you put it. I’m sorry to say that it’s the worst it could possibly be.”
Millie let out an awful sob and her hand flew to her mouth as if she could stop the sound escaping, but too late. Bea grabbed her other hand and they clung to each other. They looked as if they were facing shipwreck. “Is there nothing to be done?” Ursula asked. “Surely—”
“No,” Nancy said, cutting her short. They would all want to be hopeful, to see possibilities, and she had moved beyond possibilities. “He said that if perhaps it had been detected at an earlier stage there might have been something. And he won’t operate,” she said, holding up a hand to silence Bea, who was about to protest. “They can’t operate because of where it is, and now it’s become tangled with blood vessels”—“Oh God,” Millie said. She looked green, she was always the most squeamish of all of them—“which makes it impossible. An operation would, at best, be the end of me.”
“And if death is the best, what is the worst?” Ursula puzzled. Millie gave a little gasp at the word “death,” as if uttering it was somehow blasphemous.
“I would probably be left almost completely incapacitated, mentally and physically—”
“Probably?” Bea said, still clinging to hope amongst the storm-tossed wreckage.
“Almost certainly,” Nancy said. “Which would be the end of me too, in a different way. But even that would be no good as, because of its position, they wouldn’t be able to cut it all out.” Millie looked as if she was going to retch. “It would carry on growing. Really,” Nancy said, perhaps less kindly than she had intended, “it would be better, better for me, if you accept this.”
She had divined in her heart that this was coming, ever since that first visit to Harley Street, when she was supposedly helping Gertie to move house. The consultant Bea had found, Dr. Morton-Fraser, was a sensible sort of Scot. “Comes highly recommended,” Bea had said. “Reputation for being scrupulous. No stone unturned and so on.” There had been perhaps a little hope then, less so when she returned the following month (Wordsworth’s cottage and so on) and he showed her the X-rays and she could see how much it had already grown in a short time. “Perhaps if you had come to me a year ago,” he said, “but even then who knows…” Very rapid, incurable—poor Barbara Thoms’s diagnosis.
“I can’t bear it,” Millie murmured as Bea went round topping up their glasses. Nancy felt a sudden flash of resentment. She was the one who had to bear it, not them.
She wanted to be left alone in peace, to disappear into her own quiet world and meditate upon death. Death. Yes, she could form that blunt, obscene word too. But instead she was the one who was going to have to be kind and strong and say that everything was going to be all right (which it clearly was not) and that she had “come to terms with it.”
“It’s going to be all right,” she said to Millie. “I’m all right. I’ve come to terms with it
and now you must.”
“And Teddy?” Ursula said, her voice breaking. “He phoned me this morning, Nancy. He suspects you of having an affair, for heaven’s sake. You must put him out of his misery.”
Nancy laughed bitterly and said, “And put him in a worse misery?”
“Tell him as soon as possible, it’s unfair keeping him in the dark this long.” (Ursula, Nancy thought rather irritably, always Teddy’s greatest champion and protector.) “Although I suppose not Viola—”
Oh, God. Viola, Nancy thought. She was quietly convulsed with despair.
“No, not Viola,” Bea said quickly. “She’s far too young to understand.”
“We’ll be there for her,” Millie said wildly. “We’ll care for her—”
“But first you have to tell Teddy,” Ursula said insistently. “You have to go home now and tell him.”
“Yes,” Nancy sighed. “Yes, I will.”
They all accompanied her to King’s Cross and saw her on the train. Bea kissed her tenderly, as if she had suddenly turned to thinnest glass and might shatter at any moment. “Courage,” she said. Ursula seemed to have no fear of Nancy breaking and held her tight. “You’re going to have to help Teddy,” she said urgently. “Help him to cope with it.” Oh, Lord, Nancy thought wearily, would none of them just let her be weak and irredeemably selfish?
They stood on the platform waving as the train pulled out of the station, all of them in tears, Millie in floods. You would think I was going off to war, Nancy thought. The battle, however, was already fought and lost.
Plodding?” she queried.
“I know what you’ve been up to,” he said. In all these years she had never really seen Teddy angry, not like this, certainly. Not with her.
She went into the kitchen, walked over to the sink, turned the tap on and filled a glass with water. She had rehearsed this moment on the train (an awful journey, stuck in a carriage full of beery smokers, leering at her), but when it came to it she didn’t seem to have the words. She drank the water slowly to give herself more time.
“I know,” Teddy said, his voice tight with this new animosity.
She turned to face him and said, “No, Teddy. You don’t know. You don’t know anything.”
At first, the tumour had appeared to Nancy to be a predator, an invader, worming its way through the fibres in her brain, consuming her, but now it was settled, now there were no more possibilities, it was no longer the enemy. It may not be a friend (far from it), but it was part of her. Hers and hers alone and they would be companions to the awful end.
She left work immediately. What, after all, would be the point of staying on, giving herself away to others? Viola, who was used to travelling to and from school with Nancy, was put out that suddenly she had to make her own way. Nancy taught her how to catch the bus (“But why?”), explaining that she wasn’t very well and needed to take some time away from teaching to get better. It was harsh for Viola that she was being thrust into an independence that she should have grown into slowly, but it had to be about practicalities now, not sentiment. The iron had entered into Nancy’s soul.
She bought clothes for Viola, two and three sizes ahead, made lists and notes—where her piano teacher lived, her friends’ parents’ addresses and phone numbers, her likes and dislikes. Teddy, of course, knew many of Viola’s preferences but even he could not have imagined the full range.
She felt, ironically, remarkably well during the first few weeks that followed the confirmation of her death sentence. That was how she thought of it, although for everyone else’s sake there were euphemisms. She tidied drawers and cupboards, threw away unnecessary clutter, pared down her own wardrobe. Would she last through next winter? Would she need these drawers stuffed with woollens and vests and thick stockings? She imagined her sisters would come and sort through her clothes when she was gone, the way they had all done for their mother after the funeral. It would be a help to them if she broke the backbone of it now. She didn’t discuss these rather macabre tasks with anyone. It would upset them more than it upset her, for Nancy drew considerable satisfaction from thinking that she was leaving things in good order. She imagined Gertie looking around her bedroom after she was gone, saying, “Good old Nancy, typical of her to leave everything ship-shape and Bristol fashion.” When it came to it, of course, Gertie said no such thing, too consumed by grief for such buoyant remarks.
Teddy was confounded by all this energy and hazarded that somehow the diagnosis had been a mistake (“records get mixed up all the time”). Or perhaps she was actually getting better. “That would be a miracle, Teddy,” she said, as gently as she could. “There is no cure.” Hope would be the worst thing for him. Her, too. She wanted to enjoy this respite for what it was, not for what it could never be.
“But you thought I was dead during the war,” he persisted. “Did you give up hope?”
“Yes. Yes, I did. You know I did. And you said it yourself—I thought you were dead.”
“So then when I came back it was a miracle,” he said, as if he’d won the argument. But he had come back from a POW camp, not from the dead. There was no logic in him these days, but then what did it really matter? He would stop believing in miracles soon enough.
And then all the drawers were tidied, all the lists were made. When she stopped being busy she discovered that she craved simply being on her own in the house, filling the silence with the piano, occasionally Beethoven, mostly Chopin. Her playing was rusty, but day by day she saw small improvements and said to Teddy, “At least some things are capable of remedy,” but he shied away from gallows humour.
One afternoon, when she was intent on the Polonaise in E flat—fiendishly difficult—Teddy came home early, something he was doing more and more, she had noticed. She could feel him trying to fill his heart and mind with her because that was where she would live on afterwards. (Not living, just a memory, an illusion.) And in her sisters’ hearts, too. And a little of her in Viola, and that would fade and be forgotten. Our mother’s favourite flower, of course, as you know. “My favourite flower is the bluebell,” she said apropos of nothing to Viola one day, who said, “Oh?” indifferently, more interested in watching Blue Peter. But then Teddy would die, her sisters would die, Viola would die and nothing of Nancy would remain. That was how it was. The tragedy of life was death. Sic transit gloria mundi. “Penny for them?” Teddy said often, too often, when she was engaged in this philosophy (pointless, by its very nature). Better to be a dumb animal like Bobby and greet every new morning in ignorance. “Oh, my thoughts are nonsense,” she said, making an effort to smile at Teddy. “You would feel cheated out of your penny.”
It wasn’t that she didn’t want to share her thoughts with Teddy or spend time with him—and Viola, of course—but she was preparing to go into the darkness on her own, a place (not even a place, a nothing) where everything would cease to matter—cocoa, library books, Chopin. Love. That list, should she choose to make it, would be endless. She chose not to make it. She was done with lists. She put her morbid philosophy aside. She played Chopin instead.
“Is that the Revolutionary?” Teddy asked, interrupting her concentration so that she played a wrong note that sounded particularly harsh to her ears. “My mother used to play it,” he said.
Sylvie had been a terrific pianist. Sometimes Nancy used to sneak next door to listen to her. When Sylvie was in a bad mood you didn’t need to go to Fox Corner to hear her, Nancy’s father said, you could hear her from the end of the lane. He said this fondly. (“There goes Mrs. Todd!”) Major Shawcross held Sylvie in great esteem (“a magnificent creature”).
It hadn’t struck Nancy at the time, but perhaps Sylvie, too, had wanted to be left alone, had resented the quiet little listener in the corner of her drawing room. She had seemed lost in the music, oblivious to Nancy’s presence until she finished whatever piece she was playing. Nancy couldn’t help but applaud. (“Bravo, Mrs. Todd!”)
“Oh, it’s you, Nancy,” Sylvie would
say, rather sharply.
“No, not the Revolutionary, it’s the Heroic,” Nancy said, her hands resting impatiently on the keys. Time’s wingèd chariot, she thought. She could hear the wings beating, heavy and creaking, like a great ponderous goose. She could feel her own strength ebbing away and was powerless to fight it. “Your mother was accomplished,” she said. “I’m a rank amateur, I’m afraid. And it’s such a difficult piece.”
“Sounded pretty good to me,” Teddy said. He was lying, she knew. “You reminded me of Vermeer, when I came into the room just now.”
“Vermeer? Why?”
“That painting in the National Gallery. Lady at a Virginal—something like that anyway.”
“A Young Woman Seated at a Virginal,” Nancy said.
“Yes. Your memory is always so precise.”
“Why Vermeer?” she prompted.
“It was the way you turned to look at me. The enigmatic expression on your face.”
“I always thought the girl in that picture had the look of a frog about her,” Nancy said, thinking, I look enigmatic because I’m dying.
“Isn’t there one of a woman standing by a virginal too?” he puzzled. “Or am I getting them mixed up?”
“No, there are two, the National has both.”
“Same woman?” Teddy said, looking ruminative. “Same virginal?”
Oh, do go away, my love, Nancy thought. Stop spinning out conversations so that you’ll have them to look back on, stop making memories. Leave me to Chopin. She sighed and closed the lid of the piano and said with false cheerfulness, “Shall we have some tea?”
“I’ll make it,” Teddy said eagerly. “Would you like cake? Do we have cake?”
“Yes, I believe we do.”
I want you to promise me something.”
“Anything,” Teddy said. A fatal promise to make, Nancy thought. They were sitting at the dining-room table. Teddy was going through the month’s bills, while Nancy was sewing Cash’s nametapes on to Viola’s uniform. The long school holiday was nearly over, the new school year was about to begin. The rhythm of Nancy’s life had always been the school year and it seemed strange that a new one was beginning that she wouldn’t see the end of.
A God in Ruins Page 34
