A God in Ruins

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A God in Ruins Page 35

by Kate Atkinson


  Viola B. Todd, the nametapes said in that familiar red cursive. “B” for Beresford, Teddy’s middle name, Sylvie’s name before she became a Todd. Her father had been an artist—“very famous in his day,” according to Sylvie—although the family owned none of his work. Nancy had been delighted when, investigating the art gallery in York with Viola, she had found a portrait, some civic dignitary, long forgotten now, painted by Sylvie’s father at the end of the last century. The tiny brass plaque beneath read “Llewellyn A. Beresford 1845–1903.” And a ghostly monogram of the letters L, A and B was painted in the corner of the picture. “Look,” Nancy said to Viola, “this was painted by your great-grandfather”—but it was a relationship too distant to have any meaning for Viola.

  Nancy began a new nametape, on the collar of a school blouse, and almost immediately pricked herself with the needle. She was a clumsy seamstress these days. And she could no longer follow a knitting pattern. She imagined the silent bees were secretly making a honeycomb in her brain.

  “Are you all right?” Teddy asked, looking at the perfect little sphere of blood on her finger. She nodded and licked the drop away before it could stain the blouse.

  “Promise me,” she continued, laying her sewing down, “that when the time comes—” (Teddy flinched at the phrase) “when the time comes you will help me.”

  “Help you what?” He abandoned the gas bill he had been checking.

  He knew perfectly well what. “Help me to go, when it starts to get bad, if I can’t help myself. And it will get bad, Teddy.”

  “It might not.”

  She could scream with frustration at the avoidance, the ducking and diving. She was dying of brain cancer, it was going to be brutal, savage (completely bad). Unless she was outrageously fortunate, she was not going to fade away in serene sleep. “But if it does start to get bad,” she said patiently, “then I want to go before I become a drooling imbecile.” (I want to die as myself, she thought.) “You wouldn’t let a dog suffer, so please don’t let me.”

  “You want me to put you down? Like a dog?” he said testily.

  “That’s not what I said. You know it isn’t.”

  “But you want me to kill you?”

  “No. To help me kill myself.”

  “And that’s better in what way?”

  Nancy pushed on. “Only if it’s difficult for me to do because I become incapacitated. Morphine or tablets, something like that, I’m not sure.” Or just stick a pillow over my face, for heaven’s sake, and be done with it, she thought. But of course that would never do. “It must clearly be by my own hand,” she said. “Otherwise you’ll be tried for murder.” (Now there was a barbarous word to lay before him.)

  “But it’s as good as,” he said. “I don’t really see the difference.”

  His hands were clasped together and he stared at them as if assessing whether or not they could do the deed. After a considerable silence he said, “I’m not sure I can.” Not looking at her, looking anywhere but at her, anguish on his face. You made the fatal promise, Nancy thought, you promised anything. You made another promise too, she thought. For better or worse. And now we’ve come to worse. The worst. And a mean thought—how many had he killed during the war?

  “Never mind,” she said, reaching across the table and putting forgiving hands on top of his, clenched now in a kind of rigor. “It might not get bad after all, we’ll just have to see.” He nodded gratefully as if she’d given him benediction.

  He was a terrible coward. He had rained down destruction on thousands, on women and children—no different from his wife, his child, his mother, his sister. He had killed people from twenty thousand feet up in the sky, but to kill one person, one person who was asking to die? He had watched as the life went out of Keith, he didn’t know if he could do that again. Even for Nancy. He had known her since he was three years old (childhood sweethearts), all of his conscious remembering life, and he was to be her executioner?

  He had imagined them settling into an unchallenging old age. He couldn’t picture himself but he could see Nancy growing thick in the waist, acquiring comfortable chins and grey hair. A little like Mrs. Shawcross. She would strain her eyes to knit and to do the Telegraph crossword. He would dig up potatoes, she would pull up weeds. She was not a gardener but she couldn’t be idle. They would be good companions and they would fade quietly away together and now she was just going to leave early. He remembered Sylvie’s displeasure at Hugh’s sudden easy death. He just slipped away without a word. “To cease upon the midnight with no pain,” Teddy thought. Didn’t Nancy deserve that?

  She would have to seek her own solace, she realized. She was lying on Viola’s bed, Viola asleep in the crook of her arm. Nancy was uncomfortable, it was still a small child’s bed, Viola would need a bigger one soon but it wouldn’t be Nancy who bought it. She had been reading Anne of Green Gables to Viola. Anne, too, had had to acquire iron in her soul. Sometimes, if she wasn’t too sleepy at bedtime, Viola read to Nancy instead. Viola was a good reader, a bookworm—a phrase she hated. “How can a worm be a nice thing to be?” Viola said. I would be a worm, Nancy thought, if that was the only existence on offer, and then laughed at herself for having reached such a pass. “Without worms we wouldn’t be able to grow food and everyone would starve,” Nancy said reasonably.

  She must make sure that Teddy knew she wanted to be cremated. To go up in flames, a pyre, and be returned to the atomic world of elements. It would be better for Viola not to spend the rest of her childhood imagining her mother buried in the dark, damp earth, worms feeding on her flesh. Nancy’s heart was heavier every day. To be thinking of such things (to feel obliged to think of such things) while lying with one’s arms around one’s child, Anne of Green Gables open on the bedspread, Viola’s glass of milk half drunk on the bedside table (cocoa, library books, and so on).

  In the past few weeks they had also read together The Secret Garden and Heidi. No coincidence that they were all tales about orphans. After Anne (if there was time) Nancy planned to move on to Little Women—not orphans, it was true, but strong, resourceful young women. All the Shawcross sisters had loved Louisa May Alcott. “And fairy tales, too,” she said to Winnie, who had “popped up for a quick weekend visit.” Winnie, the eldest of them all, lived in Kent. She had “married well” to a self-styled “captain of industry,” a title that amused her sisters. But she was a good sort, kind-hearted and competent.

  “Think about all those heroines who have to be quick-witted just to survive,” Nancy said. “Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Snow White. People have the wrong idea about fairy tales, they think they’re about being rescued by handsome princes, whereas really they’re like Girl Guide handbooks.”

  “Beauty and the Beast,” Winnie offered, warming to the subject. They were having tea and Winnie was slicing up a cherry Genoa she had brought with her. No one expected Nancy to bake any more. Which was as well as she could barely lift a kettle. Teddy came home every evening and cooked and did housework. Nancy was never hungry any more. Always tired. She used to be up with the lark, but now Teddy brought her tea in bed every morning and she lay there for hours after Teddy and Viola had left the house to get on with their lives.

  “You look so well though,” Winnie said.

  “I have headaches,” Nancy said, feeling rather defensive. She was tired of people telling her how well she looked, as if she were cheating somehow. Of course, Winnie didn’t mean it like that, she chided herself.

  “The Goose Girl,” Winnie said. “Did she have a name? I can only remember the horse’s name.”

  “Falada. A funny name for a horse. But I don’t know about the goose girl herself. Nameless, I think.”

  “Shall I be mother and pour?” Winnie said. Even the simplest of sentences could be like a dagger to Nancy’s heart.

  “Please.” Would this be the last time that she ever saw her eldest sister, she wondered? Soon (now even) it would become a cascade of last times. It was imperative that she go
quickly, early, sidestepping the awfulness of all the farewells. She could throw herself beneath the wheels of an express train (but then think of the poor driver). Could she walk into the sea or cast herself into a river? But by instinct she might swim.

  “The girl with the brothers who were turned into swans,” Winnie said. “What was she called? She was very brave.”

  “She was. Elise. ‘The Wild Swans.’ ” What about poison? Too horrible, Nancy thought, too uncertain—she might gag on it rather than swallow it.

  “Hansel and Gretel,” Winnie said. “But just Gretel really. Hansel wasn’t too bright, was he?”

  “No, he got himself locked up. Sisters are always cleverer than their brothers in fairy stories.” Hanging was supposed to be quick, but deeply distressing for whoever found you, which might well be—probably would be—either Teddy or (unthinkable) Viola.

  “Goldilocks,” Winnie said. “Was she foolish rather than enterprising?”

  “Foolish, I think,” Nancy said. “She had to be rescued.” She was going to have to rescue herself. She must start a cache—sleeping tablets and painkillers, anything she could get her hands on. She must take them while she was still capable, still in control. It was difficult to assess what would constitute a fatal dose. It wasn’t the kind of thing you could ask, although she had a different GP now, a Dr. Webster, who was the older, wiser partner of the GP she had first seen (“a young buck,” Dr. Webster called him). Thankfully, Dr. Webster was happy to talk about the reality of what was to come.

  But what if she had left it too late? Was it already too late? “Gerda in ‘The Snow Queen,’ ” she said to Winnie. “She was very resourceful.”

  The Fourier series, theorems, lemmas, graphs, Parseval’s theorem, natural numbers—words hummed in her brain. She had understood them all once, but now their meaning was lost to her. The bees were back, an endless infuriating buzzing that she tried to drown out with the piano. She had played nothing but the Heroic all day. It was incredibly challenging but she was determined to master it.

  She was playing with great vigour. Con brio. It sounded almost perfect to her ears. How extraordinary, how wonderful that she had become so proficient at such a difficult piece. It was as if this, and this only, had been her life’s work. She finished with an enormous flourish.

  “Hello, you,” Teddy said, coming into the room. “Fancy a cup of tea?” He was carrying a tray, Viola trotting at his heels. “Shall I help you into an armchair?” He was fussing. He put the tray down and led her to a chair by the window. “You like this one, don’t you?” he said. “You can see the birds on the bird table.” She wished he wouldn’t stare at her like that, as if he was trying to see something behind her eyes. He settled her feet on a footstool, her tea on a table by the side of her. Tea in a beaker. Cups and saucers had suddenly become fiddly, confusing.

  “Do you want a biscuit, Mummy?” Viola was hovering at her elbow. “Chocolate bourbon or pink wafers?”

  “Or there’s some of Win’s cake left,” Teddy said. “It goes on without end. It would have done better than the loaves and fishes for feeding the five thousand.” Nancy ignored both offers. She was feeling rather annoyed that neither of them had congratulated her on her magnificent playing. (Bravo, Mrs. Todd!) Yet her triumph with the Chopin was fading already. The bees were making her sleepy, all that buzzing. Honey was oozing through her brain.

  Time folded in on itself. Where had Teddy gone? Wasn’t he here a minute ago? It felt as if everyone had just left the room. Or perhaps it was Nancy herself who had left the room. But there was no room, there was only something she didn’t have a name for. Nothing. And then there wasn’t even that. And then the bees took flight and blessed her in farewell and Nancy stopped. Dead.

  A stiff whisky, that’s my prescription. Pour one for me too.” Their GP, Dr. Webster, who was “looking forward to retirement, a bit of golf, some watercolour painting.” He was the old-fashioned sort. He had given his blessing to Nancy when she refused the operation and had been generous with the morphine and held back on homilies.

  A crisp October morning. Spider webs were spangled across the plants in the garden. It was going to be a beautiful day.

  Bobby, their Labrador, paced between the rooms, confused by the upset in his regime. Routine was the first thing to be discarded by a death.

  Teddy poured the whisky and handed one to the doctor. He raised his glass and for an odd, rather awful moment Teddy thought he was going to say, “Cheers,” but instead he said, “Let us toast Nancy,” and it was still odd and rather awful, but made sense somehow, and Teddy raised his glass and said, “To Nancy.”

  “ ‘From this world to that which is to come,’ ” Dr. Webster said, surprising Teddy with Pilgrim’s Progress. “She was a good woman. Such a bright mind, and a kind nature.” Teddy downed the whisky in one, he wasn’t ready for eulogies. “You should call the police,” he said.

  “Now why on earth would I do that?”

  “Because I killed her,” Teddy said.

  “You helped her on her way with a little extra dose of morphine. If that was a crime I would be serving several life sentences.”

  “I killed her,” Teddy said stubbornly.

  “Now listen to me. She was a few hours away from death.” The GP looked alarmed, Teddy noticed. It was him, after all, who had been so generous with his liquid-morphine prescriptions over the last few weeks for her awful headaches. “Nancy was in distress,” the doctor continued. “You did the right thing.” He had visited Nancy the previous evening and given his opinion that it “wouldn’t be long now,” and added, “Do you have enough morphine?”

  Enough, Teddy thought?

  He had been in the kitchen, making a shepherd’s pie, when he heard the terrible cacophony coming from the living room. Before he could run through to investigate, a tearful Viola appeared in the kitchen and said, “There’s something wrong with Mummy.”

  Nancy was bashing at the piano keys as if she was trying to destroy the instrument. Her hands were clawed almost into fists and when he had taken hold of them in an effort to quieten her she had looked at him with a strange, lopsided smile on her face and tried to form words. It seemed important to her that he understood, but it was Viola standing beside him that translated her spastic mumble. “The Heroic,” she said.

  He led her gently into an armchair by the window and they ministered to her with tea and biscuits, but when he looked into her eyes he knew that the thing she had feared the most had happened to her. Nancy was no longer Nancy.

  He had helped her to bed early but she had woken before midnight, moaning and calling out, whether from pain or distress he couldn’t tell. Both, he supposed. The shell, the shade of the woman who had once been his wife was shouting out nonsense, not even words—just barks and growls like an animal.

  He made warm milk, put in a tot of rum and emptied several of the morphine vials into it. Then he sat Nancy up and wrapped a bed jacket around her thin shoulders. “Drink up,” he said, excessively cheerful. “This will make you feel much better.”

  He didn’t spot Viola, woken by the inhuman noises her mother was making, standing sleepily in the doorway of the bedroom in bare feet and cotton pyjamas.

  Instead of falling into the deep sleep that Teddy had hoped would be the precursor of death, Nancy grew suddenly much more agitated, throwing herself around in the bed, tearing at the bedspread, her nightdress, her hair, as if she was trying to rid herself of a burning demon. He added more morphine to the milk that remained in the beaker but her thrashing arms sent it flying across the room. She started screaming, an unholy noise, unstoppable, her wide-open mouth a black maw, as if she finally had become the demon that was in her brain. In desperation Teddy grabbed a pillow and pressed it against her face, at first tentatively and then more firmly, unable to bear the idea that at the end, the very end, she should be denied peace, denied the ceasing upon the midnight with no pain. He pressed down hard on the pillow. This is what it meant to kill someone
. Hand-to-hand combat. Until death us do part.

  She was still. He removed the pillow. The fight was out of her, or perhaps the morphine had worked, but she lay still. He felt her pulse. Stopped. His own heart was thundering. Her face was peaceful, the pain and animal distress had fallen away. She was Nancy again. She was herself.

  Viola padded silently back to bed. “The true nightmares occur when we are awake,” according to the narrator of Every Third Thought, her last novel. (“Her best yet,” Good Housekeeping.)

  And what would happen to that little girl upstairs if you were arrested and stood trial?” Dr. Webster said. She had any number of aunts she could live with, Teddy thought. Any one of them would probably do a better job than he would. “If something happens to you as well,” Nancy had said to him, “then I think Viola should go and live with Gertie.” (“Not that anything is going to happen to you, of course!”)

  Out of all the aunts available Gertie seemed almost the oddest choice—Millie taking first place in the race for unsuitability. “Why Gertie?” he asked.

  “She’s sensible and practical and patient,” Nancy said, ticking off Gertie’s virtues on her fingers. “But at the same time she’s adventurous and not frightened by things. She’ll be able to teach Viola how to be brave.” Viola wasn’t brave, they both knew that, but neither of them ever said it.

  What right did Teddy have to talk about bravery, he thought, pouring both himself and Dr. Webster another whisky.

  “I’ll make out the death certificate,” the GP said. “You should probably telephone an undertaker, or I’ll do it for you if you’d prefer?”

 

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