A God in Ruins

by Kate Atkinson

  “No,” Teddy said. “I’ll do it.”

  After the doctor had left, Teddy went upstairs to Viola’s room. She was still fast asleep. He couldn’t bring himself to wake her in order to give her the worst news she would probably ever hear. He stroked her forehead, slightly damp, and kissed it lightly. “I love you,” he said. They should have been his last words to Nancy, but he had been too taken up in the awful final struggle to say anything to her. Viola stirred and muttered something, but didn’t wake.

  2012

  Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace

  The Queen was sailing slowly down the Thames.

  “The Queen,” Viola said. “She’s on the television.” She was keeping her interpretation of events simple—the flotilla on the river, the rain, the admirable perseverance of monarchy. “You can’t really see the television though, can you?” She talked very loudly and slowly to Teddy as if he was a particularly stupid child. She was sitting next to his bed in one of the care home’s high-backed armchairs. It always disturbed her to sit in this chair. It was meant for the elderly and she dreaded being counted amongst that number now that she was old enough to qualify for Saga holidays and lunch clubs in church halls, old enough to wear beige anoraks and pull-on “slacks.” (As if.) She was old enough to move into Fanning Court. God forbid.

  Teddy could no longer sit in the chair. He could no longer leave the bed, no longer do anything. He was approaching the end of his twilight, entering into the final darkness. Viola imagined the synapses in her father’s brain flaring and dimming like the slow death of a star. Soon Teddy would burn out completely and implode and become a black hole. Viola was hazy on the subject of astrophysics, but she liked the image.

  He was labelled, a plastic hospital bracelet around his wrist. Sunny and Bertie had both worn them in the maternity ward. Other people kept things like that—first baby teeth, first shoes, primitive nursery paintings, school reports—regarding them as precious relics of childhood, but Viola had managed to discard everything as she went. (Yes, she regretted it. All right?)

  “DNR,” it said on Ted’s plastic bracelet, indicating he had lingered on, long past his sell-by date. Oh God, life was awful. A memory of last night came back to her, although the memory of last night hadn’t ever gone away. She shuddered at it now. She had embarrassed herself dreadfully. “Humiliated” would be a better word.

  She had arrived in York from Harrogate in the evening, hoping to see some friends. Yes, she did have friends, against the odds. She was going to phone them and say casually, “How about meeting up? A drink?,” pretending it was an impromptu idea, when in fact she had been planning it for several days. She was trying to be more spontaneous—what she thought of as spontaneity in her earlier years she now recognized as mere torpor. (“Shall we go to the beach?” “Yeah, OK.”) She was also trying to revive a social life that she had once had but which she had woefully neglected since her success. (“So busy with stuff, sorry.”)

  She hadn’t seen these particular friends for a long time—years (and years)—and they had parted on rather bad terms. They had all been in a “Women’s Wholefood Cooperative,” which basically meant that they bought big ugly sacks of chaff and husks, masquerading as muesli, and then divided it up between them. They didn’t have much in common, apart from the Steiner school and CND, which sounded like a lot, but wasn’t for Viola.

  Arriving in York, she realized that she had forgotten that it was both a Saturday and a bank-holiday weekend and found York bedecked in Jubilee adornment, a frenzy of bunting and red, white and blue. Weekends were also when the city was besieged by rampaging hordes of stags and hens coming down from the even-more-northern north.

  She checked in to the Cedar Court Hotel, which used to be the headquarters of the North Eastern Railway. Everything became a hotel eventually. Dust and sand and hotels. She had hoped for a room with a view, one of the ones that faced on to the Bar Walls, but there were none available. If she was in a Forster novel she would meet the love of her life at this point (she would also be forty years younger) and be wrenched emotionally and at the end she would have her view. Not that she wanted to be wrenched emotionally (she had given up men), nor indeed meet the love of her life, but she would have liked a view. The girl who checked her in at reception had almost certainly never heard of Forster, although she might have heard of Viola Romaine, but Viola didn’t feel up to testing that theory. Viola felt as if she spent her life wading through a sea of ignorance, shallow but without a shore in sight. Yes, she was making elitist assumptions. No, she didn’t have a right to. The receptionist (who had heard of neither Forster nor Viola Romaine, but had “enjoyed” Fifty Shades of Grey, a fact that would have made Viola apoplectic) handed her a key card and said she would get someone to show her to her room. “Anything else I can do for you, Mrs. Romaine?”

  After the divorce Viola had kept Wilf’s name (and half the proceeds from the sale of the house, of course) on the grounds that it was more interesting than the prosaic “Todd.” “How do you spell Romaine? Like the lettuce?” someone asked her the other day. Her father’s aunt, the writer of those endless ghastly Augustus books, had taken the name “Fox”—much nicer than a lettuce, why hadn’t she thought of that? Viola Fox. Perhaps she could use it as a pseudonym, write a different kind of book—a serious one that didn’t sell but was critically lauded. (“A text that challenges our epistemological assumptions about the nature of fiction,” TLS.)

  They had married a month after first meeting. “An immense passion,” Viola explained to her disappointed yet strangely envious women’s group. “Passion” was a word that appealed to Viola—the word possibly more than the passion itself. It was doomed and Brontëesque and she felt she hadn’t had enough of that in her life. She yearned for the Romantic. It was neither passion nor romance with Wilf Romaine, merely wishful thinking.

  Wilf Romaine had seemed a firebrand, but it turned out that really he was just bombastic. He was polemical, a political activist, CND, Labour Party, etcetera, who made much of being the son of a coal miner. But, as Viola felt it necessary to point out to him not long into their marriage, being the son of a coal miner didn’t actually make you a coal miner yourself. Instead he was a lecturer in Communications (a meaningless discipline) at a further education college, with type 2 diabetes and a drink problem. He had seemed fierce and noble but in the end he was as disappointing as everyone else.

  “Did he hit you?” Gregory, her therapist, asked. Gregory was very keen on domestic violence as cause and effect.

  “Yes,” Viola said, because that sounded infinitely more interesting than the cold, damp truth of mutual indifference. As you got older and time went on, you realized that the distinction between truth and fiction didn’t really matter because eventually everything disappeared into the soupy, amnesiac mess of history. Personal or political, it made no difference.

  Her children left home and she moved to Whitby, although technically Sunny didn’t leave home, Viola did. That was when she became a writer. Even Viola had to acknowledge that she needed to shake herself out of her indolent state of mind, engage with the realities of life—which was the kind of thing The Voice of Reason would say, of course. Writing felt like something she knew, although she only knew it from the other side—reading—and it took her a while to realize that writing and reading were completely different activities—polar opposites, in fact. And just because she could do joined-up handwriting, she discovered, didn’t mean that she could write books. But she persevered, perhaps for the first time in her life.

  She had had a good apprenticeship—early reader, only child, semi-orphan, and a nature that was essentially voyeuristic. As a child she had loitered in doorways, listening and observing. (“Writers are just vultures!,” People’s Friend, 2009.) Sparrows at Dawn was sent to an agent, who rejected it, and then another one and another one until finally one wrote back and said it was “interesting,” and although the agent made “interesting” sound like an insult she did nonetheles
s sell it to a publisher who made a (modest) two-book deal, and less than a year later Sparrows at Dawn was a solid, tangible item in the phenomenal world rather than a jumble of ideas in Viola’s head. (“What next?” Bertie said to Teddy. “Badgers for Breakfast? Rabbits at Bedtime?”)

  Her father did not seem as impressed by this achievement as she would have liked. She had sent him an early proof copy and then on publication day had come over to York, where he took her out for a meal and, surprisingly, ordered champagne “to celebrate,” but his critique of the novel was lacking in enthusiasm. She had wanted him to be overwhelmed and astonished by her talent instead of the “Very good” he awarded it, managing to make it sound like the opposite. He also failed (apparently) to understand that the book—young girl, brilliant and precocious, troubled relationship with her single-parent father, etcetera—was about them. Surely he knew that? Why didn’t he say something? Instead, on the way back to his house he sang, “And that singular anomaly, the lady novelist, I don’t think she’d be missed—I’m sure she’d not be missed!” as if the whole thing was amusing. Gilbert and Sullivan, he said. “I’ve got a little list.” Haven’t we all, she thought.

  Sparrows at Dawn had limited success. “Overly sentimental,” “Rather baggy.” She had written herself into a hole, but she wrote herself out again with her second novel, The Children of Adam, “a bittersweet tragicomedy about life in a commune in the Sixties.” She had backdated her experiences to a more fashionable decade and told it from the point of view of a four-year-old child. “But isn’t that my story, not yours?” Bertie said, rather aggrieved. It was hugely popular (“For some reason,” Bertie puzzled to Teddy) and was made into a very English and largely forgotten film with Michael Gambon and Greta Scacchi.

  And that was that, the beginning of her brilliant career.

  Her bedroom at the Cedar Court was large and rather dark and must have once been someone’s office. She phoned the friends she had thought to meet up with and found that their phone number no longer worked, which was an indication of how long it was since she’d been in touch. To be honest (she was trying more of that too), she was relieved. All that catching up they would have been forced to do. And she had moved on so far from those days and they probably hadn’t. If she thought about them, she imagined them still dressed in thick jumpers and long skirts with clogs on their feet, curtains of hair hanging down over their faces, still dishing out horse feed from sacks (although actually one was a barrister in North Square and the other one was dead).

  She lay down on the hotel bed and stared at the ceiling. It was only six o’clock and the summer evening light would, depressingly, go on for ever. She could lie here and stare at the ceiling or watch television and order room service. Neither appealed, so she decided to brave a Saturday bank-holiday evening in York, not a light undertaking. At least it wasn’t a race day, an event that also attracted large groups of inappropriately dressed young women, who could be distinguished from the regular hens by their fascinators, a ludicrous item of headgear if ever there was one. And they were all so fat! How did they manage in toilet cubicles and cinema seats? You could be squashed to death by one of them if you weren’t careful.

  It was early yet but when she left the hotel Viola discovered that the stags and hens were already out in force, already astonishingly drunk. She shuddered to think what kind of state they would be in later. Some of the stags were in fancy dress—a whole group (a bunch she should call them, she supposed) of men dressed in banana costumes were streaming down the steps into the Slug and Lettuce by the river. Most, though, were just in blokey uniform—clean jeans and T-shirts, reeking of aftershave, muscle already turning to flab. The girls were tribal, wearing T-shirts that picked out their affiliations in rhinestones—“Claire’s Hen Party,” “Hens in the City,” “The Only Way Is Darlington”—the last a particularly deluded group, in Viola’s opinion. Pink was the order of the day for the girls—pink cowboy hats, pink T-shirts, pink tutus, pink sashes. They were the kind of girls who thought cupcakes were sophisticated. Cupcakes were another bugbear of Viola’s. They were just buns, for heaven’s sake! Why all the fuss? To make money, of course.

  She caught sight of the deely-boppers (pink, naturally) on the heads of a flock of girls (“Hannah’s Horny Hens”) who were flapping around at the traffic lights on Lendal Bridge, uncertain where to take their patronage next. Viola hadn’t seen deely-boppers since the Eighties. Bertie had a pair when she was a child, silver tinsel balls that bobbed around on her little head like insect feelers. And—Viola suddenly remembered—a pair of spangled silver wings that went with them. A moth, not a butterfly, Bertie said. A little jab to the heart. You had to be careful of the jabs—if you had enough of them they could weaken the fabric of the heart, open up fault lines, fissures and rifts, and before you knew where you were the whole brittle structure could shatter into a thousand tiny pieces. Viola’s heart was being held together by sticking plaster and glue. Was that a good image? She wasn’t sure.

  Bertie, against Viola’s advice, had insisted on sleeping in her silver wings. The next morning, when she discovered they were crushed beyond repair, she had sobbed inconsolably. “Well, you should have listened to me, shouldn’t you?” Viola had said. “I told you that would happen.”

  Sow and reap, Viola. Sow and reap.

  Bringing up the rear of Hannah’s Horny Hens there was a couple of older, rather disconsolate-looking women—a mother of the bride and an aunt or prospective mother-in-law, perhaps. Their sagging bodies struggled uncomfortably with the tight pink T-shirts, let alone the rhinestone epithet inscribed across their wobbling bosoms. (“Good corsetry,” Viola Romaine confides conspiratorially, “that’s the secret to looking good for the older woman.” Sunday Express, Life and Style, 2010. That was not what she said! Completely misquoted.)

  Would this be herself one day, Viola wondered? After all, Bertie might decide, in her own post-ironic fashion, to have a traditional hen night (“Bertie’s Babes”) and inflict humiliation on her retinue. She would have to meet someone to marry first, of course. It was beginning to look as if Viola would never know the redemption of being a grandmother. Sunny may as well have been a monk from the sound of it and Bertie didn’t seem to date at all, or if she did she certainly didn’t tell her mother about it.

  Hannah’s Horny Hens seemed to come to an unspoken decision and the bevy wheeled away down Rougier Street. As they passed in front of her Viola realized, to her embarrassment, that the wobbling deely-boppers she was staring at were actually stubby little penises. Without warning the penises lit up and began to flash and the hens cawed raucously at each other. Viola found herself blushing as she hurried on to the familiar comfort of Bettys. A sanctuary from dystopia, a reliably clean, well-lighted place.

  She ate a chicken salad and drank two glasses of wine. She was no longer a vegetarian. It was difficult to stay slim on all those pulses. A man was playing the piano—very well, not just the usual lounge songs but some Chopin and Rachmaninov. Chopin reminded Viola of her mother and always made her horribly sad. Viola gave up piano lessons after Nancy’s death. If she’d kept them up she might have had a musical career. A concert pianist—well, why not?

  Viola went downstairs to the toilets. There was a fragment of a mirror down there, the mirror that used to be behind the bar when this was “Bettys Bar” during the war. The RAF crews used to scratch their names on the glass. Her father had told her about Bettys Bar, how he used to drink here during the war, but she hadn’t really listened to his reminiscences. Now the mirror was a relic. Nearly all of these men who had left their names behind would be dead now. Many of them would have died during the war, Viola supposed. She peered at the near-illegible names. Had her father left his name behind here? She wished she had asked him about his war when he was still compos mentis. She might have been able to use his memories as the basis of a novel. One that everyone would respect. People always took war novels seriously.

  When she sat back down at
her table she found that a group of men dressed as condoms were staggering across St. Helen’s Square. They were in one of the best-preserved medieval cities in Europe and they were dressed as condoms. What was wrong with Benidorm? Or Magaluf? (“You want everyone to behave better, but you don’t behave better yourself,” Bertie said.)

  One of the condom men squashed himself like an insect against the large plate-glass of Bettys and leered at the diners. The pianist glanced up from his keyboard and then continued serenely with Debussy. A van drew up in the centre of St. Helen’s Square and disgorged several people dressed as zombies. The zombies proceeded to chase the men who were dressed as condoms. The condom men didn’t seem very surprised, as if they were expecting to be chased by zombies. (“They pay for it,” Bertie said.) Was this fun? Viola despaired. It was possible, she thought, that she had won the race to reach the end of civilization. There was no prize. Obviously.

  But not quite yet. The finishing line was in sight but Viola was still to stumble over it. She left Bettys and negotiated her way back across Lendal Bridge, where the atmosphere was decidedly rowdier now. Somehow or other she became accidentally entangled with Amy’s Single Ladies, a brood who were utterly dishevelled by drink and being led by the eponymous Amy herself, tiara askew, a sash across a cheap bustier proclaiming her “The Bride” and an L-plate attached to her not-insignificant rump. What had happened to girls? Was this what Emily Davison had thrown herself beneath a horse for? So girls could wear light-up penises on their heads and eat cupcakes? Really? Every time they encountered a male of the species they each held up a finger and screamed, “Put a ring on it!” before hanging on to each other because they were collapsing with the humour of it. “I’m going to wet myself!” one of them shrieked.

  A herd of stags streamed around Viola. “Cheer up, you old bag!” one of them yelled at her. “You might get lucky if you stop looking so miserable.” Viola stomped on, a boiling fury inside. The cracks and fissures spreading, crazing the surface of her heart. She was an overstrung piano, all the wires about to rupture and spring apart in a dreadful cataclysm of metaphors.