And now it’s just boats, ships, passing in front of her. All kinds of different ones. Quite boring ones.” Viola’s phone rang. “Bertie” the screen said. Viola thought about not answering, answered.
“Are you watching the Thames Pageant with Grandpa Ted?” Bertie asked.
“Yes, I’m in his room.”
“It’s rubbish, isn’t it? And the poor Queen, she’s almost as old as Grandpa Ted and she’s having to suffer all this.”
“She’ll catch her death in all that rain,” Viola said. She had spouted socialism and republicanism most of her adult life, but lately had revealed a strange affection for the royal family. And she had voted Tory in the last election, although it would have taken torture to drag that fact out into the open. “In my defence, it was a tactical vote,” she explained to the jury. They were not convinced. UKIP were still beyond the pale, but never say never. People didn’t mellow in old age, they simply decomposed, as far as Viola could see.
“Anyway,” Bertie said, indicating she had already run out of things to say to her mother, “can you put me on to Grandpa Ted?”
“He won’t understand you.”
“Just put me on anyway.”
If Viola could start again—there are no second chances, life’s not a rehearsal, blah, blah, blah—yes, but if she could, if she could retake the journey that wasn’t really a journey, what would she do? She would learn how to love. Learning to Love, a painful but ultimately redemptive journey, displaying warmth and compassion as the author learns how to overcome loneliness and despair. The steps she takes to mend her relationship with her children are particularly rewarding. (Half the members of the jury had nodded off by now.) She had tried, she really had. She had worked on herself. Years of therapy and fresh starts, although nothing that really required an effort on her part. She wanted someone else to effect change in her. It seemed a shame you couldn’t just get an injection that would suddenly make everything all right. (“Try heroin,” Bertie said.) She hadn’t turned to the Church yet, but now that she had voted Tory (tactical!), Anglicanism would probably be next. But it didn’t seem to matter how many new beginnings she had, Viola always somehow found herself in the same place, and no matter how hard she tried, the earliest template of herself always seemed to trump later versions. So why bother? Really?
“Pointless,” she said again as she tried to open the window further, but it had a lock that prevented it moving more than a couple of inches, as if the powers-that-be were trying to prevent elves falling out rather than normal-sized, if slightly shrunken, old people. They were on the first floor and the view was of the huge industrial bins that contained God knows what kind of unpalatable refuse.
Her father must miss having fresh air, he had always been so into the outdoors. He loved nature. She felt a sudden spark of sympathy for him and stamped on it.
When she was a child, they drove out to the country nearly every weekend and walked for miles while he battered her with information about flowers and animals and trees. Oh God, how she had hated those nature walks. He wrote a column for years for some obscure rural magazine. Of course, if she had listened to him she might have learned some useful stuff, but she didn’t listen on principle because there was nothing he could ever say about anything that would make up for his losing her mother. I want my mother. The desperate cry of a child in the night. (“Oh, for God’s sake, get over it,” Bertie said. Unnecessarily harsh, in Viola’s opinion.)
“You used the word ‘wary’ earlier, in the context of your father,” Gregory said. He was yet another incarnation of The Voice of Reason, of course, a voice that had been pursuing her all her life.
“Wary?” he prompted her.
“Did I use that word?”
“Yes.”
She supposed he was trying to truffle out abuse or something equally traumatic and dramatic. But it was her father’s provident character that had made her want to keep her distance from him. His stoicism (yes, that much-overused word), his cheerful frugality—the bees, the chickens, the home-grown vegetables. Chores had to be done (“I’ll wash if you dry”). Leftovers had to be used up (“Well, let’s see, there’s a bit of ham and some cold potatoes in the fridge, why don’t you pop outside and see if our feathered friends have given us any eggs?”). And his persistent patience with her as if she were a mulish dog. (“Come on, now, Viola, if you come and sit down and do your homework, we’ll see if we can’t find you a treat afterwards.”)
“He sounds sensible, Viola.”
“You’re supposed to be on my side.” (Sensible! What a horrid word.)
“Am I?” Gregory said mildly.
Was there no one who would ever sympathize with her tales of woe? Even people that she paid a fortune to precisely for that task? “And he cut my hair off after my mother died.”
“Himself?”
“No, he took me to a hairdresser.” Nancy used to take her to Swallow and Barry in Stonegate and then they would go to Bettys and eat meringues filled with cream. She had ordered a meringue in Bettys last night. It was very good but it was not the meringue perdu of her childhood.
Swallow and Barry had a little counter downstairs where they sold jewelled tortoiseshell combs and clips and it smelt of some lovely grown-up perfume, and upstairs the hairdresser always said how nice her long hair was and then he trimmed the ends neatly so it would be “even nicer.” It was a place of luxury and indulgence where people told her she was pretty and everyone loved Nancy, but after she died her father said he couldn’t do her plaits every morning and she needed something more “manageable,” so he took her to a horrible little salon near where they lived. It was painted lilac, the sort of place that nowadays would be called “A Cut Above” or “Curlz” but then was called “Jennifer’s,” and she clearly remembered that it was cold and the mauve paint was peeling.
She left with an awful short style that didn’t suit her, made her look like a plain pudding, her lost hair abandoned on the cracked lino of Jennifer’s. No meringues in Bettys, only lemon barley water and chocolate bourbons at home. She had wept and wept and—
“Couldn’t you brush your own hair?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Couldn’t you brush your own hair?”
“I was nine years old. So, no. Not properly.” Nancy had brushed her hair attentively, every morning and every evening before bed. It had been a lovely communion that they shared.
Bertie had long hair when she was small. By default really as Viola had never taken her to a hairdresser. Viola remembered rushing to get her children off to school in the mornings, always an appalling hour of chaos with Bertie being slow and Sunny being obnoxious. (“Why don’t you get up a bit earlier?” her father suggested. Right, as if she got enough sleep as it was.) Bertie hated the ritual tug-of-war with the little Mason Pearson, a brush that wasn’t really up to the task. She fidgeted endlessly and yowled when the brush snagged so she usually went off to school with it sticking out all over the place. It was a Steiner school, all the children arrived looking vaguely unkempt so it didn’t seem to matter that much.
Viola winced at a long-forgotten memory that resurfaced unexpectedly—yelling at Bertie, “Well brush it yourself if you’re not prepared to stand still!” before throwing the brush across the room. How old was Bertie then? Six? Seven?
Oh, Viola.
This memory, coming out of the blue, was another little jab to Viola’s heart, already severely damaged by the previous evening’s revels. (“Was I really such a terrible mother?” she asked Bertie. “Why the past tense?” Bertie said. Sow and reap.) Another jab. The fissure in Viola’s ossified heart widened into a crevasse. Jab, jab. Of course, it wasn’t that people didn’t love her (although it certainly felt as if they didn’t), she hadn’t been exiled from love, she had exiled herself. She wasn’t stupid, she knew that. What was the next step then, The Voice of Reason asked? Was it perhaps to begin—
“Oh, shut the fuck up,” Viola said wearily.
When
Bertie went to stay with Viola’s father (“I lived with him, I didn’t stay with him”), true to precedent, he took her to a hairdresser and she returned with an old-fashioned bob held back with a plastic hair slide. She loved it, she reported, but Viola suspected that she only said that to annoy her. “She can look after it herself now,” her father said. He was obsessed with self-sufficiency, of course, with people being responsible for themselves.
He started to snore.
“I’m still interested in the word ‘wary’?” Gregory said.
Viola sighed. “Maybe it was the wrong word.”
Everyone liked her father. He was good. He was kind. She had watched him kill her mother.
“Do you want to talk about that, Viola?”
The insubstantial pageant started to drizzle limply to an end and a pair of carers came into the room and said, “Ready for bed, Ted?” like a children’s rhyme. “He’s already in bed,” Viola pointed out and the carers laughed as if she’d said something funny. They were both Filipino (“Tagalog spoken here”) and laughed no matter what you said. Were the Philippines really such a happy place or were the carers just happy not to be there? Or did they not understand a word she said? It was only six o’clock—even his bedtime was that of a little boy. One of them was carrying an adult nappy and they waited silently for her to leave the room. (“Preserving the dignity of our residents is of paramount importance.”)
Once her father had been cleaned up and tucked in, Viola went back to say goodbye. “I won’t be here next week,” she said, although it seemed pointless to talk to him about anything that involved the future, pointless to talk to him about anything really. “I’m not going home,” she added, “I’m going to a literary festival in Singapore.”
He said something, it could have been “Sunny.”
“Yes, it will be hot,” she said, even though she knew that wasn’t what he meant. Sun, son, Sunny. It was just “a hop and a skip” from Singapore to Bali, Bertie said. If she was already going that far, why wasn’t Viola going to see her “only son”? (And Bertie called her a passive aggressive!) It was four hours actually, but it wasn’t the time or the distance unless you thought of those things as metaphorical. Which Viola did.
“Right, well, I’ll be off now,” Viola said, glancing with relief at her watch. “I’ve got a taxi booked to pick me up.” She kissed Teddy lightly on the forehead, the proximity of escape making her almost affectionate. He was cool and dry to the touch, already half-embalmed and mummified. His hand twitched, but that was the only acknowledgement he gave her.
Downstairs, at the main exit door, an old woman, one of the walking dead, was treading water, looking out at what would have made quite a nice garden for the “residents” if it hadn’t been given over to staff parking. Viola recognized her as someone called Agnes. She had still been in possession of her mind when her father first moved to Poplar Hill and used to sit in his room and chat to him. Now she had the dead stare of a fish and was fluent in gibberish.
“Hello, there,” Viola said pleasantly. Experience had taught her that it was difficult to converse with someone whose eyes slid past you as if you were the ghost, not them, but she pressed on. “Would you mind moving?” she said. “I’d like to leave and you are a bit in the way.” Agnes said something but it was like listening to Bertie talking in her sleep. “You’re not allowed out,” Viola said, trying to nudge her out of the way, but Agnes stood her ground, immoveable as a cow or a horse. Viola sighed and said, “Be it on your own head then,” and keyed in the magic exit number on the security pad (“4-3-2-1”). Agnes slipped swiftly out, her speediness impressive, already halfway down the drive by the time Viola was climbing into her taxi. You had to admire her fugitive spirit.
The new nursing sister came jogging awkwardly out of the building and said to Viola, “You haven’t seen Agnes, have you?” Viola shrugged and said, “Sorry.”
She caught the last train to London and missed the sub-headline in The Press the next day. The news item was buried amongst photos of the weekend’s street parties and reports of the Jubilee celebrations and Viola did not read that “An eighty-year-old resident of a care home who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease has been reported missing. She was spotted by a motorist wandering on the hard shoulder of the A64 and police are trying to trace her whereabouts through CCTV. The woman, who has not been named, is a resident of Poplar Hill Care Home. A spokesperson for the care home said a full investigation is underway as to how the woman had been able to get out of a secure ward and declined to comment further.”
Viola was in Changi airport by then. Another fugitive.
She took a taxi from King’s Cross to the Mandarin Oriental in Knightsbridge. She had suggested to Bertie that they meet up while she was in town. “Dinner? At Dinner—the Heston Blumenthal place at the Mandarin?” (Talk about calling a spade a spade.) “My treat!”
“Can’t, sorry,” Bertie said. “I’m busy.”
“Too busy for your own mother?” Viola said lightly. (Sow and reap.) The horror of Saturday night came surging back. Gregory said she had “abandonment issues.” (“As in you abandoned us?” Bertie said.) She felt sick.
Give Viola three wishes and what would she ask for?
Her children back as babies. Her children back as babies. Her children back as babies.
Somewhere high over the Indian Ocean she remembered the powerful dream from last night. She was in a train station, not a modern one, it felt like the past, dark and sooty. Sunny was with her, five or six years old, wearing that funny little red duffel coat he’d had, a stripy scarf around his neck. (Yes, she had dressed him badly, she admitted it, all right?) The station was busy, people were rushing to catch the train, to get home. They were impeded by a turnstile and a ticket collector in a booth. There were steps that led down to the platform and the train, which were both out of sight. It was Viola and Sunny’s job to help the people catch the train, herding them like sheepdogs and shouting encouragement at them. And then the rush slowed to a trickle and finally stopped. They could hear the last of the train’s doors slam down below and the guard blew his whistle and Sunny turned to her and, with a beaming grin on his face, said, “We did it, Mum! Everyone got on the train.” Viola had absolutely no idea what the dream meant.
“Are you all right, Mrs. Romaine?” the lovely Asian flight attendant was asking her. They were all lovely to you in First Class. Viola supposed that was what you paid for. Tears were streaming down her cheeks. “Sad film,” she said, indicating her blank TV screen. “Do you think I could have a cup of tea?”
She negotiated passport control and baggage retrieval and walked towards the exit, pulling her suitcase behind her. The automatic doors to the Arrivals hall swished quietly open. There was a driver on the other side of the barrier holding up a sign with her name on it. He would take her to a very nice hotel, and then tomorrow or the next day—she seemed to have lost her schedule—she would do a “Meet the Author” event and give a reading, “a little preview” from her new book, Every Third Thought, out next month. She seemed to recall she was also down for a couple of panel events as well. “The role of the writer in the contemporary world.” “Popular versus literary—a false divide?” Something like that. It was always something like that. Literary festivals, bookshops, interviews, online chats, you were just filling up other people’s empty spaces really. But they were filling up your empty spaces too.
She approached the driver. He would have no idea who she was unless she identified herself. She swerved away from him, carried on as if that was her intention all along, took the escalator back up to the check-in area, found the Singapore Airlines ticketing desk and bought a ticket to Denpasar.
She imagined the look on Sunny’s face. (“Surprise, surprise!”) They would get everyone on the train. Somehow or other.
30 March 1944
The Last Flight
The Fall
He had just whistled for the dog when he spotted a pair of hares in the grassy f
ield that lay on the western side of the farmhouse. March hares, boxing like bare-knuckle fighters, the spring madness upon them. He caught sight of a third hare. Then a fourth. Once when he was a boy he had counted seven at one time, in the meadow at Fox Corner. The meadow had gone now, Pamela reported, ploughed up for winter wheat for hungry wartime mouths. The flax and larkspur, buttercups, corn poppies, red campion, the ox-eye daisies, all gone, never to come back.
The hares might be convinced by the new season but it didn’t feel much like spring yet to Teddy. Pale clouds scudded across a washed-out sky. They were driven by a sharp east wind that was blowing all the way from the North Sea across the flat landscape, whipping soil off the dry tops of the bare furrows. It was the kind of weather that lowered the spirits, although Teddy’s were lifted a little by the sight of the jousting hares and the high, fluty notes of a blackbird answering his own whistle from somewhere unseen.
The dog heard his whistle too—Lucky always heard him whistle—and was making a headlong dash in his direction, blithely unaware of the hares’ sparring match taking place in the field. The dog roamed far and wide these days, quite at home in the countryside, although equally at home, apparently, in the Waafery. When the dog reached him it sat promptly, gazing up at his face, waiting for its next orders.
“Let’s go,” Teddy said. “We’re on ops tonight. Me,” he added. “Not you.” Once was enough.
When he looked again the hares had disappeared.
The orders had come down from Bomber Command HQ at High Wycombe this morning, but only a small handful of people on the station—Teddy one of them—was ever given early notice of the target.
As a wing commander he was discouraged from flying too frequently, “or we’d be losing a wing commander a week,” as the CO put it. All pre-war notions of hierarchy in the RAF had long since been upended. You could be a wing commander at twenty-three, dead at twenty-four.
A God in Ruins Page 38
