A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson
Sunny appeared to have fallen asleep, as if exhausted, as if he had been involved in hard labour rather than moving a few boxes around. The removal men had done all the brute work while Sunny merely riffled through papers and files, saying to Teddy every five minutes, “Do you want to keep this? Do you want to keep this? Do you want to keep this?” like a linguistically challenged parrot, until Teddy had to say, “Just leave it to me, Sunny, I’ll go through it all myself. But thank you.”
Teddy put a plate of biscuits and two mugs of tea on a tray. Plate, mugs and tray were all destined later for Oxfam. “You have four trays! Four!” Viola said, as if Teddy was personally responsible for a capitalist glut of tea-trays. “No one needs four trays. You can only take one with you.” He chose the oldest tray, a scratched and worn tin thing that he’d had since the year dot. It had belonged to the anonymous old lady who had lived and died in the cottage he had lived in when he was first married. “The old biddy” they used to call her, as if she were a friendly ghost.
“That old thing?” Viola said, regarding the tray with horror. “What about that nice bamboo one I bought for you?”
“Sentimental value,” Teddy said resolutely.
He took the tea outside to where the removal men were on a break. They were sitting on the tailgate, smoking and enjoying a bit of sunshine, and welcomed the tea.
Sunny opened his eyes slowly like a cat returning from sleep and said, “Didn’t you make me anything? I could murder a drink of something.” Teddy supposed Sunny got his self-absorption from his parents. Both Viola and Dominic had always put themselves first. Even the way Dominic had died had been selfish. Sunny needed to be coaxed into standing on his own feet, taking his place in the wider world, and understand that it was full of other people, not just him.
“The kettle’s in the kitchen,” Teddy said to him.
“I know that,” Sunny said sarcastically.
“Don’t use that tone,” Viola said (her own tone, Teddy noted). She had her arms folded in a combative way, glaring out of the window at the removal men. “Look at them, what a pair of layabouts, being paid to drink tea.” As long as Teddy could remember, even before they lost Nancy, Viola had resented other people’s pleasure, as if it subtracted something from the world rather than adding to it.
“You used to be on the side of the workers, I seem to remember,” Teddy said mildly. “And anyway, it’s me that’s paying them. They’re nice chaps, I’m happy to pay them to drink tea for ten minutes.”
“Well, I’m getting back to the endless task of sorting out all this stuff. Do you know how many glasses you’ve got? I’ve counted eight brandy glasses alone so far. When have you ever needed eight brandy glasses?” Viola led a sloppy kind of life. She had lurched from one disaster to the next. Perhaps having authority over tea-trays and brandy glasses gave her the illusion of control. Teddy suspected he was entering into the unsafe territory of cod psychology.
“And you certainly won’t need them where you’re going,” she pressed on. It sounded as if she were referring to the afterlife, rather than his move to sheltered housing, although he supposed that was a kind of afterlife. “The odds against eight people being in your new flat and all wanting brandy at the same time are astronomical,” Viola said. Perhaps, Teddy thought, he could organize some kind of brandy-tasting soirée after he moved, for eight people, obviously. Take photographs as evidence to show Viola.
“At least you don’t have a dog to get rid of,” she said.
“ ‘Get rid of’?”
“Well, they don’t allow pets where you’re going. You would have to give it away.”
“Or you could take it in.”
“Oh, I couldn’t manage, not with the cats.”
Why on earth were they talking about an imaginary, non-existent dog, Teddy wondered?
“Just as well that Tinker’s dead,” she said. How harsh she could be.
Teddy hadn’t considered it before, but now he realized that Tinker had been the last dog he would have. He supposed he had presumed there would be another one—not a puppy, he didn’t have the energy for a puppy, but an older, unwanted dog perhaps, from the dogs’ home. They could have lived out their last days together. It was three years since Tinker had died. Cancer. The vet had come to the house to put him down before it grew painful. He was a good dog, perhaps his best one. A foxhound, very sensible in his outlook. Teddy had cradled him in his arms while the vet injected him, looked steadfastly into the dog’s eyes until the life had gone from them. He had done the same for a man once. His friend.
“I liked Tinker, Grandpa Ted,” Sunny interjected unexpectedly, suddenly six years old again. “I miss him.”
“I know you do. So do I,” Teddy said, patting his grandson on the shoulder. “Would you like a cup of tea, Sunny?”
“What about me? Am I included in that?” Viola said in that faux-chirpy way that she had when she was trying to pretend they were all one happy family. (“The family that put the ‘fun’ in dysfunctional,” Bertie said.)
“Of course you are,” Teddy said.
They had moved to this house in York in 1960. Mouse Cottage had been superseded by a rented farmhouse (Ayswick), which was where Viola spent her first years. When they moved to York the loss of the countryside had felt like a wound to Teddy, but then greater wounds had been inflicted and he had soldiered on in York until he grew to like it.
The house was a semi-detached in the suburbs that looked like thousands of others across the land—pebble-dash, mock-Tudor accents, little diamond panes in the bowed bay windows, big gardens back and front. It had been Viola’s home for half of her childhood—the worst half undoubtedly—although she always behaved as if it meant nothing to her. Perhaps it didn’t. She had spent her sulking teenage years champing on the bit to escape its confines (“dull,” “conventional,” “little boxes” and so on). When she had finally left to go to university it had felt as if a great darkness had left the house. Teddy knew he had failed Viola but he wasn’t sure how. (“Do you ever think it might be the other way round?” Bertie said. “That she might have failed you?” “It doesn’t work like that,” Teddy said.)
He was going to a place called Fanning Court. “A sheltered retirement housing complex.” “Sheltered” made it sound like it was somewhere for a dog or a horse. “Don’t be silly,” Viola said. “It’s a much safer place for you to be.” He had trouble remembering a time when she didn’t treat him as a nuisance. It would only get worse, he suspected, the older he grew. She had been nagging him to move for a while, so that someone could “keep an eye on you.”
“I’m only seventy-nine,” Teddy said, “I can keep an eye on myself. I’m not in my dotage yet.”
“Not yet,” Viola said. “But you’ll have to move sooner or later, so it may as well be sooner. You can’t manage the stairs and you certainly can’t manage the garden any more.” He managed the garden rather well, he thought, with a little help from a man who came in once a week to do any heavy work and to mow the grass in summer. There were fruit trees at the bottom of the garden and there was once a large vegetable plot. Teddy used to grow everything—potatoes, peas, carrots, onions, beans, raspberries, blackcurrants. Tomatoes and cucumbers in the greenhouse. He had built a little run for a couple of chickens and had even kept a hive of bees for a few satisfying years. These days most of the garden was given over to lawn, with easy-going shrubs and flowers—roses, mainly. He still planted sweet peas in the summer and dahlias for the autumn, although that was becoming a bit of a chore.
Losing the garden was going to be hard. When he moved here he thought the garden would be a poor consolation for the loss of the wild countryside that he had left behind, but he had been proved wrong. Now what would be his consolation? A couple of pots on a balcony, a window box perhaps. His heart sank.
For years now Viola had been going on about organic food and what a healthy diet she had fed her children, yet she seemed incapable of understanding him when he said that he had
“Do you still have allergies?” he asked.
“I would let you live with me,” she carried on as if he hadn’t spoken (“Let,” Teddy thought?) “but there’s so little room and, of course, you would never be able to get up and down the stairs. They’re simply not suitable for an elderly person.”
Viola had left York for Leeds several years ago. In York she had worked in a Welfare Benefits Unit (Teddy had no idea what that was), but then she got a job in “Family Mediation” in Leeds. That, too, seemed a vague kind of occupation and, from the name of it, hardly something that Viola sounded suited for. Of course, the move was prompted by her marriage to Wilf Romaine. (“We eloped,” she says rather giddily in a Woman and Home interview in 1999. Teddy wasn’t sure that “elope” was quite the right word when you were over thirty and had two small children.)
Now she was in Whitby, living off welfare benefits herself as far as he could tell, although they didn’t talk about it. She had bought an old fisherman’s cottage with the proceeds of her divorce from Wilf Romaine. She was forty-one and had spent most of her life living off money given to her by other people—Teddy, Dominic’s family (“a pittance”) and then the disastrous marriage to Wilf. “If I’d realized,” she said crossly, as if it were someone else’s fault, “I would have sidestepped motherhood and men and gone straight into a profession when I graduated. I would probably be a controller at the BBC by now, or something in MI5.” Teddy made a non-committal noise.
The cottage in Whitby was just four rooms, piled crookedly, one on top of another. Teddy wouldn’t have been surprised if Viola had gone out of her way to find somewhere unsuitable for an “elderly person.” As if he would ever have contemplated living with her. (“Fate worse than death,” Bertie agreed.)
Viola was “writing,” she said. Teddy wasn’t too sure what this meant and didn’t like to ask too closely, not because he wasn’t interested but because Viola got very snappish if you asked her to go into detail about anything. Sunny was the same, exasperated by even the most inoffensive questions. “So what are you up to these days?” Teddy had asked his grandson when he arrived—reluctantly—this morning to help with the move. Any question about Sunny’s plans for the future elicited a shrug and a sigh and the answer, “Stuff.”
“He’s so like his father,” Viola said. (No, Teddy thought, just like his mother.) “I despair of him. He hasn’t grown up, he’s just got bigger. Of course, if he were a child nowadays he’d probably be diagnosed with dyslexia, and some kind of hyperactivity thing as well. And dyspraxia probably. Autistic even.”
“Autistic?” Teddy said. It was funny how she always managed to wash her hands of responsibility. “He always seemed a pretty normal little chap to me.” This wasn’t entirely true, Sunny had stumbled and faltered his way through his life so far, but someone had to come to the poor boy’s defence. If Teddy had been forced to “diagnose” him with anything it would have been unhappiness. Teddy loved Sunny in a way that made his heart ache. He feared for him, for his future. Teddy’s love for Bertie was more straightforward, more optimistic. Bertie had a bright-eyed intelligence that reminded him of Nancy sometimes (in a way that Viola never had). Something of the same quicksilver nature too, a merry soul, although in death, in memory—which was the same thing now—Nancy had perhaps grown more mercurial than she had been in life.
What is this?” Viola sounded outraged, as if the small rectangular cardboard box contained evidence of some terrible transgression. There was a picture of a coffee grinder on the unopened box.
“It’s a coffee grinder,” Teddy said reasonably.
“It’s the coffee grinder I gave you for Christmas. You haven’t used it.”
“No, I haven’t.”
“Yours was ancient. You said you needed a new one.” She started opening doors and looking in his kitchen cabinets, finally producing—“A coffee grinder. You bought yourself one? I spent money I didn’t have on a present for you. Oh, wait.” She put a hand out as if trying to stop a tank. “Wait. Oh, of course…”
Sunny wandered into the kitchen and groaned. “What’s the drama queen ranting about now?” Viola showed him the box containing the unused coffee grinder. “German!” she pronounced, as if she was in court and had just produced the deciding evidence.
“So?” Sunny said.
“Krups,” Teddy said.
“So?” Sunny said.
“He doesn’t buy German things,” Viola said. “Because of the war.” She said the word “war” sarcastically as if she was arguing with her father about the length of her skirt or the amount of eye make-up she was wearing or the smell of tobacco on her breath—all hotly debated topics in her teenage years.
“The Krupp family supported the Nazis,” Teddy said to Sunny.
“Oh, here comes the history lesson,” Viola said.
“Their factories produced steel,” Teddy continued, ignoring her. “Steel is at the heart of all war.” He had bombed (or tried to bomb) the Krupp works in Essen several times. “They used slave labour. And Jews from the concentration camps.”
“It’s not the same Krups!” Viola shouted at him. “They’re completely different. And anyway, the war ended nearly fifty years ago. Don’t you think it’s about time you got over it? Plus”—there was always a plus with Viola—“a lot of the workers in those factories you were bombing were slave labourers, Jews too. There’s an irony for you,” she said triumphantly. Case closed. Jury convinced.
Viola’s first car after her “emancipation” from Dominic (and four attempts at passing her driving test) had been an old VW Beetle and when Teddy had murmured something about “buying British” she had erupted with accusations of xenophobia. Later, after he’d been living in Fanning Court for several years, the cheap built-in oven that came with the flat gave up the ghost and Viola ordered a new Siemens one from Currys, without any consultation with Teddy. When the delivery men turned up with the oven he asked them (very politely) to put it back on the van and return it to the store.
“I suppose you bombed them too?” Viola said.
“Yes.”
He remembered Nuremberg (he could never forget), the last raid of his war, and in the briefing the intelligence officer—a woman—telling them that the Siemens factory there produced searchlights, electric motors “and so on.” He learned after the war that they had manufactured the ovens for the concentration camp crematoria and wondered if that was the “and so on.” During the war he had been introduced to a friend of Bea’s called Hannie, a refugee, and, although he knew it could mean nothing to Hannie now, it was for her that he made this rather paltry gesture towards Currys. Six million was just a number but Hannie had a face, a pretty one, little emerald earrings (“Costume!”), and she played the flute and wore Soir de Paris and had a family who had been left behind in Germany. There was a suggestion that Hannie was still alive when she was shovelled into the ovens at Auschwitz. (“One so wants to forgive them,” Ursula had said long ago, “and then one thinks about poor Hannie.”) So he didn’t really feel that he needed an excuse for not buying a German oven. Or for having bombed the living daylights out of them for that matter either. That wasn’t entirely true and he might have admitted it if he hadn’t been in an argument with someone as intransigent as his daughter. He had killed women and children and old people, the very ones that society’s mores demanded he protect. At the twisted heart of every war were the innocents. “Collateral damage” they called it these days, but those civilians hadn’t been collateral, they had been the targets. That was what war had become. It was no longer warrior killing warrior, it was people killing other people. Any people.
He didn’
Teddy looked at Sunny, slouched against the kitchen sink, and knew he could never communicate any of this to him.
What a pair of old farts, Sunny thought as the row in the kitchen continued, backwards and forwards like a game of table-tennis. He had enjoyed table-tennis (once, anyway) when he was a child, although Sunny wasn’t entirely convinced that he had ever been a child. They’d had a summer holiday—himself, Bertie and Grandpa Ted—in a big old dilapidated house somewhere, with a table-tennis table in a garage or a shed. It had been the best holiday of his life. There’d been horses (“Donkeys,” Bertie corrected) and a lake (“a pond”).
The argument in the kitchen ground on. Ha ha.
“So you bought a Philips coffee grinder instead?” Viola said. “And you’re going to tell me that their hands were clean during the war? No one’s hands are clean in a war.”
“Philips’s hands were pretty clean,” Teddy said. “Frits Philips was declared ‘Righteous Amongst the Nations’ after the war. That means he helped the Jews,” he explained to Sunny.
“Pah,” Viola said dismissively, indicating she was losing the argument.
Sunny yawned and wandered back out of the kitchen.
Viola escaped to the garden. It wasn’t as neat as it used to be but it still betrayed the fact that her father was anally retentive. Beans grew straight on their canes, roses remained unspotted and uneaten. On her mother’s coffin her father had placed not a florist’s wreath but a bunch of roses from the garden. Viola remembered thinking that her mother deserved something opulent and fancy from a less amateurish hand. Home-made was nicer, her father said. Quite the opposite, Viola thought.