A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson
Teddy knew all this because he returned with Bertie in 1999 on his “farewell tour.” They found that Mouse Cottage had disappeared altogether, not a stone remained, but Ayswick was still where it had been, looking much the same on the outside. It was a B&B now, renamed Fairview, run by a couple in their fifties “escaping the urban rat race.”
They decided on a whim to stay the night there. Teddy was assigned the bedroom he had once shared with Nancy and asked to be moved, and instead slept in a small room at the back that only when he woke up the next morning did he realize had once been Viola’s room, and he wondered how he could have forgotten that. In here had been her cradle and then her cot, and finally her little single bed. Under Nancy’s direction he had nailed painted plywood cut-out figures on the wall—Jack, Jill, the well and a bucket. (“No, further over to the left—make the bucket look as if it’s tumbling over.”) There had been a small nightlight by her bed, a little house, the warm light glowing through the windows. He had built a bookcase for Viola’s childhood reading—The Wind in the Willows, The Secret Garden, Alice in Wonderland—and now here he was on the other side of the looking glass gazing at a Toile de Jouy wallpaper, a large, amateurish painting of the dale in winter, and a bedside lamp with a cheap white paper shade. And no going back, ever, to the other side.
The house was much warmer than it had been when he had lived here with Nancy, although he was sad to see that the Georgian panelling had gone from the walls, a victim of the Sixties, Teddy supposed, and now the place was decorated in fresh florals and stripes, pale rugs and “en-suites” in every room. Ayswick was transformed into something unrecognizable—into Fairview, in fact—and nothing remained of himself or his past. No one now but Teddy would ever know that once he and Nancy had huddled by the great Aga in the kitchen while the wind blew up the hill and whistled through every room, competing with Beniamino Gigli and Maria Caniglia singing Tosca on their cherished gramophone. No one would know that their black-and-white collie had been called Moss and slept contentedly on a rag-rug in front of that great Aga while Teddy drafted his Nature Notes in a reporter’s notebook and Nancy, a ripe seed-pod about to burst, knitted little lacy things for the baby they were about to meet.
It would all die with him, he realized, as he buttered toast in Fairview’s breakfast room—once a dusty and unused back parlour and now, he had to admit, rather nice with three round tables dressed in white tablecloths, a little posy of flowers on each. He was the first of the guests to come down and had already eaten a plate of bacon, egg and sausage (he still had “a good appetite,” according to Viola, who made it sound like a criticism) and chatted affably to the proprietress before anyone else put in an appearance. He didn’t mention to her that he had once lived here. It would seem odd, he decided. And the conversation would run on predictable lines. She would express surprise and say, “It must have changed a lot since your day,” and he would say, “Yes it certainly has!” and none of it would convey the cawing of the rooks in the evening hurrying to roost in the stand of trees behind the farmhouse or the Blakean magnificence of the sunset from the top of the hill.
Ayswick,” Nancy said. “It’s a farmhouse.” Mrs. Taylor-Scott raised an eyebrow as if she disapproved of farmhouses. “In a village,” Nancy added hastily. “Or at any rate on the edge of it. All the necessary amenities and so on.”
They were able to rent Ayswick because the farmer who owned it had built himself a modern brick house “with all mod cons” and regarded the old farmhouse as a “white elephant” and was only too glad to have tenants willing to take on its draughty, stone-flagged passages and rattling windows. “But so much character!” Nancy said, delighted when they signed the lease.
Where Mouse Cottage was tiny, the farmhouse was vast, far too big for two people. It dated from the mid-eighteenth century and the weathered grey stone of the exterior gave away little, but inside it revealed a certain elegance in its broad oak floorboards, the painted Georgian panelling in the living room, the swag and drop cornices and, best of all, the huge farmhouse kitchen with an old cream Aga “like a big comforting animal,” according to Nancy. They still had no furniture of their own apart from Nancy’s piano and no old biddy to lend them her goods and chattels post-mortem, so they were grateful to the farmer and his wife for leaving behind their enormous kitchen table, meant for feeding breakfast to a herd of hungry farm workers.
The farmer’s wife had insisted on plain new-fashioned Ercol in her small spare dining room. “Lovely,” Nancy said politely when she visited. She had taken flowers to say “thank you” and sat at the simple elmwood table and drank Camp coffee that had been boiled up with evaporated milk. Both Teddy and Nancy were rather particular about their coffee. They had the beans, an Italian roast, sent in the post from Border’s in York. The postman always looked taken aback by the aroma escaping from the brown paper packet. They ground the beans themselves in a hand grinder that they left permanently clamped on to the kitchen table and made their coffee in an old percolator that Teddy had brought back with him from France, before the war.
“The new farmhouse is quite soulless,” Nancy reported back to Teddy. “No character.” No spiders or mice either. No dust, no cracks creeping across the ceiling or damp inching its way up the walls that would one day give their hard-won daughter a croupy cough and winter catarrh. And the new farmhouse nestled in the sheltering lee of a hill, whereas Ayswick looked down the length of the dale, taking the brunt of the wind’s brute force. They could stand at their front door and watch the weather coming towards them, like an approaching foe. It lived with them, it had a personality—“the sun’s trying to come out,” “I think it wants to rain,” “the snow’s keeping itself off.”
It was a Saturday and Nancy found Teddy in pastoral mode when she returned from the new farmhouse.
The woods are full of foxgloves at the moment. The Latin name—given to this humble native flower by sixteenth-century German botanist Leonhart Fuchs—is digitalis, which translates as “of the finger,” and indeed here in Yorkshire they are sometimes referred to as “Witches’ fingers.” (It is perhaps an odd coincidence that “Fuchs” is the German for “fox.”) The foxglove goes by many other names—fairy gloves, fairy bells, fox bells, tod-tails—but most of us are most familiar with “foxglove.” The word most likely comes from the Anglo-Saxon Foxes glófa.
“I never thought about where the word came from before,” Nancy said. She stood behind him, resting her hands on his shoulders while she read.
It is a flower without pretension and was used for centuries as folk medicine to cure a multitude of ailments before its efficacy in treating heart problems was discovered. During the war some of you may remember or have been a member of one of the County Herb Committees, tasked with picking foxgloves for the manufacturing of the medical digitalis when we were unable to import from our usual source.
“You got that from my mother,” Nancy said.
“I did. She was the chairwoman of the County Herb Committee.”
“Your mother thinks my mother’s a witch,” Nancy said. “She would have had her ducked and drowned three hundred years ago.” Their own garden, Ayswick’s garden, was full of foxgloves and little else. They made a rough lawn by borrowing a pair of scythes from the farmer and left the rest to nature. There seemed little point in creating a garden to have it dwarfed by the magnificence of the landscape. Teddy was surprised when they moved to York to discover how much enjoyment there was to be had from a suburban quarter-acre.
Nancy kissed the top of his head and said, “I have marking to do.” She no longer taught her keen grammar-school girls, eventually drawn by conscience to go where she was “really needed.” She drove every day to Leeds, where she was head of maths in a grateful secondary modern. Nancy went by her married name now, having left “Miss Shawcross” behind at the grammar school. The new school, full of “disadvantaged” pupils, was not so ambivalent about married women. They would not have minded, Nancy said, if she had been a
Teddy himself had slowly become the de facto editor of the Recorder as Bill Morrison had taken more and more of “a back seat.” Teddy employed a school leaver to do some of the more tedious leg-work but still found himself writing most of the contents.
At weekends, as reported to Mrs. Taylor-Scott, they went on long tramps over hill and dale, observing nature “in all her different raiments,” as Agrestis put it, and gaining inspiration for the Nature Notes. They had a dog, Moss, a very good black-and-white collie who went to work every day with Teddy. In the evenings they did the crossword or read out snippets from the Manchester Guardian to each other. There was the wireless and they liked to play cribbage and listen to the gramophone that had been a wedding present from Ursula.
“And friends?” the woman from the adoption agency asked. “Not much time, really,” Nancy said. “We have our jobs and each other.”
“It was like an awful oral exam,” Nancy said afterwards to Teddy. “When I said we liked to listen to opera records I swear she winced. And when I said we both came from quite large families you could see her wondering if we were constitutionally inclined towards incontinent lust or—worse—Catholicism. And I couldn’t work out whether it was good to have a large social circle or just one or two friends. I faltered on that one, I think. We probably shouldn’t have mentioned Moss, she wasn’t a dog-lover. And the Guardian was a mistake, you could tell she was a Mirror reader.”
“Church?” Mrs. Taylor-Scott had asked, staring at Teddy as if trying to force a guilty secret out of him.
“Every Sunday, C of E,” Nancy said briskly. Another quick squeeze of the hand.
“And your vicar will write a reference?”
“Of course.” (“I didn’t fudge that one.” No, just an outright lie, Teddy thought.)
“We could become Methodists, join our local chapel,” Nancy said afterwards. “I’m sure Wesley would appeal to Mrs. Taylor-Scott, he was so very intent on exemplary behaviour. ‘God grant that I may never live to be useless!’ ” Teddy quoted those words at Ursula’s funeral and then regretted doing so because it made his sister sound awfully po-faced, especially in 1966 when usefulness was out of fashion. Ursula hadn’t been religiously inclined at all, the war knocked that out of her, but she admired the way that Non-Conformism forged both reticence and endeavour.
Teddy had made all the arrangements for Ursula’s funeral and then spent months afterwards expecting her to write and tell him all about it. (“My dearest Teddy, I hope this finds you well.”)
“Are you all right, Grandpa?” Bertie asked, slipping into the chair next to him at the Fairview breakfast table and leaning over to kiss his cheek. “Is this jaunt down memory lane getting to you?” He patted her hand and said, “Not at all.”
Today they were setting out to explore some of the airfields where he had served out his RAF career during the war. Industrial estates now, or out-of-town shopping complexes. Houses had been built on them, and on one a prison, but where he had been stationed on his first tour was still the abandoned, melancholy place of his imagination, with the ghostly remains of accommodation blocks, the trace of the perimeter track, the outline of a grassed-over bomb dump and the hollow-eyed, broken shell of the control tower with its rusted window frames and crumbling concrete. The inside had been colonized by shabby weeds—rosebay willowherb, nettles and docks—but there remained part of the ops board, and a faded, tattered piece of a map of Western Europe still adhered to the wall, long out of date.
“And this too shall pass,” Teddy said to Bertie as they surveyed the map and Bertie said, “Don’t. We’ll start to cry. Let’s find somewhere to have a cup of tea.”
They found a pub called the Black Swan where they had tea and scones and it was only as they were paying the bill that Teddy remembered that this was the place on his first tour that they used to call the Mucky Duck and where they had gone on many a crew binge.
Do you think we passed Mrs. Taylor-Scott’s catechism?” Nancy fretted.
“I don’t know. She was keeping her cards close to her chest.”
But before a baby of any colour was found, Nancy came down to breakfast one morning and said, “I think I have been visited by an angel.”
“I’m sorry?” Teddy said. He was toasting bread on the Aga, his mind on Agrestis, not annunciation. He had seen hares boxing in the field yesterday and was trying to phrase something that conveyed the pleasure he had felt.
“An angel?” he said, wrenching his mind away from Lepus europaeus (“the Celtic messengers of Eostre, the goddess of spring”).
Nancy smiled beatifically at him. “You’re burning the toast,” she said. And then, “Blessed am I among women. I think that I’m having a baby. We. We are having a baby, my love. A new heart beating. Inside me. A miracle.” Nancy may have rejected Christianity a long time ago, but sometimes Teddy caught a glimpse of the sublime religieuse who dwelled within.
There was a moment, near the end of Nancy’s harrowing two-day labour, when Teddy was taken aside by a doctor and warned that he might have to make a choice between saving Nancy and saving the baby. “Nancy,” he said, without any hesitation. “Save my wife.”
Teddy had been unprepared. With the end of the war he was supposed to have moved out of the valley of the shadow of death into the sunlit uplands. He had become unready for battle.
“They asked you to choose,” Nancy said when mother and child were both safely gathered in. (Who had told her, he wondered?) She was lying in bed, white from the blood loss, her lips dry and cracked, her hair still limp with sweat. He thought she looked beautiful, a martyr who had survived the flames. The baby in her arms seemed strangely untouched by their trial by ordeal. “I would have chosen the baby, you know that, don’t you?” Nancy said, tenderly kissing this new creature on the forehead. “If it had been a choice between saving you or the baby, I would have had to choose the baby.”
“I know,” he said. “I was being selfish. You were responding to a maternal imperative” (a paternal one did not apply apparently). In later years Teddy wondered if Viola somehow knew that, in theory if not in practice, he had been willing to condemn her to die without a second thought. When, during her pregnancy, she was asked what she was hoping for—a boy or a girl—Nancy always laughed and said, “I’ll just be happy if it turns out to be a baby,” but when Viola was born and they learned she was to be their only child, she said, “I’m glad it’s a girl. A boy grows and marries and leaves. He belongs to another woman, but a girl always belongs to her mother.”
There would be no more babies, the doctor said. Nancy was one of five children, as was Teddy. It was strange to be reduced to this singularity, this fat pupa in its cradle cocoon. Sugar and spice. (More spice than sugar, it turned out.) They had already discussed names—Viola for a girl. Nancy, thinking of her own four sisters, imagined daughters, adding a Rosalind, a Helena and perhaps a Portia or a Miranda. Resourceful girls. “No tragedies,” she said. “No Ophelias and Juliets.” And a son, she had thought, for Teddy, and they would call him Hugh. The boy that would never be.
Shakespeare had seemed an obvious choice for a name. It was 1952 and they were still considering what it meant to be English. To help them there was a new young queen, Gloriana risen. On their treasured gramophone they listened to Kathleen Ferrier singing British folk songs. They had journeyed to hear her sing with the Hallé at the re-opening of the Free Trade Hall in Manchester. It had been blitzed in 1940 and Nancy said 1940 seemed so long ago. “What silly patriots we are,” she said, wiping a tear away as the audience stamped and cheered their approval of Elgar and “Land of Hope and Glory.” When the following year Kathleen Ferrier died, too young, Bill Morrison said, “A grand lass,” claiming her for the north, even though she was from the wrong side of the Pennines, and wrote her obituary for the Recorder.
Nancy fell in love with Viola at first sight of her. A coup de foudre, she said, more intense and ove
Was it simply love on Nancy’s part? Or something more febrile? Their shared experience of being in the place between life and death, perhaps. His own experience of motherhood was based on Sylvie, of course. He knew that she had loved him hugely when he was a boy (all his life probably), but she had never invested her happiness in him. (Had she?) Of course, he had never understood his mother, he doubted that anyone ever had, certainly not his father.
Nancy, the easy-going atheist, decided that Viola should be christened.
“I believe that’s called hypocrisy,” Sylvie said to Teddy, out of earshot of Nancy (which was where many of her conversations with Teddy took place).
“Well, then that makes two of you,” Teddy said. “You still go to church but I know you don’t believe.”
“What a good husband you are,” Nancy said afterwards, “always taking your wife’s side rather than your mother’s.”
“It’s the side of reason that I’m on,” Teddy said. “It just so happens that that’s where you’re always to be found and my mother rarely.”
“I’m not taking any chances,” Nancy told Sylvie at the christening. “I’m hedging my bets, in the manner of Pascal.” Sylvie was not mollified by references to philosophical French mathematicians. If only Teddy had married someone less educated, she thought.