“I’m Philip now,” Sunny reminded him. He was covered in melted chocolate, which was exactly the kind of thing that got you into trouble with “the she-wolf” but he was too sleepy now to care. He began to nod off, leaning against his father’s thin, agitated body. “And with parallel lines, like the railway track, then you have to have a vanishing point.” Sleep seemed like the most delicious thing. Dominic’s incoherent thoughts—sun worship, perspective, toadstools—faded pleasantly away.
He was woken up by bells ringing and lights flashing and saw that the two white gates were moving slowly, closing off the road. Were they going to be trapped? Finally the gates clanged noisily shut. “Wow,” Dominic said. “This is going to be amazing, you don’t want to miss it.” Sunny suspected that he did and he tried to stand up, but Dominic pulled him back down. “Trust me, Phil, you’re going to want to see this. Oh, man—look, it’s coming. See the train? See it? Unbefuckinglievable.”
Dominic stood up suddenly, yanking Sunny to his feet.
The small object that was far away—the three-thirty from King’s Cross to Norwich, as it would be explained later at the inquest—was growing larger and larger, its perspective changing by the second. “Stay, stay,” Dominic urged as if Sunny was a dog. “What’s wrong with you? Don’t you want to experience this? It’s going to be mind-blowing. Now! Aargh!—” No, not exactly “aargh”—that was something Augustus would have said, not a man being hit full in the face by an express train.
Rightio, this must be it,” Teddy said. In the back of the car Bertie slurped the dregs from her juice box and looked around with interest.
A sign affixed to one of the pillars of the arched sandstone gateway announced “Jordan Manor” and beneath that another sign said, “Private.” Teddy wondered if this was a biblical Jordan or if it referred to someone’s name. A few years ago he would have considered Jordan to be a surname. He had known a WAAF called Nellie Jordan during the war (and, no, not in a biblical way), but apparently nowadays it was used as a Christian name—there was a Jordan (a boy) in Bertie’s class at school. There was also, along with the usual clutch of Hannahs and Emmas, a Saffron and a Willow (both girls), and a Dharma (a pale, skinny child whose gender Teddy had never been able to determine). In Sunny’s class there had been a girl called Squirrel. At least it was a name that couldn’t be shortened, that was something that had occupied Nancy when they had named Viola. “Will people call her ‘Vi,’ do you think? I do hope not.” As the years rolled on Teddy found himself occasionally wondering about Squirrel. Did she change her name or, somewhere in the adult world, was there a teacher or a solicitor or a housewife who answered to “Squirrel”?
Any of the aforementioned professions seemed unlikely, given the kind of school it was. Rudolf Steiner—“child-centred education,” according to Viola, unlike Viola herself, who was not really very child-centred at all. And now she was a recusant and had approved the Villierses’ choice of a local fee-paying prep school for poor Sunny. It was bad enough that she had more or less washed her hands of him but she had also separated him from his sister. Teddy could imagine only too well the pain he himself would have felt if at the tender age of seven he had been deprived of Ursula and Pamela. And what if the Villierses changed their mind about Bertie? Would Viola let them have her too?
“Dom’s parents can give Sunny all kinds of advantages,” Viola said to Teddy. “He’s the Villierses’ heir, after all, and Dom’s been reconciled to the family. He’s moved back, in fact, and he’s working on his paintings.” Teddy had a tendency to forget that Dominic was an artist, perhaps because he was so spectacularly unsuccessful at it. “And you must agree it would be good for Sunny to have a father back in his life again.” And so on, endlessly justifying her decision to abandon her child. Money, and her need for it, was at the root of it all, Teddy suspected.
Of course, the original proposal had been for “a couple of weeks” in the school holidays and Teddy hadn’t realized that there might be a longer-term plan afoot. Now it seemed that Sunny was to remain with the Villierses (“For ever?” Bertie said, a look of horror on her face). He was a sensitive child and it seemed quite wrong to Teddy’s mind to uproot him like this and expect him to flourish with people who were more or less strangers to him. Without mentioning it to Viola, Teddy had been to see his solicitor and set in motion an appeal to the family courts for custody of his grandchildren. He wasn’t too hopeful about the outcome, but someone had to be their champion, surely?