The impressive cast-iron gates to Jordan Manor were wide open and they drove through unimpeded. It had taken longer to drive to Norfolk than Teddy had calculated. He had never been here before, to the rump on the map of England. They had been on a single-track road for the last tortuous half-hour, stuck behind slow-moving farm vehicles and recalcitrant sheep. Their provisions were more or less used up. They had sustained themselves on the journey with cheese-and-pickle sandwiches on white bread, salt-and-vinegar crisps and KitKats—all of which were strictly forbidden by Viola, who had left “dietary suggestions” (“nothing with a face”) with Teddy for Bertie and Sunny—meals such as “millet-and-spinach casserole” and “noodle-and-tofu bake.” He could cope with them being vegetarians (“I don’t eat dead animals, Grandpa Ted,” Bertie said), it was an admirable regime in many ways, but not with Viola’s edicts from on high. “My house, my rules,” Teddy said. “And that means no budgerigar food.” He remembered buying sprays of millet for Viola’s budgie, Tweetie. Poor bird, he thought, even all these years later.
The vegetarianism, the Steiner school, the traipse across town to Woodcraft Folk meetings, Teddy was willing to comply with all of these if it meant that Viola allowed them to stay safely beneath his roof. He had been wrong to let Sunny go to the Villierses. Viola had swanned off down south to demonstrate against cruise missiles and when Teddy had mildly suggested that her duties as a parent, and a single one at that, might trump the need for world peace, she said that was the most ridiculous thing she’d ever heard as she was trying to secure the future of all the children in the world, which seemed a bit of a tall order for one person. The last time she had gone down to protest she had taken Sunny and Bertie with her and camped at Greenham Common for several days. The children begged not to go again—“cold” and “hungry” seemed to be the words that summed up their experience and they had been frightened by the Thames Valley police on horseback treating women like football hooligans. Next time, Viola said, she was hoping to get arrested. Teddy said most people went through their lives hoping not to get arrested, and Viola said he didn’t understand non-violence and did he ever think about the thousands of innocent people he had bombed during the war? She was a mistress of non sequiturs. “That’s got nothing to do with it,” Teddy said, and Viola said, “It has everything to do with it.” (Did it? He no longer knew. Ursula would have had an answer.) In the end Teddy said, “Sunny and Bertie can stay with me,” and Viola looked like Atlas might have looked if someone had said to him that it was OK, he could put the world down now.
That was several months ago and they had settled into a routine. Love had always seemed to Teddy to be a practical act as much as anything—school concerts, clean clothes, regular mealtimes. Sunny and Bertie seemed to agree. They had previously been subject to Viola’s whimsical mothering (“I was a terrible mother!” she cries gaily, Mother and Baby magazine, 2007. “You were,” Bertie agreed).
Teddy still had the chickens and bees at the time and the children loved both. They played outside a lot. Teddy hung a swing from the branch of one of the big pear trees at the bottom of the garden. They had expeditions into the countryside around York, to the water lilies in Pocklington, to Castle Howard and Helmsley, to the Dales in lambing time, to Fountains Abbey, to Whitby. The North Sea seemed less forlorn in the company of Bertie and Sunny. They loved hiking along ferny trails or having picnics on the purple moors. They were vigilant for adders, butterflies and hawks. (Were they really Viola’s children?) Teddy was retired now and the children filled a lot of the spaces in his life. And he filled a big space in theirs.