When they first moved into this house there had been a lovely lilac that graced the front garden, but Teddy had chopped it down when it was in full scented flower in the first April. “But why?” she said, but then saw the look in his eyes and realized it was something from the war—the great fall from grace—and he was unlikely to explain it. Teddy’s war was the one enigma that she would never decode. But it was the 1960s, for heaven’s sake, she sometimes thought, finding herself losing patience. She was tired. She seemed to spend a good deal of her time chivvying and encouraging people—Teddy, Viola, her pupils. It was rather like being the captain of the netball team that she had once been.
Teddy was not the only one who had sacrificed precious years. She had gained a First in Parts I and II of the Tripos at Newnham, she was a Wrangler, graduated with a double first in Mathematics in ’36, was awarded the Philippa Fawcett Prize and then had been plucked, recruited to go to the Government Code and Cypher School in the spring of 1940. She had given up a brilliant career for the war and then given it up again for Teddy and Viola.
I’m going down to Lyme to give Gertie a hand with her house move.”
“All right. That’s good of you,” Teddy said.
“It’s just packing the light stuff, crockery and ornaments and so on. Only a couple of days. I thought it would be nice to spend some time with her, just the two of us.”
The day after she returned home there was a card from Gertie, a watercolour of violas on the front of it—“Our mother’s favourite flower, of course, as you know.” No, she had forgotten, and yet she had named her daughter Viola. It had been for Shakespeare, not her mother. How could a daughter forget such a thing? Or, at any rate, not consciously remember. What would her own daughter forget in time? Nancy felt a sudden sense of desolation. She wished her mother was still here. This would be how Viola would feel without a mother. It was unbearable. Hot, painful tears welled up in her eyes. She brushed them away and told herself to pull her socks up.
She continued with Gertie’s card—“I just thought I should drop you a quick note,” she wrote. “Teddy phoned looking for you while you were ‘here,’ I hope I fudged enough, made out I was a complete dimwit. Are you sure, darling, you shouldn’t tell him what’s happening? (Not interfering, just saying.) Much love, G. PS. Did you come to a decision about the sideboard?”
You should tell him,” Millie said, “you really should. I mean I covered for you awfully well, saying I’d just put you on the train and everything and what a wonderful time we had in the Lakes, but Teddy’s going to find out, one way or another.”
It was her sisters not her husband that Nancy had turned to, little flurries of communication between different permutations of them. She could burden her sisters but she couldn’t burden Teddy. He wasn’t na?ve, he probably suspected something, but she wasn’t going to tell him until it was definitive. At heart she would always be a mathematician, her faith in absolutes. And if the worst came to the worst, then the less time he had to suffer knowing the better.
“You have to tell him, Nancy.”
“I will, Millie, of course I will.”
She may not have been in Dorset or the Lakes, but Nancy was most certainly in London with Bea. Not, it was true, taking in a show, maybe an exhibition, but sitting on the sofa in her sister’s rather bohemian Chelsea bedsit, nursing a glass of whisky. Ursula, sitting next to Nancy, had brought a bottle with her. “I thought we would need something stronger than tea,” she said.
“I always have gin,” Bea said. She had been divorced for some time now from her surgeon husband. She worked at the BBC and was happy being single, she said.
Millie arrived in a fluster and out of breath from rushing up the stairs. “I got lost,” she said. “Sorry.”
“Whisky or gin?” Bea offered. “Or tea?”
“I’m tempted by all three, but gin, please. A stiff one.” She glanced over at Nancy but continued to address Bea. “I need it, don’t I? It’s bad, isn’t it?”
“Very bad,” Bea said, her voice pitchy.
“Completely bad?” Millie was using a funny clipped accent, either trying not to give way to emotion or imagining herself to be a character in a play or a film, one who was putting on a stiff upper lip—Celia Johnson in Brief Encounter came to mind. The call of duty, the moral imperative of doing the right thing. Nancy admired it and yet something in her now rebelled. Run away, she thought, forget duty. She imagined herself fleeing down Bea’s steep, narrow staircase and out into the street, along the river, on and on until she had outpaced the dread thing on her heels.
A glint in Millie’s eye and a little tremor in her hand as she took the glass of gin reassured Nancy that she wasn’t play-acting.
“I am here,” she said to her. “You can ask me.”
“I don’t think I want to ask you,” Millie said. “I don’t think I want to know.” The glint turned into a tear that rolled down her cheek and Bea pushed her gently towards a chair and then sat on the carpet at her feet.
“Well, it is true,” Nancy said calmly. “It’s been confirmed and I’m afraid it is completely bad, as you put it. I’m sorry to say that it’s the worst it could possibly be.”