One afternoon, when she was intent on the Polonaise in E flat—fiendishly difficult—Teddy came home early, something he was doing more and more, she had noticed. She could feel him trying to fill his heart and mind with her because that was where she would live on afterwards. (Not living, just a memory, an illusion.) And in her sisters’ hearts, too. And a little of her in Viola, and that would fade and be forgotten. Our mother’s favourite flower, of course, as you know. “My favourite flower is the bluebell,” she said apropos of nothing to Viola one day, who said, “Oh?” indifferently, more interested in watching Blue Peter. But then Teddy would die, her sisters would die, Viola would die and nothing of Nancy would remain. That was how it was. The tragedy of life was death. Sic transit gloria mundi. “Penny for them?” Teddy said often, too often, when she was engaged in this philosophy (pointless, by its very nature). Better to be a dumb animal like Bobby and greet every new morning in ignorance. “Oh, my thoughts are nonsense,” she said, making an effort to smile at Teddy. “You would feel cheated out of your penny.”
It wasn’t that she didn’t want to share her thoughts with Teddy or spend time with him—and Viola, of course—but she was preparing to go into the darkness on her own, a place (not even a place, a nothing) where everything would cease to matter—cocoa, library books, Chopin. Love. That list, should she choose to make it, would be endless. She chose not to make it. She was done with lists. She put her morbid philosophy aside. She played Chopin instead.
“Is that the Revolutionary?” Teddy asked, interrupting her concentration so that she played a wrong note that sounded particularly harsh to her ears. “My mother used to play it,” he said.
Sylvie had been a terrific pianist. Sometimes Nancy used to sneak next door to listen to her. When Sylvie was in a bad mood you didn’t need to go to Fox Corner to hear her, Nancy’s father said, you could hear her from the end of the lane. He said this fondly. (“There goes Mrs. Todd!”) Major Shawcross held Sylvie in great esteem (“a magnificent creature”).
It hadn’t struck Nancy at the time, but perhaps Sylvie, too, had wanted to be left alone, had resented the quiet little listener in the corner of her drawing room. She had seemed lost in the music, oblivious to Nancy’s presence until she finished whatever piece she was playing. Nancy couldn’t help but applaud. (“Bravo, Mrs. Todd!”)
“Oh, it’s you, Nancy,” Sylvie would say, rather sharply.
“No, not the Revolutionary, it’s the Heroic,” Nancy said, her hands resting impatiently on the keys. Time’s wingèd chariot, she thought. She could hear the wings beating, heavy and creaking, like a great ponderous goose. She could feel her own strength ebbing away and was powerless to fight it. “Your mother was accomplished,” she said. “I’m a rank amateur, I’m afraid. And it’s such a difficult piece.”
“Sounded pretty good to me,” Teddy said. He was lying, she knew. “You reminded me of Vermeer, when I came into the room just now.”
“Vermeer? Why?”
“That painting in the National Gallery. Lady at a Virginal—something like that anyway.”
“A Young Woman Seated at a Virginal,” Nancy said.
“Yes. Your memory is always so precise.”
“Why Vermeer?” she prompted.
“It was the way you turned to look at me. The enigmatic expression on your face.”
“I always thought the girl in that picture had the look of a frog about her,” Nancy said, thinking, I look enigmatic because I’m dying.
“Isn’t there one of a woman standing by a virginal too?” he puzzled. “Or am I getting them mixed up?”
“No, there are two, the National has both.”
“Same woman?” Teddy said, looking ruminative. “Same virginal?”
Oh, do go away, my love, Nancy thought. Stop spinning out conversations so that you’ll have them to look back on, stop making memories. Leave me to Chopin. She sighed and closed the lid of the piano and said with false cheerfulness, “Shall we have some tea?”
“I’ll make it,” Teddy said eagerly. “Would you like cake? Do we have cake?”
“Yes, I believe we do.”
I want you to promise me something.”
“Anything,” Teddy said. A fatal promise to make, Nancy thought. They were sitting at the dining-room table. Teddy was going through the month’s bills, while Nancy was sewing Cash’s nametapes on to Viola’s uniform. The long school holiday was nearly over, the new school year was about to begin. The rhythm of Nancy’s life had always been the school year and it seemed strange that a new one was beginning that she wouldn’t see the end of.
Viola B. Todd, the nametapes said in that familiar red cursive. “B” for Beresford, Teddy’s middle name, Sylvie’s name before she became a Todd. Her father had been an artist—“very famous in his day,” according to Sylvie—although the family owned none of his work. Nancy had been delighted when, investigating the art gallery in York with Viola, she had found a portrait, some civic dignitary, long forgotten now, painted by Sylvie’s father at the end of the last century. The tiny brass plaque beneath read “Llewellyn A. Beresford 1845–1903.” And a ghostly monogram of the letters L, A and B was painted in the corner of the picture. “Look,” Nancy said to Viola, “this was painted by your great-grandfather”—but it was a relationship too distant to have any meaning for Viola.
Nancy began a new nametape, on the collar of a school blouse, and almost immediately pricked herself with the needle. She was a clumsy seamstress these days. And she could no longer follow a knitting pattern. She imagined the silent bees were secretly making a honeycomb in her brain.
“Are you all right?” Teddy asked, looking at the perfect little sphere of blood on her finger. She nodded and licked the drop away before it could stain the blouse.