He was labelled, a plastic hospital bracelet around his wrist. Sunny and Bertie had both worn them in the maternity ward. Other people kept things like that—first baby teeth, first shoes, primitive nursery paintings, school reports—regarding them as precious relics of childhood, but Viola had managed to discard everything as she went. (Yes, she regretted it. All right?)
“DNR,” it said on Ted’s plastic bracelet, indicating he had lingered on, long past his sell-by date. Oh God, life was awful. A memory of last night came back to her, although the memory of last night hadn’t ever gone away. She shuddered at it now. She had embarrassed herself dreadfully. “Humiliated” would be a better word.
She had arrived in York from Harrogate in the evening, hoping to see some friends. Yes, she did have friends, against the odds. She was going to phone them and say casually, “How about meeting up? A drink?,” pretending it was an impromptu idea, when in fact she had been planning it for several days. She was trying to be more spontaneous—what she thought of as spontaneity in her earlier years she now recognized as mere torpor. (“Shall we go to the beach?” “Yeah, OK.”) She was also trying to revive a social life that she had once had but which she had woefully neglected since her success. (“So busy with stuff, sorry.”)
She hadn’t seen these particular friends for a long time—years (and years)—and they had parted on rather bad terms. They had all been in a “Women’s Wholefood Cooperative,” which basically meant that they bought big ugly sacks of chaff and husks, masquerading as muesli, and then divided it up between them. They didn’t have much in common, apart from the Steiner school and CND, which sounded like a lot, but wasn’t for Viola.
Arriving in York, she realized that she had forgotten that it was both a Saturday and a bank-holiday weekend and found York bedecked in Jubilee adornment, a frenzy of bunting and red, white and blue. Weekends were also when the city was besieged by rampaging hordes of stags and hens coming down from the even-more-northern north.
She checked in to the Cedar Court Hotel, which used to be the headquarters of the North Eastern Railway. Everything became a hotel eventually. Dust and sand and hotels. She had hoped for a room with a view, one of the ones that faced on to the Bar Walls, but there were none available. If she was in a Forster novel she would meet the love of her life at this point (she would also be forty years younger) and be wrenched emotionally and at the end she would have her view. Not that she wanted to be wrenched emotionally (she had given up men), nor indeed meet the love of her life, but she would have liked a view. The girl who checked her in at reception had almost certainly never heard of Forster, although she might have heard of Viola Romaine, but Viola didn’t feel up to testing that theory. Viola felt as if she spent her life wading through a sea of ignorance, shallow but without a shore in sight. Yes, she was making elitist assumptions. No, she didn’t have a right to. The receptionist (who had heard of neither Forster nor Viola Romaine, but had “enjoyed” Fifty Shades of Grey, a fact that would have made Viola apoplectic) handed her a key card and said she would get someone to show her to her room. “Anything else I can do for you, Mrs. Romaine?”
After the divorce Viola had kept Wilf’s name (and half the proceeds from the sale of the house, of course) on the grounds that it was more interesting than the prosaic “Todd.” “How do you spell Romaine? Like the lettuce?” someone asked her the other day. Her father’s aunt, the writer of those endless ghastly Augustus books, had taken the name “Fox”—much nicer than a lettuce, why hadn’t she thought of that? Viola Fox. Perhaps she could use it as a pseudonym, write a different kind of book—a serious one that didn’t sell but was critically lauded. (“A text that challenges our epistemological assumptions about the nature of fiction,” TLS.)
They had married a month after first meeting. “An immense passion,” Viola explained to her disappointed yet strangely envious women’s group. “Passion” was a word that appealed to Viola—the word possibly more than the passion itself. It was doomed and Bront?esque and she felt she hadn’t had enough of that in her life. She yearned for the Romantic. It was neither passion nor romance with Wilf Romaine, merely wishful thinking.
Wilf Romaine had seemed a firebrand, but it turned out that really he was just bombastic. He was polemical, a political activist, CND, Labour Party, etcetera, who made much of being the son of a coal miner. But, as Viola felt it necessary to point out to him not long into their marriage, being the son of a coal miner didn’t actually make you a coal miner yourself. Instead he was a lecturer in Communications (a meaningless discipline) at a further education college, with type 2 diabetes and a drink problem. He had seemed fierce and noble but in the end he was as disappointing as everyone else.