Ursula came into the room and picked the book up off the floor and started to read out loud, “ ‘ “Isn’t that Augustus?” Miss Slee whispered in Mr. Swift’s ear. Quite a loud whisper, the kind that makes people in surrounding seats turn and look at you with interest.’ ”
What had gone into the making of Teddy? Not slugs and snails, it was true, but generation upon generation of Beresfords and Todds, all coming to one singular point in a cold bed in the chill of an autumn night when his father had caught hold of the golden rope of his mother’s hair and hadn’t let go until he had hauled them both to the far shore (they had many euphemisms for the act). As they lay amongst the shipwreck of the marital bed they each felt slightly befuddled by the unexpected ardour of the other. Hugh cleared his throat and murmured, “A voyage into the deep, eh?” Sylvie said nothing as she felt the seafaring metaphor had been stretched far enough.
But the grain had entered the shell (Sylvie’s own metaphoric stance) and the pearl that would be Edward Beresford Todd began to grow until he was revealed into the sunshine that came before the Great War and lay happily for hours on end in his pram with nothing but a silver hare dangling from the pram hood for company.
His mother was a great lioness padding softly through the house, protecting them all. His father was more of an enigma, disappearing every day to another world (“The Bank”) and then without warning to another even greater and more faraway world (“The War”). His sisters loved him and swung him and tossed him and covered him in kisses. His brother, already away at school, already trained in the necessary stoicism, sneered at him when he came home in the holidays. His mother held her cheek against his and whispered, “Out of all of them, you are my favourite,” and he knew it was true and felt bad for the others. (It was a relief, Sylvie thought, finally to know what love was.)
They were all happy, this much at least he was sure of. Later on he realized it was never as simple as that. Happiness, like life itself, was as fragile as a bird’s heartbeat, as fleeting as the bluebells in the wood, but while it lasted, Fox Corner was an Arcadian dream.
1980
The Children of Adam
“Mummy, I’m hungry.”
Viola was too busy surveying the sea to acknowledge this statement. It was the frazzled end of a boiling-hot afternoon. “Day at the beach!” Dominic had announced enthusiastically that morning. Too enthusiastically, as if going to the seaside had the potential to transform their lives in some transcendental way. Hardly a day passed without him having one great idea or another, most of which seemed to involve drudgery on Viola’s part. (“I swear Dominic thinks of six impossible things before breakfast!” Dorothy laughed admiringly, as if that were a good thing.) The world, in Viola’s opinion, would be better off without so many ideas. She was twenty-eight but already jaded. Twenty-eight seemed a particularly unsatisfactory age. She was no longer young and yet no one ever seemed to take her seriously as an adult. People still told her what to do all the time, it was infuriating. Her only power seemed to be over her own children and even that was limited by endless negotiation.
They had borrowed the van from Dorothy for the five-mile journey and it broke down (no surprise) a mile from the beach.
A passing motorist, an elderly, rather frail-looking man in an old Morris Minor estate, had stopped and done something simple beneath the hood and—hey-presto—the van was fixed. Their rescuer was a local farmer, one of their neighbours, and both he and the Morris Minor were more robust than they appeared. Only the children recognized him but they gave no sign, already stunned by the heat and the general despair they were feeling at breaking down in Dorothy’s van for the third time that month.
“You still need to take it to a garage,” the farmer told them. “What I did was just temporary.”
Ever-helpful, Dominic offered his guru wisdom. “Man, everything’s temporary.”
Unmoveable mountains and the wheeling stars in the heavens, not to mention the face of God, passed through the farmer’s mind, but he was not inclined to disputation. He was bemused by them—the raggle-taggle infants (a touch of the Victorian poor) sitting morosely on the verge with their mother, herself a dishevelled young Madonna wearing an outfit that seemed to have come out of a dressing-up box.
Viola’s faux-gypsy attire—peasant-style headscarf, DM boots, long velvet skirt, embroidered Indian jacket sewn with little mirrors—had all been put on hastily without a thought to the fact that they were going to a beach and that it was already hot and was only going to get hotter. It had taken so much effort to assemble everything necessary for this hegira—food, drink, towels, swimming costumes, more food, more towels, a change of clothes, buckets, spades, more food, more clothes, fishing nets, a small ball, more drink, a big ball, suntan cream, hats, wet flannels wrung out and put in a plastic bag, a blanket to sit on—that she had simply dragged on the first clothes that she could find.
“Nice day,” the old man said, tipping his tweed cap to Viola.