He could no longer fight F-Fox. The aircraft was mortally wounded, a bird shot out of the air. Ah! bright wings. He heard the words quite clearly as if someone in the cockpit had spoken them. He had made it to the coast. Beneath him the moon glinted off the North Sea like a thousand diamonds. He was reconciled to this moment, to this now. The noise in the aircraft had ceased, the heat from the flames had disappeared. There was just a beautiful, unearthly silence. He thought of the wood and the bluebells, the owl and the fox, a Hornby train trundling around his bedroom floor, the smell of a cake baking in the oven. The skylark ascending on his thread of song.
F-Fox fell with Teddy still inside her, a blaze of light in the dark, a bright star, an exaltation, until her fires were finally quenched by the waves. It was over. Teddy sank to the silent sea-bed and joined all the tarnished treasure that lay there unseen, forty fathoms deep. He was lost for ever, only a small silver hare to keep him company in the dark.
And with a massive roar the fifth wall comes down and the house of fiction falls, taking Viola and Sunny and Bertie with it. They melt into the thin air and disappear. Pouf!
The books that Viola wrote vanish from bookshelves as if by magic. Dominic Villiers marries a girl who wears pearls and a twinset and drinks himself to death. Nancy marries a barrister in 1950 and has two sons. During a routine examination, her brain cancer is discovered and successfully removed. Her mind is less keen, her intelligence less bright, but she is still Nancy.
A man, a doctor, standing on Westminster Bridge turns away after the Jubilee barge, Gloriana, has passed beneath the bridge. For a moment he thinks someone is standing beside him but there is no one there, only a fluctuation in the air. He feels as if he has just lost something but can’t imagine what it might be. An Australian yoga teacher on Bali worries that she will never find someone to love, never have a child. An old woman called Agnes dies in Poplar Hill nursing home, dreaming of escape. Sylvie overdoses on sleeping tablets on VE Day, unable to come to terms with a future that doesn’t contain Teddy. Her best boy.
Across the world millions of lives are altered by the absence of the dead, but three members of Teddy’s last crew—Clifford, the bomb-aimer, Fraser, the injured pilot, and Charlie, the tail-end Charlie—all bail out successfully from F-Fox and see out the rest of the war in a POW camp. On their return they all marry and have children, fractals of the future.
Fifty-five thousand, five hundred and seventy-three dead from Bomber Command. Seven million German dead, including the five hundred thousand killed by the Allied bombing campaign. The sixty million dead overall of the Second World War, including eleven million murdered in the Holocaust. The sixteen million of the First World War, over four million in Vietnam, forty million to the Mongol conquests, three and a half million to the Hundred Years War, the fall of Rome took seven million, the Napoleonic Wars took four million, twenty million to the Taiping Rebellion. And so on and so on and so on, all the way back to the Garden when Cain killed Abel.
All the birds who were never born, all the songs that were never sung and so can only exist in the imagination.
And this one is Teddy’s.
1947
Daughters of Elysium
The hawthorn in the lane was just coming into blossom and Ursula said, “Oh, look, the hawthorn’s flowering. Teddy would have loved to see that.”
“Oh, don’t,” Nancy said, the tears starting. “I can’t believe he’s gone from this world for ever.” They walked, arm in arm, Lucky running backwards and forwards, excited to be in the lively warm air. “I wish we had a grave to visit,” Nancy said.
“I’m glad we don’t,” Ursula said. “Now we can imagine him as free as the air.”
“I can only imagine him at the bottom of the North Sea, cold and lonely.”
“Of his bones are coral made,” Ursula said.
A tremulous “Oh” from Nancy.
“Those are pearls that were his eyes.”
“Stop, do stop, please.”
“Sorry. Do you want to walk across the meadow?”
Look!” Nancy exclaimed, letting go of Ursula’s arm and pointing towards the sky. “There. A lark—a skylark. Listen,” she added in a thrilled whisper, as though she might disturb the bird.
“Beautiful,” Ursula murmured.
In thrall to the skylark, they watched as it soared, flying further and further away until it was no more than a speck in the blue sky and then it was just the memory of the speck.
Nancy sighed. “Sometimes I wonder,” she said, “about reincarnation. I know it’s absurd, but wouldn’t it be wonderful if Teddy came back as something else—as that skylark, say. I mean we don’t know, do we? That could have been Teddy saluting us, letting us know that he’s all right. That he still is in some way. Do you believe in reincarnation?”
“No,” Ursula said. “I believe we have just one life, and I believe that Teddy lived his perfectly.”
And when all else is gone, Art remains. Even Augustus.
The Adventures of Augustus
The Awful Consequences