“A maze?”
“Yeah.” Dominic, to his credit, prided himself on his egalitarianism. “Dukes or dustmen,” he said, “it’s all the same to me,” although Viola suspected that he knew more dukes than dustmen. His “people,” as he referred to them, lived in the depths of Norfolk and were of the hunting, shooting, fishing tribe, vaguely related to royalty “on the wrong side of the blanket.” Viola had never met them, the estrangement still firmly in place even after the birth of Sunny and Bertie. “They don’t want to meet their grandchildren?” Teddy said. “That’s very sad.”
Viola had been relieved. She suspected that she would never measure up in the eyes of his “people.” Why exactly was he alienated from them, Teddy asked? “Oh, you know, the usual—drugs, art, politics. They think I’m a waster, I think they’re fascists.”
“Well, he’s a good-looking chap at any rate,” Teddy said, searching for something complimentary to say as he and Viola washed the pots together after a ham salad and an apple crumble that he’d made that morning. Teddy was “handy” in the kitchen (“Even though I say so myself”). Dominic was having “forty winks” in the living room. “Tired, is he?” Teddy said. Viola had never seen her father asleep, not even a catnap or a deckchair snooze.
When Dominic woke up, Teddy, unable to think of anything else (somehow he couldn’t imagine Dominic playing board games), got out the photo albums in which his daughter’s awkwardness was displayed at various ages and in varying degrees. Viola was never good in front of a camera. “She’s much prettier in real life,” Teddy said.
“Yeah, very sexy,” Dominic said, leered even. Viola preened a little. Her father, she noticed, grimaced at Dominic’s remark and all that it implied. Get used to it, she thought. I’m a grown woman now. (“I screw therefore I am,” she had written in the front of her Penguin Classics copy of Descartes’s Discourse on Method, pleased with her iconoclasm.)
She was the next in a long line of girlfriends and she was never sure why Dominic had stopped at her. Not stopped—merely paused, it turned out. “But you’re the one I always come home to,” he said. Like a dog, she thought, but not without satisfaction.
They were both, essentially, very lazy people and it was easier to stay together than it was to pull themselves apart.
Viola managed to struggle her way through her finals and came away with an undistinguished third, a mashed-up degree of philosophy, American studies and English literature. “It’s an irrelevance anyway,” she said. “Life’s about living, not about paper qualifications.” She told no one how wretchedly disappointed she was at her results and chose not to attend her graduation ceremony, it being “meaningless lip-service to the established hierarchy.”
“You might regret it in the future,” Teddy said.
“You just want a photograph of me in a cap and gown to put on the wall and show off,” she said irritably.
Well, what would be so wrong with that, Teddy wondered?
You’re not going to get married then?” Teddy asked tentatively when Viola told him she was pregnant with Sunny.
“No one gets married any more,” she said dismissively. “It’s an outmoded bourgeois convention. Why would I want to be handcuffed to someone for the rest of my life just because an authoritarian society demands it?”
“Oh, it’s not so bad,” Teddy said. “You grow used to the ‘handcuffs,’ as you put it.”
When Sunny was born they were living in a squat in London with ten other people. They shared the kitchen and bathroom and had one room they could call their own, which was crammed with Dominic’s paintings as well as all the baby paraphernalia that Teddy had funded when he realized that no one else was going to buy it. He was alarmed that Viola seemed to have no idea what having a baby involved. “You’re going to need a cot,” he told her, “and a little baby bath.”
“It can sleep in a drawer,” Viola said, “and I can wash it in the sink.” (“Yeah,” Dominic concurred, “that’s how poor people have always done it.”) Keep it in a drawer? It? Teddy dug into his savings and sent them a cot and a pram and a bath.