“I almost missed the small clump by a hedgerow ditch. The water in the ditch is still ‘like a stone,’ as is every pond and rural waterway on this island, and so I was not expecting Wordsworth’s ‘venturous harbinger of spring’ to appear on time this year. Traditionally, snowdrops are flowering by Candlemas (2nd February) and are indeed known in some parts as ‘Candlemas Bells’ but in the midst of this bleakest, longest of winters we would surely excuse them if they were a little tardy in their arrival.”
Nancy stifled a yawn which Teddy caught but didn’t comment on. She was peering at her knitting, the lamp by her side inadequate. The dreadful weather had meant cuts to the electricity all over the country, but not for them as the cottage had none to begin with. Oil and paraffin lamps downstairs, candles upstairs. They were huddled around the fire which, apart from each other, was their only source of warmth. Teddy leaned over to give the log on the fire an encouraging prod with the poker and glanced up at Nancy and thought, She’ll ruin her eyes in this light. She was knitting a complex Fair Isle, a sleeveless pullover for him. There were mathematics in the pattern, she said. There were patterns in everything. Maths was “the one true thing,” according to Nancy.
“Not love?” Teddy said.
“Oh, love, of course,” Nancy said, in an offhanded way. “Love is crucial, but it’s an abstract and numbers are absolute. Numbers can’t be manipulated.” An unsatisfactory answer, surely, Teddy thought. It seemed to him that love should be the absolute, trumping everything. Did it? For him?
They had married in the autumn of ’45, in Chelsea Register Office with no guests other than a sister each—Ursula and Bea—who acted as their witnesses. Teddy had worn his uniform, but not his medals, and Ursula had begged one of Izzie’s pre-war Paris gowns off her without telling her why and Bea had helped Nancy to alter it so it was less glamorous and more suited to austerity. Bea had been to Covent Garden that morning and bought some big mop-headed, rust-coloured chrysanthemums that she’d tied up artfully for a bouquet. The flowers went beautifully with the oyster silk of the dress. Bea had been a student at St. Martin’s before the war and out of all the Shawcross girls she was the one with the most artistic nature, although Millie would have contested that furiously. Teddy still thought of them as girls, even though Winnie, the eldest, was forty now.
Neither Teddy nor Nancy had been able to contemplate a big wedding so soon after the war. “And who would give me away?” Nancy said. “It would be so sad not to be on my father’s arm.” Major Shawcross had died, not unexpectedly, a few weeks previously.
Teddy thought he knew Nancy—before the war he did know her—but now she was a continual surprise. He had imagined that in marriage he and Nancy would cleave to each other and become one—in some vague biblical sense of the word—whereas in fact he was constantly aware of the difference between them and she frequently unbalanced him when he had expected—hoped—her to root him.
They had been childhood sweethearts, or so everyone told them. “How I dislike that expression,” Nancy said on the eve of their modest wedding. They were having a drink in a rather shoddy, near-deserted pub off Piccadilly, chosen because of its proximity to the college where they were both doing an accelerated teaching qualification.
Teaching had formed part of their vision of a wholesome life after the war. It was Nancy’s vision really, Teddy had simply gone along with it, unable to think of anything else. He had no intention of returning to banking—his insufferable occupation before the war—and he could no longer be a pilot. The RAF had no call for the dozens of men—hundreds, probably—who wanted to stay on after the war and continue to fly. The country was done with them. They had given everything and then they were suddenly set adrift. Gratitude was no longer the order of the day. In this atmosphere teaching seemed as good an option as anything to him. Poetry, drama, the classic novels, it was a field that he had loved once. Surely he could rekindle that love and communicating it would be a good deed, wouldn’t it?
“I should say,” Nancy said enthusiastically. “And the world needs art now more than ever. It can teach us when man clearly cannot.” Not maths then? “No, maths can’t teach us anything. It is itself.”