Teddy didn’t believe art (“Art,” he thought, acknowledging his mother) should be didactic, it should be a source of joy and comfort, of sublimation and of understanding. (“Itself,” in fact.) It had been all these things to him once. Nancy, however, tended towards pedagogy.
The honest schoolteacher imparting knowledge, Nancy said, brightly entertained by the idea. They were the very people who would, in their own small way, be making a better future for the world. She had joined the Labour Party and steadfastly attended earnest, dreary meetings. The Kibbo Kift had prepared her well.
They were in the pub because Nancy said she wanted to make sure that Teddy wasn’t suffering from “pre-wedding jitters” and that he was “completely certain” that he wanted to go ahead with the wedding. He wondered if it might be the other way round and that she was hoping he would set her free at the eleventh hour. They were drinking an unexpectedly good cognac that, when he discovered that they were to be married the next day, the landlord had procured from beneath the counter for the “lovebirds.” It seemed unlikely to have had a legal provenance. Sometimes Teddy wondered if everyone had done well out of the war except for those who had fought in it.
“Courage, mon ami,” Nancy toasted, in honour of the brandy’s homeland. Did she feel that they needed courage?
“The future,” he answered, chinking her glass. For a long time, during the war, he hadn’t believed in a future—it had seemed like an absurd proposition—and now that he was living in this “afterward,” as he had thought of it during the war, it somehow seemed like an even more absurd proposition. “And to happiness,” he added as an afterthought, because it was the kind of thing one should say, if only for luck.
“It’s rather like ‘he married the girl next door,’ ” Nancy continued to grumble. “As if we had no choice in the matter, as if we were destined.”
“But you were the girl next door,” he said, “and I am marrying you.”
“Yes,” she said patiently, “but we’re making a choice. That’s important. We’re not just sleepwalking into something.” Teddy thought perhaps he was.
They had known each other from childhood, if not as sweethearts then certainly as the closest of friends. When he left Fox Corner for boarding school Nancy was the only person who wasn’t family that was in Teddy’s prayers every night. Please keep my mother and father safe (he learned that no one called their parents “Mummy” and “Daddy” at boarding school, even in their silent prayers) and Ursula and Pamela and Jimmy and Nancy and Trixie. After Trixie’s death and her replacement by Jock this was amended to and Jock and keep Trixie safe in heaven. And, yes, dogs were family. Maurice usually made the list as a guilty afterthought, if at all.
“You don’t have to go through with it,” he said to her. “I wouldn’t hold you to anything. After all, everyone got engaged during the war.”
“Oh, what a goose you are,” she said. “Of course I want to marry you. Are you sure that you want to marry me? That’s the question. And only ‘yes’ or ‘no’ will do for an answer. No fudging the issue.”
“Yes,” he said, quickly and quite loudly so that the pub’s two other patrons—an old man and his even older-looking dog—were startled out of their torpor.
The war had been a great chasm and there could be no going back to the other side, to the lives they had before, to the people they were before. It was as true for them as it was for the whole of poor, ruined Europe. “One thinks,” his sister Ursula said, “of the great spires and towers that have been toppled, the Altstadts with their little narrow cobbled streets, the medieval buildings, the Rathauses and cathedrals, the great seats of learning, all reduced to mounds of rubble.”
“By me,” Teddy said.
“No, by Hitler,” Ursula said. She was always keen to lay blame at Adolf’s feet, rather than the Germans in general. She had known the country before the war, had friends there, was still trying to trace some of them. “The Germans were victims of the Nazis too, but one can’t say that too loudly, of course.”