Ursula had flown on a “Cook’s tour” at the end of the war and had witnessed at first hand the desolation, the still-smouldering ruins of Germany. “But then one thinks of the crematoria,” she said. “One thinks of poor Hannie. The argument always seems to end at the concentration camps, doesn’t it? Auschwitz, Treblinka. The terrible evil. We had to fight. Yet we must move on. And there can never be any going back anyway, war or not.” (She was the family philosopher.) “We can only ever be walking into our future, best foot forward and all that.” This was when people still believed in the dependable nature of time—a past, a present, a future—the tenses that Western civilization was constructed on. Over the coming years Teddy tried, in the manner of a simple layman, to keep up with theoretical physics, via articles in the Telegraph and an heroic struggle with Stephen Hawking in 1996, but admitted defeat when he came across string theory. From then on he took every day as it came, hour by hour.
Ursula had been dead for decades by then, subtracted from time altogether. But in 1947 time was still a fourth dimension that could be relied upon to shape everyday life and for Ursula that meant working in the civil service, as she would for the next twenty years, leading the decent, quiet life of a single professional woman in post-war London. Theatre, concerts, exhibitions. Teddy had always thought his sister would have a great passion of some kind—a vocational calling, a man, certainly a baby. He had looked forward to being an uncle to Ursula’s child almost more than he had to his own potential fatherhood (which, if he was honest, he faced with some trepidation), but his sister was nearly forty and so he supposed she would never be a mother now.
Teddy thought of his wife and his sister as two sides of the same shining coin. Nancy was an idealist, Ursula a realist; Nancy an optimist with a lively heart, while Ursula’s spirit was freighted with the grief of history. Ursula was forever cast out of Eden and making the best of it while Nancy, cheerful and undaunted, was sure her search for the gate back into the garden would be successful.
Teddy sought out involved imagery, like “a hound looking for a fox,” to quote Bill Morrison.
Nancy looked up from her Fair Isle and said, “Go on. Carry on with your snowdrops.”
“Are you sure?” he said, sensing a certain lack of enthusiasm.
“Yes.” Said with determination, possibly grim.
“My friends in the south of England have yet to spy one, but here, perversely, in these hardy northern climes, Keble’s ‘first-born of the year’s delight’ have begun to poke their frail heads through the blanket of snow. (Perce-neige, the French aptly call them.) But perhaps my favourite name for this little spring flower is the pretty ‘February fairmaids.’ ”
He was Agrestis, his nom de plume, and these were his monthly Nature Notes, a short column for the North Yorkshire Monthly Recorder. Known by everyone simply as the Recorder, it was a small magazine, both in format and aspiration, with a strictly local circulation, apart from the few copies that were sent abroad every month, all to Commonwealth countries and (so he was led to believe) one war bride living in Milwaukee. They were all emigrants, Teddy supposed, people who found themselves in exile from this part of the world with its sheep-auction tallies and reports from WI meetings. How long, he wondered, before the bride in Milwaukee began to feel that her native county was as alien as the moon?
A woman in Northallerton—no one at the magazine had ever met her—posted in recipes as well as the Handy Hints and the occasional knitting pattern. There was a crossword (not cryptic, not at all), readers’ letters and articles about the area’s beauty spots and places of historical interest, and pages of dull advertisements for local businesses. It was the kind of publication that hung around in the waiting rooms of doctors and dentists until it was months, occasionally years, out of date. Not including the woman in Northallerton, the Recorder had a staff of precisely four—a part-time photographer, a woman who dealt with all the administration including Notices and Advertisements and subscriptions, the editor, Bill Morrison, and now Teddy, who did everything else, including the Nature Notes.
They had moved to Yorkshire because Nancy thought it would be a place where they could lead a good, simple life, a country life, surrounded by nature, which was how man—and woman—was meant to live. Again, the Kibbo Kift had done its work. Neither of them could abide the grim, battle-scarred face of the capital, and Yorkshire, Nancy said, seemed a long way away, less affected by mechanization and war. “Well…” Teddy said, thinking of the bombing of Hull and Sheffield, of the monolithic soot-blackened factories of the West Riding and, most of all, the brutal windswept airfields on which he had been stationed during the war and where the better part—perhaps the best part—of his life had been lived inside the freezing noisy shell of a Halifax bomber.
“You liked it in Yorkshire, didn’t you?” Nancy said, in the casual way someone might say, “Shall we go to the Lakes this year? You like it there, don’t you?”
“Like” was hardly the word that Teddy would have used for a time in his life when every day was fragile and seemed as if it might be his last on earth and the only tense was the present one because the future had ceased to exist even though they were fighting so desperately for it. They had thrown themselves wholesale at the enemy, every day a new kind of Thermopylae. (“ ‘Sacrifice,’ ” Sylvie said, “is a word that makes people feel noble about slaughter.”)