But, yes, it was true, he had liked Yorkshire.
They had talked for a while about emigrating. Australia or Canada. Teddy had done his initial pilot training in Canada and had enjoyed the friendly people, the easy-going ways they had. He still remembered a trip they had gone on to pick peaches, like a dream now in this winter. He had travelled around France before the war too, even more evanescent than any dream, but France had been a young man’s fancy, not a place for a married Englishman in 1947. In the end, they concluded, they had fought the war for England (“Britain,” Nancy corrected him), and it seemed wrong to abandon the country in this new hour of her need. It was perhaps a mistake, he thought in later years. They should have taken the five-pound passage and left, joined all those other disgruntled ex-servicemen who realized that Britain in the gloomy aftermath of war felt more like a defeated country than a victorious one.
Nancy found an old farm cottage to rent in a dale that was on the cusp of moorland. It was called Mouse Cottage (“How very fey,” Sylvie said), although they never found out why for they never, to their surprise, saw a single mouse the whole time they lived there. Perhaps it was called that because it was so tiny, Nancy said.
There was a cast-iron range, with a fire and oven built in, and a back boiler to provide hot water. (“Thank God,” they both said frequently, fervently, in this cold.) They often made a supper of just toast, scraped with their rationed butter, holding the bread on a brass fork in front of the fire, rather than face the icy blasts that blew through the small scullery that had been tacked on to the back of the cottage at some point in the past. On to this scullery had been attached something more like a shed than a room, in which there was a washbasin and a half-bath, its brass taps blackened and its worn enamel streaked with rust. No wireless, no telephone and an outside privy that meant in this weather an understandable reliance on the unsavoury chamber-pot. It was their first home together and Teddy thought he already understood how fondly they would think of it in the future, if not necessarily now.
They had rented it fully furnished, which was just as well as they had no furniture of their own apart from an upright piano that they had managed to cram into the downstairs room. Nancy was a good pianist although nowhere near as good as Sylvie. The previous owner had apparently died in situ and so they were now availing themselves of some poor old biddy’s cups and saucers, cushions and lamps, not to mention the brass toasting fork. They presumed a woman because although the curtains and loose covers on the chairs were a worn linen in a Jacobean pattern that could have been favoured by either sex, the cottage was dotted with crocheted blankets and tatted mats and framed cross-stitch pictures of gardens and crinolined ladies that all spoke of an old woman. They thought of her as an invisible benefactor. Their bedding, at least, had not last embraced a corpse as Mrs. Shawcross had raided her laundry cupboard for “spares.”
They had taken on the lease in May, in blossom time, bamboozled by balmy skies. (“That’s a lot of ‘b’s, lad,” Bill Morrison said. “I bet there’s a word for that.” “ ‘Alliteration,’ ” Teddy said and Bill Morrison said, “Well, try not to.”) “Goodness,” Sylvie said when she visited. “Quite primitive, isn’t it?” They made corned-beef sandwiches and Sylvie had brought eggs from her chickens and cucumber pickles and they hardboiled the eggs and made quite a good picnic, sitting on an old rug, flattening the overgrown grass of the garden. “You’re going backwards,” Sylvie said. “Soon you’ll be living in a cave and bathing in the stream.”
“Would that be so bad?” Nancy said, peeling an egg. “We could live like gypsies. I could grub around in hedgerows for berries and sell pegs and lucky charms from door to door and Teddy could catch fish and shoot rabbits and hares.”
“Teddy won’t shoot anything,” Sylvie said decisively. “He doesn’t kill.”
“He would if he had to,” Nancy said. “Can you pass the salt, please?”
He has killed, Teddy thought. Many people. Innocent people. He had personally helped to ruin poor Europe. “I am here, you know,” he said, “sitting next to you.”
“And,” Nancy continued, visibly warming to the idea, “our hair would smell of woodsmoke and our babies would run around naked.”
She said it to annoy Sylvie, of course. Sylvie, duly annoyed, said, “You used to be such a bluestocking, Nancy. Married life has quite changed something in you.”