“No, the war changed something in me,” Nancy said. There was a brief silence as the three of them contemplated what that “something” might be.
He had lost Nancy to the Official Secrets Act during the war. She had been unable to tell him what she was doing and he had been incapable of telling her what he was doing (because he didn’t want to) and their relationship foundered on ignorance. She had vowed to tell him when the war finished (“Afterwards, I’ll tell you everything. I promise”), but by then he wasn’t terribly interested. “Cryptology and codes and so on,” she confessed, although of course he had guessed this long ago, for what else could she have been doing?
No one else who had worked at Bletchley during the war talked about what they had done and yet Nancy was quite prepared to break her oath so that there would be “nothing between us.” Secrets had the power to kill a marriage, she said. Nonsense, Sylvie said, it was secrets that could save a marriage.
Nancy was willing to unpack her whole heart to him, but Teddy had chambers that he never opened. He was not so honest about his own war—the horror and the violence, not to mention the fear, seemed an immensely private thing. And there was his own infidelity, too. Nancy admitted to having “had sex” (a crude phrase to Teddy’s ears) with other men when she thought he was dead, rather than in a POW camp, whereas he had been unfaithful without the excuse of thinking her dead.
She never asked, he supposed that was the beauty of her. And he couldn’t see what good could come from confession. He had considered it, in that shoddy little pub the night before their wedding. He could have made a clean breast of his sins and shortcomings, but really in the end it was nothing and Nancy, too, would consider it nothing and that might be the worst of it.
Sylvie had brought cake too, a rather solid affair with caraway seeds that stuck in their teeth. She had made it herself. Having learned to cook late in life Sylvie was still baffled by the science of it. Nancy sliced the cake and served it on the old biddy’s mismatched plates.
“Now if you had had a proper wedding,” Sylvie said, “you would have wedding presents—a china tea service, for example—so that you didn’t have to serve your guests from such a rum assortment of crockery. Not to mention all the other necessities of married life.”
“Oh, we get by just fine without the necessities,” Nancy said.
“You’re becoming more like your mother,” Sylvie said and Nancy replied, “Thank you. I’ll take that as a compliment,” which riled Sylvie even more. Sylvie, of course, had never quite got over being denied a wedding by Teddy and Nancy. They had “sneaked away,” in her words. “Not exactly the kind of photographs you can put in a silver frame, are they?” she sighed, when she scrutinized the tiny snaps Bea had taken on the day on her old box Brownie.
“The cake is delicious,” Nancy said in an effort to mollify Sylvie, but was distracted by a large bee that dropped from exhaustion on to the rug and became entangled in the fibres of wool. Nancy encouraged it on to the palm of her hand and carried it over to the hedge, where she sought out a shady patch for it.
“It will die,” Sylvie said to Teddy. “They never recover. They’re worn out by hard work, they’re the Methodists of the insect world.”
“Yet the instinct is to save,” Teddy said, regarding Nancy fondly as she tended to the bee, insignificant in the greater order of things.
“Perhaps sometimes we shouldn’t,” Sylvie said. “It’s so hot,” she added, fanning herself with a napkin. “I’m going inside. And the cake is not delicious. Nancy was always a good liar.”
They had had no suspicions of winter when they moved into Mouse Cottage. They were still talking of getting a flock of leghorns and learning beekeeping, of digging over the neglected garden and planting potatoes “the first year” to turn over the soil. “Eden raised,” Nancy laughed. There had even been talk of a goat. None of these things had come to pass by the time the long dark nights closed in on them. They had been too taken up with each other, grasshoppers enjoying the summer, rather than ants preparing for the winter. They were both immensely relieved that they had never got as far as the goat.