It was difficult now to remember those first summer evenings—the stored heat of the day beneath the eaves, the worn cotton curtains billowing idly at the wide-open casement. They made love when it was still light, fell into an ecstasy of sleep and woke to make love again at dawn. They never saw the dark. Now they had an old grey horse blanket tacked up at the window and lived in terror of draughts. There was ice on the window panes, both inside and out.
“It’s no better here,” Ursula wrote from London. They picked up their post from a makeshift box at the end of the track. They had left for work by the time the post was delivered and, never having witnessed the heroics of their postman, could only imagine them. Their own efforts seemed epic enough. They had bought an old Army Land Rover at auction with some of Izzie’s (very generous) wedding-present money. Her standard gift for family weddings was a set of fish knives and forks, but she handed Teddy a large cheque over afternoon tea at Brown’s. “Augustus owes you,” she said. Augustus, who had never grown as Teddy had, who had remained irresponsible and endlessly culpable. Teddy occasionally wondered what Augustus would be doing if he had grown. He imagined that this fictional doppelg?nger—Gus—would now be hanging around Soho in the grimy aftermath of war, frequenting disreputable pubs and clubs. A more interesting story surely than Augustus and the Disappearing Act, the latest offering in the Augustus oeuvre which had made it through the snow two days ago and was sitting unread on top of Nancy’s piano. “In which Augustus joins a local magic circle and wreaks his usual mischief,” it said on the back of the jacket.
“Even this eternal winter must end,” Nancy said. “And we have the snowdrops as proof. You did see them, didn’t you? You weren’t just making it up for your column?”
He was surprised that she would think such a thing. “Of course not,” he said. He was beginning to wish he had never seen the dratted snowdrops, let alone chosen them as his subject. He was looking forward to March with its abundance of birds and buds. There would be no shortage of topics for Agrestis in the spring. He took a log from the basket and placed it on the fire. It spat out a glittering shower of sparks on to the hearth rug. They both watched with interest to see if any of them would catch but they sputtered harmlessly and died.
“Why don’t you go on?” Nancy said.
“Sure?”
“Yes.” Her eyes firmly on her knitting. (Nancy was always a good liar.)
“Some say the snowdrop was first brought to these lands by the Romans, others say that they were first cultivated by monks (or perhaps nuns), and indeed in many of Shakespeare’s ‘bare, ruined choirs’ they can be found carpeting the ground in profusion in Spring. Yet somehow it feels like a flower that is native, that has been here since the dawn of time, the very essence of Englishness.
“One legend of the snowdrop’s origins tells how when Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden they were sent into what seemed to them to be the punishment of eternal Winter and that an angel, taking pity on them, turned a snowflake into a snowdrop as a sign that Spring would return to the world.”
A yawn again from Nancy, perhaps less well concealed.
“I’m only looking for corrections to mistakes,” Teddy said. “You don’t have to like it.”
She looked up from her knitting and said, “I do like it! Don’t be such a sensitive soul. I’m just tired, that’s all.”
“Those of us enduring this unforgiving Winter can perhaps sympathize only too readily with our biblical forebears. Candlemas in the Catholic calendar is the Feast of the Purification of Mary—”
“It’s quite wordy, isn’t it? Don’t you think?”
“Wordy?” Teddy said.
Before the war he had fancied himself as something of a poet and had a couple of poems published in obscure literary magazines, but on a visit home to Fox Corner during the war he had looked through these antebellum offerings, kept in a shoebox beneath his childhood bed, and saw them for what they were—the amateur scribblings of an immature mind. In style they relied on vague, tortuous metaphors, nearly always in an attempt to describe his response to nature. He was drawn to the grand Wordsworthian sweep of hill and vale and water. “You have a pagan soul,” Nancy had once told him but he didn’t agree. He had the soul of a country parson who had lost his faith. But it didn’t matter now, for the great god Pan was indeed dead and war had long ago killed Teddy’s desire to make poetry.
After graduating from Oxford he had applied to stay on and do an MPhil, putting off the time when he would have to find a career. In his heart of hearts he still wanted to be a train driver but he supposed that was out of the question. He would have been very surprised (and thrilled too) if someone had told him that five years later he would be training to be a pilot.