When they moved to Yorkshire Teddy found himself in an indifferent boys’ grammar school in a smallish woollen mill town, soot-soiled and shoddy, that was quietly dying, and knew from the very first lesson—Romeo and Juliet, “Women, being the weaker vessels, are ever thrust to the wall”—to a class of sniggering thirteen-year-olds that it had been a mistake. He saw the future unravelling before him, day after dismal day. Saw himself dutifully earning money to support Nancy and their as-yet-unborn children who were already weighting him down with responsibility. Saw himself, too, on the day he finally retired, a disappointed man. It was the bank all over again. He was a stoic, it had been beaten into him at school, and he was as loyal as a dog, and he knew he would stick it out, no matter how great the sacrifice of self.
“You fought the war for those boys,” Ursula said when she visited, “for their freedom. Are they worth it?”
“No, not at all,” Teddy said and they both laughed because it was a cliché that they were already tired of hearing and they knew that freedom, like love, was an absolute and not to be parcelled out on a whim or a favour.
Nancy, on the other hand, loved her profession. She was a maths teacher in a grammar school for well-behaved, clever girls, in a pleasant spa town. She enjoyed making them even cleverer, even better-behaved, and they loved her in return. She had lied on application, told the school that she was unmarried (not even a widow), erasing Teddy efficiently from her history. She was Miss Shawcross again. “They don’t like married teachers,” she explained to Teddy. “They leave to have babies, or they are distracted by their domestic life, by their husbands.” Distracted? Of course, the plan was to give up teaching when they started a family, but that was in the lap of the gods and the gods didn’t appear to be in a hurry.
She knew how miserable Teddy was teaching. One of the many good things about Nancy was that she didn’t believe that people should suffer unnecessarily. (It always surprised Teddy how many people did.) She encouraged him to take up writing again—“A novel this time,” she said. She had read the shoebox poems and Teddy supposed her opinion of them was pretty much the same as his. “A novel,” she said. “A novel for the new world, something fresh and different that tells us who we are and what we should be.” The world didn’t seem very new to Teddy, but rather old and weary (as he suspected himself to be), and he wasn’t sure he had anything to say that was worth writing about, but Nancy seemed determined that he would have talent. “At least have a go,” she said. “You won’t know if you can do it until you try.”
And so he allowed Nancy to cajole him into sitting down in the evenings and at the weekends in front of the little Remington that she had found in a second-hand shop. No more “Observations,” he thought. No more thick notebooks. Just get on with it.
He found a title first, calling his debut upon the literary stage A Bower Quiet for Us, taken from Keats’s “Endymion”:
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
“Oh, how he must have longed for ‘health, and quiet breathing,’ ” Ursula said. “And perhaps by imagining it he hoped it would come true.” His sister always spoke sadly of Keats, as if he had only just died. It was an awkward title though, not exactly catchy. “It will do,” Nancy said, “for now at any rate.” He knew her thinking. She believed he needed to be healed and writing might be the physic that did the trick. “Art as therapy,” he had overheard her say to Mrs. Shawcross. His own mother would have derided such a notion. The opening line of “Endymion,” “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever,” was more Sylvie’s creed. Perhaps that would have made a better title. A Thing of Beauty.