“There’s a lot of them, aren’t there? So—‘her cultural heritage of Bach, Brahms, Beethoven—’ ”
Nancy nodded silently, like a schoolteacher approving a pupil’s corrections. She could just have been counting stitches, of course.
“ ‘Of these Beethoven is—’ ”
“We have rather left the snowdrop behind. Why all this talk of Germans?”
“Because it was a German legend I was referring to,” Teddy said.
“This seems to be about forgiving the Germans though. Have you? Forgiven them?”
Had he? Theoretically perhaps, but not in his heart, where truth resided. He thought of all the men he knew who had been killed. The dead, like demons and angels, were legion.
It was three years since his own war had ended. He had spent the last year hors de combat in a POW camp near the Polish border. He had parachuted out of a burning aircraft over Germany and had been unable to evade capture because of a broken ankle. His aircraft had been coned and shot down by flak on the dreadful raid to Nuremberg. He hadn’t known it at the time but it was the worst night of the war for Bomber Command—ninety-six aircraft lost, five hundred and forty-five men killed, more than in the whole Battle of Britain. But by the time he made it home this was all old, cold news, Nuremberg all but forgotten. “You were very brave,” Nancy said, with the same encouraging indifference—to Teddy’s ears anyway—that she might have afforded him if he had done well in a maths test.
The war now for him was a jumble of random images that haunted his sleeping self—the Alps in moonlight, a propeller blade flying through the air, a face, pale in the water. Well, good luck to you then. Sometimes the overwhelming stench of lilacs, at other times a sweetly held dance tune. And always at the end of the nightmare there was the inescapable end itself, the fire and the sickening hurtle of the fall to earth. In nightmares we wake ourselves before the awful end, before the fall, but Teddy had to be woken by Nancy’s shushing, by her cradle hand soothing him, and he would stare into the darkness for a long time wondering what would happen to him if she failed to wake him one night.
He had been reconciled to death during the war and then suddenly the war was over and there was a next day and a next day and a next day. Part of him never adjusted to having a future.
Beethoven,’ ” he began again doggedly. You could hardly hold Beethoven responsible for the war. He had a sudden memory—himself and Ursula in the Royal Albert Hall—when was that, 1943?—listening to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the Choral, Ursula almost vibrating with the emotional power of the music. He had felt it too, the power of something beyond, something outwith the petty everyday pace. He shook himself, a wet dog.
“Are you all right, darling?”
An affirmative. Just dislodging the war, the awfulness of it all, the overwhelming sadness. Nothing he could convey in words to her.
“And, you know,” Nancy continued, a blithe spirit, “I don’t think people necessarily want to be reminded about the war when they’re reading Agrestis’s Nature Notes. In fact quite the opposite, I imagine.”
“Shall I make cocoa?” he offered, to escape the subject. “Or would you rather have Ovaltine?”
“Ovaltine, please.”
“You’ll ruin your eyes,” he said as he poured the half-frozen milk into a pan and placed it on the trivet over the fire.
“I’m stopping now,” she said, efficiently winding up her different-coloured balls of wool.
The milk rose up suddenly in the pan and Teddy snatched it away from the fire before it could boil over. His face, hot from the flames, made him aware of the burn tissue on his neck. It was just visible above his collar, the skin shiny and puckered pink, a promise of other scars in less visible places.
“Well, Wing Commander Todd,” Nancy said, “time for bed, I think.”
She never used his wartime rank without a kind of mild irony, as if he had pretended to something. He had no idea why she did that, but it made him shrink inside a little.
They retired to Ultima Thule, as they called it, the ice-box that was their attic bedroom. Teddy shivered as he stripped himself of his layers and jumped into bed as if he was plunging into the icy waters of the North Sea.
They soon warmed each other up after the initial shock of polar sheets and frosty air. Lovemaking was vigorous rather than romantic in this kind of weather. (“One is never cold with a husband,” Nancy’s sister Millie wrote from the arid heat of Arizona. “Especially a handsome one like yours!”)
A blizzard had started up and it sounded as if someone was pelting the windows with snowballs. They were a new Adam and Eve, exiled into eternal winter.
Nancy kissed him on the cheek and said, “Goodnight, dear heart,” but Teddy was already asleep.
Nancy blew out the candle by the side of the bed and waited for Teddy’s nightmares to begin.
They must have a baby, she thought. They must have a child to heal Teddy, to heal the world.
1939
Teddy’s War