Innocence
He didn’t hear Chamberlain make his sombre declaration on the wireless because he had chosen instead to take the Shawcrosses’ old dog, Harry, for a walk in the lane. An amble, slow and arthritic, all that the Golden Retriever was capable of nowadays. His eyes were clouded with cataracts and a once-large frame was now gaunt, the flesh shrunk against the bones. Deaf too, like Major Shawcross himself. The two of them, man and dog, had snoozed companionably through the long summer afternoons of 1939, locked together in their silent world—Major Shawcross in his old wickerwork chair and Harry melted on the lawn at his feet.
“It breaks my heart to see him like that,” Nancy said. She meant Harry, although the sentiment extended to her father. Teddy understood the particular poignancy of seeing a dog you had known as a puppy approaching the end of its life. “Intimations of mortality, as Wordsworth didn’t write,” Ursula said. “Oh, if only dogs lived longer lives. We’ve mourned so many.”
The Shawcross girls were all enormously fond of their “old Pa,” an affection that was more than reciprocated by Major Shawcross. Hugh was close to Pamela and Ursula, of course, but Teddy was always rather surprised at the way that Major Shawcross was so free with his feelings, kissing and cuddling “my girls” and often reduced to tears merely by the sight of them. (“The Great War,” Mrs. Shawcross said. “It changed him.”) Hugh tended to reticence, a temperament that, if anything, the war had reinforced. Had Major Shawcross wished for a son? Surely he must have done, didn’t all men? Did Teddy?
He intended to propose to Nancy. Today perhaps. A day of high historical drama so that in the future Nancy would say to their children (for they would surely have them), “You know, your father proposed to me on the day that war broke out.” Teddy felt as if he had been waiting for a long time, too long perhaps. First, so that Nancy, at Newnham, could complete her Maths Tripos, and now for her to study for her PhD. Her doctoral topic was something to do with “natural numbers.” They didn’t seem at all natural to Teddy. He didn’t want to find himself waiting for the war to be over as well, for who knew how long that would be?
Teddy was twenty-five, almost “too long in the tooth” for marriage, as far as his mother was concerned. She was keen for grandchildren, keener than she had been for the ones she already had, courtesy of Pamela, who had “three boys and counting,” and Maurice, who had one of each. “Like fish and chips,” Ursula said. Teddy barely knew Maurice’s offspring and Sylvie reported them to be “rather dull.”
Marrying Nancy seemed inevitable. Why wouldn’t he marry her? “Childhood sweethearts,” Mrs. Shawcross said, affected by the idea of romance. His own mother was less affected.
Everyone presumed it, even Sylvie, who thought Nancy “too clever” for marriage. (“Marriage blunts one so.”)
“And who else could there possibly be apart from Nancy anyway?” Teddy puzzled to Ursula. “She’s by far and away the best person I know. The nicest one too.”
“And you do love her. And you know that we all do.”
“Of course I love her,” Teddy said. (Had it been a question?) Did he know what love was? The love for a father, a sister, for a dog even, yes, but between a husband and wife? Two lives knitted inextricably together. Or yoked and harnessed. (“That’s the point,” Sylvie said, “otherwise we would all run wild.”)
He thought of Adam and Eve, he thought of Sylvie and Hugh themselves. Neither seemed like terribly good examples. “Nancy’s parents’ marriage,” Ursula said. “Isn’t that a good pattern? Major and Mrs. Shawcross are happy. To all appearances, anyway.” But appearance and reality were different things, weren’t they? And who knew the secrets of a marriage?
He had loved Nancy when they were young but that was a different kind of thing, high and clear but childishly innocent. For now we see through a glass darkly.