“Perhaps more to the point,” Ursula said, “how would you feel if you didn’t marry her?” So, yes, he thought, of course he would marry Nancy. They would move to a pleasant suburb, have those inevitable children, and he would work his way up in the bank until one day the staff would perhaps be as deferential to him as they were to his father. Or perhaps not.
It wouldn’t just be the sharp knife of his wife who would be blunted. The future was a cage closing around him. Wasn’t life itself a great trap, its jaws waiting to snap? He should never have returned from France. He should have ceased being indolent, stopped pretending he had a poet’s soul, embraced the adventurer in himself instead, and pushed on eastwards, explored the extremities of Empire—Australia, perhaps. Somewhere raw and unsettled where a man could make himself rather than being made by those around him. Too late for that. Now it would not be the geography of Empire that would make him, it would be the architecture of war.
They had reached the dairy herd’s field by now and Teddy pulled some stalks of long grass from the hedgerow and cried, “Cush-cow, cush-cow,” but the cows, after the briefest of glances in his direction, remained placidly indifferent. He lit a cigarette and leaned on the gate while he smoked it. Harry had collapsed awkwardly on the ground, his scrawny sides heaving with exertion. “Poor old boy,” Teddy said, reaching down and scratching behind the old dog’s soft ear. He thought about Hugh. Their paths never crossed at the bank but his father would occasionally invite Teddy to lunch at his club on Pall Mall. The stolid world of finance suited Hugh, but for Teddy it was stultifying tedium and, occasionally, downright misery.
His father would retire soon, of course, potter around the garden, doze over the open pages of his Wisden in the garden or the growlery, get on Sylvie’s nerves. That was indeed how Hugh was found, just over a year later, in a garden deckchair, a copy of Wisden open on his lap. Asleep for ever. Even this, the least troublesome of deaths, seemed to exasperate Sylvie. “He just slipped away without a word!” she complained, as if he had owed her more. Perhaps he had.
“Dad was never one to make a fuss,” Ursula wrote to Teddy in Canada on flimsy blue, the ink smudged irrevocably where a tear must have dropped.
Teddy ground out the cigarette stub beneath his foot and said, “Come on then, Harry, we’re going to miss lunch if we don’t get a move on.” The dog couldn’t hear him but he didn’t shift even when Teddy gave him a gentle prod and he feared that he had worn him out completely. He might be a bag of bones but he was still heavy and Teddy wasn’t sure that he could carry the dead weight of the dog all the way home, although he supposed he would have to manage if there was no alternative—needs must. But luckily Harry hauled himself heroically on to four legs and they wended their way slowly back to Nancy’s house.
Oh, stay away, do,” Mrs. Shawcross implored when she caught sight of him at the back door of Jackdaws. She flapped a tea-towel at him as if he were a fly.
Nancy, at home for the long vacation, was in bed, with what had turned out to be whooping cough (“At my age!”), being nursed assiduously by Mrs. Shawcross, who knew that Teddy had also missed out on the illness as a child. “You mustn’t catch it,” she said. “It’s quite horrible in an adult.”
“Don’t go near that girl,” Sylvie warned when he told her that he had offered, in the current absence of a resident dog at Fox Corner, to take Harry for a walk. Too late, he thought.
“That girl” was the girl he was going to propose to, but not today after all, perhaps. “She’s really rather poorly,” Mrs. Shawcross said. “But I’ll give her your love, of course.”
“Please do.”
The various smells of Sunday lunch wafted out of Mrs. Shawcross’s kitchen. Mrs. Shawcross, hair straggling from an untidy bun, looked rather flushed and not a little flustered, but in Teddy’s experience that was the effect that cooking Sunday lunch had on women. Jackdaws, like Fox Corner, had recently lost its cook and Mrs. Shawcross seemed even less suited to the culinary arts than Sylvie. Of Major Shawcross there was no sign. Mrs. Shawcross herself was a vegetarian and Teddy wondered what she would eat while Major Shawcross was enjoying his beef. An egg, perhaps. “Oh, Lord, no,” Mrs. Shawcross said, “the whole idea of eating an egg makes me feel quite squeamish.”
Teddy spotted an open bottle of Madeira on the kitchen table and a little glass, half full of the brown liquor. “War,” Mrs. Shawcross said, her eyes filling with tears, and, infection forgotten, she pulled Teddy towards her in a warm, rather damp embrace. She smelt of the Madeira and of Coal Tar soap, an unlikely, rather unsettling combination. Mrs. Shawcross was large and soft and always a little sad. Sylvie was annoyed by the misbehaviour of the world but Mrs. Shawcross carried the burden of it patiently, as you would for a child. He supposed the war would make that burden heavier.