Mrs. Shawcross placed a hand against her temple and said, “Oh dear, I think I have one of my heads coming on.” She sighed and added, “Thank goodness we have girls. Neville would never be able to face sending a son into battle.”
It seemed more than probable to Teddy that he was already incubating the whooping cough. Mrs. Shawcross didn’t know that Nancy had travelled up to London last week to see him, sneaking into his lodgings beneath the gimlet eye of his landlady and staying the night, the two of them squeezed together in his narrow bed, convulsing with laughter at the noise that the creaking bedsprings were making. They were still novices at that kind of thing. “Rank amateurs,” Nancy said cheerfully. There was passion between them, but it was of the orderly, good-humoured kind. (Of course, one might argue that, by its definition, this was not passion.) There had been a girl or two at Oxford and a couple in France, but sex with them had been more like a bodily function, one that had left him discontented and not a little abashed. The sex act was perhaps not bestial but it was certainly animalistic and he supposed he was grateful to Nancy for domesticating it. Savage desire and yearning romance were probably best kept between the pages of a book. He was his father’s son, he suspected. The war changed this, as it changed everything, introducing him to less civilized encounters. However, Teddy would never be comfortable with terms for describing sex. Prudery or reservation, he wasn’t sure. His daughter had no problem with the vocabulary. Viola screwed, she got laid, she did indeed fuck, and made a point of articulating this fact. It was something of a relief to Teddy when she declared herself celibate at the age of fifty-five.
His lodgings were quite close to the British Museum, a bit of a ramshackle place but he liked it, despite the landlady, who could have given Genghis Khan a run for his money. Teddy had no idea that his furtive night with Nancy would, due to the unforgiving constraints of war and circumstances, be one of the few occasions when they would manage to be intimate with each other until the hostilities were over.
How is poor Nancy?” Hugh enquired when Teddy returned to Fox Corner.
“Bearing up, I suppose,” Teddy said, “although I didn’t actually see her. We’re at war then?”
“I’m afraid so. Come into the growlery, Ted, and have a drink with me.” The growlery was Hugh’s hermitage, a place of safety into which one came only by invitation. “Best be quick,” he added, “before your mother catches sight of you. She’ll be hysterical, I expect. She didn’t take it well, even though we knew it was coming.”
Teddy wasn’t sure why he had decided not to hear war being declared. Perhaps simply because taking a dog for a stroll on a sunny Sunday morning before lunch was a better calling.
Hugh poured two tumblers of malt whisky from the heavy cut-glass decanter he kept in the growlery. They chinked glasses and Hugh said, “To peace,” when Teddy had expected him to say, “To victory.” “What will you do, do you suppose?” Hugh asked him.
“I don’t know.” Teddy shrugged. “Join up, I expect.”
His father frowned and said, “Not in the Army though,” the unspoken horror of the trenches flashing momentarily across his features.
“The RAF, I thought,” Teddy said. He hadn’t actually thought about it at all until this moment, but now he realized that the cage doors were opening, the prison bars falling away. He was about to be freed from the shackles of banking. Freed too, he realized, from the prospect of suburbia, of the children who might turn out to be “rather dull.” Freedom even from the yoke and harness of marriage. He thought of the fields of golden sunflowers. The solid blocks of colour. The hot slices of sunshine.
Would France fall under Hitler’s evil spell, he worried? Surely not.
“A pilot,” he said to his father. “I should like to fly.”
The declaration of war delayed Sunday lunch. Sylvie was still plucking mint from the garden for the lamb when Teddy went to look for her. She didn’t seem at all hysterical to him, merely rather grim. “You missed Chamberlain,” she said, straightening up from her labours and rubbing the small of her back. His mother too, he thought, getting old. “And I suppose you will have to fight,” she said, addressing the bunch of mint that she was crushing in her hand.
“I suppose I will,” he said.
Sylvie turned on her heel and stalked back inside the house, leaving the aromatic trail of mint in her wake. She paused at the back door and addressed him over her shoulder. “Lunch is late,” she said, rather unnecessarily.
“Is she very cross?” Ursula asked him on the phone later that afternoon.
“Very,” he said and they both laughed. Sylvie had been ferocious about the need for appeasement.
There had been a flurry of phone calls between various permutations of the family all afternoon and Teddy, if he was honest, was getting rather weary of being asked what he intended to do, as if the future of the conflict was on his shoulders alone.