“But you’re the family’s only warrior,” Ursula said. “What will you do?”
“Join the RAF,” he said promptly. The more he had been asked this question over the course of the day, the more certain his answer had become. (What would Augustus do, he wondered? The grown-up one, his counterpart, not the Peter Pan of Izzie’s books.) “And I’m not the only warrior anyway, what about Maurice and Jimmy?”
“Maurice will avoid any danger, you’ll see,” Ursula said. “But Jimmy, I suppose… oh dear. I still think of him as the baby, I can’t imagine him with a weapon in his hand.”
“He’s almost twenty,” Teddy felt it necessary to point out.
Lunch was a subdued affair. There were only the three of them—four if you counted Bridget, in the kitchen, which they didn’t. They ate the lamb with potatoes and some rather stringy runner beans from the garden and afterwards Bridget plonked down an oval dish of rice pudding on the table and said, “It’s dried up, thanks to those ruddy Germans.”
“At least now Bridget will have someone other than Mother to blame for the woes of her world,” Ursula said when Teddy reported this remark to her on the phone. “It’s going to be bloody, you know,” she added sadly. Ursula seemed privy to a lot of information. She “knew” people, of course, including a senior man in the Admiralty.
“How is your Commodore?” he asked her, rather cautiously as Sylvie was about.
“Oh, you know—married,” Ursula said lightly. “Judge not that ye be not judged,” she had said when she confided in him about this affair. Teddy had been startled at the idea of his sister as a scarlet woman, as the other woman. By the end of the war there was nothing about men and women that surprised him. Nothing about anything really. The whole edifice of civilization turned out to be constructed from an unstable mix of quicksand and imagination.
There was another large whisky after lunch and then another before supper and both Teddy and Hugh, neither of whom were drinkers, were a little worse for wear by the time Teddy left for London. Back to the bank in the morning, he thought, but in his lunch hour he would find a recruitment office and sign up and the world would turn perhaps not upside down, as the old Civil War ballad would have it, but certainly a few notches in easement.
“That ‘ballad’ was a lament, not a rejoicing,” Ursula said. She could be almost as particular as Nancy sometimes. “Christmas was killed at Naseby fight.” His sister was not yet a puritan—the war would make her one.
Sylvie kissed him goodbye on the cheek, very cool, and turned away, saying that she wouldn’t say goodbye because it was “too final,” and Teddy thought how histrionic his mother could be if she set her mind to it. “I’m catching the seven-twenty to Marylebone,” he said to her, “not going off to die.”
“Not yet.”
Hugh gave him a paternal pat on the shoulder and said, “Don’t pay any attention to your mother. Take care of yourself now, Ted, won’t you?” It was the last time he would be touched by his father.
He made his way along the lane to the station through the twilight and by the time he had taken his seat in a second-class carriage Teddy realized that it was not Hugh’s whisky that was making him feel so woozy and feverish but Nancy’s whooping cough. The disease delayed his attempt to enter the war for several wretched weeks and even then when he tried to register he was sent away and told to wait. It was well into the spring of 1940 before he picked up an envelope from the hall table of his lodgings, which, when opened, proved to be a buff-coloured directive from the Air Ministry telling him to report to Lord’s Cricket Ground for an interview. The summer before he went up to Oxford, his father had taken him to Lord’s to see the first All-India test match. It seemed strange that this, of all places, was to be where he would be admitted into war. “England won by one hundred and fifty-eight runs,” his father recalled when he told him of the venue. And how many runs would it take to win this war, Teddy wondered?—even at this stage of his life inclined to mutilate metaphor. Although in fact it took exactly seventy-two runs not out—the number of sorties he had flown by the end of March 1944.
There was a new lightness to his step as he walked to work. He paused to stroke a cat sunning itself on a wall. He tipped his hat to an elegant woman who, clearly charmed, smiled in response (rather invitingly, especially for this time of day). He stopped to smell a late lilac hanging over the railings around the gardens of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Wordsworth’s “glory and the dream” were not entirely forgotten, he thought.
The familiar scent of polished wood and brass assailed him as he entered the bank. No more, he thought, no more.