No funny business now,” Ivy said, stripping down to her petticoat before they finally climbed into the cold bed. “I’m a good girl,” she said primly. She was plain with buck teeth and had a fiancé in the Navy and Teddy considered her safe from his advances, especially as he was quite drunk, but somewhere in the now peaceful night they rolled towards each other in the middle of the sagging mattress and she manoeuvred herself skilfully so that he slipped inside her, still dopey with sleep, and it seemed ungentlemanly to protest. It was brief, the briefest. At best carnal, at worst sleazy. When they woke, both bleary-eyed from the beer, he expected her to be penitent, but instead she stretched and yawned and wriggled around, expecting more. In the grey morning light she looked rough and if she hadn’t known so much about real anti-aircraft fire he might have mistaken her for one of the Piccadilly flak. He berated himself—she was a pleasant girl, good company even, and he was being a snob—but he made his excuses and left.
He paid for the room and asked a man at the reception desk to see about taking a breakfast tray up to “my wife,” slipping a hefty tip across the desk.
“Certainly, sir,” the man said, sneering despite the tip.
Later that day he boarded a train at King’s Cross, bound for an OTU. Operational Training Unit. After that an HCU, Heavy Conversion Unit. “War’s all about acronyms,” Ursula said.
He felt relief when the overcrowded train finally pulled slowly away from the platform, glad to be leaving behind the dirty wreckage of London. There was a war on, after all, and he was supposed to be fighting it. He discovered the little wrinkled apple in his pocket and ate it in two bites. It tasted sour when he had expected it to be sweet.
1993
We That Are Left
“There, that box is done,” Viola said, as if completing something distasteful, like picking up someone else’s dirty litter, when all she had been doing was filling a cardboard box with clean glassware. She was wielding a parcel-tape dispenser as if it were a weapon. She caught sight of Sunny shaking a cigarette out of a packet and before he could strike a match yelled at him, “Don’t light that!” as if he were about to put the match to a fuse on a bomb rather than a Silk Cut. “I’m nineteen,” Sunny muttered. “I can vote, get married and die for my country” (Would he do any of those things, Teddy wondered?) “but I can’t have a quick fag?”
“It’s a disgusting habit.”
Teddy thought about saying, “You used to smoke,” to Viola, but could see that would just light another kind of fuse. Instead, he put the kettle on to make tea for the removal men.
Sunny collapsed on to the sofa. The sofa, like most of Teddy’s furniture, was being disposed of as it was too big for the flat that he was moving to. It was being replaced by a cheap little two-seater, “for guests,” Viola said, ordering it for him from a catalogue. For himself he had something called a “rise and recline” chair (“suitable for the elderly”) that he had to admit, albeit reluctantly, was wonderfully comfortable. He didn’t like the word “elderly,” it invited prejudice in the same way that “young” had once done.
The majority of Teddy’s possessions were due to be offloaded on charity shops. He was leaving behind more than he was taking. A life accrued and what was it worth? Not much apparently. “Granddad’s got so much crap,” Teddy had overheard Sunny say to Viola earlier, as if it were a moral affront to have hung on to a decade’s worth of bank statements or a calendar from five years ago—reproductions of Japanese bird prints that he’d kept because they were so pretty. “You can take hardly any of this stuff with you, you know that, don’t you?” Viola had said, as if he were a toddler with too many toys. “Do you ever throw anything away?”
It was true, in the last year or two he had begun to lose the thrifty habits he had once had, growing tired of the relentless culling and resolution that the material world demanded. Easier to let it pile up, waiting for the great winnowing of goods that his death would bring. “This is good,” he had overheard his daughter say to Sunny. “It means there’ll be less to clear out when he finally goes.”