“I know you do. So do I,” Teddy said, patting his grandson on the shoulder. “Would you like a cup of tea, Sunny?”
“What about me? Am I included in that?” Viola said in that faux-chirpy way that she had when she was trying to pretend they were all one happy family. (“The family that put the ‘fun’ in dysfunctional,” Bertie said.)
“Of course you are,” Teddy said.
They had moved to this house in York in 1960. Mouse Cottage had been superseded by a rented farmhouse (Ayswick), which was where Viola spent her first years. When they moved to York the loss of the countryside had felt like a wound to Teddy, but then greater wounds had been inflicted and he had soldiered on in York until he grew to like it.
The house was a semi-detached in the suburbs that looked like thousands of others across the land—pebble-dash, mock-Tudor accents, little diamond panes in the bowed bay windows, big gardens back and front. It had been Viola’s home for half of her childhood—the worst half undoubtedly—although she always behaved as if it meant nothing to her. Perhaps it didn’t. She had spent her sulking teenage years champing on the bit to escape its confines (“dull,” “conventional,” “little boxes” and so on). When she had finally left to go to university it had felt as if a great darkness had left the house. Teddy knew he had failed Viola but he wasn’t sure how. (“Do you ever think it might be the other way round?” Bertie said. “That she might have failed you?” “It doesn’t work like that,” Teddy said.)
He was going to a place called Fanning Court. “A sheltered retirement housing complex.” “Sheltered” made it sound like it was somewhere for a dog or a horse. “Don’t be silly,” Viola said. “It’s a much safer place for you to be.” He had trouble remembering a time when she didn’t treat him as a nuisance. It would only get worse, he suspected, the older he grew. She had been nagging him to move for a while, so that someone could “keep an eye on you.”
“I’m only seventy-nine,” Teddy said, “I can keep an eye on myself. I’m not in my dotage yet.”
“Not yet,” Viola said. “But you’ll have to move sooner or later, so it may as well be sooner. You can’t manage the stairs and you certainly can’t manage the garden any more.” He managed the garden rather well, he thought, with a little help from a man who came in once a week to do any heavy work and to mow the grass in summer. There were fruit trees at the bottom of the garden and there was once a large vegetable plot. Teddy used to grow everything—potatoes, peas, carrots, onions, beans, raspberries, blackcurrants. Tomatoes and cucumbers in the greenhouse. He had built a little run for a couple of chickens and had even kept a hive of bees for a few satisfying years. These days most of the garden was given over to lawn, with easy-going shrubs and flowers—roses, mainly. He still planted sweet peas in the summer and dahlias for the autumn, although that was becoming a bit of a chore.
Losing the garden was going to be hard. When he moved here he thought the garden would be a poor consolation for the loss of the wild countryside that he had left behind, but he had been proved wrong. Now what would be his consolation? A couple of pots on a balcony, a window box perhaps. His heart sank.
For years now Viola had been going on about organic food and what a healthy diet she had fed her children, yet she seemed incapable of understanding him when he said that he had brought her up on organic food—“straight out of the garden.” How could it be organic, she said, as if there was no manure and hard work before her time. When she was a child she hadn’t been interested in learning about beekeeping, was reluctant to feed the hens or collect eggs and said the garden gave her hay fever. Did she still have hay fever in the summer?
“Do you still have allergies?” he asked.
“I would let you live with me,” she carried on as if he hadn’t spoken (“Let,” Teddy thought?) “but there’s so little room and, of course, you would never be able to get up and down the stairs. They’re simply not suitable for an elderly person.”