Viola had left York for Leeds several years ago. In York she had worked in a Welfare Benefits Unit (Teddy had no idea what that was), but then she got a job in “Family Mediation” in Leeds. That, too, seemed a vague kind of occupation and, from the name of it, hardly something that Viola sounded suited for. Of course, the move was prompted by her marriage to Wilf Romaine. (“We eloped,” she says rather giddily in a Woman and Home interview in 1999. Teddy wasn’t sure that “elope” was quite the right word when you were over thirty and had two small children.)
Now she was in Whitby, living off welfare benefits herself as far as he could tell, although they didn’t talk about it. She had bought an old fisherman’s cottage with the proceeds of her divorce from Wilf Romaine. She was forty-one and had spent most of her life living off money given to her by other people—Teddy, Dominic’s family (“a pittance”) and then the disastrous marriage to Wilf. “If I’d realized,” she said crossly, as if it were someone else’s fault, “I would have sidestepped motherhood and men and gone straight into a profession when I graduated. I would probably be a controller at the BBC by now, or something in MI5.” Teddy made a non-committal noise.
The cottage in Whitby was just four rooms, piled crookedly, one on top of another. Teddy wouldn’t have been surprised if Viola had gone out of her way to find somewhere unsuitable for an “elderly person.” As if he would ever have contemplated living with her. (“Fate worse than death,” Bertie agreed.)
Viola was “writing,” she said. Teddy wasn’t too sure what this meant and didn’t like to ask too closely, not because he wasn’t interested but because Viola got very snappish if you asked her to go into detail about anything. Sunny was the same, exasperated by even the most inoffensive questions. “So what are you up to these days?” Teddy had asked his grandson when he arrived—reluctantly—this morning to help with the move. Any question about Sunny’s plans for the future elicited a shrug and a sigh and the answer, “Stuff.”
“He’s so like his father,” Viola said. (No, Teddy thought, just like his mother.) “I despair of him. He hasn’t grown up, he’s just got bigger. Of course, if he were a child nowadays he’d probably be diagnosed with dyslexia, and some kind of hyperactivity thing as well. And dyspraxia probably. Autistic even.”
“Autistic?” Teddy said. It was funny how she always managed to wash her hands of responsibility. “He always seemed a pretty normal little chap to me.” This wasn’t entirely true, Sunny had stumbled and faltered his way through his life so far, but someone had to come to the poor boy’s defence. If Teddy had been forced to “diagnose” him with anything it would have been unhappiness. Teddy loved Sunny in a way that made his heart ache. He feared for him, for his future. Teddy’s love for Bertie was more straightforward, more optimistic. Bertie had a bright-eyed intelligence that reminded him of Nancy sometimes (in a way that Viola never had). Something of the same quicksilver nature too, a merry soul, although in death, in memory—which was the same thing now—Nancy had perhaps grown more mercurial than she had been in life.
What is this?” Viola sounded outraged, as if the small rectangular cardboard box contained evidence of some terrible transgression. There was a picture of a coffee grinder on the unopened box.
“It’s a coffee grinder,” Teddy said reasonably.
“It’s the coffee grinder I gave you for Christmas. You haven’t used it.”
“No, I haven’t.”
“Yours was ancient. You said you needed a new one.” She started opening doors and looking in his kitchen cabinets, finally producing—“A coffee grinder. You bought yourself one? I spent money I didn’t have on a present for you. Oh, wait.” She put a hand out as if trying to stop a tank. “Wait. Oh, of course…”
Sunny wandered into the kitchen and groaned. “What’s the drama queen ranting about now?” Viola showed him the box containing the unused coffee grinder. “German!” she pronounced, as if she was in court and had just produced the deciding evidence.
“So?” Sunny said.
“Krups,” Teddy said.
“So?” Sunny said.
“He doesn’t buy German things,” Viola said. “Because of the war.” She said the word “war” sarcastically as if she was arguing with her father about the length of her skirt or the amount of eye make-up she was wearing or the smell of tobacco on her breath—all hotly debated topics in her teenage years.
“The Krupp family supported the Nazis,” Teddy said to Sunny.
“Oh, here comes the history lesson,” Viola said.
“Their factories produced steel,” Teddy continued, ignoring her. “Steel is at the heart of all war.” He had bombed (or tried to bomb) the Krupp works in Essen several times. “They used slave labour. And Jews from the concentration camps.”