Her father seemed so old-fashioned, but he must have been like new once. That was a nice phrase. She tucked that away for later use as well. She was writing a novel. It was about a young girl, brilliant and precocious, and her troubled relationship with her single-parent father. Like all writing, it was a secretive act. An unspeakable practice. Viola sensed there was a better person inside her than the one who wanted to punish the world for its bad behaviour all the time (when her own was so reproachable). Perhaps writing would be a way of letting that person out into the daylight.
She dropped a Midwinter milk jug and it broke into several pieces. “Fuck,” she said, more quietly than she’d intended.
Teddy had let Viola arrange for a couple of the bulkier pieces in his house to be shipped off to auction, where they had fetched, in her words, “a pittance.” Nancy’s piano, Gertie’s sideboard. Precious objects. The piano was out of tune and neglected, played by no one now. Viola gave up her lessons (she had little aptitude) after Nancy died.
When Teddy thought about Nancy he often pictured her sitting at the piano. He thought about her every day, as he thought about so many others. The dead were legion and remembrance was a kind of duty, he supposed. Not always related to love.
He recalled—near the end—walking into this room and seeing Nancy playing the piano. Chopin. He had been reminded of Vermeer, one of his paintings in the National Gallery—a woman in a room, a virginal—he couldn’t remember exactly, it was years since he had been up to London. Woman Interrupted at the Piano, he thought when he saw Nancy. He could imagine her living in one of Vermeer’s cool, uncluttered interiors. The reading of the letter, the pouring of the milk. Order and purpose. She had looked up from the piano as he entered the room, surprised, as if she had forgotten his existence, and wearing that cryptic expression she had sometimes as though she had been lost inside herself. The secret Nancy.
He had felt an awful wrench when the removal men had taken the piano. He had loved Nancy, but perhaps not in a way that suited her. There had probably been someone else out there in the world who would have made her happier. But he had loved her. Not the high romance of passion or chivalry, but something more robust and dependable.
And Gertie’s sideboard, he was sad to see that go too. It had belonged to the Shawcrosses originally, had lived in the dining room at Jackdaws. It was a Liberty Arts and Crafts piece, out of fashion for many years but coming back now, although not soon enough for Viola, who had always regarded it as ugly and “depressing.” Fifteen years later, in 2008, she saw the twin of Gertie’s sideboard—perhaps the sideboard itself—on the Antiques Roadshow and was furious that she hadn’t “hung on to it” given the price it was valued at. “I would have kept it,” she said to Bertie, “but he insisted on getting rid of it.” The older Teddy got the more Viola simply referred to him as “he,” as if he was a patriarchal god who had blighted her life.
“Where’s that old carriage clock of yours?” she asked suddenly, casting her eye around the now almost denuded living room. “I don’t remember seeing it when we were packing.” The clock had been Sylvie’s, and her mother’s before that. It had gone to Ursula on Sylvie’s death and Ursula had left it to Teddy, and so it had zigzagged its way down the family tree. “You know,” Viola said with a faux nonchalance, “if you don’t want it I’ll take it off your hands.” She was the worst kind of liar—transparently untruthful and yet completely convinced of her ability to deceive. If she needed money why didn’t she just ask him? She was always looking to be given things, a cuckoo rather than a predator. It was as if there was something hungry inside her that could never be filled up. It made her greedy.
The clock was a good one, made by Frodsham and worth quite a bit, but Teddy knew that if he gave it to Viola she would sell it or misplace it or break it and it seemed important to him that it stayed in the family. An heirloom. (“Lovely word,” Bertie said.) He liked to think that the little golden key that wound it, a key that would almost certainly be lost by Viola, would continue to be turned by the hand of someone who was part of the family, part of his blood. The red thread. To this end, he had given the clock to Bertie the last time she visited him. He should have given her Gertie’s sideboard too, it would have suited the Arts and Crafts cottage where she lived with her twins and the good man she married—a doctor whom she met by chance on Westminster Bridge, the week of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. Years later, after Bertie married and moved to this cottage in East Sussex, she had the clock valued for insurance and discovered that it was worth a whopping thirty thousand pounds. Every time Viola came to visit, Bertie had to hide her little golden nest-egg and muffle its chime. Teddy had been in the earth for two years by then and never saw Bertie’s Arts and Crafts cottage, never saw the clock continuing to count down time on her mantelpiece.
“Have you already packed the clock?” Viola asked accusingly.
Teddy shrugged innocently and said, “Probably. It’ll be at the bottom of a box somewhere.” He loved Viola as only a parent can love a child, but it was hard work.