A woman hirpled along the corridor towards them with the aid of a walking frame. “Hello, coming to join us, are you?” she said cheerfully to Teddy. It was a bit like a cult. Teddy was reminded of that television programme from the Sixties that Viola had liked to watch. The Prisoner. His heart sank. This was to be his prison, wasn’t it? A prison with a warden.
More women—everywhere, in fact. Once he had moved in he realized that nearly all of the “residents” were women. They liked him, women always did. Of course he was still pretty spry then, and competent, and the women belonged to a generation that could be impressed if a man simply knew how to flick a switch on a kettle. He set quite a few frail hearts a-flutter in Fanning Court but had done his best to neatly sidestep romance and intrigue, for although it was all pleasantries on the surface, beneath the magnolia paint the place seethed with gossip and cattiness. Teddy, still a good-looking man in his eighties (especially if you were a woman in your seventies), unintentionally provoked all kinds of heightened emotions.
“I suppose men are in short supply at my age,” he said, excusing some incident of spiteful behaviour.
“At my age too,” Bertie said.
Come along, Ted,” Ann Schofield said. “Plenty more to see.” “Plenty more” was a bit of garden, planted in municipal style. Some benches. A car park.
“Oh, I don’t think he’ll be bringing his car,” Viola said.
“Oh, I think he will,” Teddy said.
“Really, Dad, you’re getting on a bit for driving.” (She wanted his car, he supposed. Hers was always breaking down.) Viola liked having this kind of argument in a public arena with an audience who could see how reasonable she was being and how unreasonable her other family members were. She used to do it with Sunny all the time. Drove the poor boy mad. Still did.
“Oh, lots of residents have cars,” Ann Schofield said, letting Viola down.
The flat itself would have fitted into his grandmother’s drawing room in Hampstead. Teddy hadn’t thought about Adelaide in a long time and surprised himself with a vivid memory of her, dressed in long Victorian black even in the Twenties, complaining about her boisterous grandchildren. What a long, long way they had come from those days.
Once, he remembered, on a particularly tedious visit, he and Jimmy had crept upstairs to investigate her bedroom, a place that was strictly off limits to them. He remembered her wardrobe, an immense contraption, lined inside with pleated silk and reeking with the competing scents of camphor and lavender, underpinned by the perfume of decay. The two of them had climbed inside, their faces brushing rather unpleasantly against Adelaide’s strange outmoded clothes. “I don’t like it in here,” Jimmy whispered. Neither did Teddy and he stepped out first and accidentally knocked the door so that it swung shut. It took a while to get it open again as the handle had a rather odd mechanism.
When Jimmy finally tumbled out his shrieks of terror summoned the whole household. Adelaide was furious (“Wicked, wicked boys”), but he remembered Sylvie holding her hand over her mouth so that Adelaide couldn’t see that she was laughing. Poor Jimmy had never liked confined spaces after that. He had been a Commando during the war, had landed on Sword Beach and skirmished his way across the ravaged remains of Europe after D-Day before slogging out the endgame, attached to the 63rd Anti-Tank Regiment. How he must have hated the cramped insides of tank destroyers. He had been with the 63rd when they liberated Bergen-Belsen, but he and Teddy had never spoken about that, had barely spoken about the war. He wished they had.
Until he found out about Jimmy, one unexpected day just after the war had ended, Teddy’s picture of queers had been the fairies and pansies he saw about Soho. He hadn’t considered such men capable of the kind of brutal courage that Jimmy must have had.
Jimmy was long gone, to a fast-growing lymphoma in his fifties. When he was given the diagnosis he drove his car off the road and over a precipice. Flamboyant in life, flamboyant in death. He lived in America, of course. Teddy hadn’t gone to the funeral, but he went to a local church and sat silently with his thoughts at the same time that Jimmy was being buried on the other side of the Atlantic. A few days later a flimsy blue airmail letter had drifted through his letter-box like a rare leaf. In it Jimmy had made his farewells. He wrote that he had always loved and admired Teddy and what a good brother he had been. Teddy didn’t think this was true at all. If anything he had been quite derelict in his fraternal duties. He had never asked about Jimmy’s homosexual life (hadn’t wanted to know, really) and had always thought (condescendingly, he was ready to admit now) that his profession—in advertising—was rather trivial. He had felt similarly disappointed when Bertie took a job in advertising, which as far as he could tell was just encouraging people to spend money they didn’t have on things they didn’t need. (“It is,” Bertie agreed.)
“Well, Jimmy had a terrible war,” Ursula said at the time. “I think triviality is as good an antidote as anything.”
“We all had a terrible war,” Teddy said.
“Not everyone,” Ursula said. “You did, I know.”