“So did you.”
“There was a job to do,” Ursula said. “And we did it.”
Oh, how he missed his sister. Out of everyone, the legions of the dead, the numberless infinities of souls who had gone before, it was the loss of Ursula that had left him with the sorest heart. She had a stroke, nearly thirty years ago now. A swift death, thank goodness, but she was too young. And now Teddy was too old.
“Dad?”
“Yes, sorry, miles away.”
“The warden—Ann—is explaining the emergency cords.” Oh joy, Teddy thought.
Thin red cords dangled from the ceiling in every room. “So if you have a fall,” Ann Schofield said, “you can pull on one and summon help.” Teddy didn’t bother asking what would happen if he wasn’t near a cord when he fell. He imagined Ann Schofield waddling at speed towards him along the pink and magnolia corridors, and thought he might prefer to lie where he had dropped and slowly expire with some dignity remaining.
Ann Schofield referred to the complex as “the Fanning” so that it sounded to Teddy’s ears like a hotel in Mayfair, one he had stayed the night in once with a girl. He couldn’t remember the name of the hotel (Hannings? Channings?) but he was pretty sure the girl had been called Ivy. They had bumped into each other in the blackout, both looking for somewhere to lay their head that night. She had been looking for the Catholic Club in Chester Street and now Teddy couldn’t remember what, if anything, he had been looking for. He had been drunk and she had been fairly tipsy and they had stumbled (literally) across the hotel.
The present was a rather dim, unfocused place—he supposed that could only get worse—but the past was increasingly bright. He could see the grubby steps of that London hotel, the white portico and the narrow stairway up to the fourth-floor attic bedroom. He could almost taste the beer they had drunk. There was a shelter in the cellar but when the siren sounded they didn’t go down to it, instead they hung out of the window, in the freezing night air, watching the raid, the ack-ack battery in Hyde Park making a frightful racket. He was on leave after returning from training in Canada, a pilot who had not yet been blooded in battle.
She had been engaged to a sailor. He wondered what had happened to her. What had happened to her sailor.
He had thought about her once, on an op to Mannheim, as they crossed the heavy belt of searchlights that defended the Ruhr. He had thought how down there on the ground, on enemy soil, there were probably hundreds of Ivys, nice Fr?uleins with buck teeth and fiancés on U-boats, manning the German ack-ack, all united in an effort to kill him.
“Dad? Dad? Really. Pay attention, will you?” Viola rolled her eyes at Ann Schofield, trying to display amusement and affection at the same time, although Teddy doubted that she was feeling either. You’ll be old too, one day, he thought. Thank goodness he wouldn’t be around to see that. And Bertie too, how sad to think that one day she might be an old lady with a walking frame, shuffling along uninspiring corridors. It is the blight man was born for. That was Hopkins, wasn’t it? It is Margaret you mourn for. Those lines had always moved him, he remembered—
“Dad!”
It was his own fault, he supposed. He had slipped on a patch of black ice near his house and knew straight away that it was bad. He heard himself howling with the pain, surprised that he could make such a noise, surprised that it was himself making it. He had ended up half sitting, half sprawled on the pavement. He had been shot down in flames during the war, you would think that there wasn’t anything worse that could happen to you. But this felt unbearable.
Several people, perfect strangers, rushed to his aid. Someone called an ambulance and a lady who told him she was a nurse draped her coat over his shoulders. She crouched down next to him and took his pulse and then gently patted his back, as if he were an infant. “Don’t move,” she said. “I won’t,” he said meekly, rather glad for once to be told what to do. She held his hand while they waited for the ambulance to arrive. Such a simple thing and yet he was overwhelmed with gratitude. “Thank you,” he murmured when he was finally loaded into the ambulance. “You’re welcome,” she said. He had never learned her name. He would have liked to have sent her a card or some flowers perhaps.
He had broken his hip and needed an operation. The hospital insisted on notifying his “next of kin,” even though Teddy asked them not to. He wanted to crawl away and heal his wounds in peace, like a fox or a dog, but as he came round from the anaesthetic he could hear Viola muttering, “It’s the beginning of the end.”
You’re nearly eighty,” she said, using her “reasonable” voice. “You can’t go gallivanting around like you used to.”