“I was on my way to the local shop to buy milk,” Teddy said. “I would hardly call that ‘gallivanting.’ ”
“Even so. It’s only going to get more difficult for you. I can’t keep rushing over every time you do something silly.”
Teddy sighed and said, “I didn’t ask you to come over.”
“Oh, and I wouldn’t?” she said self-righteously. “Not come and help my own father when he’d had an accident?”
He endured her presence for three days after he was discharged. She fretted the whole time about leaving her cats in order to look after him. Also, she “hated being in this house,” she said. “Look at it, you haven’t done a thing to it for decades. It’s so old-fashioned.”
“I’m old-fashioned,” Teddy said. “I don’t think that’s a bad thing.”
“You’re impossible,” Viola said, twirling a strand of her heavily hennaed hair around a finger (an irritating habit he had forgotten about).
Viola phoned Sunny and told him he would have “to put in some time” looking after his grandfather. Whenever Viola thought about Sunny she was gripped with panic. He’d already made a half-hearted attempt at suicide. He was too apathetic to actually kill himself though. Wasn’t he? What if he did? The panic tightened its grip on her heart. She thought she was going to pass out. She had failed Sunny and had no idea what to do about it.
Terror made her callous. “It’s not as if you’ve got anything else to do,” she said to him.
Sunny, for his part, liked the respite of being back in Grandpa Ted’s house. It was the only place he’d ever been happy.
Teddy slept on the sofa downstairs while Sunny took the pleasant back bedroom upstairs that had once been his mother’s and then had been Bertie’s during the year in which she had lived here. Sunny had lived here too, of course, although not for quite as long, as he had been forced to endure that terrible long summer at Jordan Manor. He wondered if he would ever get over it.
He liked this little back bedroom. It was where his sister had slept. At some point in the night he had always made his way through to Bertie’s room. His sister had saved him in some fundamental way—warmth and light—but she was gone now. To Oxford, a foreign world. “We’re pinning our hopes on that one!” Viola used to say to her friends, pointing at Bertie. As if it was funny. It didn’t help that they all thought that women were “the superior species” (all that “fish on a bicycle” crap). Sunny was apparently the living proof of this.
The harsh smell of burning vegetation drifted out of Sunny’s bedroom and down the stairs every night when Teddy was dropping off to sleep. Marijuana, he supposed, although he knew little about it.
Sunny still lived in Leeds, left behind by Viola when she moved to Whitby. He was currently living in a sordidly unruly flat with several members of his peer group, all too self-centred to qualify as friends.
He had dropped out of college (Communication Studies—“Oh, the irony,” Viola said), and now didn’t seem to be doing much of anything. The boy was all awkward corners. He didn’t seem to have any of the skills that were necessary to negotiate the simple challenges of everyday life. He played guitar in a band, he said, shouting from the kitchen where he was heating up a tin of baked beans for their tea.
“Good for you!” Teddy shouted back from the living room. He was pretty sure he could smell the baked beans burning.
They had tinned beans and spaghetti hoops quite often. Fish and chips too, Sunny actually making the effort to go and pick them up from the local chip shop. Otherwise their dinners were delivered from restaurants all over town, indeed all over the world—Indian, Chinese. Pizzas, plenty of those. Teddy hadn’t realized, he thought it was just the women from the WRVS who did meals on wheels. “Eh?” Sunny said.
“Joke,” Teddy said.
“Eh?”
It all cost Teddy a fortune. (Needs must, his mother’s voice said in his brain.) The boy couldn’t cook at all. Viola was a rotten cook too, stodgy dishes made from brown rice and beans. Viola had brought both her children up as vegetarian, Bertie still was, but Sunny now seemed happy to eat anything going. Teddy thought if he could get back on his feet a bit he could teach him some simple dishes—lentil soup, hot-pot, a Madeira cake. The boy just needed a bit of encouragement.