“They’re in pristine condition.”
“That’s because I was taught to take care of books,” Teddy said. So had Viola been, of course, but she was a filthy reader. Food and drink, cat sick, heaven knows what else all over the pages of her books. She was always dropping them in the bath or leaving them out in the rain. When she was a child she used to hurl them like missiles whenever she was angry. Teddy had been clipped on the forehead more than once by Enid Blyton when Viola was small. The Land of Far-Beyond had almost broken his nose. He wouldn’t be surprised if she still threw things. Teddy supposed she had so much anger because she had lost her mother. There he went with the cod psychology again. (“I’m angry because I have a mother,” Bertie said.) Sylvie had never subscribed much to theories of childhood trauma. People came as they were, she said, all packeted up, complete, waiting to be unwrapped. His mother’s generation seemed wonderfully free of guilt.
Teddy fetched an empty box and started putting Augustus into it. Years since he’d opened one. Izzie wrote the last one in 1958. They hadn’t sold for a long time, not since the war really. Augustus’s heyday had been between the wars. Augustus Edward Swift floruit 1926–1939. Of course, poor old Augustus was finished long before Izzie died in 1974. Teddy’s version of him lingered on, rearing his head occasionally. Was he an old man now, being dragged, kicking and screaming, into sheltered housing, a fag hanging out of the corner of his mouth? Stained trousers and whiskery chin?
Teddy went to visit Izzie a few days before she died. She was pretty doolally by then. It was hard to conjure her up now, she was an impression, the greedy red mouth, the perfume, the affectations. She had wanted to adopt him at one point. Would his life have turned out very differently or would it have developed in much the same way?
In her will Izzie left the copyright for Augustus to Teddy. It was worth virtually nothing. The rest of the estate, which mainly comprised the house in Holland Park, went to “my granddaughter,” a woman in Germany whom they had never heard of. “For reparation,” it had said in the will.
Pamela and Teddy and Pamela’s daughter, Sarah, had sifted through everything in the house after Izzie’s funeral. A nightmare of a job. They had found a Croix de Guerre at the bottom of her jewellery box. It seemed so unlikely. These twin mysteries, the German granddaughter and the Croix de Guerre, summed up the impenetrable nature of Izzie. If Ursula, with her detective soul, had still been alive she would have got to the bottom of both. Teddy had been uninterested (he felt guilty about that now) and it wasn’t long before Pamela was showing the signs of early-onset Alzheimer’s. Poor Pammy, she spent years living a grey half-life. So the ambivalence that was Izzie was never solved, which was exactly how she would have liked it.
He packed the studio portrait that Cecil Beaton had taken of Izzie after her first flush of success. It made Izzie look like a film star, artificial and full of manipulation. “But glamorous,” Bertie said. “Yes, I suppose so,” Teddy said. He gave her the photograph the first time she visited him in Fanning Court. “But it was my mother who was the beauty,” he said. Sylvie’s corpse, he remembered, in the open coffin for viewing. The years had fallen from her face and Bea had clutched his arm, just the two of them, as if they were at a private exhibition (they were, he supposed). Why Bea? Where was Nancy that day? He couldn’t remember. Bea gone too now, of course. She had been close to his heart, perhaps closer than she knew. Dear God, Teddy thought, stop thinking about dead people. He packed the Beaton in with the Augustuses (“Augusti” perhaps) and taped the box shut. “They’re coming with me,” he said decisively to Viola.
“Where’s Sunny?” Viola puzzled.
Yes, where is Sunny?
I have seen a large dog fox several times recently but it was a hot afternoon and no doubt, like most creatures, it was lying low in the shade. The fox has an unfortunate reputation. A crafty thief, often a charming one in fable and fairy story, its name is a byword for low (and occasionally high) cunning. A moral outlaw, a trickster and sometimes downright malevolent. The Christian Church often equated the fox with the devil. In many churches across the land you will find images of the fox in priestly robes preaching to a flock of geese. (There is a fine woodcut in the Cathedral at Ely.) The fox is a subtle outlaw, a devilish predator without conscience, and the geese a flock of innocents…