They decided on a whim to stay the night there. Teddy was assigned the bedroom he had once shared with Nancy and asked to be moved, and instead slept in a small room at the back that only when he woke up the next morning did he realize had once been Viola’s room, and he wondered how he could have forgotten that. In here had been her cradle and then her cot, and finally her little single bed. Under Nancy’s direction he had nailed painted plywood cut-out figures on the wall—Jack, Jill, the well and a bucket. (“No, further over to the left—make the bucket look as if it’s tumbling over.”) There had been a small nightlight by her bed, a little house, the warm light glowing through the windows. He had built a bookcase for Viola’s childhood reading—The Wind in the Willows, The Secret Garden, Alice in Wonderland—and now here he was on the other side of the looking glass gazing at a Toile de Jouy wallpaper, a large, amateurish painting of the dale in winter, and a bedside lamp with a cheap white paper shade. And no going back, ever, to the other side.
The house was much warmer than it had been when he had lived here with Nancy, although he was sad to see that the Georgian panelling had gone from the walls, a victim of the Sixties, Teddy supposed, and now the place was decorated in fresh florals and stripes, pale rugs and “en-suites” in every room. Ayswick was transformed into something unrecognizable—into Fairview, in fact—and nothing remained of himself or his past. No one now but Teddy would ever know that once he and Nancy had huddled by the great Aga in the kitchen while the wind blew up the hill and whistled through every room, competing with Beniamino Gigli and Maria Caniglia singing Tosca on their cherished gramophone. No one would know that their black-and-white collie had been called Moss and slept contentedly on a rag-rug in front of that great Aga while Teddy drafted his Nature Notes in a reporter’s notebook and Nancy, a ripe seed-pod about to burst, knitted little lacy things for the baby they were about to meet.
It would all die with him, he realized, as he buttered toast in Fairview’s breakfast room—once a dusty and unused back parlour and now, he had to admit, rather nice with three round tables dressed in white tablecloths, a little posy of flowers on each. He was the first of the guests to come down and had already eaten a plate of bacon, egg and sausage (he still had “a good appetite,” according to Viola, who made it sound like a criticism) and chatted affably to the proprietress before anyone else put in an appearance. He didn’t mention to her that he had once lived here. It would seem odd, he decided. And the conversation would run on predictable lines. She would express surprise and say, “It must have changed a lot since your day,” and he would say, “Yes it certainly has!” and none of it would convey the cawing of the rooks in the evening hurrying to roost in the stand of trees behind the farmhouse or the Blakean magnificence of the sunset from the top of the hill.
Ayswick,” Nancy said. “It’s a farmhouse.” Mrs. Taylor-Scott raised an eyebrow as if she disapproved of farmhouses. “In a village,” Nancy added hastily. “Or at any rate on the edge of it. All the necessary amenities and so on.”
They were able to rent Ayswick because the farmer who owned it had built himself a modern brick house “with all mod cons” and regarded the old farmhouse as a “white elephant” and was only too glad to have tenants willing to take on its draughty, stone-flagged passages and rattling windows. “But so much character!” Nancy said, delighted when they signed the lease.
Where Mouse Cottage was tiny, the farmhouse was vast, far too big for two people. It dated from the mid-eighteenth century and the weathered grey stone of the exterior gave away little, but inside it revealed a certain elegance in its broad oak floorboards, the painted Georgian panelling in the living room, the swag and drop cornices and, best of all, the huge farmhouse kitchen with an old cream Aga “like a big comforting animal,” according to Nancy. They still had no furniture of their own apart from Nancy’s piano and no old biddy to lend them her goods and chattels post-mortem, so they were grateful to the farmer and his wife for leaving behind their enormous kitchen table, meant for feeding breakfast to a herd of hungry farm workers.
The farmer’s wife had insisted on plain new-fashioned Ercol in her small spare dining room. “Lovely,” Nancy said politely when she visited. She had taken flowers to say “thank you” and sat at the simple elmwood table and drank Camp coffee that had been boiled up with evaporated milk. Both Teddy and Nancy were rather particular about their coffee. They had the beans, an Italian roast, sent in the post from Border’s in York. The postman always looked taken aback by the aroma escaping from the brown paper packet. They ground the beans themselves in a hand grinder that they left permanently clamped on to the kitchen table and made their coffee in an old percolator that Teddy had brought back with him from France, before the war.
“The new farmhouse is quite soulless,” Nancy reported back to Teddy. “No character.” No spiders or mice either. No dust, no cracks creeping across the ceiling or damp inching its way up the walls that would one day give their hard-won daughter a croupy cough and winter catarrh. And the new farmhouse nestled in the sheltering lee of a hill, whereas Ayswick looked down the length of the dale, taking the brunt of the wind’s brute force. They could stand at their front door and watch the weather coming towards them, like an approaching foe. It lived with them, it had a personality—“the sun’s trying to come out,” “I think it wants to rain,” “the snow’s keeping itself off.”
It was a Saturday and Nancy found Teddy in pastoral mode when she returned from the new farmhouse.