Teddy had made all the arrangements for Ursula’s funeral and then spent months afterwards expecting her to write and tell him all about it. (“My dearest Teddy, I hope this finds you well.”)
“Are you all right, Grandpa?” Bertie asked, slipping into the chair next to him at the Fairview breakfast table and leaning over to kiss his cheek. “Is this jaunt down memory lane getting to you?” He patted her hand and said, “Not at all.”
Today they were setting out to explore some of the airfields where he had served out his RAF career during the war. Industrial estates now, or out-of-town shopping complexes. Houses had been built on them, and on one a prison, but where he had been stationed on his first tour was still the abandoned, melancholy place of his imagination, with the ghostly remains of accommodation blocks, the trace of the perimeter track, the outline of a grassed-over bomb dump and the hollow-eyed, broken shell of the control tower with its rusted window frames and crumbling concrete. The inside had been colonized by shabby weeds—rosebay willowherb, nettles and docks—but there remained part of the ops board, and a faded, tattered piece of a map of Western Europe still adhered to the wall, long out of date.
“And this too shall pass,” Teddy said to Bertie as they surveyed the map and Bertie said, “Don’t. We’ll start to cry. Let’s find somewhere to have a cup of tea.”
They found a pub called the Black Swan where they had tea and scones and it was only as they were paying the bill that Teddy remembered that this was the place on his first tour that they used to call the Mucky Duck and where they had gone on many a crew binge.
Do you think we passed Mrs. Taylor-Scott’s catechism?” Nancy fretted.
“I don’t know. She was keeping her cards close to her chest.”
But before a baby of any colour was found, Nancy came down to breakfast one morning and said, “I think I have been visited by an angel.”
“I’m sorry?” Teddy said. He was toasting bread on the Aga, his mind on Agrestis, not annunciation. He had seen hares boxing in the field yesterday and was trying to phrase something that conveyed the pleasure he had felt.
“An angel?” he said, wrenching his mind away from Lepus europaeus (“the Celtic messengers of Eostre, the goddess of spring”).
Nancy smiled beatifically at him. “You’re burning the toast,” she said. And then, “Blessed am I among women. I think that I’m having a baby. We. We are having a baby, my love. A new heart beating. Inside me. A miracle.” Nancy may have rejected Christianity a long time ago, but sometimes Teddy caught a glimpse of the sublime religieuse who dwelled within.
There was a moment, near the end of Nancy’s harrowing two-day labour, when Teddy was taken aside by a doctor and warned that he might have to make a choice between saving Nancy and saving the baby. “Nancy,” he said, without any hesitation. “Save my wife.”
Teddy had been unprepared. With the end of the war he was supposed to have moved out of the valley of the shadow of death into the sunlit uplands. He had become unready for battle.
“They asked you to choose,” Nancy said when mother and child were both safely gathered in. (Who had told her, he wondered?) She was lying in bed, white from the blood loss, her lips dry and cracked, her hair still limp with sweat. He thought she looked beautiful, a martyr who had survived the flames. The baby in her arms seemed strangely untouched by their trial by ordeal. “I would have chosen the baby, you know that, don’t you?” Nancy said, tenderly kissing this new creature on the forehead. “If it had been a choice between saving you or the baby, I would have had to choose the baby.”
“I know,” he said. “I was being selfish. You were responding to a maternal imperative” (a paternal one did not apply apparently). In later years Teddy wondered if Viola somehow knew that, in theory if not in practice, he had been willing to condemn her to die without a second thought. When, during her pregnancy, she was asked what she was hoping for—a boy or a girl—Nancy always laughed and said, “I’ll just be happy if it turns out to be a baby,” but when Viola was born and they learned she was to be their only child, she said, “I’m glad it’s a girl. A boy grows and marries and leaves. He belongs to another woman, but a girl always belongs to her mother.”