There would be no more babies, the doctor said. Nancy was one of five children, as was Teddy. It was strange to be reduced to this singularity, this fat pupa in its cradle cocoon. Sugar and spice. (More spice than sugar, it turned out.) They had already discussed names—Viola for a girl. Nancy, thinking of her own four sisters, imagined daughters, adding a Rosalind, a Helena and perhaps a Portia or a Miranda. Resourceful girls. “No tragedies,” she said. “No Ophelias and Juliets.” And a son, she had thought, for Teddy, and they would call him Hugh. The boy that would never be.
Shakespeare had seemed an obvious choice for a name. It was 1952 and they were still considering what it meant to be English. To help them there was a new young queen, Gloriana risen. On their treasured gramophone they listened to Kathleen Ferrier singing British folk songs. They had journeyed to hear her sing with the Hallé at the re-opening of the Free Trade Hall in Manchester. It had been blitzed in 1940 and Nancy said 1940 seemed so long ago. “What silly patriots we are,” she said, wiping a tear away as the audience stamped and cheered their approval of Elgar and “Land of Hope and Glory.” When the following year Kathleen Ferrier died, too young, Bill Morrison said, “A grand lass,” claiming her for the north, even though she was from the wrong side of the Pennines, and wrote her obituary for the Recorder.
Nancy fell in love with Viola at first sight of her. A coup de foudre, she said, more intense and overwhelming than any form of romantic love. Mother and daughter were each a world to the other, complete and unassailable. Teddy knew he could never be so consumed by another person. He loved his wife and daughter. It was perhaps a stalwart affection rather than a magnificent obsession, but nonetheless he didn’t doubt that if called upon to do so he would sacrifice his own life in a heartbeat for them. And he also knew that there would be no more hankering for something else, something beyond, for the hot slices of colour or the intensity of war or romance. That was all behind him, he had a different kind of duty now, not to himself, not to his country, but to this small knot of a family.
Was it simply love on Nancy’s part? Or something more febrile? Their shared experience of being in the place between life and death, perhaps. His own experience of motherhood was based on Sylvie, of course. He knew that she had loved him hugely when he was a boy (all his life probably), but she had never invested her happiness in him. (Had she?) Of course, he had never understood his mother, he doubted that anyone ever had, certainly not his father.
Nancy, the easy-going atheist, decided that Viola should be christened.
“I believe that’s called hypocrisy,” Sylvie said to Teddy, out of earshot of Nancy (which was where many of her conversations with Teddy took place).
“Well, then that makes two of you,” Teddy said. “You still go to church but I know you don’t believe.”
“What a good husband you are,” Nancy said afterwards, “always taking your wife’s side rather than your mother’s.”
“It’s the side of reason that I’m on,” Teddy said. “It just so happens that that’s where you’re always to be found and my mother rarely.”
“I’m not taking any chances,” Nancy told Sylvie at the christening. “I’m hedging my bets, in the manner of Pascal.” Sylvie was not mollified by references to philosophical French mathematicians. If only Teddy had married someone less educated, she thought.
They went “home” to have Viola christened. “Why do we still call it that when we have a perfectly good home of our own?” Nancy mused. “I don’t know,” Teddy said, although he knew that in his heart Fox Corner would always be home.
The godmothers—aunts Bea and Ursula—pledged to reject the devil and all rebellion against God and afterwards they celebrated at Jackdaws with cream sherry and a Dundee cake, Sylvie, needless to say, very put out that they weren’t next door at Fox Corner.
Teddy gave Nancy a ring, a small diamond solitaire, to mark Viola’s safe passage into the world. “The engagement ring I never gave you,” he said.
Viola grew, the pupa fattened but not yet turned into a butterfly. Nancy returned to work when Viola herself started at the village primary school, taking a part-time job in a nearby expensive private Church of England boarding school for girls who had failed their Eleven Plus but whose parents couldn’t countenance the social humiliation of a secondary modern.
The farmer had offered to sell them Ayswick and they had applied for a mortgage to buy the old farmhouse. Life seemed as if it would go on in much the same way for ever, Teddy was not ambitious and Nancy seemed contented until one day in the summer of 1960, when Viola was eight years old, she decided she wanted to upheave them.
Living in the country was all very well, she said, but Viola would soon need more, a good secondary school that wasn’t an hour’s bus ride away, friends, a social life, and it was hard to find those “in the middle of nowhere.” And the farmhouse was too big, impossible to keep clean, it cost a fortune to heat, the plumbing was from the Dark Ages. And so on.
“I don’t think they had plumbing in the Dark Ages,” Teddy said. “I thought you loved it because it had character.”