“You can have too much character.”
This ambush had been a complete surprise. They were sitting up in bed at the time, both reading their library books, a sedate conclusion to what had been, for Teddy at any rate, a rather tedious day, covering a local agricultural show for the Recorder. There were only so many well-groomed sheep and intricate vegetable displays that a man could take an interest in. Rather to his despair, he had been dragooned into adjudicating the Victoria sponges in the WI tent (feeling rather like a novelty judge at a beauty contest). “As light as a feather,” he declared the winner, falling gratefully back on cliché.
It was the school holidays and Nancy had wanted to visit an optician for a check-up and as it was such good weather Teddy said he would take Viola along to the agricultural show with him. Viola, of course, didn’t really like farm animals. She was nervous around cows and pigs, even sheep made her anxious, and she screeched if a goose came anywhere near (an unfortunate incident when she was smaller). “But there’ll be other things going on,” Teddy said hopefully, and there was indeed a flower show that Viola said was “nice,” although—despite Teddy’s warnings—thrusting her nose into vase after vase of sweet peas brought on her hay fever. The sheepdog trials, however, were “boring” (Teddy had to agree on that one) but the Young Farmers’ coconut shy was a success and she spent a lot of money at it for little return, throwing wildly and with no aim. Eventually Teddy had to step in and lob a few balls and win a goldfish so that she didn’t come away empty-handed. There was also a pony show which, despite an avowed aversion to horses, she enjoyed watching, clapping enthusiastically whenever anyone managed to hop over the small jumps.
In the WI tent Viola was treated like a pet—all the WI women knew Teddy well and fed her far too much cake. Fed Teddy far too much cake as well. Viola was like Bobby, their yellow Labrador—she would keep on eating until someone told her to stop. Like Bobby, too, she was a little on the plump side. “Puppy fat,” Nancy said. For Viola perhaps, but not for Bobby, long past puppyhood now. Moss, their excellent collie, died not long after Viola was born and placid Bobby had been chosen to be the faithful and uncomplaining companion of Viola’s childhood.
By the end of the afternoon Viola was crotchety with heat and tiredness. That, mixed with the cake and the copious amounts of orange squash she had drunk, made for a lethal combination and Teddy had to stop the car twice on the way home so that Viola could be sick on the grass verge. “You poor thing,” he said, trying to give her a cuddle, but she squirmed out of his arms. Teddy had hoped for a relationship with his daughter that would be like the one that Major Shawcross had had with his daughters, or perhaps the slightly more restrained one that Pamela and Ursula had enjoyed with Hugh, but Viola had no space left in her heart for him, Nancy occupied it all. After they lost her, Nancy occupied even more space in Viola’s heart. His daughter was consumed with bitterness towards a universe that had taken her mother and left her with the poor substitute of her father.
Viola slept the rest of the way home, leaving Teddy to worry about the goldfish (already named Goldie by Viola) in the suffocating heat of its plastic prison.
I want a pony,” Viola declared to Nancy when they got home, and when Teddy said quite reasonably, “But you don’t like horses,” Viola burst into tears and shouted at him that ponies weren’t horses. He didn’t argue the point. “She’s over-tired,” Nancy said as Viola flung herself down on the sofa in a fit of—rather histrionic—sobbing. “Whither the famous Todd stoicism?” Nancy murmured. “Sensitive” was how she described their thin-skinned daughter. “Over-indulged,” Sylvie would have said. Teddy rescued the goldfish from being squashed beneath Viola’s puppy fat. “It’s all right, darling,” Nancy said to Viola. “Come on, let’s get you a little bit of chocolate, that will cheer you up, won’t it?” It would and it did.
Teddy took the goldfish through to the kitchen and set it free from the bag, watching it slither into a washing-up bowl of tap water. “Not much of a life, is it, Goldie?” he said to it. Teddy was an early member of the Goldfish Club, although he rarely gave this fact much thought. There was a little cloth badge somewhere, a fish with wings, a result of having ditched in the North Sea. It was during his first tour and sometimes he wondered if he couldn’t have made a better job of it, made those last few miles to land instead of thudding his Halifax on to the sea. It had been a horrible affair. Well, good luck to you then.
He made a mental note to go to a pet shop tomorrow and buy a bowl for Goldie so that the fish could spend the rest of its life swimming round and round in solitary confinement. He could, he supposed, buy a companion for it but that would simply be doubling the misery.