Lying in bed that night, Teddy could feel that he was paying the price for all that WI cake—stuck uncomfortably somewhere beneath his ribs.
“Poor you,” Nancy said. “Shall I get you some Milk of Magnesia?” She used the same tone of voice, he noticed, that she employed to quell Viola’s pain and distress (a little bit of chocolate). He declined her offer of the Milk of Magnesia and returned to his book. He was reading Born Free, Nancy was reading Iris Murdoch’s The Bell. He wondered if their books said something about themselves.
He couldn’t concentrate, however, and snapped the book shut rather more forcefully than he had intended. “So you want us to move?” he puzzled.
“Yes, I think I do.”
When Viola was born Teddy and Nancy had enthusiastically discussed the robust rural childhood they intended for her—imagining her climbing trees and jumping ditches, rambling around the countryside with just a dog for company. (“A bit of neglect never does any harm,” Nancy said. “You could argue it did us good when we were children.”) Viola, it was revealed by the passage of time, was not a country child. She was quite happy to be sequestered inside all day, reading a book or listening to the little Dansette record player they had bought her (Cliff Richard, the Everly Brothers) with Bobby lying lazily on the carpet at her feet. Both dog and child had long since come to an agreement about not tramping and jumping. Perhaps Nancy was right. Viola would fare better in the suburbs.
And anyway, perhaps a change would be good for all of them, Nancy said. Teddy felt no need for change, he was quite content to be in “the middle of nowhere” and had thought Nancy was too. “Good for us?” he said. “In what way?”
“More stimulating. More to do. Cafés, theatres, cinemas, shops. People. We can’t all be content with truffling out the first primrose of spring or listening for larks.” (She wasn’t content? The Discontented Wife, like a Restoration comedy, Teddy thought. A rather poor one. He couldn’t help but think of his mother.) “You used to be content with ‘truffling primroses,’ as you put it,” he said. He rather liked the phrase, more poetic than was Nancy’s wont, and he put it aside for Agrestis’s use. As the years had gone by his alter ego had taken on shape and character in his mind—a hardy countryman, cap on head, pipe in hand, a down-to-earth man, yet nonetheless attendant upon the whims of Mother Nature. Teddy occasionally felt himself wanting in comparison to this sturdy counterpart.
There was a time when the discovery of a bird’s nest or, indeed, the first primrose would have delighted his discontented wife. “But none of us are the same people we once were,” she said.
“I am,” Teddy said.
“No, you’re not.”
“Are we having an argument?”
“No!” Nancy said, laughing. “But we’re in our forties now, plodding along…”
“Plodding?”
“It’s not an insult. I’m just saying that maybe we need to shake ourselves up a bit. You don’t want life to pass you by, do you?”
“I thought this was about Viola, not us?”
“I’m not suggesting we emigrate to the other side of the world,” Nancy said. “Just as far as York.”
“York?”
Nancy climbed out of bed, saying, “I’m going to fetch you that Milk of Magnesia anyway. All that cake has clearly made you grumpy. That will teach you to be so charming to all those WI ladies.” As she passed by his side of the bed she ruffled his hair affectionately, as if he were a little boy, and said, “I’m only saying we should think about it, not that we should necessarily do it.”
He smoothed his hair down and stared at the ceiling. Plodding, he thought. Nancy returned from the bathroom, shaking the contents of the blue glass bottle. For a moment he feared that she was going to spoon-feed him the Milk of Magnesia but instead she handed it to him, saying, “There you go, that should do the trick.” She climbed back into bed and returned to her book, as if the subject of changing their lives had been satisfactorily debated and decided.
He took a swig of the chalky white medicine and switched off his bedside light. As was so often the case, sleep was evasive and his thoughts turned to Agrestis, who was working on a column about water voles.
Although of the order Rodentia this charming little fellow (Arvicola terrestris) is often wrongly called a water rat. That much-loved character Ratty in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows is actually a water vole. A short-lived creature in the wild, it has a mere handful of months to fulfil its time on earth, although it has proven to be much longer-lived when in captivity. There are around eight million water rats, living—like Grahame’s Ratty—in burrows in the river banks, as well as ditches and streams and other waterways…