Not long before he left Fanning Court for Poplar Hill Care Home, when he was already well over ninety (“living in captivity” clearly having prolonged his life), Teddy read an article in the Telegraph (by then he was employing the aid of a magnifying glass to see the print). The article stated that there were barely a quarter of a million water voles left in Britain. He felt angry on their behalf and introduced the subject, rather vigorously, at the weekly coffee morning, somewhat to the disconcertion of the residents. “Farmed mink,” he explained, “escaped into the wild and usurped the voles. Ate them.”
One or two of the older female residents in the communal lounge had hung on grimly to their mink coats, mothballed in the flimsy melamine wardrobes of Fanning Court, and were not inclined to sympathy towards the innocent water vole. “And, of course,” Teddy pursued, “we’ve destroyed their habitat, something humans are very good at.” And so on. If they had been paying attention, and many were resolutely not, there would have been nothing that the Fanning Court residents would not have learned about the water vole (or indeed the tetchy subject of global warming) by the end of this lecture.
Teddy’s crusade for a small neglected mammal did not go down well over the Nescafé and the chocolate bourbons. (Nor his feelings about the humble hedgehog and the brown hare, “and when did you last hear a cuckoo?”) “Tree-hugger,” one of the male residents—a retired solicitor—muttered.
“Really, Dad,” Viola said, “you can’t harangue people.” Apparently, the Fat Controller, Ann Schofield, had asked Viola to “have a word” with Teddy about his “belligerent” behaviour. “But we’ve lost nearly ninety percent of the water-vole population in thirty years,” he protested to Viola. “That’s enough to make anyone feel belligerent. Although not a patch on how annoyed the water voles must feel, I imagine.” (“You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone,” Bertie said. “As the song goes.” Teddy didn’t know what song but he understood the sentiment.) “Don’t be silly,” Viola said. “And I think you’re a bit old to be embracing causes.” Wildlife took its chances in his daughter’s harsh Darwinian universe. “All this obsession with ecology isn’t doing you any good,” Viola said. “You’re too old to be getting so worked up.”
Ecology, Teddy thought? “Nature,” he said. “We used to call it Nature.”
At the time of this “flying visit” to Fanning Court, Viola was already campaigning for Teddy to move to a nursing home—she had brought a handful of leaflets with her. He had taken a fall a couple of days ago, not a bad one, his legs had given way and he had gone down like a collapsed concertina. “Stuck on my bloody arse,” he said gruffly to Ann Schofield when she came in (yes, he had been near one of the red cords, and yes, he had pulled it). “Language, please!” she reprimanded, as if he were a delinquent child, when only yesterday he had overheard her when she thought she was alone in the laundry room addressing a truculent door on a washing machine with the words, “Why don’t you behave, you little fucking shit?” An invocation made all the more scrappy somehow by her Birmingham accent.
He had managed—with minimal help from the Fat Controller (“against Health and Safety regulations, I have to call the paramedics”)—to get on to his knees and from there on to the sofa and was perfectly fine apart from a couple of bruises, but this was “proof positive” to Viola that he couldn’t manage “independent living.” She had harried him out of his house and into Fanning Court. Now she was trying to shuck him out of here and into a place called Poplar Hill. He imagined she wouldn’t be satisfied until she’d badgered him into his coffin.
She fanned out the nursing-home leaflets, the one for Poplar Hill placed significantly on top of the pile, and said, “At least take a look.” He gave them a cursory glance—photographs of happy, smiling people with full heads of grey hair and, as he pointed out to her, not a hint of shit and piss and dementia.
“Your language is terrible these days,” Viola said primly. “What’s happening to you?”
“I’ll be dead soon,” he said. “It’s making me bolshie.”
“Don’t be silly.” She was dressed very smartly, he noticed. “I’m on my way somewhere.”
“Somewhere?” She had always hated explaining, it was part of her closed-off character. He had passed her in the street once, when she was a teenager. She was with friends from school and she had looked right through him when she passed. A son called Hugh would never have done such a thing.