“Somewhere?” he repeated, trying to needle her into elaboration.
“They’re making a movie out of one of my novels. I’ve got a meeting with the execs.” The offhand but deliberate way she said the words “movie” and “execs” made them sound like she was indifferent when she clearly wasn’t. There had been a film of her second novel, The Children of Adam. It had been an inferior sort of film—British; Viola had given him a DVD. Not that the book was much cop to begin with. Not that he would ever have said that to her. He had found it “very good,” he told her.
“Just ‘very good’?” she frowned.
Good Lord, he thought, wasn’t that enough? He would have been more than pleased with a “very good” if he had ever finished his attempt at a novel. What had it been called? Something about sleeping and quiet breathing, it was a quote from Keats, that much he remembered, but which poem? He could sense the clouds gathering in his brain. Perhaps Viola was right, perhaps it was time to give up, check into God’s waiting room.
Her first novel, Sparrows at Dawn (what a terrible title!), had been about a “clever” (or annoyingly arrogant) young girl being brought up by her father. It was clearly meant to be autobiographical, a message of some sort to him from Viola. The girl was relentlessly badly done by and the father was a doltish martinet. Not what Sylvie would have called Art.
“Which one?” he asked, gathering his thoughts, pushing the clouds out of the way. “Which novel are they making into a film?”
“The End of Twilight.” And then, impatiently when she caught him looking blankly at her, “It’s the one about the mother who has to give up her baby.” (“Wishful thinking on her part,” Bertie said.) She made a show of looking at the heavy gold watch on her wrist. (“Rolex. It’s an investment really.”) He was unsure whether this ostentatious gesture was meant to remind him of her busy life or her success. Both, he supposed. She was a more streamlined version of herself these days, dieted and coiffed, her hair ten different shades of blonde that Teddy had never seen before. No more henna, no more droopy clothing. All the velvets and sequins she’d held on to into middle age had gone and now whenever he saw her she was dressed in tailored suits and neutral colours. “The Children of Adam changed my life,” he read in a copy of Woman’s Weekly left in the communal lounge that he had been idly leafing through, looking for recipes promised on the cover for “Cheap and Easy Suppers.” “Prize-winning author Viola Romaine talks about her bestselling early novel. ‘It’s never too late to pursue your dream,’ she tells us in this exclusive interview.” And so on.
“I have to go,” she said, standing up abruptly, swinging her handbag on its heavy gilt chain. “You have to start considering a nursing home, Dad. ‘Care home’—that’s what they’re called these days. Money’s not an issue. I’ll help out, of course. This one here”—she tapped the Poplar Hill brochure with a pink-varnished fingernail—“is supposed to be excellent. Think about it. Think where you would like to go.”
Fox Corner, he thought. That’s where I’d like to go.
Teddy didn’t fight Nancy’s sudden desire to move and when the job came up on the Yorkshire Evening Press he applied and a few weeks later they moved to York. (It was swift, like an incision.) Nancy easily found part-time work in the maths department at the Mount, a Quaker school, and returned to the relief of educating clever, well-behaved girls. Viola took up a place in the junior school. Nancy liked the Society of Friends, she said, it was the nearest Christianity could get to agnosticism.