Teddy knew York from the war. Then, it had been a mysterious maze of dark, narrow streets and snickets. It had been a place to go drinking and dancing, carousing in Bettys Bar or shuffling girls around the De Grey rooms, a place of fumbled kisses with willing girls in the tenebrous blackout. In the light of peace York was a less veiled city, its history on show everywhere. He liked it more in the daylight yet it remained a place of secrets, as if whenever one layer had been unearthed another one was waiting to be discovered. One’s own life seemed puny against the background of so much history. It was a strange comfort to think of how many had gone before, how many had been forgotten. It was the natural order of things.
The house they bought—a solid semi in the suburbs—wasn’t the kind that Teddy had ever imagined living in. Unlike Mouse Cottage and Ayswick, it had no name, only a number, which suited its bland anonymity. No “character” at all. The new Nancy, the one who didn’t go about truffling primroses, embraced it—“sensible and practical,” she called it. They installed central heating, fitted carpets and modernized both kitchen and bathroom. It had no aesthetic virtues whatsoever in Teddy’s eyes. Sylvie would have been appalled, but she had already been dead for two years by then, felled by a stroke while she was pruning her roses. They always used the possessive pronoun—the roses belonged to no one but their mother. Now they didn’t even exist—“dug up,” according to Pamela, by the new owners of Fox Corner. “The trick, I suppose,” Ursula said, “is not to mind.” But he did. And so did she.
For months after they moved to York, Teddy would wake in the morning and feel a pang of sorrow as he listened to a subdued suburban dawn chorus competing with the low rumble of traffic from somewhere—the A64, he guessed. He missed having a wild green world on his doorstep—no rabbits or pheasants or badgers in York, only peacocks in the Museum Gardens. He didn’t see another fox until the mangy urban species started raiding the bins around the back of Fanning Court. Teddy sneaked leftovers out to them, covert charity that left Ann Schofield reeling with horror. They were vermin, she said. (“She’s the vermin,” Bertie said. Sometimes Bertie reminded him of Sylvie—the best of her, at any rate.)
The new house had a generous back garden and he bought a Reader’s Digest book on gardening. A garden, as far as Teddy could see, was nature tamed and constrained by artifice. His wings had been clipped, like Tweetie, the blue budgerigar that Viola had insisted on for her birthday. “A robin redbreast in a cage,” Teddy murmured when Nancy returned home from the pet shop with the bird. “I know, I know,” she said, “puts all heaven in a rage. But budgerigars are bred for captivity. It’s a shame, but they don’t know anything else.”
“That must be a great consolation to them,” Teddy said.
Their other little POW, the hapless Goldie, did not survive the house move. In Blake’s litany of wrongdoing there was nothing about a goldfish in a bowl, but he would surely not have approved. Viola was upset at the sight of the pale, floating corpse and Teddy rooted out his old Goldfish Club badge and showed it to her. “Imagine him with wings,” he advised, “rising up to heaven.”
Tweetie proved to be a misnamed bird, never uttering a single chirp in his whole short life, most of which he spent either pecking listlessly at his cuttlefish bone or paddling from one foot to another on his wooden perch. Better perhaps, Teddy thought, in a fleeting moment of identification with the morose creature, to be Icarus and embrace the fall.
Away? Again?” he said, making an effort to sound casual.
“Yes, again,” she said lightly. “That’s all right with you, isn’t it?”
“Yes, of course,” Teddy said. “It’s just…” He hesitated, not sure how to give voice to his misgivings.
This would be the third time Nancy had been away in as many months, each time to visit one of her sisters. Firstly, she had gone down to Dorset to help Gertie move house, and this was quickly followed by a trip to the Lakes with Millie. (“Wordsworth’s cottage and so on.”) Millie was leading a rather rackety life in Brighton and was “between husbands” at the moment. “She probably needs a sympathetic ear,” Nancy said.
Nancy claimed to be “a homebody,” not even keen on decamping for their annual seaside holiday. Every summer, the three of them, “the family triumvirate” as Nancy called it—according Viola equal power with her parents, Teddy noted, although really they were not so much a triumvirate as a tiny tyrant and her two dedicated attendants—took a dutiful holiday on the east coast—Bridlington, Scarborough, Filey. This was for Viola’s benefit rather than their own. “Bucket and spade,” Nancy said, that was all a small child needed, and persisted heroically in this belief as the triumvirate sheltered, shivering, in the lee of hired windbreaks or took refuge in damp and steamy tea-shops after eating the liver-sausage sandwiches that their boarding-house landlady packed up for them every morning.