It was less of a holiday and more of an endurance test. “Can we go home yet?” was Viola’s constant refrain, echoed silently by Teddy. They stayed in boarding houses from which their dog was exiled and so it was at these times that Viola’s stark status as an only child was most apparent. She wasn’t very good at playing by herself and even less so with others.
A wind-whipped Yorkshire coast wasn’t Teddy’s idea of a holiday. The North Sea was the graveyard of many of the incorporeal dead at Runnymede, the sea-bed littered with the rich and strange. Two of the worst nights of his war had been spent helplessly floating on its uncharitable waves. (Well, good luck to you then.) When Viola was a bit older, Nancy said, they would go further afield—Wales, Cornwall. “Europe,” Teddy said. The solid blocks of colour. The hot slices of sunshine.
Yet now Nancy was proposing a visit to Bea in London. (“Just a couple of nights, take in a show, maybe an exhibition.”) It was late, nearly bedtime, and she was still marking homework. Teddy could see columns of fractions that were meaningless to him. “Show me your workings,” Nancy wrote in neat red pen and then paused and looked up at him. She always wore such a frank, guileless expression, it invited confession, promised absolution. He imagined her pupils adored her.
“Well, anyway,” Nancy said, “I thought I would leave for London on Wednesday evening and be back on Friday. Viola will be at school while you’re at work and after school she can go home with her friend—Sheila—and wait for you to pick her up.” (How detailed this scheme was, Teddy thought. Wouldn’t it be easier for everyone if she simply visited Bea at the weekend?) “You don’t mind holding the fort, do you? And Viola will love spending some time alone with you.”
“Will she?” Teddy said, somewhat ruefully. Viola, nearly nine now, still doted on her mother, while Teddy seemed to be merely a parental necessity.
“I won’t go if you don’t want me to,” Nancy said. What a polite conversation this was, Teddy thought. What if he said, “No, don’t go,” what would she say then? Instead he said, “Don’t be silly, why wouldn’t I want you to? Of course you should go, no earthly reason why not. And I can reach you at Bea’s if there are any problems.”
“I’m sure you won’t need to,” Nancy said and added casually, “and we’ll be out a lot, I expect.”
When Nancy had been in the Lakes there had been no telephone in the cottage that Millie had rented. When she had helped Gertie move house the new telephone had not yet been connected. “If there’s a dreadful emergency,” Nancy said breezily, “or some terrible accident occurs” (it was tempting fate to refer to such things so glibly, Teddy thought), “you can put out one of those announcements you hear on the radio. You know—the police are trying to contact—whoever—believed to be in the Westmorland area. Please get in touch, and so on.” Forty years later, when he was living in Fanning Court, Viola gave him a mobile phone and said, “There, now you’ll never be out of touch. If you have another accident” (she meant the broken hip, she never let him forget this mishap, as if it had exposed a great flaw in his character) “or get lost or something.”
“Lost?”
He never learned how to use the phone. The buttons were too small, the instructions too complicated. “Old dog, new tricks,” he said to Bertie. “And anyway why would I want to be ‘in touch’ all the time?”
“There’s nowhere for anyone to hide these days,” she said.
“In the imagination,” he offered.
“Even there,” Bertie said grimly, “you’re not safe.”
Good,” Nancy said. “I’ll go on Wednesday then. That’s settled.” She started stacking the homework jotters tidily on top of each other. “All finished. Why don’t you heat up the milk for some cocoa?” She gave him a quizzical smile and said, “Is everything all right? We don’t have to bother with cocoa, if you don’t want.”
“No,” he said, “it’s fine. I’ll do it.” Show me your workings, Nancy, he thought.
When Nancy had been unreachable in Dorset, helping Gertie to move house, Teddy had been surprised when the phone rang and it was Gertie herself (although her phone was supposedly not yet connected). A woman not given to preamble, she said, “You know that big oak sideboard in my dining room, the Arts and Crafts one that used to be in the dining room at Jackdaws?”
“The one with copper hinges and the De Morgan tiles?” Teddy said. Clearly, he did know it.