A God in Ruins Read online

  “Tell me more about yourself,” Izzie said, wrenching a stalk of cow parsley from the hedgerow and spoiling the moment.

  “What about myself?” he puzzled, the euphoria gone, the mysteries once more veiled from view. Later, in school, he would learn Brooke’s poem “The Voice”—“The spell was broken, the key denied me” a fitting description of this moment, but by then—these sensations being ephemeral by their nature—he would have forgotten it.

  “Anything,” Izzie said.

  “Well, I’m eleven years old.”

  “I know that, silly.” (Somehow he doubted that she did.) “What makes you you? What do you like doing? Who are your friends? Do you have a thingamajig, you know—” she said, struggling for alien vocabulary, “David and Goliath—a slingshot thingy?”

  “A catapult?”

  “Yes! For going around hitting people and killing things and so on.”

  “Killing things? No! I would never do that.” (His brother Maurice, yes.) “I don’t even know where it is. I used to use it to get conkers down from the tree.”

  She looked disappointed by his pacifism but was not to be diverted from the catechism. “What about scrapes? You must get into those, all boys do, don’t they? Scrapes and japes.”

  “Scrapes?” He remembered with a certain horror the incident with the green paint.

  “Are you a Boy Scout?” she said, standing to mock attention and giving a smart salute. “I bet you’re a Scout. Dyb, dyb, dob and all that.”

  “Used to be,” he muttered. “Used to be a Cub.” It was not a topic he wished to explore with her but it was actually impossible for him to lie, as if a spell had been put on him at birth. Both his sisters—and even Nancy—could lie beautifully if necessary, and Maurice and truth (or Truth) were poorly acquainted, but Teddy was deplorably honest.

  “Did you get kicked out of the Scouts?” Izzie asked eagerly. “Cashiered? Was there some terrible scandal?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Do tell. What happened?”

  The Kinship of the Kibbo Kift happened, Teddy thought. He would probably have to spend hours explaining to Izzie if he so much as mentioned the words.

  “Kibbo Kift?” she said. “It sounds like the name of a clown.”

  How about sweets? Are you very fond of them, for example, and if so, what kind?” A little notebook appeared, alarming Teddy. “Oh, don’t mind this,” she said. “Everyone takes notes these days. So… sweets?”

  “Sweets?”

  “Sweets,” she affirmed and then sighed and said, “You know, dear Teddy, it’s just that I don’t know any little boys, apart from you. I have often wondered what goes into the making of a boy, apart from the usual slugs and snails and puppy dogs’ tails, of course. And a boy,” she continued, “is a man in the making. The boy in the man, the man in the boy, and so on.” This last said rather absently while considering the cow parsley. “I wonder if you will be like your father when you grow up, for example?”

  “I hope so.”

  “Oh, you mustn’t settle for ordinariness, I’m sure I never shall. You must grow up to be quite piratical!” She started to shred the cow parsley to pieces. “Men say that women are mysterious creatures, but I think that’s a ruse to deflect us from seeing their absolute incomprehensibility.” These last two words said rather loudly and very irritably as if she had a particular person in mind. (“She always has some man or other on the go,” he had heard his mother say.) “And what about little girls?” Izzie said.

  “What about them?” he puzzled.

  “Well, do you have a ‘special friend’—you know, a girl you particularly like?” She made a silly, smirking face which he supposed was her attempt (a very poor one) at miming romance or some such other nonsense.

  He blushed.

  “A little bird tells me,” she continued relentlessly, “that you have a bit of a pash on one of the next-door girls.”

  What little bird, he wondered? Nancy and her clutch of sisters—Winnie, Gertie, Millie and Bea—lived next to Fox Corner in a house called Jackdaws. A great many of these birds roosted in the woods and showed a preference for the Shawcross lawn, on to which Mrs. Shawcross tossed cold toast every morning.

  Teddy would not give Izzie Nancy, not under any circumstances, not under torture—which this was. He would not say her name to have it sullied on Izzie’s lips and be made fun of. Nancy was his friend, his boon companion, not the stupid soppy sweetheart that Izzie was implying. Of course he would marry Nancy one day and he would love her, yes, but it would be the pure chivalrous love of a knight. Not that he really understood any other kind. He had seen the bull with the cows, and Maurice said that was what people did too, including their mother and father, he sniggered. Teddy was pretty sure he was lying. Hugh and Sylvie were far too dignified for such acrobatics.

  “Oh, my, are you blushing?” Izzie crowed. “I do believe I’ve ferreted out your secret!”

  “Pear drops,” Teddy said in an effort to put an end to this inquisition.

  “What about them?” Izzie said. (She was easily distracted.) The ruined cow parsley was tossed on to the ground. She cared nothing for nature. In her heedlessness she would have trampled through the meadow, kicked over lapwings’ nests, terrorized the field mice. She belonged in the city, in a world of machines.

  “They’re my favourite sweets,” he said.

  Turning a corner they came across the dairy herd, nudging and bumping their way along the lane as they returned from milking. It must be late, Teddy thought. He hoped he hadn’t missed tea.

  Oh, bluebells, how lovely,” his mother said when they walked through the front door. She was dressed in evening clothes and looked rather lovely herself. At the school he was about to start his mother had many admirers, according to Maurice. Teddy felt rather proud of his mother’s status as a beauty. “What on earth have you been doing all this time?” Sylvie asked. A question aimed at Teddy but intended for Izzie.

  Sylvie in furs, contemplating her reflection in the bedroom mirror. Holding up the collar of a short evening cape to frame her face. A critical examination. The mirror was once her friend, but now she felt that it regarded her with indifference.

  She put a hand up to her hair, her “crowning glory,” a nest of combs and pins. Old-fashioned hair now, the mark of a matron being left behind by the times. Should she have it cut? Hugh would be bereft. She had a sudden memory—a portrait in charcoal, sketched by her father not long before he died. Sylvie Posing as an Angel, he called it. She was sixteen years old, demure in a long white dress—a nightdress actually, rather flimsy—and was half turned away from her father in order to show off her lovely waterfall of hair. “Look mournful,” her father instructed. “Think of the Fall of Man.” Sylvie, the whole of a lovely unknown life before her, found it hard to care very much for the subject but nonetheless pouted prettily and gazed absently at the far wall of her father’s enormous studio.

  It had been an awkward pose to hold and she remembered how her ribs had ached, suffering for her father’s art. The great Llewellyn Beresford, portraitist to the rich and famous, a man who left nothing but debts upon his death. Sylvie still felt the loss, not of her father but of the life he had built on what had unfortunately turned out to be baseless fabric.

  “As you sow,” her mother wailed quietly, “so shall you reap. Yet it is he who has sown and we who have reaped nothing.”

  A humiliating bankruptcy auction had followed his death and Sylvie’s mother had insisted that they attend, as if she needed to witness every item they had lost pass in front of their eyes. They sat anonymously (one hoped) in the back row and watched their worldly goods being paraded for all to see. Somewhere towards the end of this mortification the sketch of Sylvie came up for sale. “Lot 182. Charcoal portrait of the artist’s daughter” was announced, Sylvie’s angelic nature now lost apparently. Her father should have given her a halo and wings and then his purpose would have been clear. As it was she merely looked like a sullen, p
retty girl in a nightdress.

  A fat man with a rather seedy air had raised his cigar at each round of bidding and Sylvie was finally sold to him for three pounds, ten shillings and sixpence. “Cheap,” her mother muttered. Cheaper now probably, Sylvie thought. Her father’s paintings had gone quite out of fashion after the war. Where was it now, she wondered? She would like it back. The thought made her cross, a frown in the mirror. When the auction had finally limped to an end (“One job lot comprising a pair of brass fire-dogs, a silver chafing dish, tarnished, a large copper jug”) they had bustled out of the room with the rest of the crowd and had chanced to overhear the sleazy man saying loudly to his companion, “I’ll enjoy myself looking at that ripe young peach.” Sylvie’s mother shrieked—discreetly, she was not one to make a fuss—and pulled her innocent angel out of earshot.

  Tainted, everything tainted, Sylvie thought. From the very beginning, from the Fall. She rearranged the collar of the cape. It was far too hot for it but she believed that she looked her best in furs. The cape was Arctic fox, which made her rather sad as Sylvie was fond of the foxes that visited their garden—she had named the house for them. How many foxes would it take to make a cape, she wondered? Not as many as for a coat, at least. She had a mink hanging in her wardrobe, a tenth-anniversary present from Hugh. She must send it to the furriers, it needed to be remodelled into something more modern. “As do I,” she said to the mirror.

  Izzie had a new cocoon-shaped coat. Sable. How had Izzie come by her furs when she had no money? “A gift,” she said. From a man, of course, and no man gave you a fur coat without expecting to receive something in return. Except for one’s husband, of course, who expected nothing beyond modest gratitude.

  Sylvie could have swooned from the amount of perfume that she was wearing, spilt by a jittery hand, although she was not usually given to nerves. She was going up to London for the evening. It would be hot and stuffy on the train, even worse in town, she would have to sacrifice her fur. As the foxes had been sacrificed for her. There was a joke—of sorts—lodged in there somewhere, the kind that Teddy might make, not Sylvie. Sylvie had no sense of humour. It was a blight on her character.

  Her eye was caught unwillingly by the photograph on her dressing-table, a studio portrait taken after the birth of Jimmy. Sylvie was seated. The new baby in his christening gown—a vast affair, worn by every Todd—seemed to overflow from her arms while the rest of her brood were arranged artfully around her in a semblance of adoration. Sylvie ran a finger over the silver frame, intending fondness but finding dust. She must have a word with Bridget. The girl had grown sluttish. (“All servants turn on their masters eventually,” her mother-in-law had advised when Sylvie was first married to Hugh.)

  A commotion downstairs could only indicate the return of Izzie. Reluctantly, Sylvie removed her fur and put on her light evening duster for which only hard-working silkworms had been sacrificed. She placed her hat on her head. Her unfashionable hair didn’t suit the neat skull caps and berets of the day and she was still wearing a chapeau. She accidentally jabbed herself with her long silver hat pin. (Could you kill someone with a hat pin? Or merely injure them?) She muttered an imprecation to the gods that caused the scrubbed innocent faces of her children to look reproachfully at her from the photograph. As well they might, she thought. She would soon be forty years old and the prospect had made her dissatisfied with herself. (“More dissatisfied,” Hugh offered.) She could feel impatience at her back and recklessness before her.

  She gave herself one last appraisal. Good enough, she supposed, which was not necessarily a judgement that she liked to settle for. It was two years since she had seen him. Would he still think her a beauty? That was what he had called her. Was there a woman on earth who could resist being called a beauty? But Sylvie had resisted and had remained chaste. “I am a married woman,” she had repeated primly. “Then you shouldn’t be indulging in this game, my dear,” he said. “The consequences might be awful for you—for us.” He laughed at this idea as if it were appealing. It was true, she had led him on and then found there was nowhere to go.

  He had gone abroad, to the colonies, doing important work for the Empire, but now he was back and Sylvie’s life was running through her hands like water and she no longer felt inclined to be prim.

  She was greeted by an enormous bunch of bluebells. “Oh, bluebells, how lovely,” she said to Teddy. Her boy. She had two others but sometimes they hardly seemed to count. Her daughters weren’t necessarily objects of affection, more like problems to be solved. Only one child held her heart in his rather grubby fist. “Do wash before tea, dear,” she said to Teddy. “What on earth have you been doing all this time?”

  “Getting to know each other,” Izzie said. “Such a darling boy. I say, aren’t you looking glamorous, Sylvie. And I could smell you from a hundred yards away. Quite the femme séduisante. Do you have plans? Do tell.”

  Sylvie glared at her but was diverted from a response when she saw the mucky green alligators on the Voysey hall runner. “Out,” she said, shooing Izzie towards the front door, and again, “Out.”

  “Damned spot,” Hugh murmured, wandering into the hall from the growlery as Izzie flounced down the path. He turned to Sylvie and said, “You look lovely, darling.”

  They listened to the engine of Izzie’s Sunbeam kicking into life and the unnerving sound of her accelerating away. She drove in the manner of Toad, much tooting and little braking. “She’ll kill someone sooner or later,” Hugh, a stately driver, said. “And I thought she was penniless. What did she do to get the wherewithal for another car?”

  “Nothing decent, of that you can be sure,” Sylvie said.

  Teddy was free at last of Izzie’s awful ramblings, but still had to suffer the usual interrogation from his mother before she was satisfied that one of her children hadn’t been corrupted in some way by contact with Izzie. “She’s never without motive,” she said darkly. He was eventually freed to search out his tea, a somewhat put-up affair of sardines on toast as it was Mrs. Glover’s evening off.

  “She’s eaten a lark,” Teddy said to his sisters over the tea table. “In Italy. Not that it makes a difference where.”

  “ ‘A skylark wounded in the wing,’ ” Ursula said, and when Teddy looked at her blankly she said, “Blake. ‘A skylark wounded in the wing, a cherubim does cease to sing.’ ”

  “Let’s hope that something eats her one day,” the more down-to-earth Pamela added cheerfully.

  Pamela was going to Leeds University to study science. She was looking forward to the “bracing north,” the “real” people. “Aren’t we real enough?” Teddy grumbled to Ursula, who laughed and said, “What is real?” which seemed a silly question to Teddy, who had no occasion to question the phenomenal world. Real was what you could see and taste and touch. “You’re missing at least two senses there,” Ursula pointed out. Real was the wood and the bluebells, the owl and the fox, a Hornby train trundling around his bedroom floor, the smell of a cake baking in the oven. The skylark ascending on his thread of song.

  The evening’s account for Fox Corner: after Hugh had driven Sylvie to the station he retired to his growlery again with a small glass of whisky and the stub of a half-smoked cigar. He was a man of moderate habits, more by instinct than conscious choice. It was unusual for Sylvie to go up to town. “The theatre and supper with friends,” she said. “I shall stay over.” She had a restless spirit, an unfortunate thing in a wife, but he must trust her in everything or the whole edifice of marriage would fall and crumble.

  Pamela was in the morning room, her nose in a chemistry textbook. She had failed her Girton entrance exam and didn’t really want to venture into the “bracing north,” but “needs must” as Sylvie was wont—irritatingly—to say. Pamela had (quietly) hoped for glittering prizes and a brilliant career and now feared that she would not be the bold woman she had hoped to be.

  Ursula, sprawled on the carpet at Pamela’s feet, was declining irregular Latin verbs. “
Oh, joy,” she said to Pamela. “Life can surely only improve from here,” and Pamela laughed and said, “Don’t be so sure.”

  Jimmy was sitting at the kitchen table in his pyjamas, enjoying his milk and biscuits before bedtime. Mrs. Glover, their cook, was a woman who would brook no myth or fable and so, in the absence of her oversight, Bridget was taking the opportunity to entertain Jimmy with a garbled yet still remarkably bloodcurdling tale about “the Pooka” while she scrubbed the pots. Mrs. Glover herself was at home, dozing lightly, her feet propped up on the fender, a small glass of stout to hand.

  Izzie, meanwhile, was on the open road, singing “Alouette” to herself. The tune was now lodged firmly in her brain. Je te plumerai, she bellowed unmusically, je te plumerai. I will pluck you. The war had been a dreadful thing, she wished she hadn’t reminded herself of it. She had been a FANY. A rather silly acronym, in Izzie’s opinion. First Aid Nursing Yeomanry. She had gone out to drive ambulances, although she had never even driven a car, but in the end she was doing all kinds of horrible things. She remembered cleaning out the ambulances at the end of the day, blood and fluids and waste. Remembered, too, the mutilations, the charred skeletons, the ruined villages, limbs poking through mud and earth. Buckets of filthy swabs and pus-soaked bandages and the terrible oozing wounds of the poor boys. No wonder people wanted to forget all about it. Have a bit of fun, for heaven’s sake. She was awarded a Croix de Guerre. Never told anyone at home about it. Put it away in a drawer when she came home. It meant nothing when you thought about what those poor boys had gone through.

  She had been engaged twice during the war, both men dying within days of proposing to her and long before Izzie herself had got round to writing a letter home with her happy news. She had been with one of them, the second one, when he died. By chance she had found him in a field hospital that her ambulance was delivering the wounded to. She hadn’t recognized him at first, he had been so mangled by artillery fire. The matron, short of nurses and orderlies, encouraged her to stay with him. “There, there,” Izzie soothed, keeping watch at his deathbed by the oily yellow light of a Tilley lamp. He called out for his mother at the end, they all did. Izzie couldn’t imagine calling for Adelaide on her deathbed.