A God in Ruins Read online

  She had once been at home in London, yet now it was a foreign city to her. A dirty, lurid nightmare of a place and yet she had willingly descended into this circle of hell. She must have been mad. All she wanted to do was to get home, yet here she was wandering the streets like a mad woman. When she eventually found her way back to a gleamingly busy Oxford Street she cried out in relief. A cab ride later and she was sitting demurely on a bench on the station platform as if she were returning from a day of shopping and lunch with friends.

  Goodness,” Hugh said. “I thought you must be a burglar. You said you were staying up in town.”

  “Oh, it was all deathly tedious,” Sylvie said. “I decided I would rather come straight back. Mr. Wilson, the stationmaster, gave me a lift in his pony and trap.”

  Hugh regarded his wife’s high complexion, the slightly wild look in her eye of an overused racehorse. Mrs. Shawcross, in contrast, was less of a thoroughbred and more of a good-natured Dobbin. Which, in Hugh’s opinion, could be preferable sometimes. He kissed Sylvie lightly on the cheek and said, “I’m sorry that your plans for the evening didn’t work out, but it’s very nice to have you home.”

  Sitting in front of her mirror, unpinning her mound of hair, a fresh despair fell on Sylvie. She had been a coward and now she was chained to this life for ever. Hugh came up behind her and rested his hands on her shoulders. “Beautiful,” he murmured, running his hands through her hair. She had to suppress the desire to flinch away from him. “Bed?” he said, looking hopeful.

  “Bed,” she agreed brightly.

  But it wasn’t just the bird, was it, Teddy thought as he lay in bed waiting for sleep to find him, the nightly oblivion kept at bay by meandering thought. It wasn’t just the one lark that had been silenced by Izzie. (A mouthful.) It was the generations of birds that would have come after it and now would never be born. All those beautiful songs that would never be sung. Later in his life he learned the word “exponential,” and later still the word “fractal,” but for now it was a flock that grew larger and larger as it disappeared into a future that would never be.

  Ursula, looking in on him on her way to bed, found him awake and reading Scouting for Boys. “Can’t sleep?” she said with the offhand sympathy of a fellow insomniac. Teddy’s feelings for his sister were almost as straightforward and uncomplicated as those he had for Trixie, who was lying at the foot of the bed, whining softly in her sleep. “Rabbits, I suppose,” Ursula said.

  Ursula sighed. She was fifteen and prone to pessimism. Although their mother would have vigorously denied it, this was her character too. His sister perched on his bed and read out loud, “ ‘Be always ready with your armour on, except when you are taking your rest at night.’ ” (Perhaps this was his mother’s “armour of good manners,” Teddy thought.) “A metaphor, I expect,” Ursula said. “Knights can hardly have been expected to clank around all day long in a suit of armour. I’m always reminded of the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz when I think of knights.” It was a book they were all fond of but Teddy wished that she hadn’t put that image in his mind, the Idylls of the King and Morte d’Arthur dissolving into thin air in an instant.

  An owl hooted, a loud, almost aggressive sound. “On the roof, by the sound of it,” Teddy said. They listened together for a while.

  “Well, night-night,” Ursula said eventually. She kissed him on the forehead.

  “Night-night,” he said, stowing Scouting for Boys beneath his pillow. Despite the owl, which continued to hoot its unholy lullaby, he fell almost immediately into the deep and innocent sleep of the hopeful.

  The Adventures of Augustus

  —The Awful Consequences—

  IT BEGAN innocently enough, in Augustus’s opinion anyway. “It always begins innocently,” Mr. Swift sighed, although he doubted that Augustus’s definition of innocence was the same as that of other people.

  “But it wasn’t my fault!” Augustus protested furiously.

  “That will be written on your headstone, dear,” Mrs. Swift said, looking up from the sock she was darning. One of Augustus’s, needless to say. (“What does he do to them?” she frequently puzzled.)

  “And anyway, how could I have known what would happen?” Augustus said.

  “There is no action that doesn’t bring with it a consequence,” Augustus’s father said. “Only the short-sighted don’t consider the consequences.” Mr. Swift was a barrister and in court he spent his day prosecuting the guilty, relishing the to-and-fro of the courtroom battle. Some of this necessarily spilled over into his home life, which his son thought put his father at an unfair advantage.

  “Innocent until proven guilty,” Augustus muttered.

  “You were caught red-handed,” Mr. Swift said mildly. “Isn’t that proof of your guilt?”

  “I wasn’t red-handed,” Augustus said indignantly. “And, anyway, it was green paint. M’lud,” he added solemnly.

  “Oh, please,” Mrs. Swift murmured. “You’re giving me a headache.”

  “How can I be givin’ you a headache?” he asked, hurt by this further accusation. “To give you a headache I’d have to have a headache in the first place. You can’t give something you don’t have. And I don’t have a headache. Ergo,” he said grandly, pulling the word from some distant corner of learning, “I cannot have given it to you.” Mrs. Swift’s headache was not improved by this barrage of reason. She flapped her hand at her son as if trying to get rid of a particularly annoying fly and returned to her darning. “Sometimes,” she murmured, “I wonder what I did to offend the gods.”

  Augustus, on the other hand, felt rather pleased with himself. He was putting up a spirited defence. He was an innocent man in the dock, fighting for his rights. His sister, Phyllis, a “bluestocking,” according to their mother, was always soapboxing about “the rights of the common man.” And here I am, Augustus thought, they don’t come more common than me. “I have rights, you know,” he said stoutly. “I have been sorely used,” he added grandly. He had heard his brother Lionel (“a prig,” according to Phyllis) say this over some stupid pash he had on a girl.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” his father said. “You’re not Edmond Dantès.”

  “Who?”

  “You never seem to think,” his father said. “Anyone with an ounce of sense could have seen what would happen.”

  “What I was thinkin’ was that I just wanted to see what was on the other side,” Augustus said.

  “Ah, how many times has that sentence been uttered as a prelude to disaster, I wonder?” Mr. Swift said to no one in particular.

  “And what was on the other side?” Mrs. Swift asked, unable to stifle her curiosity.

  “Well,” Augustus said, moving a pear drop from one cheek to the other to give himself time to consider.

  “Was it, by any chance, Mrs. Brewster’s wig?” Mr. Swift asked in his courtroom voice, the one that implied it already knew the answer.

  “How was I s’posed to know she wore a wig? It could have been any ol’ wig! Just a wig lyin’ around. And how was I to know that Mrs. Brewster was bald? You wear a wig and you’re not bald.”

  “In court. I wear a wig in court,” an exasperated Mr. Swift said.

  “I don’t suppose you have any idea where the dog took the wig?” Mrs. Swift asked her son.

  Jock, yapping with excitement and a little tainted with the aforesaid green paint, chose that moment to enter the room, and Mrs. Swift—

  Oh ye gods,” Teddy groaned, dropping the book to the floor.

  Izzie had stolen his life. How could she? (The paint incident really hadn’t been his fault.) She had taken his life and twisted it and turned him into a quite different boy, a stupid boy, having stupid adventures. With a stupid, stupid, stupid dog—a Westie, with a sketchy face and black bead eyes. The book had pictures, cartoony things that made everything so much worse. Augustus himself was a scuffed, badly behaved schoolboy, his cap glued permanently to the back of his head and a cowlick of hair in his eyes and a catapult
hanging out of his pocket. The book had green card covers and gold lettering and on the front it said The Adventures of Augustus by Delphie Fox, which, apparently, was Izzie’s “pen-name.” Inside it was inscribed “To my nephew, Teddy. My own darling Augustus.” What rot.

  More than anything it was the Westie that had upset him. It wasn’t just the wrong dog but it reminded him of his awful loss, of Trixie, who had died just before Christmas. It had never struck Teddy that she would die before him so he had suffered as much from disbelief as grief. When he came home from his first term at boarding school he found her gone, buried alongside Bosun beneath the apple trees.

  “We tried to keep her going until you got here, old chap,” Hugh said, “but she just couldn’t hang on.”

  Teddy thought he would never get over this bereavement, and perhaps he never did, but a few weeks after the publication of The Adventures of Augustus Izzie turned up with another gift, a tiny Westie puppy with the name “Jock” engraved on his expensive collar. Teddy tried very hard not to like him as it would be not only a betrayal of his love for Trixie but a sign of his acceptance of the whole horrible fictionalization of his life. It was an impossible task, of course, and the little dog had soon burrowed its way deep into the caverns of his heart.

  Augustus, however, would plague him one way or another for the rest of his life.

  Ursula came into the room and picked the book up off the floor and started to read out loud, “ ‘ “Isn’t that Augustus?” Miss Slee whispered in Mr. Swift’s ear. Quite a loud whisper, the kind that makes people in surrounding seats turn and look at you with interest.’ ”

  What had gone into the making of Teddy? Not slugs and snails, it was true, but generation upon generation of Beresfords and Todds, all coming to one singular point in a cold bed in the chill of an autumn night when his father had caught hold of the golden rope of his mother’s hair and hadn’t let go until he had hauled them both to the far shore (they had many euphemisms for the act). As they lay amongst the shipwreck of the marital bed they each felt slightly befuddled by the unexpected ardour of the other. Hugh cleared his throat and murmured, “A voyage into the deep, eh?” Sylvie said nothing as she felt the seafaring metaphor had been stretched far enough.

  But the grain had entered the shell (Sylvie’s own metaphoric stance) and the pearl that would be Edward Beresford Todd began to grow until he was revealed into the sunshine that came before the Great War and lay happily for hours on end in his pram with nothing but a silver hare dangling from the pram hood for company.

  His mother was a great lioness padding softly through the house, protecting them all. His father was more of an enigma, disappearing every day to another world (“The Bank”) and then without warning to another even greater and more faraway world (“The War”). His sisters loved him and swung him and tossed him and covered him in kisses. His brother, already away at school, already trained in the necessary stoicism, sneered at him when he came home in the holidays. His mother held her cheek against his and whispered, “Out of all of them, you are my favourite,” and he knew it was true and felt bad for the others. (It was a relief, Sylvie thought, finally to know what love was.)

  They were all happy, this much at least he was sure of. Later on he realized it was never as simple as that. Happiness, like life itself, was as fragile as a bird’s heartbeat, as fleeting as the bluebells in the wood, but while it lasted, Fox Corner was an Arcadian dream.

  1980

  The Children of Adam

  “Mummy, I’m hungry.”

  Viola was too busy surveying the sea to acknowledge this statement. It was the frazzled end of a boiling-hot afternoon. “Day at the beach!” Dominic had announced enthusiastically that morning. Too enthusiastically, as if going to the seaside had the potential to transform their lives in some transcendental way. Hardly a day passed without him having one great idea or another, most of which seemed to involve drudgery on Viola’s part. (“I swear Dominic thinks of six impossible things before breakfast!” Dorothy laughed admiringly, as if that were a good thing.) The world, in Viola’s opinion, would be better off without so many ideas. She was twenty-eight but already jaded. Twenty-eight seemed a particularly unsatisfactory age. She was no longer young and yet no one ever seemed to take her seriously as an adult. People still told her what to do all the time, it was infuriating. Her only power seemed to be over her own children and even that was limited by endless negotiation.

  They had borrowed the van from Dorothy for the five-mile journey and it broke down (no surprise) a mile from the beach.

  A passing motorist, an elderly, rather frail-looking man in an old Morris Minor estate, had stopped and done something simple beneath the hood and—hey-presto—the van was fixed. Their rescuer was a local farmer, one of their neighbours, and both he and the Morris Minor were more robust than they appeared. Only the children recognized him but they gave no sign, already stunned by the heat and the general despair they were feeling at breaking down in Dorothy’s van for the third time that month.

  “You still need to take it to a garage,” the farmer told them. “What I did was just temporary.”

  Ever-helpful, Dominic offered his guru wisdom. “Man, everything’s temporary.”

  Unmoveable mountains and the wheeling stars in the heavens, not to mention the face of God, passed through the farmer’s mind, but he was not inclined to disputation. He was bemused by them—the raggle-taggle infants (a touch of the Victorian poor) sitting morosely on the verge with their mother, herself a dishevelled young Madonna wearing an outfit that seemed to have come out of a dressing-up box.

  Viola’s faux-gypsy attire—peasant-style headscarf, DM boots, long velvet skirt, embroidered Indian jacket sewn with little mirrors—had all been put on hastily without a thought to the fact that they were going to a beach and that it was already hot and was only going to get hotter. It had taken so much effort to assemble everything necessary for this hegira—food, drink, towels, swimming costumes, more food, more towels, a change of clothes, buckets, spades, more food, more clothes, fishing nets, a small ball, more drink, a big ball, suntan cream, hats, wet flannels wrung out and put in a plastic bag, a blanket to sit on—that she had simply dragged on the first clothes that she could find.

  “Nice day,” the old man said, tipping his tweed cap to Viola.

  “Is it?” she said.

  The mechanically inept head of the family meanwhile was playing the Holy Fool, or just the fool perhaps, prancing around in the road like a jester. He was wearing a tie-dyed T-shirt and jeans covered in patches, even where they didn’t need patching, something that Viola resented as she was the one who had done the patching. Stylistically, the whole family was hopelessly out of date, even the farmer could sense that. He had seen the face of the revolting future—the local town’s youth parading in the precinct, ripped and pierced and held together with safety pins, and the juvenile hedonists who had followed in their footsteps, dressed as pirates and outlaws and Civil War Royalists. When the farmer was their age he had dressed like his father and had never thought twice about it.

  “We were children of the Sixties,” Viola liked to say in later years, as if that in itself made her interesting. “Flower children!” Although when the Sixties were already over Viola was still wrapped neatly in her grey Quaker school uniform and the only flowers in her hair were from the occasional childish daisy chain, the flowers plucked from the edge of the school’s lacrosse field.

  She lit a thin roll-up and gloomily contemplated the bad karma that seemed to be her lot. She drew heavily on the cigarette and then, in a touching display of maternal responsibility, lifted her chin so that the smoke blew over her children’s heads. When she got pregnant the first time, with Sunny, Viola had had no idea what it would involve further down the line. She wasn’t sure she’d ever seen a baby, let alone held one, and imagined it would be like getting a cat, or, at worst, a puppy. (Turned out it was nothing like either.) Inertia was her only excuse really when a year later
she found herself pregnant again, this time with Bertie.

  “Our saviour!” Dominic beamed when the engine had coughed back into life. He dropped to his knees in front of the farmer, his hands in prayer position above his head, and touched his forehead to the tarmac. Viola wondered if he’d dropped acid—it wasn’t always easy to tell as his existence seemed to be one endless trip, either going up or coming down.

  It was only when this phase of her life was over that Viola realized that he was a manic depressive. The term “bi-polar” came a little too late for Dominic. He was dead by then. “Walking in front of a train can do that to you,” Viola said flippantly to her women’s soul drumming group in Leeds, where she studied for a part-time MA in women’s studies on the topic of “post counter-culture feminism.” (“Eh?” Teddy said.) The north in the Eighties was a hotbed of revolt.

  “Grinning nitwit,” the farmer said to his wife when he got home. “Posh, as well. You would think the rich would know better.”

  “They don’t,” the farmer’s wife said sagely.

  “I felt like bringing the lot of them back here and giving them a plate of ham and eggs and a hot bath.”

  “They’ll have been from the commune,” his wife said. “Poor kiddies.” The “kiddies” had appeared at the farmhouse door a few weeks ago and at first the farmer’s wife thought they were gypsies sent to beg and was going to shoo them away, but then she’d recognized them as the children who lived on the neighbouring farm. She’d invited them in and given them milk and cake and let them feed the geese and visit the Red Devons’ milking parlour.