Dorothy herself seemed to spend a lot of time “balancing her chakras” (all right for some, Viola thought) and having her Tarot read by Jeanette. She did precious little basket-weaving and Viola had never once seen her milk the goat, a curmudgeonly Toggenburg that despised Viola as much as Viola despised it.
The only time she got any peace at Adam’s Acre was when she went out pretending to look for eggs. The chickens laid anywhere they wanted, it was ridiculous. Her father kept chickens, but they were disciplined birds, laying in their nests. Even on a fruitless egg forage she wasn’t safe from Dorothy swooping in (she came from nowhere, she was like a bat). “You’re Viola Todd, aren’t you?” she said rather accusingly to her one day, appearing on the path in front of her like Miss Jessel. Bertie was asleep in her Maclaren buggy, an item far too flimsy for this kind of rutted terrain (the wheels were always coming off). She had left Sunny with his father, an act that was tantamount to child neglect.
Bertie stirred in her sleep and raised a hand as if to ward off the unwelcome apparition of Dorothy. Viola, who had been wandering along the hedgerows in the midst of a potent fantasy that involved both piles of hot buttered toast and Captain Wentworth from Persuasion, was horribly startled.
“Yes, I’m Viola Todd,” Viola said cautiously. She had been living beneath the same roof as Dorothy for over a year and Dorothy didn’t know her name? “Guilty as charged.”
“Your mother is called Nancy? Nancy Shawcross?”
“Maybe,” Viola said even more cautiously. She didn’t like her mother’s name being on Dorothy’s lips. Her mother was sacred.
“Well, she is or she isn’t,” Dorothy said.
“Is,” Viola said, reluctant to hand over the conversational gift of her mother in the past tense.
“She’s one of the Shawcross sisters?”
“She is.” Plus it was nice to be talking about her mother as if she were still alive.
“I knew it!” Dorothy exclaimed theatrically. “I knew her sister—Millie. We trod the boards together when we were both ingénues. Been out of touch for years. How is your dear aunt?”
“Dead,” Viola said helpfully, quite happy to give up Millie to the past tense.
Dorothy’s face collapsed into a kind of paroxysm of anguish. She put her hand to her forehead in a mime of despair. “Gone!”
“I hardly knew her,” Viola said matter-of-factly. “She always seemed to be abroad.”
“Hm,” Dorothy said, as if insulted by this news. She frowned. “What are you doing anyway?”
“Looking for eggs,” Viola lied easily. You always had to be seen to be doing something useful. It was so tiring.
“Shouldn’t that child” (they were always “that child” or “those children”) “be wearing a sun bonnet?”
“Bonnet?” Viola said, taken by such an old-fashioned word. Captain Wentworth beckoned. “Must get on,” she said. “Eggs to look for.”
When Viola was pregnant with Bertie, Dorothy had advocated a “natural birth” for the new baby at Adam’s Acre. Viola couldn’t think of anything worse. Sunny had been born in a big busy London teaching hospital, Viola high as a kite on pethidine. At night the babies were taken away to a nursery and the mothers were all given sleeping pills. It was bliss. They were kept in for a week and fed meals and snacks and milky drinks and not expected to do very much other than feed and change their babies, often without even getting out of bed. Viola wasn’t about to give all that up for some torturous rite of passage orchestrated by (a childless) Dorothy. Viola couldn’t help but think of Rosemary’s Baby.
She was virtually a prisoner. There was no telephone at the farm and how would she get to hospital if no one would drive her in the van? She regretted now not persevering with driving lessons with her father when she still lived at home. She hadn’t wanted to be stuck in a car with her father while he taught her stuff he knew and she didn’t (which was almost everything). He was an irritatingly patient teacher. She suddenly remembered something, how her father had spent every Saturday morning for a whole year coaching her so that she could get through her Maths O level. He had used the same pencil all year, a stubby soft-leaded one. Viola couldn’t keep her hands on the same pencil or pen for more than a day before she lost it. She felt sick at the thought of the algebra and equations they had worked their way through, her father persevering until she had (briefly) understood. All forgotten now, of course, so what had been the point? And all it meant was that she scraped through with a low grade, got middling results in all her A levels except for English, got a foot in the door of a mediocre university and ended up with a crap degree. And look where that had got her. Here. That was where. No money, no job, two kids, useless boyfriend. She would have been better off leaving school at fifteen and doing a hairdressing apprenticeship.
In the end, of course, she had Bertie in hospital and the devil did not come calling for his child. He had no need, he already had Sunny.
She must have fallen asleep. She woke with a start and felt her face burning uncomfortably from where the sun had progressed across it. It took her a few seconds to remember her children. How long since they went for ice-creams? She struggled to her feet and looked around the beach. No sign. Kidnapped, drowned, fallen off the cliff? Any number of scenarios had Viola in their dramatic grip, all of them indicting her as a terrible mother.
They were eventually found, waiting patiently if somewhat glumly at the Lost Children hut. Viola had no idea such a thing even existed. “Did you do that on purpose?” she said to Sunny as they raced the incoming tide to collect their wet sandy belongings and stuff them back into bags. (This is why we don’t come to the beach, she thought.)
Sunny was speechless with indignation. He had been terrified out of his mind when he realized that he couldn’t find his way back from the ice-cream van. The beach was vast and almost everyone on it was taller than he was. He had imagined them being washed away by the sea or having to stay there all night on the sand in the dark on their own. The added burden of knowing he was the one who, in his mother’s absence, was duty-bound to look after Bertie drove him to distraction and when a nice motherly lady came up to him and said, “Now then, what are you two doing wandering around? Have you lost your mummy?” he was overcome with relief and broke down in tears. He loved that woman with all his heart.
“Never do that again,” Viola said.
“I didn’t do anything,” he said quietly. The fight had gone out of him. He had begun the day as an overwound clock. Now he knew he was barely ticking.
“Where is Daddy?” Bertie asked.
“Swimming,” Viola snapped.
“He’s been swimming for hours.”
“Yeah, he has,” Viola said. She had no watch. Teddy had given her a neat little Timex when she passed her O levels but she had lost that long ago. Please let Dominic be dead, she thought.
If he had drowned out there in the sea she could start a new life. It would be such an easy way of breaking up with him, much easier than packing up and leaving. And besides, where would she go? And then there was the money. Dominic had a trust fund. She didn’t know exactly what that was, but he had “come into it” a few weeks ago. There was some complex legal reason (he said) why he couldn’t walk away from this money the way that he’d walked away from his “people.” But had he given any to her or her children? No, he was giving the money to the commune, signing it over to Dorothy! And worse—no, not worse, slightly less bad—she’d discovered a letter from his mother, who had used a private detective to find him, and in the letter she begged him to “heal the rift” between them and let her see her grandchildren “and their mother, who I am sure is wonderful.”
If Dominic was dead, Viola would get the trust fund (wouldn’t she?) instead of Dorothy and she could go and live in a proper house and have a normal life. If only she had married Dominic and made her right to his inheritance secure, now she would be a tragic young widow and people would have to be nice to her. She could even go and live wi
th these unknown hunting, shooting, fishing in-laws. They thought she was wonderful, after all. Of course, once they met her they would probably revise their judgement, but, who knew, perhaps over time she could be accepted into their clan and become “people” herself. She could adopt their name. Viola Villiers, bit of a mouthful, like an elocution exercise, but nonetheless it had a ring to it, like those eighteenth-century actresses who became mistresses to the aristocracy and often ended up as duchesses themselves.
Sunny was probably the heir to an estate or something and for a moment she allowed herself to imagine swans on lakes and peacocks on lawns. She didn’t mind if they were fascists, she really didn’t, not as long as they had central heating and tumble dryers, and white bread instead of rye sourdough and soft mattresses instead of futons on the floor.
Should she alert someone? All three of them were exhausted, too tired surely for all the stuff that would follow the report of a missing person. But then how would they get home? She couldn’t drive. She sighed heavily.
“Mummy?” Bertie said. Bertie was finely tuned to Viola’s moods.
They trudged all the way back to the Lost Children tent. The motherly woman was still there. Sunny launched himself at her, hugging her round the waist, hanging on to her for dear life.
“Lost someone else?” she said cheerfully to Viola.
Sunny, Bertie, Viola and two burly policemen were all crammed into a panda car, being driven to Adam’s Acre. (“That would be Long Grove Farm, would it?” one of the policemen said.) The children, in the back with Viola, fell asleep immediately. They were slick with old suntan cream, except for their legs, which were stockinged with gritty sand. Their feet were still bare, Viola hadn’t had the energy to force sandals back on them. They were beginning to smell over-ripe.
Her children would probably be better off without her. She should have left them with that farmer’s wife, she thought, skilfully converting selfishness into altruism. She had a sudden memory of the geese in the yard and shuddered. She had been chased by a goose when she was small, pecked half to death, and had had a terror of them ever since. Her parents—she’d had both of them at the time—had laughed at her. Geese always sensed her fear, running towards her like a mob, crowding round her, pecking and honking. “Don’t be a silly goose, Viola,” Teddy used to say to her. Always telling her how to be, how not to be. (The Voice of Reason.) The Goose Girl, that was a story her mother read to her. It involved a decapitated talking horse, Viola seemed to remember.
Perhaps she could ask the police to keep on driving, all the way to York, and drop her off at her father’s house. She was surprised to find that she felt homesick. Not just for the narrow streets and medieval churches, for the Bar Walls and the great Minster, but for the suburban semi-detached that she had spent half of her life deriding.
“Mrs. Todd?” She had told the policemen that she was a “Mzzz” but they ignored this new-fangled idea. And she was the mother of children so they weren’t going to call her “Miss.”
“We’re here, Mrs. Todd. You’re home.” Not really, she thought.
Viola had told her tale of woe to the woman in the Lost Children hut, who immediately took charge, alerting the coastguard, the local lifeboat and the police and several other unidentified people, most of whom milled around on the promenade, excited by the drama but disappointed that there was nothing to see. It seemed a lot for one lone swimmer lost at sea.
Viola had related the facts. They were sparse. Dominic had said, “I’m going for a swim,” run down to the sea, plunged in, arms and legs waving, and never come back. There was no more to be wrung out of this statement and so the two burly policemen took them back to Adam’s Acre. A fractious Sunny had to be prised off the body of the woman in the Lost Children hut like a limpet from a rock. “The poor little pet,” the woman said and Viola said, “You can keep him if you want,” which obviously the Lost-Children-hut woman thought was a joke.
The door of the farmhouse flew open as the panda car drew up and Dorothy appeared, glared at Viola and said, “You brought the pigs to my door?” The two policemen clearly resented being addressed in this disrespectful fashion by a woman who was, let’s face it, kaftan notwithstanding, an old-age pensioner and should have known better.
“You can’t come in without a warrant,” Dorothy said imperiously.
“We weren’t planning on coming in,” one of the policemen said, sniffing the air ostentatiously, although the only smell was the reek of Dorothy’s patchouli rather than drugs, even though drugs there were a-plenty on the premises.
Dorothy had by now moved out into the farmyard and was standing arms akimbo, defending her territory. “You shall not pass,” she said as if she were defending a barricade.
“Oh, for goodness’ sake,” Viola said. She was far too worn out for this kind of nonsense.
“Where on earth have you been, Viola? We wondered what had happened to you. Dominic’s in his studio, he’s been back for hours.”
“He’s back? Here?” Viola said.
“Well, where else would he be?”
“This is Mr. Villiers we’re talking about?” one of the policemen intervened. “Mr. Dominic Villiers?”
“The gentleman we’re conducting a massive air-sea search for?” the other one said. “The one we’ve scrambled an RAF rescue helicopter for?”
And so he came back from his dip in the sea and couldn’t find you? And he just drove home?” the farmer puzzled.
“In his swimming trunks?” the farmer’s wife said, shaking her head in disbelief at this fact. Viola could see that she’d pushed the pair of them to the edge of their imaginations. They would never behave like Dominic because they were normal people.
She had packed a bag, taken all the money from the kitty when no one was looking and walked over to the neighbouring farm. No one had even noticed she had gone. She had been prepared to run the gauntlet of the geese but they seemed to have gone to bed for the night.
“Oh, it’s you,” the farmer said. This morning seemed a long way away to all of them.
The farmer’s wife bathed the children and they emerged from the bathroom wrapped in towels looking clean and polished, like new, before being dressed in the pyjamas that the farmer’s wife kept for her grandchildren when they visited. She had heated up stew and potatoes and Viola and her children came to a mute agreement that no one would mention the fact that they were vegetarians. Viola felt she had enough on her plate (ha!) without this added ethical complication (they were on a farm, she excused herself). Afterwards, the farmer’s wife produced junket that she’d made with cream from the burnished red cows and Viola didn’t say, “Don’t eat that! It’s made with rennet which comes from an enzyme in a cow’s stomach!” which was how she normally greeted cheese and instead let it quietly slip down her throat. It was delicious.
They slept there, between clean old sheets, the children in a double bed. From an early age, almost before she had words for doing it, Bertie had been a sleeptalker, mumbling her way through the night, but tonight, to Sunny’s relief, she slept without a murmur. He placed a pebble beneath his pillow for comfort. When he woke next morning it was the first thing he reached for. “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Viola said when he put it next to his breakfast plate.
They ate scrambled eggs as yellow as the sun and then were dressed again by the farmer’s wife in more clothes from her cache. Sunny sported clean short trousers and a little Aertex shirt while Bertie wore a print dress with a smocked bodice and a white Peter Pan collar. They looked like someone else’s children.
The farmer drove them to the station, where they took a train to London, and from King’s Cross they took another train to York.
“Hello,” Teddy said when he opened his front door and saw the little group of refugees standing on the doorstep. “This is a nice surprise.”
1947
This Unforgiving Winter
February
The Snowdrop in purest white array
First
rears her head on Candlemas Day
“I almost missed the small clump by a hedgerow ditch. The water in the ditch is still ‘like a stone,’ as is every pond and rural waterway on this island, and so I was not expecting Wordsworth’s ‘venturous harbinger of spring’ to appear on time this year. Traditionally, snowdrops are flowering by Candlemas (2nd February) and are indeed known in some parts as ‘Candlemas Bells’ but in the midst of this bleakest, longest of winters we would surely excuse them if they were a little tardy in their arrival.”
Nancy stifled a yawn which Teddy caught but didn’t comment on. She was peering at her knitting, the lamp by her side inadequate. The dreadful weather had meant cuts to the electricity all over the country, but not for them as the cottage had none to begin with. Oil and paraffin lamps downstairs, candles upstairs. They were huddled around the fire which, apart from each other, was their only source of warmth. Teddy leaned over to give the log on the fire an encouraging prod with the poker and glanced up at Nancy and thought, She’ll ruin her eyes in this light. She was knitting a complex Fair Isle, a sleeveless pullover for him. There were mathematics in the pattern, she said. There were patterns in everything. Maths was “the one true thing,” according to Nancy.
“Not love?” Teddy said.
“Oh, love, of course,” Nancy said, in an offhanded way. “Love is crucial, but it’s an abstract and numbers are absolute. Numbers can’t be manipulated.” An unsatisfactory answer, surely, Teddy thought. It seemed to him that love should be the absolute, trumping everything. Did it? For him?