Nancy hadn’t wanted to talk, Teddy had once said, and now she wanted to do nothing but talk. Ursula herself had barely talked but wept continually. She had hardly gone an hour without finding the tears streaming unstoppably. Her eyes were still swollen and sore. Crighton had been awfully good, cradling her and shushing her, making endless cups of tea, tea purloined from the Admiralty, she supposed. He didn’t deliver platitudes, didn’t say everything will be all right, time will heal, he’s in a better place – none of that rubbish. Miss Woolf was wonderful too. She came and sat with Crighton, never questioning who he might be, and held her hand and stroked her hair and allowed her to be an inconsolable child.
That was over now, she thought, finishing her whisky. Now there was just nothing. A vast, featureless landscape of nothing, as far as the horizon of her mind. Despair behind, and Death before.
‘Will you do something for me?’ Nancy asked.
‘Yes, of course. Anything.’
‘Will you find out if there’s a scrap of hope that he’s alive? Surely there’s a chance, however small, that he’s been taken captive. I thought you might know someone in the Air Ministry—’
‘Well, I know a girl …’
‘Or perhaps Maurice knows someone, someone who could be … definitive.’ She stood up suddenly, swaying slightly from the whisky, and said, ‘I have to go.’
‘We’ve met before,’ Roy Holt said to her.
‘Yes, I came up to visit last year,’ Ursula said. ‘I stayed here, at the White Hart, they have rooms, but I suppose you know that. This is “your” pub, isn’t it? The aircrew, I mean.’
‘We were all drinking in the bar, I remember,’ Roy Holt said.
‘Yes, it was a very jolly evening.’
Maurice was no use, of course, but Crighton had tried. It was always the same story. Teddy had gone down in flames, no one jumped.
‘You were the last person who saw him,’ Ursula said.
‘I don’t think about it really,’ Roy Holt said. ‘He was a good bloke, Ted, but it happens all the time. They don’t come back. They’re there at tea and they’re not there at breakfast. You mourn for a minute and then you don’t think about it. Do you know the statistics?’
‘I do actually.’
He shrugged and said, ‘Maybe after the war, I don’t know. I don’t know what you want me to tell you.’
‘We just want to know,’ Izzie said gently, ‘that he didn’t bail out. That he is dead. You were under attack, in extreme circumstances, you may not have seen the whole sorry drama play itself out.’
‘He’s dead, believe me,’ Roy Holt said. ‘The whole crew. The plane was ablaze from front to back. Most of them were probably already dead. I could see him, the planes were very close, still in formation. He turned and looked at me.’
‘Looked at you?’ Ursula said. Teddy in the last moments of his life, knowing he was going to die. What did he think about – the meadow and the copse and the stream that ran through the bluebell wood? Or the flames that were going to consume him – another martyr for England?
Izzie reached out and clutched her hand. ‘Steady,’ she said.
‘I was only bothered about getting away from them. His kite was going out of control, I didn’t want the bugger crashing into us.’ He shrugged. He looked incredibly young and incredibly old at the same time.
‘You should get on with your lives,’ he said rather roughly, and then less so added, ‘I brought the dog. I thought you might want it back.’
Lucky was asleep at Ursula’s feet, he had been deliriously happy when he saw her. Teddy hadn’t left him at Fox Corner, instead he had taken him north, to his base. ‘With a name and a reputation like his, what else could I do?’ he wrote. He sent a photograph of his crew, lounging in old armchairs, Lucky sitting proudly to attention on Teddy’s knee.
‘But he’s your lucky mascot,’ Ursula protested. ‘Isn’t that like asking for bad luck? Giving him away, I mean.’
‘We’ve had nothing but bad luck since Ted went,’ Roy Holt said morosely. ‘He was Ted’s dog,’ he added more kindly, ‘faithful unto the last, as they say. He’s pining something rotten, you should take him. The lads can’t bear to see him hanging around on the airfield, waiting for Ted to come back. It just reminds them that it’s probably going to be them next time.’
‘I can’t bear it,’ she said to Izzie as they drove away. It was what Miss Woolf said when Tony died, she remembered. Just how much was one expected to bear? The dog was sitting contentedly on her lap, sensing something of Ted about her perhaps. Or so she liked to think.
‘What else is there to do?’ Izzie said.
Well, one could kill oneself. And she might have done but how could she leave the dog behind? ‘Is that ridiculous?’ she asked Pamela.
‘No, not ridiculous,’ Pamela said. ‘The dog is all that’s left of Teddy.’
‘Sometimes I feel that he is Teddy.’
‘Now that is ridiculous.’
They were sitting on the lawn at Fox Corner, two weeks or so after VE Day. (‘Now begins the hard part,’ Pamela said.) They hadn’t celebrated. Sylvie had marked the day by taking an overdose of sleeping pills. ‘Selfish, really,’ Pamela said. ‘After all, we’re her children too.’
She had embraced the truth in her own inimitable way and lain down on Teddy’s childhood bed and swallowed a whole bottle of pills, washed down with the last of Hugh’s whisky. It was Jimmy’s room too, but he hardly seemed to count to her. Now two of Pamela’s boys slept in that room and played with Teddy’s old train set, laid out in Mrs Glover’s old attic room.
They lived at Fox Corner, the boys and Pamela and Harold. To everyone’s surprise, Bridget made good on her threat to return to Ireland. Sylvie, enigmatic to the last, left behind her own version of a delayed action bomb. When her will was read they discovered that there was some money – stocks and shares and so on, Hugh wasn’t a banker for nothing – that was to be divided equally but Pamela was to inherit Fox Corner. ‘But why me?’ Pamela puzzled. ‘I was no more of a favourite than anyone else.’
‘None of us were favourites,’ Ursula said, ‘only Teddy. I suppose if he’d lived she would have left it to him.’
‘If he’d lived she wouldn’t be dead.’
Maurice was incandescent, Jimmy was not back from the war and when he did return he didn’t seem to care too much one way or the other. Ursula wasn’t entirely indifferent to the snub (a small word for a rather large betrayal) but she thought Pamela was the perfect person to live at Fox Corner and she was glad it was in her stewardship. Pamela wanted to sell and divide the proceeds but Harold, to Ursula’s surprise, talked her out of it. (And it was difficult to talk Pamela out of things.) Harold had always disliked Maurice, for his politics as much as his person, and Ursula suspected this was his way of punishing Maurice for, well, for being Maurice. It was all rather Forsterian and it would have been easy to develop a grudge but Ursula chose not to.
The contents were to be divided among them. Jimmy wanted nothing, he already had his passage booked to New York and a job secured in an advertising agency, thanks to someone he met during the war, ‘A man I know,’ he said, an echo of Izzie. Maurice, on the other hand, having decided not to contest the will (‘even though I would be successful, of course’), sent a removal van and virtually looted the house. None of the contents of the van ever turned up in Maurice’s own house so they presumed he sold them, out of spite more than anything. Pamela cried for Sylvie’s nice rugs and ornaments, the Regency Revival dining table, some very good Queen Anne chairs, the grandfather clock in the hall, ‘Things we grew up with,’ but it seemed to appease Maurice and prevented an outbreak of total war.