Teddy’s idea of Utopia would not have included the Kibbo Kift. What would it have included? A dog, certainly. Preferably more than one. Nancy and his sisters would be there—his mother too, he supposed—and they would all live in a lovely house set in the green countryside of the Home Counties and eat cake every day. His real life, in fact.
In turn, the Kibbo Kift produced their own breakaway movement, the less eccentric Woodcraft Folk, by which time Teddy had managed to weasel his way out of the lot of them. At school he joined the OTC and enjoyed the concerted lack of pacifism. He was a boy, after all. He would have been surprised to know that in his sixties, when his grandchildren came to live with him in York, he would spend several months trailing backwards and forwards to a chilly church hall so that Bertie and Sunny could attend a weekly meeting of the Woodcraft Folk group that they were members of. Teddy thought that continuity would probably be a good thing for them, seeing as Viola, their mother, seemed to have provided so little. He gazed at his grandchildren’s innocent faces while they intoned the hopeful words of the “creed” at the beginning of the meeting—“We shall go singing to the fashioning of a new world.”
He even went on a camping trip with them and was complimented on his “woodcraft skills” by the group leader, who, despite being large, young and black, reminded him a little of Mrs. Shawcross. “Learned in the Scouts,” he said, even all those years later unwilling to admit that he had taken anything from the Kibbo Kift.
Sylvie paid the cab driver and the hotel doorman opened the door of the cab and murmured, “Madam.” She hesitated on the pavement. Another doorman was already holding open the door of the hotel. “Madam.” Again.
She moved closer, inch by slow inch, edging her way towards adultery. “Madam?” the doorman said again, still holding the door, perplexed by this slow progress.
The hotel beckoned. She could see the lush tones of the foyer, the promise of luxury. Imagined champagne sparkling in engraved Bohemian glass, foie gras, pheasant. The dimmed lighting in the room, the bed with its starched hotel sheets. Her cheeks flamed. He would be waiting inside, just beyond the door. Perhaps he had glimpsed her, was already rising to his feet to greet her. She hesitated again, balancing what she was about to be given against what she was about to give away. Or—perhaps a worse outcome—everything would simply remain the same. And then she thought of her children, thought of Teddy, her best boy. Would she risk her life as his mother? For an adventure? A cold thrill of horror quenched the flames of sin. For sin it was, she thought, make no mistake. You did not need a God (Sylvie was an unconfessed atheist) to believe in sin.
She composed herself (difficult) and said to the doorman, rather haughtily, “Oh, I’m so sorry. I’ve just remembered another appointment elsewhere.”
She fled, walking quickly, head held high, a purposeful woman with a decent, civilized destination beckoning her—a charitable committee, even a political meeting, anything but a rendezvous with a lover.
A concert! The lighted entrance of Wigmore Hall appeared ahead of her—a warm beacon, a safe harbour. The music struck up almost at once, one of Mozart’s Haydn Quartets, The Hunt. Appropriate, she thought. She had been the hind, he had been the hunter. But now the hind had bounded free. Not quite bounded, perhaps, as she was in a rather poor seat at the back of the hall, squashed between a somewhat shabby young man and an elderly lady. But then one always paid a price for freedom, didn’t one?
She had been a frequent attender of concerts with her father and knew the Haydn Quartets well, but still felt too flummoxed by her narrow escape to hear the Mozart. Sylvie was a pianist herself but she avoided attending recitals these days, they reminded her too painfully of a life that might have been. She had been told by her teacher when she was young that she could go on to “play at concert level” if she took her studies seriously, but then of course the bankruptcy, the great fall from grace, had occurred and the Bechstein had been hauled unceremoniously away and sold to a private buyer. The first thing she had done on moving into Fox Corner was to acquire a B?sendorfer, her wedding present from Hugh. A great solace for marriage.