Work Text:
Southport, 1923
They went over to Southport one Christmas without telling anyone, across on the train on Christmas Eve with a picnic lunch in a basket. Susannah wanted Scotch eggs, Gally wanted little sausages on sticks, and Vanessa wanted treacle tart, so they had all three, leaning against the railings on the marina, watching the wind whip the seawater like it was cream. Newt wanted a nice quiet Christmas, indoors, with the wireless on and hot food on plates like normal people, but he’d got accustomed by then to being outvoted and then told sternly that what did he think this was, the Roman Republic, it had never been a democracy to start.
“It’s not like we didn’t do that scads of times at home,” Gally said, shouting to be heard over the wind rattling its way through the railings and timbers. There was a funfair, of a sort, and little electric trams that you could ride to the end of the pier, but no one around to operate any of it and no one else out but themselves. They could see some very distant dog walkers miles along the sand, and beyond that, only the big merchant ships setting out from Liverpool. “You, me, the old mater and pater and whatever esteemed don with his underpants on his head we were entertaining that year.”
“Underpants on their head, really?” asked Vanessa, with a mouth full of marzipan. She’d also insisted on Christmas cake, which Susannah had sent for specially from Boothroyd’s in town and put religiously in their picnic basket. She offered Newt some, but he shook his head. He had gone off it in approximately 1918, around the same time he’d got fed up of life in Spetwith and being handed white feathers on the street. Gally was right: their parents had insisted on doing the wartime Christmases with all the trimmings, even if it meant going without sugar and butter the whole month beforehand. No one had enjoyed themselves particularly, not even Toby, who'd got a mincemeat jar stuck on his head Newt’s last year living at home. Undergraduate festivities by candlelight had been Dionysian by comparison.
“Oh, absolutely,” Gally said to Vanessa. “All sorts of jolly old eccentrics. Terribly clever people who’d dug up dead kings in Egypt or shot tigers in Africa and whatnot.”
“There are no tigers in Africa, Gally,” Newt said tiredly, watching Vanessa meticulously wrap up half her cake for later and start making her way across the sand towards the water. Tigers of her own to shoot, clearly. Step by step, into the maw of the wind. Vanessa was seven, which meant Newt was about to be thirty. Not a lot to show for it save a tolerable first and several turns at the Palladium in front of a lot of people who thought he was terribly good.
“Well, jaguars then. Lions. Big things that go roar. What’s eating you, brother mine?”
“Nothing,” Newt said. Vanessa turned back, looked directly at him and waved. Then she was marching onwards, her little boots making perfectly-formed prints. Susannah had got her a bucket and spade the summer before in Whitby and she’d stored them carefully in a corner of her room, ready for any future sand-and-sea eventuality. Newt had tried to explain that it would be too cold to play, but it hadn’t stuck. Very little did stick to Vanessa, other than marzipan.
“Something’s bothering you,” Gally proclaimed. “Never mind. Have a sausage.”
He did, and it wasn’t bad: cold of course but glazed with something sweet and sticky. Gally gave him another when he’d finished the first, and it seemed to help a bit. Susannah cut the treacle tart into equal shares and shouted for Vanessa, who was busy inspecting the seashells and bladderwrack at the water’s edge. Vanessa shrieked with joy; the sound fell perfectly into a lull in the wind, so it rang out with the purity of a bell. Newt shivered, and handed over a handkerchief to Susannah in advance, for wiping the treacle away from Vanessa’s mouth.
“Lovely,” Gally said, of her own slice. By the time the picnic basket was empty, it was too cold to stay. They walked along the railing at the edge of the beach, past the shuttered shops and whelk stalls back towards the station. It was past three, nearly dark, and the last-minute shoppers were making their way home under gaslight. Vanessa dawdled to look at doll’s houses and rocking horses through gleaming shop windows, and wouldn’t hurry up until Susannah resorted to bribery.
“We’ll have hot cocoa on the train,” she promised, finally. “And coffee for Aunt Gally and Uncle Newt. Doesn’t that sound nice?”
It did sound nice, Newt was thinking, wondering why it wasn’t touching the sides. It was as though the winter chill had got inside him somehow, insulating him against such small pleasures as hot cocoa and doll’s houses in shop windows. They ran for the train, Susannah dragging Vanessa along by the hand, and caught it by the skin of their collective teeth. Once inside, they all uncurled luxuriously in the warmth. Gally staked claim to a compartment while Susannah put their coats and hats up on the luggage rack. Newt went to the buffet car and fetched coffee and cocoa, but only for himself and Susannah.
“Out like a light,” Susannah said lovingly, stroking Vanessa’s hair away from her face. Vanessa was fast asleep, lulled by the motion of the train. “Just like always.”
“She comes by it honestly,” Newt said, looking at Gally.
“Not asleep,” Gally muttered indignantly. “Resting my eyes. ‘S all it is.”
“Of course,” Newt said, as her mouth dropped open and she started to snore. He reached down for his scarf from the luggage rack and bundled it under Gally’s head. “There. Much better.”
“Much,” Susannah agreed, holding out her hand for Newt to pass her the cup, and settling back into the cushions with a happy sigh. “What is it, then?”
“Mmm?” Newt said.
“That’s troubling you.” Susannah took a deep draught of cocoa. “Don’t say nothing. If Gally’s noticed it, it’s visible from China.”
“I suppose that’s true,” Newt said, sitting down by the window and breathing in the steam from his coffee. The train was crossing the Pennines, rattling into a coal-black sky, and their little lit compartment felt like the heart of the world. “Oh, Susannah. Has anyone ever asked you what sort of war you had?”
Susannah raised her eyebrows. “I can’t say as they have, no.”
“They wouldn’t,” Newt said. “You don’t hear it among women or on the music hall stage. So-and-so, he had a good war. Rose to captain, got minimally gassed, now something dreadfully important in the Foreign Office.”
“So?” Susannah said. “Do you want to be something dreadfully important in the Foreign Office?”
“No,” Newt said. “But I don’t see what else I’ve done, instead of that. I never went to war at all. Everyone had their suspicions about me, which I didn’t exactly dispel by pretending to be a male impersonator.”
“You’re very good at it.”
“I’m a man, Susannah,” Newt said impatiently. “It comes naturally. I can play the cello and sing, not so well as Gally. I teach science to boys with sawdust for brains. I neither bayoneted nor was bayoneted at Passchendaele. And I’m about to be thirty, with nothing of note to show for it.”
“Other than your daughter,” Susannah said. Newt inhaled sharply and found himself looking around, anxious as if it were a state secret. There was no one else in the compartment, and no one lurking in the train corridor. His heart fluttered inside him like an errant bird and for a minute neither of them spoke.
“Uncle Newt,” he said. “That’s all I am. We agreed.”
“We did,” Susannah said, stroking Vanessa’s hair again. “But you could say it out loud to yourself, at least. Make a point of it once a year.”
“On my birthday or at Christmas?” Newt said sardonically, and regretted it. It wasn’t her fault it had to be a secret; it wasn’t anyone’s fault that they were what they were.
Susannah rolled her eyes at him with affection. The train rumbled on quietly, and Vanessa murmured something in her sleep. Newt looked at her, and Susannah and Gally, and felt dizzy with his love for them, with the heat and motion of the train. He fell asleep before he could think of anything else to say. Susannah woke them all up at York.