Life After Life

  ‘You’re a droll little thing, aren’t you?’ Izzie inhaled deeply on her cigarette holder and then puckered up her (astonishingly) red cupid’s bow as if she were about to play the trumpet before exhaling a stream of smoke. Several men seated nearby turned to stare at her in fascination. She winked at Ursula. ‘I bet the first French words you learned were déjà vu. Poor old thing. Maybe you were dropped on your head as a baby. I expect I was. Come on, let’s tuck in, I’m ravenous, aren’t you? I’m supposed to be banting but really there’s only so much one can take,’ Izzie said, cutting enthusiastically into the beef.

  This was an improvement, when she had met Ursula on the platform at Marylebone Izzie had looked green and said she was ‘a tad queasy’ on account of the oysters and rum (‘never a good combination’) after a ‘disreputable’ night in a club in Jermyn Street. Now, oysters apparently forgotten, she was eating as if she were starving even though she claimed, as usual, to be ‘watching her figure’. She also claimed to be ‘stony broke’ yet was wildly extravagant with her money. ‘What’s life worth if you can’t have some fun?’ she said. (‘Her life is nothing but fun as far as I can see,’ Hugh grumbled.)

  Fun – and the concomitant treats – were necessary, Izzie claimed, to sweeten the fact that she had now ‘joined the ranks of the workers’, and had to ‘pound away’ on a typewriter to earn her keep. ‘Goodness, you would think she was hewing coal,’ Sylvie said crossly after a rare and rather embattled family luncheon at Fox Corner. After Izzie had gone, Sylvie banged down the Worcester fruit plates she was helping Bridget to clear and said, ‘All she’s doing is producing drivel, which is something she’s been doing since she first learned to talk.’

  ‘Heirlooms,’ Hugh murmured, rescuing the Worcester.

  Izzie had managed to get a job (‘God knows how,’ Hugh said) writing a weekly column for a newspaper – Adventures of a Modern Spinster, the column was called – on the subject of being a ‘singleton’. ‘Everyone knows that there simply aren’t enough men to go round any more,’ she said, tearing into a bread roll at Fox Corner’s Regency Revival dining table. (‘You don’t seem to have any trouble finding them,’ Hugh muttered.) ‘The poor boys are all dead,’ Izzie continued, ignoring him. Butter was plastered on to the roll with no regard for the hard labour of the cow. ‘There’s nothing can be done about it, we have to move on as best we can without them. The modern woman must fend for herself without the prospect of the succour of hearth and home. She must learn to be independent, emotionally, financially and, most importantly, in her spirit.’ (‘Rot.’ Hugh again.) ‘The men are not the only ones who had to sacrifice themselves in the Great War.’ (‘They’re dead, you’re not, that’s the difference.’ This from Sylvie. Coldly.)

  ‘Of course,’ Izzie said, mindful of Mrs Glover at her elbow with a tureen of Brown Windsor, ‘the women of the lower classes have always known what it is to work.’ Mrs Glover gave her a baleful look and tightened her grip on the soup ladle. (‘Brown Windsor, how delicious, Mrs Glover. What do you put in it to make it taste this way? Really? How interesting.’) ‘We’re moving towards a classless society, of course,’ a remark directed at Hugh but which earned a snort of derision from an unappeased Mrs Glover.

  ‘Are you a Bolshevik this week then?’ Hugh asked.

  ‘We’re all Bolsheviks now,’ Izzie said blithely.

  ‘And at my table!’ Hugh said and laughed.

  ‘She’s such a fool,’ Sylvie said when Izzie had finally departed for the station. ‘And so much make-up! You would think she was on the stage. Of course, in her head she’s always on the stage. She is her own theatre.’

  ‘The hair,’ Hugh said regretfully. It went without saying that Izzie had bobbed her hair before anyone else they knew. Hugh had expressly forbidden the women in his family to cut their hair. Almost as soon as he had issued this paternal edict the normally unrebellious Pamela had gone into town with Winnie Shawcross and the pair of them had returned shingled and shorn. (‘It’s just easier for games’ was Pamela’s rational explanation.) Pamela had saved her heavy plaits, whether as relics or trophies, it was hard to say. ‘Mutiny in the ranks, eh?’ Hugh said. Neither of them being the argumentative sort, that was the end of the conversation. The plaits now lived at the back of Pamela’s underwear drawer. ‘You never know, they might come in useful for something,’ she said. No one in the family could imagine what that something might be.

  Sylvie’s feelings about Izzie went deeper than hair or make-up. She had never forgiven Izzie for the baby. He would be thirteen now, the same age as Ursula. ‘A little Fritz or Hans,’ she said. ‘My own children’s blood running through his veins. But, of course, the only thing of any interest to Izzie is Izzie.’

  ‘Still, she can’t be entirely shallow,’ Hugh said. ‘I expect she saw some awful things in the war.’ As if he hadn’t.

  Sylvie tossed her head. There might have been a halo of gnats around her own lovely hair. She was rather envious of Izzie’s war, even the awfulness. ‘She’s still a fool,’ she said and Hugh laughed and said, ‘Yes, she is.’

  Izzie’s column seemed for the most part to be nothing more than a diary of her own hectic personal life with the odd social comment thrown in. Last week it had been ‘How high can they go?’ and was about ‘the rise of the emancipated female hemline’, but consisted mostly of Izzie’s tips to acquire the necessary shapely ankles. Stand backwards, on tiptoe, on the bottom step of a staircase and let your heels drop over the edge. Pamela practised all week on the attic staircase and declared no improvement at all.

  Much against his will, Hugh felt it necessary to buy Izzie’s news paper every Friday and read it on the train home, ‘just to keep an eye on what she’s saying’ (and then jettison the offending item on the hall table, from where Pamela was able to rescue it). Hugh harboured a particular horror that Izzie would write about him and his only comfort was that she wrote under the pseudonym Delphine Fox, which was ‘the silliest name’ that Sylvie had ever heard. ‘Well,’ Hugh said, ‘Delphine is her middle name, from her godmother. And Todd is an old word for fox, so I suppose there is some logic in it. Not that I’m defending her.’

  ‘But it’s my name, it’s on my birth certificate,’ Izzie said, looking hurt when attacked over the pre-prandial decanter. ‘And it’s from Delphi, you know, the oracle, and so on. So rather fitting, I would have said.’ (‘She’s an oracle now?’ from Sylvie. ‘If she’s an oracle then I’m the high priestess of Tutankhamun.’)

  Izzie, in the person of Delphine, had already on more than one occasion mentioned ‘my two nephews’ (‘Terrific rascals, both of them!’) but had not cited any names. ‘So far,’ Hugh said darkly. She had made up a few ‘amusing anecdotes’ about these clearly fictional nephews. Maurice was eighteen (Izzie’s ‘sturdy little chaps’ were nine and eleven), still away at boarding school and had spent no more than ten minutes in Izzie’s company in as many years. As for Teddy, he tended to avoid situations that might evolve into anecdotes.

  ‘Who are these boys?’ Sylvie quizzed over Mrs Glover’s surprisingly capricious interpretation of sole Véronique. She had the folded newspaper on the table next to her and tapped Izzie’s column with her forefinger as if it might be impregnated with germs. ‘Are they supposed to be based in some way on Maurice and Teddy?’

  ‘What about Jimmy?’ Teddy said to Izzie. ‘Why don’t you write about him?’ Jimmy, perky in a sky-blue knitted jumper, was spooning mashed potato into his mouth and didn’t look too bothered about being written out of great literature. He was a child of the peace, the war to end all wars had, after all, been fought for Jimmy. Yet again, Sylvie claimed to be taken by surprise by the newest addition to the family (‘Four had seemed like the complete set’). Once, Sylvie had had no idea how children were started, now she seemed uncertain as to how you might stop them. (‘Jimmy’s an afterthought, I suppose,’ Sylvie said.

  ‘I wasn’t thinking much,’ Hugh said and they both laughed and Sylvie said, ‘Really, Hugh.
’)

  Jimmy’s arrival had the effect of making Ursula feel as if she was being pushed further away from the heart of the family, like an object at the edge of an overcrowded table. A cuckoo, she had overheard Sylvie say to Hugh. Ursula’s a bit of an awkward cuckoo. But how could you be a cuckoo in your own nest? ‘You are my real mother, aren’t you?’ she asked Sylvie and Sylvie laughed and said, ‘Incontrovertibly, dear.’

  ‘The odd one out,’ she said to Dr Kellet.

  ‘Well, there always has to be one,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t write about my children, Isobel,’ Sylvie said heatedly to Izzie.

  ‘They’re imaginary, for heaven’s sake, Sylvie.’

  ‘Don’t even write about my imaginary children.’ She lifted the tablecloth and peered at the floor. ‘What are you doing with your feet?’ she said testily to Pamela, who was sitting opposite her.

  ‘I’m making circles with my ankles,’ Pamela said, unconcerned by Sylvie’s irritability. Pamela was quite bold these days but also rather reasonable, a combination that seemed designed to annoy Sylvie. (‘You are so like your father,’ she had said to Pamela only this morning over some trifling difference of opinion. ‘But why would that be a bad thing?’ Pamela said.) Pamela wiped gluey potato from Jimmy’s pink cheeks and said, ‘Clockwise, then anti-clockwise. It’s the way to a shapely ankle, according to Aunt Izzie.’

  ‘Izzie is not a person from whom anyone with any sense would take advice.’ (‘Excuse me?’ Izzie said.) ‘Besides which, you’re too young for shapely ankles.’

  ‘Well,’ Pamela said, ‘I’m nearly the same age as you were when you married Daddy.’

  ‘Oh, splendid,’ Hugh said, relieved at the sight of Mrs Glover waiting in the doorway to make a grand entrance with a Riz impératrice. ‘The ghost of Escoffier is at your back today, Mrs Glover.’ Mrs Glover couldn’t help but glance behind her.

  ‘Oh, splendid,’ Izzie said. ‘A cabinet pudding. You can rely on Simpson’s for nursery food. We had a nursery, you know, it took up the whole top floor of the house.’

  ‘In Hampstead? Grandmama’s house?’

  ‘The very same. I was the baby. Like Jimmy.’ Izzie wilted a little, as if she were remembering some hitherto long-forgotten sadness. The ostrich feather on her hat trembled in sympathy. She revived at the sight of the silver sauce-boat of custard. ‘And so you don’t have those odd feelings any more? The déjà vu and so on?’

  ‘Me?’ Ursula said. ‘No. Sometimes. Not so much, I suppose. It was before, you know. Now it’s gone. Sort of.’ Had it? She was never sure. Her memories seemed like a cascade of echoes. Could echoes cascade? Perhaps not. She had tried (and largely failed) to learn to be precise with language under Dr Kellet’s guidance. She missed that cosy hour (tête-à-tête, he called it. More French) on a Thursday afternoon. She was ten years old when she first went to see him and had enjoyed being liberated from Fox Corner, in the company of someone who gave his full attention to her and only her. Sylvie, or more often than not Bridget, put Ursula on the train and she was met at the other end by Izzie even though both Sylvie and Hugh doubted that Izzie was sufficiently reliable to be in charge of a child. (‘Expediency,’ Izzie said to Hugh, ‘generally trumps ethics, I’ve noticed. Personally, if I had a ten-year-old child I don’t think I would feel entirely comfortable allowing it to travel all on its own.’ ‘You do have a ten-year-old child,’ Hugh pointed out. The little Fritz. ‘Couldn’t we try and find him?’ Sylvie asked. ‘Needle in a haystack,’ Hugh said. ‘The Hun are legion.’)

  ‘So I rather miss seeing you,’ Izzie said, ‘which is why I asked if you could come up for the day. To be frank, I was surprised Sylvie agreed. There’s always been a certain, shall we say, froideur between your mother and myself. I, of course, am considered mad, bad and dangerous to know. Anyway I thought I should try to single you out from the herd, as it were. You remind me a little of me.’ (Was that a good thing, Ursula wondered?) ‘We could be special chums, what do you think? Pamela’s a little dull,’ Izzie continued. ‘All that tennis and cycling, no wonder she has such sturdy ankles. Très sportive, I’m sure, but still. And science! No fun in that. And the boys are, well … boys, but you’re interesting, Ursula. All that funny stuff in your head about knowing the future. Quite the little clairvoyant. Perhaps we should set you up in a gypsy caravan, get you a crystal ball, Tarot cards. The drowned Phoenician sailor and all that. You can’t see anything in my future, can you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Reincarnation,’ Dr Kellet had said to her. ‘Have you heard of that?’ Ursula, aged ten, shook her head. She had heard of very little. Dr Kellet had a nice set of rooms in Harley Street. The one that he showed Ursula into was half panelled in mellow oak, with a thick carpet figured in red and blue on the floor and two large leather armchairs either side of a well-stoked coal fire. Dr Kellet himself wore a three-piece Harris tweed suit strung with a large gold fob watch. He smelt of cloves and pipe tobacco and had a twinkly look about him as if he were going to toast muffins or read a particularly good story to her, but instead he beamed at Ursula and said, ‘So, I hear you tried to kill your maid?’ (Oh, that’s why I’m here, Ursula thought.)

  He offered her tea which he brewed in something called a samovar in the corner of the room. ‘Although I’m not Russian, far from it, I’m from Maidstone, I visited St Petersburg before the Revolution.’ He was like Izzie in that he treated you as a grown-up, or at least he appeared to, but that was where the resemblance ended. The tea was black and bitter and only drinkable with the aid of heaps of sugar and the contents of the tin of Huntley and Palmer’s Marie biscuits that sat between them on a little table.

  He had trained in Vienna (‘where else?’) but trod, he said, his own path. He was no one’s disciple, he said, although he had studied ‘at the feet of all of the teachers. One must nose forward,’ he said. ‘Nudge one’s way through the chaos of our thoughts. Unite the divided self.’ Ursula had no idea what he was talking about.

  ‘The maid? You pushed her down the stairs?’ It seemed a very direct question for someone who talked about nosing and nudging.

  ‘It was an accident.’ She didn’t think of Bridget as ‘the maid’, she thought of her as Bridget. And it was ages ago now.

  ‘Your mother is worried about you.’

  ‘I just want you to be happy, darling,’ Sylvie said after she had made the appointment with Dr Kellet.

  ‘Aren’t I happy?’ Ursula puzzled.

  ‘What do you think?’

  Ursula didn’t know. She wasn’t sure that she had a yardstick against which to measure happiness or unhappiness. She had obscure memories of elation, of falling into darkness, but they belonged to that world of shadows and dreams that was ever-present and yet almost impossible to pin down.

  ‘As if there is another world?’ Dr Kellet said.

  ‘Yes. But it’s this one as well.’

  (‘I know she says the oddest things, but a psychiatrist?’ Hugh said to Sylvie. He frowned. ‘She’s only small. She’s not defective.’

  ‘Of course not. She just needs a little fixing.’)

  ‘And, hey presto, you’re fixed! How marvellous,’ Izzie said. ‘He was an odd little bod, that mind doctor, wasn’t he? Shall we essay the cheese board – the Stilton’s so ripe it looks as if it’s about to walk away of its own accord – or shall we tootle off and go to mine?’

  ‘I’m stuffed,’ Ursula said.

  ‘Me too. Tootle off it is then. Shall I pick up the bill?’

  ‘I have no money. I’m thirteen,’ Ursula reminded her.

  They left the restaurant and, to Ursula’s astonishment, Izzie sauntered a few yards up the Strand and climbed into the driver’s seat of a gleaming open-top car, parked, rather carelessly, outside the Coal Hole. ‘You have a car!’ Ursula exclaimed.

  ‘Good, isn’t it? Not exactly paid for. Hop in. A Sunbeam, sports model. Certainly beats driving an ambulance. Wonderful in this weather. Shall we take the scenic route, go along the Emb
ankment?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  ‘Ah, the Thames,’ Izzie said when the river came into view. ‘The nymphs, sadly, are all departed.’ It was a lovely late-September afternoon, crisp as an apple. ‘London’s glorious, isn’t it?’ Izzie said. She drove as if she were on the circuit at Brooklands. It was both terrifying and exhilarating. Ursula supposed that if Izzie had managed to drive throughout the war unscathed then they would probably make it along the Victoria Embankment without coming to grief.

  As they approached Westminster Bridge they had to slow down on account of the crowds of people whose flow had been interrupted by a largely silent demonstration of unemployed men. I fought overseas, a placard held aloft read. Another proclaimed Hungry and wanting to work. ‘They’re so meek,’ Izzie said dismissively. ‘There’ll never be a revolution in this country. Not another one at any rate. We chopped the head off a king once and felt so guilty about it that we’ve been trying to make up for it ever since.’ A shabby-looking man came up alongside the car and shouted something incomprehensible at Izzie, although the meaning was clear.

  ‘Qu’ils mangent de la brioche,’ Izzie murmured. ‘You know she never said that, don’t you? Marie-Antoinette? She’s a rather maligned figure in history. You must never believe everything they say about a person. Generally speaking, most of it will be lies, half-truths at best.’ It was hard to figure out whether Izzie was a royalist or a republican. ‘Best not to adhere too closely to one side or the other really,’ she said.

  Big Ben tolled a solemn three o’clock as the Sunbeam pushed its way through the throng. ‘Si lunga tratta di gente, ch’io non avrei mai creduto che morte tanta n’avesse disfatta. Have you read Dante? You should. He’s very good.’ How did Izzie know so much? ‘Oh,’ she said airily. ‘Finishing school. And I spent some time in Italy after the war. I took a lover, of course. An impoverished count, it’s more or less de rigueur when you’re over there. Are you shocked?’

  ‘No.’ She was. Ursula wasn’t surprised there was a froideur between her mother and Izzie.