Life After Life

  ‘You know,’ Pamela said, ‘I used to argue with her because she said science had made the world a worse place, that it was all about men inventing new ways to kill people. But now I wonder if she wasn’t right.’ And that was before Hiroshima, of course.

  Ursula lit the gas fire, a rather pathetic little Radiant that looked as if it dated from the turn of the century, and fed the meter. The rumour was that pennies and shillings were running out. Ursula wondered why they couldn’t melt down armaments. Guns into ploughshares, and so on.

  She unpacked Pammy’s box, laying everything out on the little wooden draining board like a poor man’s still life. The vegetables were dirty but there wasn’t much hope of washing the soil off as the pipes were frozen, even in the little Ascot, although the gas pressure was so low that it could barely heat the water anyway. Water like a stone. At the bottom of the crate she found a half-bottle of whisky. Good old Pammy, ever the thoughtful one.

  She scooped some water from the bucket that she’d filled from the standpipe in the street and put a pan of water on the gas ring, thinking she might boil one of the eggs, although it would take for ever as there was only the tiniest frill of blue around the burner. There were warnings to be vigilant about the gas pressure – in case the gas came back on when the pilot light had gone out.

  Would it be so bad to be gassed, Ursula wondered? Gassed. She thought of Auschwitz. Treblinka. Jimmy had been a Commando and at the end of the war he had become attached, rather haphazardly according to him (although everything to do with Jimmy was always slightly haphazard), to the anti-tank regiment that liberated Bergen-Belsen. Ursula insisted that he told her what he had found there. He was reluctant and had probably withheld the worst but it was necessary to know. One must bear witness. (She heard Miss Woolf’s voice in her head, We must remember these people when we are safely in the future.)

  The toll of the dead had been her business during the war, the endless stream of figures that represented the blitzed and the bombed passed across her desk to be collated and recorded. They had seemed overwhelming, but the greater figures – the six million dead, the fifty million dead, the numberless infinities of souls – were in a realm beyond comprehension.

  Ursula had fetched water yesterday. They – who were ‘they’? After six years of war everyone had become accustomed to following ‘their’ orders, what an obedient lot the English were – they had set up a standpipe in the next street and Ursula had filled up a kettle and bucket from the tap. The woman ahead of her in the queue was terrifically smart in an enviable floor-length sable, silver-grey, and yet there she was, waiting patiently in the bitter cold with her buckets. She looked out of place in Soho but then who knew her story?

  The women at the well. Ursula seemed to remember that Jesus had a particularly confrontational conversation with the woman at the well. A woman of Samaria – no name, of course. She had had five husbands, Ursula recalled, and was living with a man who wasn’t her husband, but the King James Bible never said what had happened to those five. Perhaps she had poisoned the well.

  Ursula remembered Bridget telling them that when she was a girl in Ireland she had walked to a well every day to draw water. So much for progress. How quickly civilization could dissolve into its more ugly elements. Look at the Germans, the most cultured and well-mannered of people, and yet … Auschwitz, Treblinka, Bergen-Belsen. Given the same set of circumstances it could just as well have been the English, but that was something else you couldn’t say. Miss Woolf had believed that, she’d said—

  ‘I say,’ the woman in sable said, interrupting her thoughts. ‘Do you understand why my water is frozen solid and yet this isn’t?’ She had a cut-glass accent.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Ursula said. ‘I know nothing.’ The woman laughed and said, ‘Oh, I feel the same way, believe me,’ and Ursula thought that perhaps this was someone she would like as a friend but then a woman behind them said, ‘Get a move on, love,’ and the sable-furred woman hefted her buckets, as strapping as a Land Girl, and said, ‘Well, must be off, cheerio.’

  She turned on the wireless. Transmission of the Third Programme had been suspended for the duration. The war against the weather. You were lucky if you got the Home or the Light, there were so many electricity cuts. She needed noise, the sound of a familiar life. Jimmy had given her his old gramophone before he left, hers had been lost in Kensington along, sadly, with most of her records. She had managed to rescue a couple, miraculously unbroken, and placed one on the turntable now. ‘I’d Rather Be Dead And Buried In My Grave’. Ursula laughed. ‘Cheerful or what?’ she said out loud. She listened to the scratch and hiss of the old record. Was that how she felt?

  She glanced at the clock, Sylvie’s little gold carriage clock. She had brought it home after the funeral. Four o’clock only. Ye gods, how the days dragged. She caught the pips, turned off the news. What was the point?

  She had spent the afternoon trawling Oxford Street and Regent Street, for something to do – really it was just to get out of her monastic cell of a bedsit. All the shops were dim and dismal. Paraffin lamps in Swan and Edgar’s, candles in Selfridge’s – the drawn, shadowy faces of people like something from a painting by Goya. There was nothing to buy, or certainly nothing that she wanted, and anything she did want, like a lovely cosy-looking pair of fur-topped bootees, was outrageously expensive (fifteen guineas!). So depressing. ‘Worse than the war,’ Miss Fawcett at work said. She was leaving to get married, they had all clubbed together for her wedding present, a rather uninspiring vase, but Ursula wanted to get her something more personal, more special, but she couldn’t think what and had hoped that the West End department stores might have just the thing. They didn’t.

  She’d gone into a Lyon’s for a pale cup of tea, like lamb’s water, Bridget would have said. And a utilitarian teacake, she counted just two hard dry raisins, and a scraping of margarine, and tried to imagine she was eating something wonderful – a luscious Cremeschnitte or a slice of Dobostorte. She supposed the Germans weren’t getting much in the way of pastries at the moment.

  She murmured Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte accidentally out loud (such an extraordinary name, such an extraordinary cake) and attracted the unwanted attention of a neighbouring table, a woman stoically working her way through a large iced bun. ‘Refugee, love?’ she asked, surprising Ursula with her sympathetic tone.

  ‘Something like that,’ Ursula said.

  While she was waiting for the egg to boil – the water still only lukewarm – she rooted among her books, never unpacked after Kensington. She found the Dante that Izzie had given her, nicely tooled red leather but the pages all foxed, a copy of Donne (her favourite), The Waste Land (a rare first edition purloined from Izzie), a Collected Shakespeare, her beloved metaphysical poets and, finally, at the bottom of the box, her battered school copy of Keats, with an inscription that read To Ursula Todd, for good work. It would do for an epitaph too, she supposed. She flicked through the neglected pages until she found ‘The Eve of St Agnes’.

  Ah, bitter chill it was!

  The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;

  The hare limp’d trembling through the frozen grass,

  And silent was the flock in woolly fold.

  She read out loud and the words made her shiver. She should read something warming, Keats and his bees – For Summer has o’erbrimm’d their clammy cells. Keats should have died on English soil. Asleep in an English garden on a summer’s afternoon. Like Hugh.

  She ate the egg while reading a copy of yesterday’s Times, given to her by Mr Hobbs in the post room when he had finished with it, a little daily ritual they had acquired. The paper’s newly shrunk dimensions made it seem ridiculous somehow, as if the news itself was less important. Although really it was, wasn’t it?

  Snow like flakes of grey, soapy ash was falling outside the window. She thought of the Coles’ relatives in Poland – rising above Auschwitz like a volcanic cloud, circling the Earth and blotting out the sun. Even no
w, after everything people had learned about the camps and so on, anti-Semitism was still rife. ‘Jewboy’ she’d heard someone being called yesterday, and when Miss Andrews ducked out of contributing to Miss Fawcett’s wedding present Enid Barker had made a joke of it and said, ‘What a Jew,’ as if it were the mildest of insults.

  The office was a tedious, rather irritable place these days – fatigue, probably, due to the cold and the lack of good, nourishing food. And the work was tedious, an endless compilation and permutation of statistics to be filed away in the archives somewhere – to be pored over by the historians of the future, she supposed. They were still ‘clearing up and putting their house in order’, as Maurice would have it, as if the casualties of war were clutter to be put away and forgotten. Civil Defence had been stood down for over a year and a half yet she still hadn’t rid herself of the minutiae of bureaucracy. The mills of God (or the government) did indeed grind extremely small and slow.

  The egg was delicious, it tasted as if it had been laid that very morning. She found an old postcard, a picture of the Brighton Pavilion (bought on a day trip with Crighton) that she’d never sent, and scrawled a thank you to Pammy – Wonderful! Like a Red Cross package – and propped it up on the mantelpiece next to Sylvie’s clock. Next to Teddy’s photo too. Teddy and his Halifax crew taken one sunlit afternoon. They were lounging in an assortment of old chairs. Forever young. The dog, Lucky, stood as proud as a little figurehead on Teddy’s knee. How cheering it would be to still have Lucky. She had Teddy’s DFC, propped up on the glass of the photo frame. Ursula had a medal too but it meant nothing to her.

  She would put the postcard in with the afternoon post tomorrow. It would take an age to reach Fox Corner, she supposed.

  Five o’clock. She took her plate over to the sink to join the other unwashed dishes. The grey ash was a blizzard in the dark sky now and she pulled the flimsy cotton curtain to try to make it disappear. It tugged hopelessly on its wire and she gave up before she brought the whole thing down. The window was old and ill-fitting and let in a piercing draught.

  The electricity went off and she fumbled for the candle on the mantelpiece. Could it get any worse? Ursula took the candle and the whisky bottle to bed, climbed under the covers still in her coat. She was so tired.

  The flame on the little Radiant fire quivered alarmingly. Would it be so very bad? To cease upon the midnight with no pain. There were worse ways. Auschwitz, Treblinka. Teddy’s Halifax going down in flames. The only way to stop the tears was to keep drinking the whisky. Good old Pammy. The flame on the Radiant flickered and died. The pilot light too. She wondered when the gas would come back on. If the smell would wake her, if she would get up and relight it. She hadn’t expected to die like a fox frozen in its den. Pammy would see the postcard, know that she’d been appreciated. Ursula closed her eyes. She felt as though she had been awake for a hundred years and more. She really was so very, very tired.

  Darkness began to fall.

  Snow

  11 February 1910

  WARM AND MILKY and new, the smell was a siren call to Queenie the cat. Queenie, strictly speaking, belonged to Mrs Glover, although she was aloofly unaware that she was anyone’s possession. An enormous tortoiseshell, she had arrived on the doorstep with Mrs Glover, carried in a carpet bag, and had taken up residence in her own Windsor chair, a smaller version of Mrs Glover’s, next to the big kitchen range. Having her own chair didn’t stop her leaving her fur on every other available seat in the house, including the beds. Hugh, no great lover of cats, complained continually about the mysterious way that the ‘mangy beast’ managed to deposit its hairs on his suits.

  More malevolent than most cats, she had a way of simply punching you, like a fighting hare, if you got close to her. Bridget, also no great cat-lover, declared the cat to be possessed by a demon.

  Where was that delicious new scent coming from? Queenie padded up the stairs and into the big bedroom. The room was warmed by the embers of a hot fire. This was a good room, the thick, soft quilt on the bed and the gentle rhythms of sleeping bodies. And there – a perfect little cat-sized bed, already warmed by a perfect little cat-sized cushion. Queenie kneaded her paws on the soft flesh, carried suddenly back to kittenhood. She settled herself down more comfortably, a deep bass purr of happiness rumbling in her throat.

  Sharp needles in the soft skin pricked her into consciousness. Pain was a new, unwelcome thing. But then suddenly she was muffled, her mouth full of something, stoppering her, suffocating her. The more she tried to breathe the less it became possible. She was pinned down, helpless, no breath. Falling, falling, a bird shot.

  Queenie had already purred herself into a pleasant oblivion when she was woken by a shriek and found herself being grabbed and thrown across the room. Growling and spitting, she backed out of the door, sensing this was a fight she would lose.

  Nothing. Slack and still, the little ribcage not moving. Sylvie’s own heart was knocking in her chest as if a fist was inside her, punching its way out. Such danger! Like a terrible thrill, a tide washing through her.

  Instinctively, she placed her mouth over the baby’s face, covering the little mouth and nose. She blew gently. And again. And again.

  And the baby came back to life. It was that simple. (‘I’m sure it was a coincidence,’ Dr Fellowes said, when told of this medical miracle. ‘It seems very unlikely that you could revive someone using that method.’)

  Bridget returned to the kitchen from upstairs where she had been delivering beef tea and reported faithfully to Mrs Glover, ‘Mrs Todd says to tell Cook – that’s you, Mrs Glover – that you have to get rid of the cat. That it would be better if you had it killed.’

  ‘Killed?’ Mrs Glover said, outraged. The cat, now reinstated in her usual place by the stove, raised her head and stared balefully at Bridget.

  ‘I’m just telling you what she said.’

  ‘Over my dead body,’ Mrs Glover said.

  Mrs Haddock sipped a glass of hot rum, in what she hoped was a ladylike way. It was her third and she was beginning to glow from the inside out. She had been on her way to help deliver a baby when the snow had forced her to take refuge in the snug of the Blue Lion, outside Chalfont St Peter. It was not the kind of place she would ever have considered entering, except out of necessity, but there was a roaring fire in the snug and the company was proving surprisingly convivial. Horse brasses and copper jugs gleamed and twinkled. Visible from the snug, on the other side of the counter, was the public bar, where the drink seemed to flow particularly freely. It was an altogether rowdier place. A sing-song was currently in progress there and Mrs Haddock was surprised to find her toe tapping in accompaniment.

  ‘You should see the snow,’ the landlord said, leaning across the great polished depth of the brass bar counter. ‘We could all be stuck here for days.’

  ‘Days?’

  ‘You may as well have another tot of rum. You won’t be going anywhere in a hurry tonight.’

  Like a Fox in a Hole

  September 1923

  ‘AND SO YOU don’t see Dr Kellet at all now?’ Izzie asked, snapping open her enamelled cigarette case and displaying a neat row of Black Russian cigarettes. ‘Gasper?’ she offered, holding out the case. Izzie addressed everyone as if they were the same age as herself. It was both seductive and lazy.

  ‘I’m thirteen years old,’ Ursula said. Which as far as she could see answered both questions.

  ‘Thirteen is quite grown-up nowadays. And life can be very short, you know,’ Izzie added, taking out a long ebony and ivory cigarette holder. She cast vaguely around the restaurant for a waiter to produce a light. ‘I rather miss those little visits of yours to London. Chaperoning you to Harley Street and then on to the Savoy for tea. A treat for both of us.’

  ‘I haven’t seen Dr Kellet for over a year,’ Ursula said. ‘I’m considered cured.’

  ‘Jolly good. I, on the other hand, am considered by la famille to be incurable. You are, of course, a jeune fille
bien élevée and will never know what it is like to be the scapegoat for everyone else’s sins.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. I think I have an idea.’

  It was Saturday lunchtime and they were in Simpson’s. ‘Ladies at leisure,’ Izzie said, over great slices of bloody beef carved off the bone before their eyes. Millie’s mother, Mrs Shawcross, was a vegetarian and Ursula imagined her horror at the sight of the great haunch of meat. Hugh called Mrs Shawcross (Roberta) ‘a Bohemian’, Mrs Glover called her mad.

  Izzie leaned towards the young waiter who had scurried over to light her cigarette. ‘Thank you, darling,’ she murmured, gazing directly up into his eyes in a way that made him grow suddenly as pink as the roast beef on her plate. ‘Le rosbif,’ she said to Ursula, dismissing the waiter with an indifferent flap of her hand. She was always peppering her conversation with French words (‘I spent some time in Paris when I was younger. And, of course, the war …’). ‘Do you speak French?’

  ‘Well, we do it at school,’ Ursula said. ‘But that doesn’t mean I can speak it.’