Life After Life (12 page)

‘A
fait accompli
,’ Sylvie said when she was presented with the rabbits. ‘You can’t keep them in the house though. You’ll have to ask Old Tom to build a hutch for them.’

The rabbits had escaped long ago, of course, and had multiplied happily. Old Tom had laid down poison and traps to little avail. (‘Goodness,’ Sylvie said, looking out one morning at the rabbits contentedly breakfasting on the lawn. ‘It’s like Australia out there.’) Maurice, who was learning to shoot in the junior ATC at school, had spent all of last summer’s long holiday taking potshots at them from his bedroom window with Hugh’s neglected old Westley Richards wildfowler. Pamela was so furious with him that she put some of his own itching powder (he was forever in joke shops) in his bed. Ursula immediately got the blame and Pamela had to own up, even though Ursula had been quite ready to take it on the chin. That was the kind of person Pamela was – always very stuck on being fair.

They heard voices in the garden next door – they had new neighbours they were yet to meet, the Shawcrosses – and Pamela said, ‘Come on, let’s go and see if we can catch a look. I wonder what they’re called.’

Winnie, Gertie, Millie, Nancy and baby Bea, Ursula thought but said nothing. She was getting as good at keeping secrets as Sylvie.

Bridget gripped her hatpin between her teeth and lifted her arms to adjust her hat. She had sewn a new bunch of paper violets on to it, especially for the victory. She was standing at the top of the stairs, singing
K-K-Katy
to herself. She was thinking of Clarence. When they were married (‘in the spring,’ he said, although it had been ‘before Christmas’ not so long ago) she would be leaving Fox Corner. She would have her own little household, her own babies.

Staircases were very dangerous places, according to Sylvie. People died on them. Sylvie always told them not to play at the top of the stairs.

Ursula crept along the carpet runner. Took a quiet breath and then, both hands out in front of her, as if trying to stop a train, she threw herself at the small of Bridget’s back. Bridget whipped her head round, mouth and eyes wide in horror at the sight of Ursula. Bridget went flying, toppling down the stairs in a great flurry of arms and legs. Ursula only just managed to stop herself from following in her wake.

Practice makes perfect.

‘The arm’s broken, I’m afraid,’ Dr Fellowes said. ‘You took quite a tumble down those stairs.’

‘She’s always been a clumsy girl,’ Mrs Glover said.

‘
Someone
pushed me,’ Bridget said. A great bruise bloomed on her forehead, she was holding her hat, the violets crushed.

‘Someone?’ Sylvie echoed. ‘Who? Who would push you downstairs, Bridget?’ She looked around the faces in the kitchen. ‘Teddy?’ Teddy put his hand over his mouth as if he was trying to stop words escaping. Sylvie turned to Pamela. ‘Pamela?’

‘Me?’ Pamela said, piously holding both of her outraged hands over her heart like a martyr. Sylvie looked at Bridget, who made a little inclination of her head towards Ursula.

‘Ursula?’ Sylvie frowned. Ursula stared blankly ahead, a conscientious objector about to be shot. ‘Ursula,’ Sylvie said severely, ‘do you know something about this?’

Ursula had done a wicked thing, she had pushed Bridget down the stairs. Bridget might have died and she would have been a murderer now. All she knew was that she
had
to do it. The great sense of dread had come over her and she had to do it.

She ran out of the room and hid in one of Teddy’s secret hiding places, the cupboard beneath the stairs. After a while the door opened and Teddy crept in and sat on the floor next to her. ‘I don’t think you pushed Bridget,’ he said and slipped his small, warm hand into hers.

‘Thank you. I did though.’

‘Well, I still love you.’

She might never have come out of that cupboard but the front-door bell clanged and there was a sudden great commotion in the hallway. Teddy opened the door to see what was happening. He ducked back in and reported, ‘Mummy’s kissing a man. She’s crying. He’s crying as well.’ Ursula put her head out of the cupboard to witness this phenomenon. She turned in astonishment to Teddy. ‘I think it might be Daddy,’ she said.

Peace

February 1947

URSULA TRAVERSED THE street cautiously. The road surface was treacherous – crimped and rucked by ridges and crevasses of ice. The pavements were even more perilous, no more than massifs of ugly, hard-packed snow, or, worse, toboggan runs ironed by the neighbourhood children who had nothing better to do than enjoy themselves because the schools were closed. Oh, God, Ursula thought, how mean-spirited I’ve become. The bloody war. The bloody peace.

By the time she had put her key in the lock of the street door she was exhausted. A shopping trip had never seemed such a challenge previously, even in the worst days of the Blitz. The skin on her face was whipped raw by the biting wind and her toes were numb with cold. The temperature hadn’t risen above zero for weeks, colder even than ’41. Ursula imagined at some future date trying to recall this glacial chill and knew she would never be able to conjure it up. It was so
physical
, you expected bones to shatter, skin to crackle. Yesterday she had seen two men trying to open a manhole in the road with what looked like a flamethrower. Perhaps there would be no future of thaw and warmth, perhaps this was the beginning of a new Ice Age. First fire and then ice.

It was as well, she thought, that the war had robbed her of any care for fashion. She was wearing, in order, from inner to outer – a short-sleeved vest, a long-sleeved vest, a long-sleeved pullover, a cardigan and stretched on top of it all her shabby old winter coat, bought new in Peter Robinson’s two years before the war. Not to mention, of course, the usual drab underwear, a thick tweed skirt, grey wool stockings, gloves
and
mittens, a scarf, a hat and her mother’s old fur-lined boots. Pity any man who was suddenly moved to ravish her. ‘Chance’d be a fine thing, eh?’ Enid Barker, one of the secretaries, said over the balm and succour of the tea-urn. Enid had auditioned for the part of plucky young London woman somewhere around 1940 and had been playing it with gusto ever since. Ursula chided herself for more unkind thoughts. Enid was a good sort. Terrifically skilled at typing tabulations, something Ursula had never quite got the hang of when she was at secretarial college. She had done a typing and shorthand course, years ago now – everything before the war seemed like ancient history (her own). She had been surprisingly adept. Mr Carver, the man who ran the secretarial college, had suggested that her shorthand was good enough for her to train as a court reporter at the Old Bailey. That would have been a quite different life, perhaps a better one. Of course, there was no way of knowing these things.

She trudged up the unlit stairs to her flat. She lived on her own now. Millie had married an American USAF officer and moved to New York State (‘Me – a war bride! Who’d a thunk it?’). A thin layer of soot and what seemed to be grease coated the walls of the stairway. It was an old building, in Soho of all places (‘needs must’ she heard her mother’s voice say). The woman who lived upstairs had a great many gentleman callers and Ursula had become accustomed to the creaking bedsprings and strange noises that came through the ceiling. She was pleasant though, always ready with a cheery greeting and never missed her turn at sweeping the stairs.

The building had been Dickensian in its dinginess to begin with and was now even more neglected and unloved. But then, the whole of London looked wretched. Grimy and grim. She remembered Miss Woolf saying that she didn’t think ‘poor old London’ would ever be clean again. (‘Everything is so awfully
shabby
.’) Perhaps she was right.

‘You wouldn’t think we had
won
the war,’ Jimmy said when he came to visit, spivvy in his American clothes, shiny and bright with promise. She readily forgave her little brother his New World élan, he had had a hard war. Hadn’t they all? ‘A long and hard war,’ Churchill had promised. How right he had been.

It was a temporary billet. She had the money for something better but the truth was she didn’t really care. It was just one room, a window above the sink, a hot-water geyser, shared toilet down the hall. Ursula still missed the old flat in Kensington that she had shared with Millie. They had been bombed out in the big raid of May ’41. Ursula had thought of Bessie Smith singing
like a fox without a hole
but she had actually moved back in for a few weeks, living without a roof. It was chilly but she was a good camper. She had learned with the Bund Deutscher Mädel, although it wasn’t the kind of fact that you bandied about in those dark days.

But here was a lovely surprise waiting for her. A gift from Pammy – a wooden crate filled with potatoes, leeks, onions, an enormous emerald-green Savoy cabbage (a thing of beauty) and on the top, half a dozen eggs, nestled in cotton wool inside an old trilby of Hugh’s. Lovely eggs, brown and speckled, as precious as unpolished gemstones, tiny feathers stuck here and there.
From Fox Corner, with love
the label attached to the crate read. It was like receiving a Red Cross parcel. How on earth had it got here? There were no trains running and Pamela was almost certainly snowed in. Even more puzzling was how her sister had managed to dig up this wintry harvest when
Earth stood hard as iron
.

When she opened the door she found a scrap of paper on the floor. She had to put her spectacles on to read it. It was a note from Bea Shawcross.
Visited but you weren’t in. Will pop by again. Bea xxx
. Ursula was sorry she had missed Bea’s visit, it would have been a nicer way to spend a Saturday afternoon than wandering in the dystopian West End. She was immensely cheered by nothing more than the sight of a cabbage. But then the cabbage – unexpectedly as was always the wont of these moments – uprooted an unwanted memory of the little parcel in the cellar at Argyll Road and she was plunged back into gloom. She was so up and down these days. Honestly, she chided herself, buck up, for heaven’s sake.

It felt even colder inside the flat. She had developed chilblains, horrid painful things. Even her ears were cold. She wished she had some earmuffs, or a balaclava, like the grey woollen ones that Teddy and Jimmy used to wear to school. There was a line in ‘The Eve of St Agnes’, what was it? Something about the stone effigies in the church
in icy hoods and mails
. It used to make her feel cold every time she recited it. Ursula had learned the whole poem at school, a feat of memory that was probably beyond her now, and what, after all, had been the point if she couldn’t even remember a complete line? She had a sudden longing for Sylvie’s fur coat, a neglected mink, like a large friendly animal, that now belonged to Pamela. Sylvie had chosen death on VE Day. While other women were scratching together food for tea-parties and dancing in the streets of Britain, Sylvie had lain down on the bed that had been Teddy’s when he was a child and swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills. No note, but her intention and motivation were quite clear to the family that she left behind. There had been a horrible funeral tea for her at Fox Corner. Pamela said it was the coward’s way out, but Ursula wasn’t so sure. She thought it showed a rather admirable clarity of purpose. Sylvie was another casualty of war, another statistic.

‘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
.)