Life After Life (16 page)

Izzie danced around the bedroom singing
I wish I could shimmy like my sister Kate
. ‘Can you shimmy? Look, it’s easy.’ It wasn’t and they collapsed in laughter on the satin eiderdown of the bed. ‘Gort to ’ave fun, ’aven’t yew?’ Izzie said in an atrocious mock-Cockney accent. The bedroom was a terrible mess, clothes everywhere, satin petticoats,
crêpe de Chine
nightdresses, silk stockings, partnerless shoes lying abandoned on the carpet, a dusting of Coty powder over everything. ‘You can try things on if you want,’ Izzie said carelessly. ‘Although you’re rather small compared to me.
Jolie et petite
.’ Ursula declined, fearing enchantment. They were the kind of clothes that might turn you into someone else.

‘What shall we do?’ Izzie said, suddenly bored. ‘We could play cards? Bezique?’ She danced through to the living room and tripped her way towards a large shining chrome object that looked as if it belonged on the bridge of an ocean liner and turned out to be a cocktail cabinet. ‘A drink?’ She looked doubtfully at Ursula. ‘No, don’t tell me, you’re only thirteen.’ She sighed, lit a cigarette and looked at the clock. ‘We’re too late to catch a matinee, too early for an evening performance.
London Calling
! is on at the Duke of York’s, it’s supposed to be very amusing. We could go, you could get a later train home.’

Ursula fingered the keys on the Royal typewriter that sat on a desk at the window. ‘My trade,’ Izzie said. ‘Perhaps I should put you in this week’s column.’

‘Really? What would you say?’

‘I don’t know, make something up, I expect,’ she said. ‘That’s what writers do.’ She took out a record from the cabinet of the gramophone and put it on the turntable. ‘Listen to this,’ she said. ‘You’ve never heard anything like it.’

It was true, she hadn’t. It started with a piano, but nothing like the Chopin and Liszt that Sylvie played so nicely (and Pamela in such a pedestrian fashion).

‘They call it honky-tonk, I believe,’ Izzie said. A woman began to sing, raw and American. She sounded as if she had spent her life in a prison cell. ‘Ida Cox,’ Izzie said. ‘She’s a Negress. Isn’t she extraordinary?’

She was.

‘Singing about how wretched it is to be a woman,’ Izzie said, lighting up another cigarette and sucking hard. ‘If only one could find someone really filthy rich to marry.
A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of
. Do you know who said that? No? Well you should.’ She was suddenly irritable, a not completely domesticated animal. The phone rang and she said, ‘Saved by the bell,’ and proceeded to have a feverishly animated conversation with the unseen, unheard caller. She ended the call by saying, ‘That would be delish, darling, meet you in half an hour.’ And to Ursula, ‘I would offer you a lift but I’m going to Claridge’s and it’s simply
miles
from Marylebone and after that I have a party to go to in Lowndes Square so I can’t possibly see you to the station. You can Tube it to Marylebone, can’t you? You know how? The Piccadilly line to Piccadilly Circus and then change to the Bakerloo to Marylebone. Come on, I’ll walk out with you.’

When they reached the street Izzie breathed deeply as if she’d been released from unwanted confinement. ‘Ah, twilight,’ she said. ‘The violet hour. Lovely, isn’t it?’ She kissed Ursula on the cheek and said, ‘It was marvellous seeing you, we have to do this again. Are you all right from here?
Tout droit
on to Sloane Street, turn left and Bob’s your uncle, there’s Knightsbridge Tube station. Toodle-oo then.’

‘
Amor fati
,’ Dr Kellet said, ‘have you heard of that?’ It sounded like he had said, ‘A more fatty.’ Ursula was puzzled – both herself and Dr Kellet were on the lean side. Nietzsche (‘a philosopher’), he said, was drawn to it. ‘A simple acceptance of what comes to us, regarding it as neither bad nor good.’

‘
Werde, der du bist
, as he would have it,’ Dr Kellet continued, knocking the ashes from his pipe on to the hearth from where Ursula supposed someone else would sweep them up. ‘Do you know what that means?’ Ursula wondered how many ten-year-old girls Dr Kellet had actually encountered before. ‘It means become who you are,’ he said, adding more shreds of tobacco to the meerschaum. (The being before the non-being, Ursula supposed.) ‘Nietzsche got that from Pindar.
. Do you know Greek?’ He had quite lost her now. ‘It means – become such as you are, having learned what that is.’

Ursula thought he said ‘from Pinner’, which was where Hugh’s old nanny had retired to, living with her sister above a shop in an old building on the high street. Hugh had driven Ursula and Teddy out there in his splendid Bentley one Sunday afternoon. Nanny Mills was rather frightening (although not to Hugh apparently), spending a lot of time quizzing Ursula about her manners and inspecting Teddy’s ears for dirt. Her sister was nicer and plied them with glasses of elderflower cordial and slices of milk fadge spread with blackberry jelly. ‘How is Isobel?’ Nanny Mills asked, her mouth set like a prune. ‘Izzie is Izzie,’ Hugh said, which if you repeated it very quickly, as Teddy did later, sounded like a small swarm of wasps. Izzie, apparently, had become herself a long time ago.

It seemed unlikely that Nietzsche had obtained anything from Pinner, least of all his beliefs.

‘Nice time with Izzie?’ Hugh asked when he picked her up from the station. There was something reassuring about the sight of Hugh in his grey homburg and long dark-blue wool overcoat. He scrutinized her for any visible change. She thought it best not to tell him that she had taken the Tube on her own. It had been a terrifying adventure, a dark night in the forest, but one which, like any good heroine, she had survived. Ursula shrugged. ‘We went to Simpson’s for lunch.’

‘Hm,’ Hugh said as if trying to decipher a meaning from this.

‘We listened to a Negress singing.’

‘In Simpson’s?’ Hugh puzzled.

‘On Izzie’s gramophone.’

‘Hm,’ again. He opened the car door for her and she settled into the lovely leathery seat of the Bentley, almost as reassuring as Hugh himself. Sylvie regarded the car as ‘ruinously’ extravagant. It
was
breathtakingly expensive. The war had made Sylvie parsimonious: slivers of soap were collected and boiled down for the laundry, sheets turned side to middle, hats refurbished. ‘We would live on eggs and chickens if she had her way,’ Hugh laughed. He, on the other hand, had become less prudent since the war, ‘perhaps not the best trait for a banker to develop’, Sylvie said. ‘
Carpe diem
,’ Hugh said and Sylvie said, ‘You were never one for seizing.’

‘Izzie has a car now,’ Ursula offered. ‘Does she?’ Hugh said. ‘I’m sure it’s not as splendid as this beast.’ He patted the dashboard of the Bentley fondly. As they drove away from the station he said quietly, ‘She’s not to be trusted.’

‘Who?’ (Mother? The car?)

‘Izzie.’

‘No, you’re probably right,’ Ursula agreed.

‘How did you find her?’

‘Oh, you know. Incurable. Izzie is Izzie, after all.’

When they returned to the house they found Teddy and Jimmy playing a tidy game of dominos on the table in the morning room while Pamela was next door with Gertie Shawcross. Winnie was slightly older than Pamela and Gertie slightly younger and Pamela divided her time equally between them but rarely both at the same time. Ursula, devoted to Millie, found it an odd arrangement. Teddy loved all the Shawcross girls but his heart was in Nancy’s small hands.

Of Sylvie there was no sign. ‘Don’t know,’ Bridget said, rather indifferently, when Hugh enquired.

Mrs Glover had left them a rather utilitarian mutton stew keeping warm in the range. Mrs Glover no longer lived with them at Fox Corner. She rented a little house in the village so that she could look after George as well as them. George hardly ever left the house. Bridget referred to him as a ‘poor soul’ and it was hard to disagree with that description. If it was good weather (or even not particularly good weather at all) he sat in a big ugly bath-chair at the front door and watched the world pass him by. His handsome head (‘Leonine, once,’ Sylvie said sadly) hung down on his chest and a long thread of drool dangled from his mouth. ‘Poor devil,’ Hugh said. ‘Better off if he’d been killed.’

Sometimes one or other of them tagged along when Sylvie – or a more reluctant Bridget – visited him during the day. It seemed odd that they would go to his home to see him while his own mother stayed in their home looking after them. Sylvie would fuss with the blanket across his legs and fetch him a glass of beer and then wipe his mouth the way you did with Jimmy.

There were other war veterans in the neighbourhood, visible thanks to their limps or missing limbs. All those unclaimed arms and legs lost in the fields of Flanders – Ursula imagined them pushing roots down into the mud and shoots up to the sky and growing once again into men. An army of men marching back for revenge. (‘Ursula has morbid thoughts,’ she heard Sylvie say to Hugh. Ursula had become a great eavesdropper, it was the only way to find out what people were really thinking. She didn’t hear Hugh’s answer as Bridget came crashing into the room in a fury because the cat – Hattie, one of Queenie’s offspring, possessed of the same character as her mother – had stolen the poached salmon that was to have been their lunch.)

There were those, too, who, like the men in Dr Kellet’s waiting room, had less visible injuries. There was an ex-soldier in the village called Charles Chorley who had served with the Buffs and had come through the war without a scratch and then one day in the spring of 1921 he had stabbed his wife and three children where they lay sleeping in their beds and then shot himself in the head with a Mauser he had taken from a German soldier he had killed at Bapaume. (‘Terrible mess,’ Dr Fellowes reported. ‘These chaps should think about the people who have to clean up afterwards.’)

Bridget, of course, had her ‘own cross to bear’, having lost Clarence. Like Izzie, Bridget was resigned to spinsterhood although she embraced it in a less giddy fashion. They had all attended Clarence’s funeral, even Hugh. Mrs Dodds had been her usual restrained self and had flinched when Sylvie placed a comforting hand on her arm, but after they had shuffled away from the gaping hole of the grave (not a thing of beauty, not at all) Mrs Dodds said to Ursula, ‘Part of him died during the war. This was just the rest of him catching up,’ and she put her finger to the corner of her eye and dabbed at a trace of moisture there – a tear would have been too generous a description. Ursula didn’t know why she had been chosen for this confidence, possibly simply because she was the nearest person. Certainly no response was expected, or received.

‘Ironic, one might say,’ Sylvie said, ‘for Clarence to have survived the war and to die of an illness.’ (‘What would I have done if one of you had caught the influenza?’ she often said.)

Ursula and Pamela had spent a considerable amount of time discussing whether Clarence had been buried with his mask on or off. (And if off, where might it be now?) They didn’t feel it was the kind of thing that they could ask Bridget. Bridget said bitterly that Old Mrs Dodds had finally got her son to herself and stopped another woman taking him away from her. (‘A little harsh, perhaps,’ Hugh murmured.) Clarence’s photograph, a print of the one taken for his mother, before Bridget knew him, before he marched off to his destiny, had now joined that of Sam Wellington in the shed. ‘The endless ranks of the dead,’ Sylvie said angrily. ‘Everyone wants to forget them.’

‘Well I certainly do,’ Hugh said.

Sylvie returned in time for Mrs Glover’s apple charlotte. Their own apples – a small orchard that Sylvie had planted at the end of the war was beginning to bear fruit. When Hugh wondered where she had been she said something indistinct about Gerrards Cross. She sat at the dining table and said, ‘I’m not really terribly hungry.’

Hugh caught her eye and, nodding in Ursula’s direction, said, ‘Izzie.’ An exquisite shorthand communication.

Ursula had expected an inquisition but all Sylvie said was ‘Good lord, I had quite forgotten that you had been to London. You’ve returned in one piece, I’m glad to see.’

‘Untainted,’ Ursula said brightly. ‘Do you, by the way, know who it was who said,
A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of
?’ Sylvie’s knowledge, like Izzie’s, was random yet far-ranging, ‘the sign that one has acquired one’s learning from novels, rather than an education’, according to Sylvie.

‘Austen,’ Sylvie said promptly. ‘
Mansfield Park
. She puts the words in Mary Crawford’s mouth, for whom she professes disdain, of course, but really I expect dear Aunt Jane rather believed those words. Why?’

Ursula shrugged. ‘Nothing.’

‘
Till I came to Mansfield, I had not imagined a country parson ever aspired to a shrubbery, or anything of the kind
. Wonderful stuff. I always think the word shrubbery denotes a certain kind of person.’

‘We have a shrubbery,’ Hugh said but Sylvie ignored him and continued to Ursula, ‘You really should read Jane Austen. You’re surely the right age by now.’ Sylvie seemed quite gay, a mood somehow at odds with the mutton that was still sitting on the table in its dull brown pot, little ponds of white fat congealing on the surface. ‘Really,’ Sylvie said sharply, turning suddenly like the weather. ‘Standards are falling everywhere, even in one’s own home.’ Hugh raised his eyebrows and before Sylvie had a chance to call on Bridget he got up from the table and took the stew-pot back to the kitchen himself. Their little maid-of-all-work, Marjorie, no longer so little, had recently decamped and Bridget and Mrs Glover were left to shoulder the burden of looking after them. (‘It’s not as if we’re demanding in any way,’ Sylvie said crossly when Bridget mentioned that she hadn’t had a pay rise since the end of the war. ‘She should be grateful.’)