Life After Life (17 page)

In bed that night – Ursula and Pamela still shared the cramped quarters of the attic bedroom (‘like prisoners in a cell’ according to Teddy) – Pamela said, ‘Why didn’t she invite me as well as you, or even instead of you?’ This, being Pamela, was said with genuine curiosity rather than malice.

‘She thinks I’m interesting.’

Pamela laughed and said, ‘She thinks Mrs Glover’s Brown Windsor is
interesting
.’

‘I know. I’m not flattered.’

‘It’s because you’re pretty and clever,’ Pamela said, ‘while I am merely clever.’

‘That’s not true and you know it,’ Ursula said, hotly defensive of Pamela.

‘I don’t mind.’

‘She says she’ll put me in her newspaper next week but I don’t suppose she will.’

Ursula, in her account to Pamela of the day’s adventures in London, had omitted a scene she had witnessed, unseen by Izzie, who had been preoccupied with turning the car round in the middle of the road outside the Coal Hole. A woman wearing a mink coat had come out of the entrance to the Savoy, on the arm of a rather elegant man. The woman was laughing in a carefree way at something the man had just said but then she broke away from his arm to search in her handbag for her purse in order to drop a handful of coins into the bowl of an ex-soldier who was sitting on the pavement. The man had no legs and was perched on some kind of makeshift wooden trolley. Ursula had seen another limbless man on a similar contraption outside Marylebone station. Indeed, the more she had looked on the London streets, the more amputees she had seen.

A doorman from the hotel darted out of Savoy Court and advanced on the legless man, who quickly scooted away using his hands as oars on the pavement. The woman who had given him money remonstrated with the doorman – Ursula could make out her handsome, impatient features – but then the elegant man took her gently by the elbow and guided her away up the Strand. The remarkable thing about this scene was not the content but the characters. Ursula had never seen the elegant man before but the agitated woman was – quite unmistakably – Sylvie. If she hadn’t recognized Sylvie, she would have recognized the mink, given to her by Hugh for their tenth wedding anniversary. She seemed a long way from Gerrards Cross.

‘Well,’ Izzie said when the car was finally facing the right way, ‘that was a tricky manoeuvre!’

When it came to the next week Ursula was indeed absent from Izzie’s column, even in fictional form. She had written instead about the freedom that the single woman could obtain from ownership of ‘a little car’. ‘The joys of the open road far surpass being trapped on a filthy omnibus or being followed down a dark street by a stranger. One has no need to glance nervously over one’s shoulder at the wheel of a Sunbeam.’

‘I say, that’s grim,’ Pamela said. ‘Do you think she has? Been followed down a street by a stranger?’

‘Lots of times, I expect.’

Ursula was not called upon again to be Izzie’s ‘special chum’, indeed none of them heard from her again until she turned up on the doorstep on Christmas Eve (invited but not expected) and declared herself to be ‘in a bit of a jam’, a state which necessitated her being closeted in the growlery with Hugh, to emerge an hour later looking almost chastened. She had brought no presents with her and smoked throughout Christmas dinner, picking listlessly at her food. ‘Annual income twenty pounds,’ Hugh said when Bridget brought the brandy-soaked pudding to the table. ‘Annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.’

‘Oh, do shut up,’ Izzie said and flounced off before Teddy could put a match to the pudding.

‘Dickens,’ Sylvie said to Ursula.

‘
J’étais un peu dérangée
,’ Izzie said to Ursula, rather contritely, next morning by way of explanation.

‘Silly of me, really,’ Izzie said. ‘I got in a bit of a muddle.’

In the new year the Sunbeam disappeared and the Basil Street address was exchanged for a less salubrious one in Swiss Cottage (an even duller
endroit
) but nonetheless Izzie remained undeniably Izzie.

December 1923

JIMMY HAD A cold so Pammy said she would stay at home with him and make decorations from silver milk-bottle tops while Ursula and Teddy tramped along the lane in search of holly. Holly was abundant in the copse but the copse was further away and the weather was so wretched that they wanted to be outside for as little time as possible. Mrs Glover, Bridget and Sylvie were confined to the kitchen, caught up in the afternoon drama of Christmas cooking.

‘Don’t pick any branches without berries,’ Pamela instructed as they left the house. ‘And don’t forget to look for some mistletoe as well.’

They went prepared with pruning shears and a pair of Sylvie’s leather gardening gloves, having learned the painful lesson of previous Christmas foraging expeditions. They had their sights set on the big holly tree in the field at the far end of the lane, having been deprived of the handy holly hedge in the garden, which had been replaced by a more biddable privet after the war. The whole neighbourhood was tamer and more suburban. Sylvie said it would not be long before the village had spread so much that they would be surrounded by houses. ‘People must live somewhere,’ Hugh said reasonably. ‘But not here,’ Sylvie said.

It was unpleasantly windy and spitting with rain and Ursula would have much preferred to stay by the fire in the morning room with the festive promise of Mrs Glover’s mince pies scenting the whole house. Even Teddy, usually the one to find a silver lining, trudged disconsolately along beside her, hunched against the weather, a small, stalwart Knight Templar in his knitted grey balaclava. ‘This is beastly,’ he said. Only Trixie relished the outing, ferreting in the hedgerows and delving in the ditch as if she had been sent on a mission to unearth treasure. She was a noisy dog, much given to barking for reasons apparent only to herself, so when, way ahead of them in the lane, she began to yap deliriously they took little notice.

Trixie had quietened down a bit by the time they caught up with her. She was standing sentinel over her prize, and Teddy said, ‘Something dead, I expect.’ Trixie was particularly skilled at truffling out half-rotted birds and the desiccated corpses of larger mammals. ‘A rat or a vole, probably,’ Teddy said. And then an eloquent ‘Oh,’ when he saw the true nature of the trove in the ditch.

‘I’ll stay here,’ Ursula said to Teddy, ‘and you run back to the house and fetch someone,’ but then as she watched his vulnerable little figure setting off, running alone along the deserted lane, the early winter dark already closing in around him, she had shouted at him to wait for her. Who knew what terror lay in wait? For Teddy, for all of them.

There was confusion as to what to do with the body over the holiday and eventually it was decided to keep it in the ice house at Ettringham Hall until after Christmas.

Dr Fellowes, who had arrived along with a police constable, said the child had died of unnatural causes. A girl, eight or nine years old; her second set of front teeth had grown in although they had been knocked out before death. There were no little girls reported missing, the police said, certainly not locally. They speculated she might be a gypsy, although Ursula thought that gypsies
took
children, rather than left them behind.

It was almost New Year before a reluctant Lady Daunt was willing to give her up. When they removed her from the ice house they found her decorated like a relic – flowers and little tokens on her body, her skin bathed and her hair brushed and beribboned. As well as their three sons sacrificed to the Great War, the Daunts had also once had a girl, dead in infancy, and her custody of the little corpse had caused Lady Daunt to revisit her old grief and she had gone out of her mind for a while. She wanted to bury the girl in the grounds of the Hall but there was a rebellious murmuring from the villagers who insisted that she be buried in the churchyard, ‘Not hidden away as Lady Daunt’s pet,’ someone said. A strange kind of pet, Ursula thought.

Neither her identity nor that of her murderer was ever discovered. The police questioned everyone in the neighbourhood. They had come to Fox Corner one evening and Pamela and Ursula had almost hung themselves from the banisters in an attempt to hear what was said. From this eavesdropping they learned that no one in the village was a suspect and that ‘terrible things’ had been done to the child.

In the end she was buried on the last day of the old year but not before the vicar had christened her, as the general feeling was that although the girl was determined to remain an enigma she should not be buried without a name. No one seemed to know how ‘Angela’ was arrived at but it seemed appropriate. Nearly the whole village turned out for the funeral and many wept more heartily for Angela than they had ever done for their own flesh and blood. There was sadness rather than fear and Pamela and Ursula often discussed why it was, exactly, that everyone they knew was regarded as innocent.

Lady Daunt was not the only one to be strangely affected by the murder. Sylvie was particularly disturbed, more by anger, it seemed, than sadness. ‘It’s not,’ she fumed, ‘that she was killed, although heaven knows that’s terrible enough, it’s that
no one missed her
.’

Teddy had nightmares for weeks afterwards, creeping into bed beside Ursula in the dead of night. They would for ever be the ones who found her, the ones who had seen the little shoeless, sockless foot – bruised and grubby, poking out from the dead branches of an elm, her body shrouded with a cold coverlet of leaves.

11 February 1926

‘SWEET SIXTEEN,’ HUGH said, kissing her affectionately. ‘Happy birthday, little bear. Your future’s all ahead of you.’ Ursula still harboured the feeling that some of her future was also behind her but she had learned not to voice such things. They were to have gone up to London for afternoon tea at the Berkeley (it was half term), but Pamela had recently twisted her ankle in a hockey match and Sylvie was recovering from an attack of pleurisy that had seen her spend a night in the cottage hospital (‘I suspect I have my mother’s lungs,’ a remark that Teddy found funny every time he thought about it). And Jimmy was only just over a bout of the tonsillitis he was prone to. ‘Going down like flies,’ Mrs Glover said, beating butter into sugar for the cake. ‘Who’s next, I wonder?’

‘Who needs to go to a hotel for a decent tea anyway?’ Bridget said. ‘Just as good here.’

‘Better,’ Mrs Glover said. Although, of course, neither Bridget nor Mrs Glover had been invited to the Berkeley and indeed Bridget had never been inside a London hotel, or a hotel anywhere come to that, apart from having gone into the Shelbourne to admire the foyer before catching the ferry at Dún Laoghaire to come to England, ‘a lifetime ago’. Mrs Glover, on the other hand, declared herself to be ‘quite familiar’ with the Midland in Manchester where one of her nephews (of which, it seemed, she had an endless supply) had taken her and her sister for dinner ‘on more than one occasion’.

Coincidentally, Maurice was down for the weekend, although he had forgotten (‘if he ever knew’ Pamela said) that it was Ursula’s birthday. He was in his last year at Balliol where he was reading law and was ‘more of a prig than ever’ according to Pamela. His parents didn’t seem particularly taken with him either. ‘He
is
mine, isn’t he?’ Ursula had overheard Hugh say to Sylvie. ‘You didn’t have a dalliance in Deauville with that terrifically boring chap from Halifax, the one who owned the mill?’

‘What a memory you have,’ Sylvie laughed.

Pamela had taken time out from her studies to make a lovely card, a
découpage
of flowers cut out from Bridget’s magazines, as well as baking a batch of her famous (in Fox Corner anyway) ‘piccaninny’ biscuits. Pamela was studying for the entrance exam for Girton. ‘A Girton girl,’ she said, her eyes alight, ‘imagine.’ As Pamela prepared to leave the sixth form of the school they both attended, Ursula was about to enter it. She was good at Classics. Sylvie said that she couldn’t see the point of Latin and Greek (she had never been taught them and seemed to feel the lack). Ursula, on the other hand, was rather attracted to words that were now only whispers from the necropoles of ancient empires. (‘If you mean “dead” then say “dead”,’ Mrs Glover said irritably.)

Millie Shawcross was also invited to tea and had arrived early, her usual chirpy self. Her present was an assortment of lovely velvet hair ribbons, bought with her own money from the haberdasher’s in town. (‘Now you’ll never be able to cut your hair,’ Hugh said to Ursula, with some satisfaction.)

Maurice had brought two friends to stay for the weekend, Gilbert and an American, Howard (‘Call me Howie, everyone does’), who were going to have to double up in the spare-room bed, a fact that seemed to make Sylvie uneasy. ‘You can go top to tail,’ she told them briskly. ‘Or one of you can sleep on a cot with the Great Western Railway,’ which was their name for Teddy’s Hornby train set that took up all of Mrs Glover’s old room in the attic. Jimmy was allowed to share this pleasure. ‘Your sidekick, huh?’ Howie said to Teddy, ruffling Jimmy’s hair so vigorously that Jimmy was knocked off balance. The fact that Howie was an American gave him a special kind of glamour, although it was Gilbert who had the brooding, rather exotic, movie star looks. His name – Gilbert Armstrong – and his father (a high court judge) and his education (Stowe) pointed to impeccably English credentials but his mother was the scion of an old Spanish aristocratic family (‘Gypsies,’ Mrs Glover concluded, which was pretty much what she considered all foreigners to be).

‘Oh, my,’ Millie whispered to Ursula, ‘the gods walk among us.’ She crossed her hands over her heart and flapped them like wings. ‘Not Maurice,’ Ursula said. ‘He would have been kicked off Olympus for getting on everyone’s nerves.’

‘The self-importance of gods,’ Millie said, ‘what a wonderful title for a novel.’ Millie, needless to say, wanted to be a writer. Or an artist, or a singer, or a dancer, or an actress. Anything where she might be the centre of attention.

‘What are you little girls chattering about?’ Maurice said. Maurice was very sensitive, some might have said over-sensitive, to criticism.