Life After Life (19 page)

Sylvie suggested changing his name to Pilot (‘Charlotte Brontë’s dog,’ she said to Ursula. (‘One day,’ Ursula said to Pamela, ‘my communion with our mother will consist entirely of the names of the great writers of the past,’ and Pamela said, ‘I think it probably already does.’)

The little dog already answered to Jock and it seemed wrong to confuse him, so Jock he remained, and in time they all grew to love him best of any of their dogs despite his annoying provenance.

Maurice turned up on a Saturday morning, this time with only Howie in tow and no sign of Gilbert, who had been sent down for ‘an indiscretion’. When Pamela said, ‘What indiscretion?’ Sylvie said that it was the definition of an indiscretion that you didn’t speak of it afterwards.

Ursula had thought of Howie quite often since their last encounter. It was not so much the physical Howie – the Oxford bags, the soft-collared shirt, the brilliantined hair – but the fact that he had been thoughtful enough to try to find Teddy’s lost ball. Being kind modified the extraordinary, alarming
otherness
of him, which was threefold – large, male and American. Despite her ambivalent feelings she couldn’t help but experience a slight thrill when she saw him hop effortlessly out of his open-top car, parked outside the front door of Fox Corner.

‘Hey,’ he said when he caught sight of her and she realized her imaginary beau didn’t even know her name.

A pot of coffee and a plate of scones were hastily conjured up by Sylvie and Bridget. ‘We’re not staying,’ Maurice said to Sylvie, who said, ‘Thank goodness, I don’t have enough to stretch to feed two hulking young men.’

‘We’re going up to London to help out with the strike,’ Maurice said. Hugh expressed surprise. He hadn’t realized, he said, that Maurice’s politics put him on the side of the workers and Maurice in turn expressed surprise that his father could even think this was the case. They were going to drive buses and trains, and whatever else it took ‘to keep the country running’.

‘I didn’t know you knew how to drive a train, Maurice,’ Teddy said, suddenly finding his brother interesting.

‘Well, a stoker, then,’ Maurice said irritably, ‘it can’t be that difficult.’

‘They’re not called stokers, they’re called firemen,’ Pamela said, ‘and it’s a very skilled job. Ask your friend Smithy.’ A remark which for some reason got Maurice even hotter under the collar.

‘You’re trying to shore up a civilization that’s in its death throes,’ Hugh said, as casually as if he were remarking on the weather. ‘There’s really no point.’

Ursula left the room at this juncture, if there was one thing she found more tedious than thinking about politics it was
talking
about politics.

And then. Astonishing. Again. As she was skipping up the back stairs on her way to the attic bedroom to fetch something, something innocent – a book, a handkerchief, afterwards she would never remember what – she was almost sent flying by Howie on his way down. ‘I was looking for a bathroom,’ he said.

‘Well, we only have one,’ Ursula said, ‘and it’s not up these—’ but before the sentence was finished she found herself pinned awkwardly against the neglected floral wallpaper of the back stairs, a pattern that had been up since the house was built. ‘Pretty girl,’ he said. His breath smelt of mint. And then she was again subjected to pushing and shoving from the outsized Howie. But this time it was not his tongue trying to jam its way into her mouth but something inexpressibly more intimate.

She tried to say something but before a sound came out his hand clamped over her mouth, over half her face in fact, and he grinned and said, ‘Ssh,’ as if they were conspirators in a game. With his other hand he was fiddling with her clothes and she squealed in protest. Then he was butting up against her, the way the bullocks in the Lower Field did against the gate. She tried to struggle but he was twice, three times her size even and she might as well have been a mouse in Hattie’s jaws.

She tried to see what he was doing but he was pressed so tightly against her that all she could see was his big square jaw and the slight brush of stubble, unnoticeable from a distance. Ursula had seen her brothers naked, knew what they had between their legs – wrinkled cockles, a little spout – and it seemed to have little to do with this painful piston-driven thing that was now ramming inside her like a weapon of war. Her own body breached. The arch that led to womanhood did not seem so triumphal any more, merely brutal and completely uncaring.

And then Howie gave a great bellow, more ox than Oxford man, and was hitching himself back together and grinning at her. ‘English girls,’ he said, shaking his head and laughing. He wagged his finger at her, almost disapproving, as if she had engineered the disgusting thing that had just happened and said, ‘You really are something!’ He laughed again and bounded down the stairs, taking them three at a time, as though his descent had been barely interrupted by their strange tryst.

Ursula was left to stare at the floral wallpaper. She had never noticed before that the flowers were wisteria, the same flower that grew on the arch over the back porch. This must be what in literature was referred to as ‘deflowering’, she thought. It had always sounded like a rather pretty word.

When she came back downstairs a half-hour later, a half-hour of thoughts and emotions considerably more intense than was usual for a Saturday morning, Sylvie and Hugh were on the doorstep waving a dutiful goodbye to the disappearing rear end of Howie’s car.

‘Thank goodness they weren’t staying,’ Sylvie said. ‘I don’t think I could have been bothered with Maurice’s bluster.’

‘Imbeciles,’ Hugh said cheerfully. ‘All right?’ he said, catching sight of Ursula in the hallway.

‘Yes,’ she said. Any other answer would have been too awful.

Ursula found it easier than she had expected to lock this occurrence away. After all, hadn’t Sylvie herself said that the definition of an indiscretion was that you didn’t speak of it afterwards? Ursula imagined a cupboard in her mind, a corner one, in simple pitch pine. Howie and the back stairs were put on a high shelf and the key was firmly turned in the lock.

A girl surely should know better than to be caught on those back stairs – or in the shrubbery – like the heroine in a gothic novel, the kind that Bridget was so fond of. But who would have suspected that the reality of it would be so sordid and bloody? He must have sensed something in her, something unchaste, that even she was unaware of. Before locking it away she had gone over the incident again and again, trying to see in what way she had been to blame. There must be something written on her skin, in her face, that some people could read and others couldn’t. Izzie had seen it. Something wicked this way comes. And the something was herself.

The summer unrolled. Pamela was given a place at Leeds University to read chemistry and said she was glad because people would be ‘more straightforward’ in the provinces and not as snobbish. She played a lot of tennis with Gertie and championship mixed doubles with Daniel Cole and his brother Simon, and often let Ursula borrow her bike so that she could go for long rides with Millie, both of them shrieking as they freewheeled down hills. Sometimes Ursula went for lazy walks through the lanes with Teddy and Jimmy, Jock running rings around them. Neither Teddy nor Jimmy seemed to need to keep their lives secret from their sisters in the way that Maurice had done.

Pamela and Ursula took Teddy and Jimmy up to London for day trips, to the Natural History Museum, to the British Museum, to Kew, but they never told Izzie when they were in town. She had moved yet again, to a large house in Holland Park (‘a rather artistic
endroit
’). One day as they wandered along Piccadilly they spied a pile of
The Adventures of Augustus
in a bookshop window, accompanied by ‘a photograph of the author – Miss Delphie Fox, taken by Mr Cecil Beaton’ in which Izzie looked like a film star or a society beauty. ‘Oh, God,’ Teddy said and Pamela, despite being
in loco parentis
, didn’t correct his language.

There was a fête once more in the grounds of Ettringham Hall. The Daunts had gone, after a thousand years, Lady Daunt never having recovered from the murder of little Angela, and the Hall was now owned by a rather mysterious man, a Mr Lambert who some said was Belgian, some Scottish, but no one had had a long enough conversation with him to discover his origins. Rumour said he had made his fortune during the war but everyone reported him shy and difficult to talk to. There were dances, too, in the village hall on Friday evenings and at one of these Fred Smith appeared, scrubbed clean of his daily soot, and asked, in turn, Pamela, Ursula and the three eldest Shawcrosses to dance. There was a gramophone, not a band, and they danced only old-fashioned dances, no Charleston or Black Bottom, and it was pleasant to be waltzed safely around the room, with surprising skill, by Fred Smith. Ursula thought it would be rather nice to have someone like Fred as a beau, although obviously Sylvie would never have tolerated such a thing. (‘A
railwayman
?’)

As soon as she thought about Fred in this way, the cupboard door sprang open and the whole appalling scene on the back stairs tumbled out.

‘Steady on,’ Fred Smith said, ‘you’ve gone a bit green round the gills, Miss Todd,’ and Ursula had to blame it on the heat and insist on taking some fresh air on her own. She had in fact been feeling quite queasy lately. Sylvie put it down to a summer cold.

Maurice had gained his expected first (‘How?’ Pamela puzzled) and came home for a few weeks to lounge around before taking up a place in chambers in Lincoln’s Inn, to train as a barrister. Howie, apparently, had returned to ‘his people’ at their summer home on Long Island Sound. Maurice seemed a little miffed that he had not been invited to join them.

‘What happened to you?’ Maurice said to Ursula one afternoon as he sprawled on a deckchair on the lawn reading
Punch
, cramming nearly an entire slice of Mrs Glover’s marmalade cake into his mouth at once.

‘What do you mean what happened to me?’

‘You’ve turned into a heifer.’

‘A heifer?’ It was true she was filling out her summer frocks rather alarmingly, even her hands and feet seemed to have plumped up. ‘Puppy fat, dear,’ Sylvie said, ‘even I had it. Less cake and more tennis, that’s the remedy.’

‘You look hellish,’ Pamela said to her, ‘what’s wrong with you?’

‘I have no idea,’ Ursula said.

And then something truly terrible dawned on her, so awful, so shameful, so
irretrievable
, that she felt something catch fire and burn inside her at the very thought. She hunted down Sylvie’s copy of
The Teaching of Young Children and Girls as to Reproduction
by Dr Beatrice Webb, which, theoretically, Sylvie kept under lock and key in a chest in her bedroom, but the chest was never locked because Sylvie had long ago lost the key. Reproduction seemed to be the last thing on the author’s mind. She advised distracting young girls by giving them plenty of ‘home-made bread, cake, porridge, puddings and cold water splashed regularly on to the parts’. It was clearly no help. Ursula shuddered at the memory of Howie’s ‘parts’ and how they had come together with hers in one vile conjugation. Was this what Sylvie and Hugh did? She couldn’t imagine her mother putting up with such a thing.

She sneaked a look at Mrs Shawcross’s medical encyclopaedia. The Shawcrosses were on holiday in Norfolk but their maid thought nothing of it when Ursula appeared at the back door saying she had come to look at a book.

The encyclopaedia explained the mechanics of ‘the sexual act’, something which appeared to take place only within the ‘loving confines of the marital bed’ rather than on the back stairs when you were on your way to fetch a handkerchief, a book. The encyclopaedia also detailed the consequences of failing to retrieve that handkerchief, that book – the missed monthlies, the sickness, the weight gain. It took nine months apparently. And now they were already well into July. Before long she would be squeezing herself back into her navy-blue gymslip and catching the bus to school every morning with Millie.

Ursula began to take long solitary walks. There was no Millie to confide in (and would she have anyway?) and Pamela had decamped to Devon with her Girl Guide patrol. Ursula had never taken to the Guides, now she rather regretted that – they might have given her the gumption to deal with Howie. A Guide would have retrieved that handkerchief, that book, without being hindered on the journey.

‘Is there anything the matter, dear?’ Sylvie asked as they darned stockings together. Sylvie’s children only really came into focus for her when in isolation. Together they were an unwieldy flock, singly they had character.

Ursula imagined what she could say.
You remember Maurice’s friend Howie? I appear to be the mother of his child
. She glanced at Sylvie, serenely wefting and warping her little woollen patch on the hole in the toe of one of Teddy’s socks. She did not look like a woman who had had her parts breached. (A ‘vagina’, apparently, according to Mrs Shawcross’s encyclopaedia – not a word that had ever been uttered in the Todds’ household.)

‘No, nothing at all,’ Ursula said. ‘I’m fine. Absolutely fine.’

That afternoon she walked to the station and sat on a bench on the platform and contemplated throwing herself under the express when it came hurtling through, but the next train turned out to be for London, huffing slowly to a halt in front of her in a way that seemed so familiar that it made her want to cry. She spotted Fred Smith climbing down from the cab, oily overalls and face smutty with coal dust. Spotting her, he came over and said, ‘Here’s a coincidence, are you catching our train?’

‘I haven’t got a ticket,’ Ursula said.

‘That’s all right,’ Fred said, ‘nod and a wink from me and the ticket inspector’ll see a friend of mine all right.’ Was she a friend of Fred Smith? It was comforting to think so. Of course, if he knew about her condition he would no longer be a friend. No one would.

‘Yes, all right, thank you,’ she said. Not having a ticket seemed such a
little
problem.