Life After Life (24 page)

‘Well, anyway,’ Ursula said, as if this were a trivial subject to be lightly tossed away, ‘you must come and visit us in Wealdstone. Now that we’re settled. We’re very grateful, you know, for the money that Mr Oliphant left.’

‘Left? He left money?’

‘Some shares, I think, in the will,’ Ursula said. Perhaps Mrs Oliphant hadn’t been involved in the probate.

‘Will? He left nothing but debts when he went. He’s not dead,’ she added as if it were Ursula who was the simple one. ‘He’s living in Margate.’

What other lies and half-truths were there, Ursula wondered? Did Derek really nearly drown when he was younger?

‘Drown?’

‘Fall out of a rowing boat and swim to shore?’

‘Whatever gave you that idea?’

‘Now then,’ Derek said, appearing in the doorway and making them both jump, ‘what are you two gossiping about?’

‘You’ve lost weight,’ Pamela said.

‘Yes, I suppose I have. I’ve been playing tennis.’ How normal that made her life sound. She doggedly attended the tennis club, it was the only relief she had from the claustrophobia of life in Masons Avenue, though she had to face a constant inquisition on the subject. Every evening when he came home Derek asked if she had played tennis today, even though she only played two afternoons a week. She was always interrogated about her partner, a dentist’s wife called Phyllis. Derek seemed to despise Phyllis, even though he had never met her.

Pamela had travelled all the way from Finchley. ‘Obviously it was the only way I was ever going to see you. You must like married life. Or Wealdstone,’ she laughed. ‘Mother said that you put her off.’ Ursula had been putting everyone off since the wedding, rebuffing Hugh’s offers to ‘pop in’ for a cup of tea and Sylvie’s hints that perhaps they should be invited to Sunday lunch. Jimmy was away at school and Teddy was in his first year at Oxford but he wrote lovely long letters to her, and Maurice, of course, had no inclination to visit anyone in his family.

‘I’m sure she’s not too bothered about visiting. Wealdstone and so on. Not her cup of tea at all.’

They both laughed. Ursula had almost forgotten what it felt like to laugh. She felt tears start to her eyes and had to turn away and busy herself with the tea things. ‘It’s so nice to see you, Pammy.’

‘Well, you know you’re welcome in Finchley whenever you please. You should get a telephone, and then we could talk all the time.’ Derek thought a telephone was an expensive luxury but Ursula suspected that he simply didn’t want her speaking to anyone. She could hardly voice this suspicion (and to whom – Phyllis? The milkman?) as people would think she was off her head. Ursula had been looking forward to Pamela’s visit the way people looked forward to holidays. On Monday she had said to Derek, ‘Pamela’s coming on Wednesday afternoon,’ and he had said, ‘Oh?’ He seemed indifferent and she was relieved that the thrawn face did not appear.

As soon as they were finished with them Ursula quickly cleared the tea things away, washed and dried them and put them back in their places.

‘Golly,’ Pamela said, ‘when did you become such a neat little
Hausfrau
?’

‘Tidy house, tidy mind,’ Ursula said.

‘Tidiness is overrated,’ Pamela said. ‘Is anything the matter? You seem awfully down.’

‘Time of the month,’ Ursula said.

‘Oh, rotten luck. I’m going to be free of that problem for a few months. Guess what?’

‘You’re having a baby? Oh, that’s wonderful news!’

‘Yes. Isn’t it? Mother will be a grandmother again.’ (Maurice had already made a start on the next generation of Todds.) ‘Will she like that, do you suppose?’

‘Who knows? She’s rather unpredictable these days.’

‘Did you have a nice visit from your sister?’ Derek asked when he came home that night.

‘Lovely. She’s having a baby.’

‘Oh?’

The next morning her poached eggs were not ‘up to scratch’. Even Ursula had to admit that the egg she presented for Derek’s breakfast was a sad sight, a sickly jellyfish deposited on toast to die. A sly smile appeared on his face, an expression that seemed to indicate a certain triumph in finding fault. A new look. Worse than the old.

‘Do you expect me to eat that?’ he asked.

Several answers to that question passed through Ursula’s mind but she rejected them all as provocative. Instead she said, ‘I can do you another one.’

‘You know,’ he said, ‘I have to work all hours at a job I despise, just to keep you. You don’t have to worry your silly little noggin about anything, do you? You do nothing all day – oh, no, forgive me,’ he said sarcastically, ‘I was forgetting you play tennis – and you can’t even manage to cook me an egg.’

Ursula hadn’t realized he despised his job. He complained a great deal about the behaviour of the Lower Third and talked incessantly about the headmaster’s lack of appreciation of his hard work, but she hadn’t thought that he
hated
teaching. He looked close to tears and she felt suddenly and unexpectedly sorry for him and said, ‘I’ll poach another.’

‘Don’t bother.’ She anticipated the egg would be thrown at the wall, Derek was given to tossing food around since she had joined the tennis club, but instead he delivered a massive open-handed slap to the side of her head that sent her reeling against the cooker and then to the floor where she remained, kneeling as though she were at prayer. The pain, more than the act, had taken her by surprise.

Derek walked across the kitchen and stood over her with the plate containing the offending egg. For a moment she thought he was going to bring it crashing down on her but instead he slid the egg off the plate and on to the top of her head. Then he stalked out of the kitchen and she heard the front door slam a minute later. The egg slid off her hair, down her face and on to the floor, where it burst open in a quiet splash of yellow. She struggled to her feet and fetched a cloth.

That morning seemed to open up something in him. She broke rules she didn’t know existed – too much coal on the fire, too much toilet paper used, a light accidentally left on. Receipts and bills were all scrutinized by him, every penny had to be accounted for and she never had any spare money.

He proved himself capable of the most enormous rants over the pettiest of things, once started he seemed unable to stop. He was angry all the time.
She
made him angry all the time. Every evening now he demanded an exacting account of her day. How many books did she change in the library, what did the butcher say to her, did anyone call at the house? She gave up tennis. It was easier.

He didn’t hit her again but violence seemed to simmer constantly beneath his surface, a dormant volcano that Ursula had unwontedly brought back to life. She was wrong-footed by him all the time so that she never seemed to have a moment to clear the befuddlement in her brain. Her very existence seemed to be irksome to him. Was life to be lived as a continuous punishment? (Why not, didn’t she deserve that?)

She began to live in a strange kind of malaise, as though her head was full of fog. She had made her bed, she supposed, and now she must lie on it. Perhaps that was another version of Dr Kellet’s
amor fati
. What would he say about her current predicament? More to the point, perhaps, what would he say about Derek’s peculiar character?

She was to attend sports day. It was a big event in Blackwood’s calendar and wives of masters were expected to attend. Derek had given her money for a new hat and said, ‘Make sure you look smart.’

She went to a local shop that sold apparel for women and children, called A La Mode (although it really wasn’t). It was here that she bought her stockings and undergarments. She had had no new clothes since her wedding. She didn’t care enough about her appearance to badger Derek for the money.

It was a lacklustre-looking shop in a row of other lacklustre shops – a hairdressing salon, a fishmonger, a greengrocer’s, a post office. She didn’t have the heart or the stomach (or the budget) to bother going up to town to a smart London department store (and what would Derek say about such a jaunt?). When she worked in London, before the watershed of marriage, she had spent a lot of time in Selfridge’s and Peter Robinson’s. Now those places seemed as distant as foreign countries.

The contents of the shop window were protected from the sun by a yellowy-orange screen, a kind of thick cellophane that reminded her of the wrapper on a bottle of Lucozade and made everything in the window completely undesirable.

It was not the most beautiful hat but she supposed it would do. She scrutinized her reflection unwillingly in the shop’s floor-to-ceiling tripartite mirror. In triptych she looked three times worse than she did in the bathroom mirror (the only one in the house that she couldn’t avoid). She no longer recognized herself, she thought. She had taken the wrong path, opened the wrong door, and was unable to find her way back.

Suddenly, horribly, she frightened herself by wailing, the wretched sound of utter despondency. The owner of the shop came rushing from behind the counter and said, ‘There, dear, don’t get upset. Time of the month, is it?’ She made her sit and have a cup of tea and a biscuit and Ursula couldn’t begin to express her gratitude for this simple kindness.

The school was one stop on the train and then a short walk along a quiet road. Ursula joined the stream of parents flowing through Blackwood’s gates. It was exciting – and slightly terrifying – to suddenly find herself among a crush. She had been married less than six months but had forgotten what it was like to be in a crowd.

Ursula had never been to the school before and was surprised by its commonplace red brick and its pedestrian herbaceous borders, quite unlike the ancient school that the men of the Todd family attended. Teddy and then Jimmy had followed in Maurice’s footsteps to Hugh’s old school, a lovely building of soft grey stone and as pretty as an Oxford college. (‘Savage within’, though, according to Teddy.) The grounds were particularly beautiful and even Sylvie admired the profusion of flowers in the beds. ‘Rather romantic planting,’ she said. No such romance at Derek’s school, where the emphasis was on the playing fields. The boys at Blackwood were not particularly academic, according to Derek anyway, and were kept occupied by an endless round of rugby and cricket. More healthy minds in healthy bodies. Did Derek have a healthy mind?

It was too late to ask him about his sister and his father, Krakatoa would erupt, Ursula suspected. Why would you make up something like that? Dr Kellet would know.

Trestle tables, bearing refreshments for parents and staff, were set up at one end of the athletics field. Tea and sandwiches and finger slices of dry Dundee cake. Ursula lingered by the tea-urn looking for Derek. He had told her he wouldn’t be able to talk much to her as he was needed to ‘help out’ and when she did eventually spot him at the far end of the field he was diligently carrying an armful of large hoops, the purpose of which seemed mysterious to Ursula.

Everyone gathered around the trestles seemed to know each other, particularly the masters’ wives, and it struck Ursula that there must be a great many more social events at Blackwood than Derek ever mentioned.

A couple of senior masters, gowned like bats, settled on the tea-table and she caught the name ‘Oliphant’. As inconspicuously as possible Ursula stepped a little closer to them, pretending a deep fascination with the crab paste in the sandwich on her plate.

‘Young Oliphant’s in trouble again, I hear.’

‘Really?’

‘Hit a boy, I believe.’

‘Nothing wrong with hitting boys. I hit them all the time.’

‘Bad this time though, apparently. Parents are threatening to go to the police.’

‘He’s never been able to control a class. Ruddy awful teacher, of course.’

Plates now fully loaded with cake, the two men began to wander off, Ursula drifting in their wake.

‘In debt up to his ears, you know.’

‘Perhaps he’ll make some money from his book.’

They both laughed heartily as if a great joke had been told.

‘The wife’s here today, I gather.’

‘Really? We’d better watch out. I hear she’s very unstable.’ This, too, a great joke, seemingly. A sudden shot from the starting pistol signalling the beginning of a hurdles race made Ursula jump. She let the masters amble off. She had lost her appetite for eavesdropping.

She caught sight of Derek striding towards her, hoops now replaced by an unwieldy burden of javelins. He shouted to a couple of boys for help and they trotted up obediently. As they passed Ursula, one of them sniggered, sotto voce, ‘Yes, Mr Elephant, coming, Mr Elephant.’ Derek dropped the javelins to the grass with a great clatter and said to the boys, ‘Carry them to the end of the field, come on, get a move on.’ He approached Ursula and kissed her lightly on the cheek, saying, ‘Hello, dear.’ She burst out laughing, she couldn’t help herself. It was the nicest thing he had said to her in weeks and was voiced not to her but for the benefit of the two masters’ wives who were standing nearby.

‘Is there something funny?’ he asked, studying her face a little too long for comfort. She could tell he was seething. She shook her head in answer. She was worried she might scream out loud, could feel her own volcano bubbling up, ready to explode. She supposed she was hysterical.
Unstable
.

‘I have to see to the Upper School’s high jump,’ Derek said, frowning at her. ‘I’ll meet you shortly.’ He walked off, still frowning, and she started to laugh again.

‘Mrs Oliphant? Is it Mrs Oliphant, it is, isn’t it?’ The two masters’ wives pounced on her, lionesses sensing wounded prey.

She also travelled home alone as Derek had to supervise evening study and would eat at the school, he said. She made herself a scrappy tea of fried herring and cold potatoes and had a sudden longing for a bottle of good red wine. In fact one bottle after another until she had drunk herself to death. She scraped the herring bones into the bin.
To cease upon the midnight with no pain
. Anything was better than this ludicrous life.

Derek was a joke, to the boys, to the staff.
Mr Elephant
. She could just imagine the unruly Lower Third driving him mad with rage. And his book, what of his book?