Life After Life (25 page)

Ursula never bothered much with the contents of Derek’s ‘study’. She had never felt any great interest in the Plantagenets or Tudors either, for that matter. She was under strict instructions not to move any of his papers or books when dusting and polishing in the dining room (as she still liked to think of it) but she didn’t care to anyway, barely glancing at the progress of the great tome.

He had been working feverishly of late, the table was covered in a clutter of notes and scraps of paper. It was all disconnected sentences and thoughts –
rather amusing if somewhat primitive belief – planta genista, the common broom gives us the name Angevin – come of the devil, and to the devil they would go
. There was little sign of an actual manuscript, just corrections and re-corrections, the same paragraph written over and over with tiny changes each time, and endless trial pages, written in ruled exercise books with Blackwood’s crest and motto (
A posse ad esse
– ‘from possibility to reality’) on the cover. No wonder he hadn’t wanted her to type up his manuscript. She had married a Casaubon, she realized.

Derek’s whole life was a fabrication. From his very first words to her (
Oh, my, how awful for you. Let me help you
) he had not been genuine. What had he wanted from her? Someone weaker than himself? Or a wife, a mother of his children, someone running his house, all the trappings of the
vie quotidienne
but without any of its underlying chaos. She had married him in order to be safe from that chaos. He had married her, she now understood, for the same reason. They were the last two people on earth who could make anyone safe from anything.

Ursula rooted through the sideboard drawers and found a sheaf of letters, the top one with the letterhead of William Collins and Sons, Co. Ltd ‘regretfully’ rejecting his idea for a book, in an ‘already oversubscribed area of history textbooks’. There were similar letters from other educational publishers and, worse, there were unpaid bills and threatening final notices. A particularly harsh letter demanded immediate repayment of the loan taken out apparently to pay for the house. It was the kind of sour letter that she had typed up from dictation at her secretarial college,
Dear Sir, It has been brought to my notice
—

She heard the front door open and her heart jumped. Derek appeared in the doorway of the dining room, a Gothic intruder on stage. ‘What are you doing?’

She held up the letter from William Collins and said, ‘You’re a liar, through and through. Why did you marry me? Why did you make us both so unhappy?’ The look on his face. That look. She was asking to be killed, but wasn’t that easier than doing it herself? She didn’t care any more, there was no fight in her.

Ursula was expecting the first blow but it still took her by surprise, his fist punching hard into the middle of her face as if he wanted to obliterate it.

She slept, or perhaps she passed out, on the kitchen floor and woke some time before six. She was sick and dizzy and every inch of her was sore and aching, her whole body made of lead. She was desperate for a drink of water but didn’t dare turn the tap on for fear of waking Derek. Using first a chair, then the table, she hauled herself up to standing. She found her shoes and crept into the hallway where she took her coat and a headscarf from the peg. Derek’s wallet was in his jacket pocket and she took a ten-shilling note, more than enough for the rail fare and then a cab onward. She felt exhausted just at the thought of this taxing journey – she wasn’t even sure she could make it on foot as far as Harrow and Wealdstone station.

She slipped her coat on and pulled the headscarf over her face, avoiding the mirror in the hallstand. It would be too dreadful a sight. She left the front door slightly ajar in case the noise of it closing woke him up. She thought of Ibsen’s Nora slamming the door behind her. Nora wouldn’t have gone in for dramatic gestures if she had been trying to escape from Derek Oliphant.

It was the longest walk of her life. Her heart was beating so fast she thought it might give out. All the way she expected to hear his footsteps running up behind her and him yelling her name. At the ticket office she had to mumble ‘Euston’ through a mouthful of bloody, broken teeth. The ticket clerk glanced at her and then glanced quickly away when he saw the state she was in. Ursula supposed he had no precedent for dealing with female passengers who looked as if they had been in bare-knuckle fights.

She had to wait for the first train of the day for another ten agonizing minutes in the ladies’ waiting room but at least she was able to get a drink of water and remove some of the dried blood from her face.

In the carriage she sat with her head bowed, one hand shielding her face. The men in suits and bowlers studiously ignored her. As she waited for the train to pull away she risked a glance along the platform and was relieved beyond measure that there was still no sign of Derek. With any luck he hadn’t missed her yet and was still doing his press-ups on the bedroom floor, presuming her to be down in the kitchen preparing his breakfast. Friday, kipper day. The kipper still lay on the pantry shelf, wrapped in newspaper. He would be furious.

When she got off the train at Euston her legs almost gave way. People gave her a wide berth and she worried that the cab driver would refuse the fare, but when she showed him the money he took her. They drove in silence across London, bathed in rain overnight, and now the stones of the buildings were sparkling in the first rays of sun and the soft cloudy dawn was opalescent in pinks and blues. She had forgotten how much she liked London. Her heart rose. She had decided to live and now she wanted to very much.

The cab driver helped her out at the end of the journey. ‘You’re sure about this, miss, are you?’ he said, looking doubtfully at the large red-brick house in Melbury Road. She nodded, mutely.

It was an inevitable destination.

She rang the bell and the front door opened. Izzie’s hand flew to her mouth in horror at the sight of her face. ‘Oh, my God. What
happened
to you?’

‘My husband tried to kill me.’

‘You’d better come in then,’ Izzie said.

The bruises healed, very slowly. ‘Battle scars,’ Izzie said.

Izzie’s dentist fixed Ursula’s teeth and she had to wear her right arm in a sling for a while. Her nose had been broken again and her cheekbones and jaw cracked. She was flawed, no longer
intact
. On the other hand, she felt as if she had been scourged clean. The past no longer weighed so heavily on the present. She sent a message to Fox Corner saying that she had gone away for the summer, ‘a touring holiday of the Highlands with Derek’. She was fairly sure that Derek wouldn’t contact Fox Corner. He would be licking his wounds somewhere. Barnet, maybe. He had no idea where Izzie lived, thank goodness.

Izzie was surprisingly sympathetic. ‘Stay as long as you like,’ she said. ‘It’ll make a change from rattling around in here on my own. And God only knows, I’ve got more than enough money to keep you. Take your time,’ she added. ‘No rush. And you’re only twenty-three, for heaven’s sake.’ Ursula didn’t know which was more surprising – Izzie’s genuine hospitality or the fact that she knew how old she was. Perhaps Izzie had been changed by Belgravia too.

Ursula was in on her own one evening when Teddy turned up on the doorstep. ‘You’re hard to find,’ he said, giving her an enormous hug. Ursula’s heart bumped with pleasure. Teddy always seemed more real than other people somehow. He was brown and strong from spending the long summer vacation working on the Hall farm. He had announced recently that he wanted to be a farmer. ‘I’ll have the money back that I spent on your education,’ Sylvie said – but smiling because Teddy was her favourite.

‘I believe it was
my
money,’ Hugh said. (Did Hugh have a favourite? ‘You, I think,’ Pamela said.)

‘What happened to your face?’ Teddy asked her.

‘Bit of an accident, you should have seen it before,’ she laughed.

‘You’re not in the Highlands,’ Teddy said.

‘Doesn’t seem so, does it?’

‘You’ve left him then?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good.’ Teddy, like Hugh, didn’t go in for long narratives. ‘Where’s the giddy aunt then?’ he asked.

‘Out giddying. The Embassy Club, I believe.’ They drank some of Izzie’s champagne to celebrate Ursula’s freedom.

‘You’ll be disgraced in Mother’s eyes, I expect,’ Teddy said.

‘Don’t worry, I believe I already am.’

Together they made an omelette and a tomato salad and ate with their plates on their knees listening to Ambrose and his orchestra on the wireless. When they finished their food, Teddy lit a cigarette. ‘You’re so grown-up these days,’ Ursula laughed. ‘I have muscles,’ he said, demonstrating his biceps like a circus strongman. He was reading English at Oxford and said it was a relief to stop thinking and ‘be working on the land’. He was writing poetry, too, he said. About the land, not about ‘feelings’. Teddy’s heart had been fractured by Nancy’s death and once a thing was cracked, he said, it could never be repaired perfectly. ‘Quite Jamesian, isn’t it?’ he said ruefully. (Ursula thought of herself.)

A bereft Teddy carried his wounds on the inside, a scar across his heart where little Nancy Shawcross had been ripped away. ‘It’s as if,’ he said to Ursula, ‘you walk into a room and your life ends but you keep on living.’

‘I think I understand. I do,’ Ursula said.

Ursula dozed off with her head on Teddy’s shoulder. She was still tremendously tired. (‘Sleep is a great healer,’ Izzie said, bringing her breakfast on a tray every morning.)

Eventually, Teddy sighed and stretched and said, ‘I suppose I should be getting back to Fox Corner. What’s the story, did I see you? Or are you still in Brigadoon?’ He took their plates through to the kitchen. ‘I’ll clear up while you think about your answer.’

When the doorbell rang Ursula presumed it was Izzie. Now that Ursula was living in Melbury Road she had grown careless about her door keys. ‘But you’re always here, darling,’ she said when Ursula had to crawl out of bed at three in the morning to let her in.

It wasn’t Izzie, it was Derek. She was so surprised she couldn’t even speak. She had left him so firmly behind that she thought of him as someone who had ceased to exist. He didn’t belong in Holland Park, but rather in some dark place of the imagination.

He twisted her arm behind her back and frogmarched her down the hall into the drawing room. He glanced at the coffee table, a heavy wooden thing carved in the Oriental style. Seeing the empty champagne glasses still sitting on the coffee table and the big onyx ashtray containing Teddy’s cigarette stubs, he hissed, ‘Who’s been here with you?’ He was incandescent with rage. ‘Who have you been fornicating with?’

‘Fornicating?’ Ursula said, surprised by the word. So biblical. Teddy came into the room, a dishtowel casually over his shoulder. ‘What’s all this?’ he said, and then, ‘Get your hands off her.’

‘Is this him?’ Derek asked Ursula. ‘Is this the man you’re whoring around London with?’ and without waiting for an answer he smashed her head on to the coffee table and she slid to the ground. The pain in her head was terrible and grew worse rather than lessened, as if she were in a vice being tightened all the time. Derek lifted the heavy onyx ashtray high as if it were a chalice, careless of the cigarette butts that showered on to the carpet. Ursula knew her brain wasn’t working properly because she should have been cowering in terror but all she could think about was that this was rather like the incident with the poached egg and how silly life was. Teddy yelled something at Derek and Derek threw the ashtray at him instead of breaking open Ursula’s skull with it. Ursula couldn’t see whether or not the ashtray hit Teddy because Derek grabbed her by her hair, lifted her head up and cracked it back on to the coffee table. A bolt of lightning flashed in front of her eyes but the pain began to fade.

She slipped down on to the carpet, unable to move. There was so much blood in her eyes that she could barely see. The second time that her head hit the table she had felt something give way, the instinct to life perhaps. She knew from the awkward shuffling and grunting dance on the carpet around her that Derek and Teddy were fighting. At least Teddy was on his feet and not lying unconscious but she didn’t want him to fight, she wanted him to run away, out of harm’s way. She didn’t mind dying, she really didn’t, as long as Teddy was safe. She tried to say something but it came out as guttural nonsense. She was very cold and tired. She remembered feeling this way in the hospital, after Belgravia. Hugh had been there, he had held on to her hand and kept her in this life.

Ambrose was still on the wireless, Sam Browne was singing ‘The Sun Has Got His Hat On’. It was a jolly song to leave life to. Not what you expected.

The black bat was coming for her. She didn’t want to go. The blackness edged around her.
Easeful death
. It was so cold. It will snow tonight, she thought, even though it isn’t winter yet. It was already snowing, cold flakes dissolving on her skin like soap. Ursula put out a hand for Teddy to hold but this time nothing could stop her fall into the dark night.

11 February 1926

‘OW! WHAT D’YA do that for?’ Howie yelled, rubbing his cheek where Ursula had punched him in a very unladylike way.

‘You have one hell of a right cross for a little girl,’ Howie said, almost admiringly. He made another grab for her which she jinked as neatly as a cat. As she did so, she spotted Teddy’s ball, lurking deep within the recesses of a cotoneaster. A well-aimed kick connected with Howie’s shin and gave her enough time to rescue the ball from the clutches of the reluctant bush.

‘I just wanted a kiss,’ Howie said, sounding absurdly hurt. ‘It wasn’t like I was trying to
rape
you or anything.’ The brutal word hung in the chilly air. Ursula might have blushed, should have blushed at the word but she felt a certain possession of it. She sensed it was what boys like Howie did to girls like Ursula. All girls, especially those celebrating their sixteenth birthdays, had to be cautious when walking through the dark, wild wood. Or, in this case, the shrubbery at the bottom of Fox Corner’s garden. Howie rewarded her by looking somewhat shamefaced.