Life After Life (28 page)

‘You’ll be in the country – you can grow things. Keep chickens. A pig. You’ll be all right.’ Ursula felt miserable at the thought of Pamela going away.

‘You should come.’

‘I should stay, I’m afraid.’

‘Oh, good, here’s Harold,’ Pamela said when Harold appeared, carrying a big bunch of dahlias wrapped in damp newspaper. She half rose to greet him and he kissed her on the cheek and said, ‘Don’t get up.’ He kissed Ursula as well and presented the dahlias to Pamela.

‘A girl was selling them on the street corner, in Whitechapel,’ he said. ‘Very
Pygmalion
. Said they came from her grandfather’s allotment.’ Crighton had given Ursula roses once but they had quickly drooped and faded. She rather envied Pamela her robust allotment flowers.

‘So, anyway,’ Harold said, when he had poured himself a lukewarm cup of tea from the pot, ‘we’re already evacuating patients who are well enough to be moved. They’re definitely going to declare war tomorrow. In the morning. It’s probably timed so that the nation can get down on its collective knees in church and pray for deliverance.’

‘Oh, yes, war is always so
Christian
, isn’t it?’ Pamela said sarcastically. ‘Especially when one is English. I have several friends in Germany,’ she said to Ursula. ‘Good people.’

‘I know.’

‘Are they the enemy now?’

‘Don’t get upset, Pammy,’ Harold said. ‘Why is it so quiet, what have you done with the boys?’

‘Sold them,’ Pamela said, perking up. ‘Three for the price of two.’

‘You ought to stay the night, Ursula,’ Harold said kindly. ‘You shouldn’t be on your own tomorrow. It’ll be one of those awful days. Doctor’s orders.’

‘Thanks,’ Ursula said. ‘But I’ve already got plans.’

‘Good for you,’ Pamela said, picking up her knitting again. ‘We mustn’t behave as if the world is coming to an end.’

‘Even if it is?’ Ursula said. She wished now that she’d bought the yellow
crêpe de Chine
.

November 1940

SHE WAS ON her back, lying in a shallow pool of water, a fact that didn’t worry her so much at first. The worst thing was the awful smell. It was a combination of different things, none of them good, and Ursula was trying to separate them into their components. The fetid stench of gas (domestic) for one, and, for another, the stink of sewage, disgustingly rank, that was making her gag. Added to that was a complex cocktail of damp, old plaster and brick dust, all mixed with the traces of human habitation – wallpaper, clothes, books, food – and the sour, alien smell of explosive. In short, the essence of a dead house.

It was as if she were lying at the bottom of a deep well. Through a hazy veil of dust, like fog, she could make out a patch of black sky and a pared fingernail of moon that she remembered noticing earlier in the evening when she had looked out of the window. That seemed a long time ago.

The window itself, or at least the frame, was still there, way, way above her, not where it should be at all. It was definitely her window, she recognized the curtains, charred rags now, flapping in the breeze. They were – had been – a thick jacquard brocade from John Lewis’s that Sylvie had helped her pick out. The flat in Argyll Road was rented as furnished but Sylvie declared the curtains and rugs to be ‘completely shoddy’ and subbed Ursula for new ones when she moved in.

At the time Millie had suggested that she move in with her in Phillimore Gardens. Millie was still playing ingénues and said she expected to go from Juliet to the Nurse with nothing in between. ‘It would be fun,’ Millie said, ‘to share digs,’ but Ursula wasn’t so sure that Millie’s idea of fun coincided with her own. She often felt rather dull and sober against Millie’s brightness. A dunnock keeping company with a kingfisher. And sometimes Millie burnt just a little too brightly.

This was just after Munich and Ursula had already started her affair with Crighton and it seemed more practical to live on her own. Looking back, she realized that she had accommodated Crighton’s needs a great deal more than he had hers, as if Moira and the girls somehow trumped her own existence.

Think about Millie, she told herself, think about the curtains, think about Crighton if you must. Anything except her present predicament. Especially the gas. It seemed particularly important to try to take her mind off the gas.

After their purchases in soft furnishings Sylvie and Ursula had taken afternoon tea in John Lewis’s restaurant, served by a grimly efficient waitress. ‘I’m always so glad,’ Sylvie murmured, ‘that I don’t have to take a turn at being other people.’

‘You’re very good at being yourself,’ Ursula said, aware that it didn’t necessarily sound like a compliment.

‘Well, I’ve had years of practice.’

It was a very good afternoon tea, the kind you couldn’t get any more in department stores. And then John Lewis itself was destroyed, no more than the black toothless skull of a building. (‘How awful,’ Sylvie wrote, moved in a way that she didn’t appear to have been by the dreadful raids on the East End.) It was up and running again in days, ‘Blitz spirit’ everyone said, but really, what was the alternative?

Sylvie had been in a good mood that day, and they had drawn closer over the subject of curtains and the idiocy of people who thought that Chamberlain’s silly little piece of paper meant anything at all.

It was very quiet and Ursula wondered if her eardrums were shattered. How did she get here? She remembered looking out of the window in Argyll Road – the window that was so far away now – and seeing the sickle moon. And before that she had been sitting on the sofa, doing some sewing, turning the collar on a blouse, with the wireless tuned to a short-wave German station. She was taking a German evening class (
know your enemy
) but was finding it difficult to decipher anything beyond the occasional violent noun (
Luftangriffe
,
Verluste
) in the broadcast. In despair at her lack of proficiency, she had turned the wireless off and put Ma Rainey on the gramophone. Before she left for America, Izzie had bequeathed Ursula her collection of records, an impressive archive of female American blues artistes. ‘I don’t listen to that stuff any more,’ Izzie said. ‘It’s very
passé
. The future lies with something a little more
soigné
.’ Izzie’s Holland Park house was shut up now, everything covered in dustsheets. She had married a famous playwright and they had decamped to California in the summer. (‘Cowards, the pair of them,’ Sylvie said.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Hugh said, ‘I’m sure if I could sit out the war in Hollywood I would.’)

‘That’s interesting music I hear you listening to,’ Mrs Appleyard said to Ursula one day as they passed on the stairs. The wall between their flats was paper-thin and Ursula said, ‘I’m sorry. I don’t mean to disturb you,’ although she could well have added that she heard Mrs Appleyard’s baby bawling its head off day and night and that was
very
disturbing. The baby at four months old was big for its age, fat and ruddy, as if it had leeched all the life out of Mrs Appleyard.

Mrs Appleyard – the deadweight of the baby asleep in her arms, its head on her shoulder – waved a dismissive hand and said, ‘Don’t be concerned, it doesn’t bother me.’ She was lugubriously East European, a refugee of some kind, Ursula supposed, although her English was precise. Mr Appleyard had disappeared some months ago, gone for a soldier, perhaps, but Ursula hadn’t asked as the marriage had been clearly (and audibly) unhappy. Mrs Appleyard was pregnant when her husband left and, as far as Ursula could tell (or hear), he had never been back to meet his squawking infant.

Mrs Appleyard must have been pretty once but day by day she grew thinner and sadder until it seemed as though only the (very) solid burden of the baby and its needs kept her tethered to everyday life.

In the bathroom that they shared on the first floor there was always an enamel pail in which the baby’s foul-smelling nappies lay soaking before being boiled in a pan on Mrs Appleyard’s two-ring stove. On the neighbouring ring there was usually to be found a pan of cabbage and, perhaps as a result of this twin boiling, she always carried on her person a faint perfume of old vegetables and damp laundry. Ursula recognized it, it was the smell of poverty.

The Misses Nesbit, nesting on the top floor, fretted a good deal about Mrs Appleyard and the baby in the way that old maids were inclined to. The two Nesbits, Lavinia and Ruth, slight spinsters, lived in the attic rooms (‘beneath the eaves, like swallows’, they twittered). They might as well have been twins for all the difference between them and Ursula had to make a tremendous effort to remember which was which.

They were long retired – they had both been telephonists in Harrods – and were a frugal pair, their only indulgence being an impressive collection of costume jewellery, purchased mainly from Woolworths in their lunch hour, during their ‘working years’. Their flat smelt quite different to Mrs Appleyard’s, lavender water and Mansion House polish – the scent of old ladies. Ursula sometimes did shopping for both the Nesbits and Mrs Appleyard. Mrs Appleyard was always ready at the door with the exact money that she owed (she knew the price of everything) and a polite ‘thank you’, but the Nesbits were forever trying to inveigle Ursula inside with weak tea and stale biscuits.

Below them, on the second floor, were to be found Mr Bentley (‘a queer fish’, they were all agreed) whose flat smelt (appropriately) of the finnan haddock he boiled in milk for his supper, and next door to him the aloof Miss Hartnell (whose flat smelt of nothing at all) who was a housekeeper at the Hyde Park Hotel and rather severe, as if nothing could ever hope to meet her standards. She made Ursula feel distinctly wanting.

‘Disappointed in love, I believe,’ Ruth Nesbit whispered in mitigation to Ursula, clamping her bird-boned hand on her chest as if her own frail heart might be about to jump ship and attach itself to someone unsuitable. Both the Misses Nesbit were deeply sentimental about love, never having experienced its rigours. Miss Hartnell looked more as if she would mete out disappointment than receive it.

‘I also have some records,’ Mrs Appleyard said with the earnestness of a conspirator. ‘But, alas, no gramophone.’ Mrs Appleyard’s ‘alas’ seemed freighted with all the tragedy of a broken continent. It could hardly bear the weight it was asked to carry.

‘Well, do please feel welcome to come and play them on mine,’ Ursula said, rather hoping that the downtrodden Mrs Appleyard wouldn’t take up the offer. She wondered what kind of music Mrs Appleyard possessed. It seemed impossible that it could be anything very jolly.

‘Brahms,’ Mrs Appleyard said, answering the unasked question. ‘And Mahler.’ The baby shifted restlessly as if disturbed by the prospect of Mahler. Whenever Ursula met Mrs Appleyard on the stairs or the landing, the baby was asleep. It was as if there were two babies, the one inside the flat who never stopped crying and the one outside who never started.

‘Would you mind holding Emil for a moment while I find my keys?’ Mrs Appleyard asked, handing the cumbersome child over without waiting for an answer.

‘Emil,’ Ursula murmured. She hadn’t thought of the baby as having a name. Emil was, as usual, dressed for some kind of Arctic winter, bulked out with nappies and rubber knickers and romper suits and all kinds of knitted and beribboned garments. Ursula wasn’t a stranger to babies, both she and Pamela had mothered Teddy and Jimmy with the same enthusiasm they accorded puppies and kittens and rabbits, and she was the very picture of a doting aunt where Pamela’s boys were concerned, but Mrs Appleyard’s baby was of a less appealing order. The Todd babies smelt sweetly of milk and talcum powder and the fresh air that their clothes were dried in, whereas Emil had a slightly gamey scent.

Mrs Appleyard rummaged for her keys in her large battered handbag, an item that looked as if it, too, had crossed Europe from a faraway country (of which Ursula, patently, knew nothing). With a great sigh, Mrs Appleyard finally located the keys at the bottom of the bag. The baby, perhaps sensing the proximity of the threshold, squirmed in Ursula’s arms as if preparing itself for the transition. It opened its eyes and looked rather quarrelsome.

‘Thank you, Miss Todd,’ Mrs Appleyard said, reclaiming the baby. ‘It was nice talking to you.’

‘Ursula,’ Ursula said. ‘Do please call me Ursula.’

Mrs Appleyard hesitated before saying, almost shyly, ‘Eryka. E-r-y-k-a.’ They had lived next door to each other for a year now but this was the nearest they had come to intimacy.

Almost as soon as her door closed the baby began its customary roaring. ‘Does she stick pins in it?’ Pamela wrote. Pamela produced placid babies. ‘They don’t tend to turn feral until they’re two,’ she said. She had given birth to another boy, Gerald, just before last Christmas. ‘Better luck next time,’ Ursula said when she saw her. She had taken a train north to visit the new arrival, a long and challenging journey, most of which was spent in the guard’s van, on a train packed with soldiers on their way to a training camp. She had been subjected to a barrage of sexual innuendo which had started as amusing and ended as tedious. ‘Not exactly perfect gentle knights,’ she said to Pamela when she finally arrived, the last part of the journey being accomplished in a donkey-cart as if time had slipped into some other century, some other country even.

Poor Pammy was bored with the phoney war and with being shut up with so many little boys, ‘like being a matron in a boys’ school’. Not to mention Jeanette who had proved to be ‘a bit of a slacker’ (not to mention a moaner and a snorer). ‘One expects better of a vicar’s daughter,’ Pamela wrote, ‘although goodness knows why.’ She had decamped back to Finchley in the spring but since the nightly raids had started she had retreated with her brood to Fox Corner ‘for the duration’, despite her previous misgivings about living with Sylvie. Harold, now at St Thomas’s, was working on the front line. The nurses’ home there had been bombed a couple of weeks ago and five nurses killed. ‘Every night is hell,’ Harold reported. It was the same report that Ralph gave from the bombsites.