Life After Life (32 page)

‘Someone’s idea of a joke,’ Ursula said, dismayed to find herself blushing. There was something un-Crighton-like about these salacious (if not downright filthy) but seemingly innocent messages.
I believe there is a shortage of pencils
. Or
Are your ink levels sufficiently topped up
? Ursula wished he would learn Pitman’s, or more discretion. Or, better still, stop altogether.

When she was ushered inside the Savoy by a doorman, Crighton was waiting for her in the expansive foyer and instead of escorting her up to the American Bar he shepherded her up the stairs to a suite on the second floor. The bed seemed to dominate the room, enormous and pillowy. Oh, so this is why we’re here, she thought.

The
crêpe de Chine
had been deemed unsuitable for the occasion and she had donned her royal-blue satin – one of her three good evening dresses – a decision she now regretted as Crighton, if form was anything to go by, would soon be divesting her of it rather than treating her to a slap-up meal.

He liked undressing her, liked looking at her. ‘Like a Renoir,’ he said, although he knew little about art. Better a Renoir than a Rubens, she thought. Or a Picasso, for that matter. He had bestowed on her the great gift of regarding herself naked with little, if any, criticism. Moira, apparently, was a floor-length flannelette and lights-out woman. Sometimes Ursula wondered if Crighton didn’t exaggerate his wife’s sturdy qualities. Once or twice it had crossed her mind to journey out to Wargrave to catch a glimpse of the wronged wife and find out if she really was a dowd. The problem, of course, with Moira in the flesh (Rubenesque, not Renoir, she imagined) would be that Ursula would find it difficult to betray a real person rather than an enigma.

(‘But she
is
a real person,’ Pamela puzzled. ‘It’s a specious argument.’

‘Yes, I
am
aware of that.’ This later, at Hugh’s sixtieth birthday, a rather querulous affair in the spring.)

The suite had a magnificent view of the river, from Waterloo Bridge to the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben, all shadowy now, in the encroaching twilight. (‘The violet hour’.) She could just make out Cleopatra’s Needle, a dark finger poking skywards. None of the usual blaze and twinkle of London lights. The blackout had already begun.

‘The bolthole wasn’t available then? We’re out in the open?’ Ursula said while Crighton opened a bottle of champagne that had been waiting for them in a sweating silver bucket. ‘Are we celebrating?’

‘Saying our adieux,’ Crighton said, joining her at the window and handing her a glass.

‘Our adieux?’ Ursula said, bemused. ‘You’ve brought me to a good hotel and are plying me with champagne in order to end it all between us?’

‘Adieu to the peace,’ Crighton said. ‘We’re saying goodbye to the world as we know it.’ He raised his glass in the direction of the window, to London, in its dusky glory. ‘To the beginning of the end,’ he said grimly. ‘I’ve left Moira,’ he added, as if it were an afterthought, a nothing. Ursula was caught by surprise.

‘And the girls?’ (Just checking, she thought.)

‘All of them. Life is too precious to be unhappy.’ Ursula wondered how many people across London were saying the same thing that night. Perhaps in less salubrious surroundings. And there would be others, of course, who would be saying the same words to cleave to what they already had, not to discard it on a whim.

Suddenly and unexpectedly panicked, Ursula said, ‘I don’t want to marry you.’ She hadn’t realized quite how strongly she felt until the words came out of her mouth.

‘I don’t want to marry you either,’ Crighton said, and, perversely, she felt disappointed.

‘I’ve taken a lease on a flat in Egerton Gardens,’ he said. ‘I thought perhaps you would come and join me.’

‘To cohabit? To live in sin in Knightsbridge?’

‘If you will.’

‘My, you are bold,’ she said. ‘What about your career?’

He made a dismissive sound. So, she, and not the war, was to be his new Jutland then.

‘Will you say yes? Ursula?’

Ursula stared through the window at the Thames. The river was almost invisible now.

‘We should have a toast,’ she said. ‘What is it they say in the navy – “Sweethearts and wives – may they never meet”?’ She chinked her glass against Crighton’s and said, ‘I’m starving, we are going to eat, aren’t we?’

April 1940

A CAR HORN down in the street below broke the Sunday-morning silence of Knightsbridge. Ursula missed the sound of church bells. There were so many simple things she had taken for granted before the war. She wished that she could go back and appreciate them properly.

‘Why the horn,’ Crighton said, ‘when we have a perfectly good doorbell?’ He looked out of the window. ‘He’s here,’ he said, ‘if he’s a young man in a three-piece suit puffed up like a Christmas robin.’

‘That does sound like him.’ Although Ursula didn’t think of Maurice as ‘young’, had never thought of him as young, but she supposed he was to Crighton.

Hugh’s sixtieth birthday and Maurice had grudgingly offered her a lift to Fox Corner for the celebrations. It was going to be a novelty, and not necessarily a good one, to spend time cloistered in a car with Maurice. They were rarely alone with each other.

‘He has petrol?’ Crighton had said, raising an eyebrow but really it was more a statement than a question.

‘He has a
driver
,’ Ursula said. ‘I knew Maurice would squeeze the most out of the war.’ ‘What war?’ Pamela would have said. She was ‘marooned’ in Yorkshire with only six small boys for company and Jeanette, who had turned out to be not merely a moaner but ‘quite the
fainéante
. I expected better of a vicar’s daughter. She’s so lazy, I run around all day long after her boys as well as mine. I’ve had enough of this evacuation lark, I think we’ll come home soon.’

‘I suppose he could hardly turn up at home in a car
without
having given me a lift,’ Ursula said. ‘Maurice wouldn’t want to be seen to be behaving badly, even by his own family. He has a
reputation
to keep up. Besides, his family are staying there and he’s bringing them back to London tonight.’ Maurice had sent Edwina and the children to stay at Fox Corner for the Easter holidays. Ursula had wondered if he knew something about the war that the public didn’t – was Easter to be a particularly hazardous time? There must be so many things that Maurice knew that others didn’t, but Easter had passed off without incident and she supposed it was merely a case of grandchildren visiting grandparents. Philip and Hazel were very uninventive children and Ursula wondered how they were getting on with Sylvie’s rambunctious evacuees. ‘It’ll be horribly crowded on the way back, with Edwina and the children. Not to mention the
driver
. Still, needs must and so on.’

The car horn sounded again. Ursula ignored it as a matter of principle. How wickedly satisfying it would be, she thought, to have Crighton in tow, in full naval fig (all those medals, all that gold braid), outranking Maurice in so many ways. ‘You could come with me, you know,’ she said to him. ‘We just wouldn’t mention Moira. Or the girls.’

‘Is it your home?’

‘Sorry?’

‘You said, “he could hardly turn up at home”. Isn’t this? Your home?’ Crighton said.

‘Yes, of course,’ Ursula said. Maurice was pacing impatiently up and down on the pavement and she rapped on the window pane to get his attention and held up her index finger, mouthing ‘one minute’ to him. He frowned at her. ‘It’s a figure of speech,’ she said, turning back to Crighton. ‘One always refers to one’s parents’ place as “home”.’

‘Does one? I don’t.’

No, thought Ursula, you don’t. Wargrave was ‘home’ for Crighton, even if only in his thoughts. And he was right, of course, she didn’t consider the flat in Egerton Gardens to be her home. It was a point in time, a temporary stopping-off place on yet another journey that the war had interrupted. ‘We can argue the point if you want,’ she said amiably. ‘It’s just, you know … Maurice, marching up and down out there like a little tin soldier.’

Crighton laughed. He never looked for arguments.

‘I would love to join you and meet your family,’ he said, ‘but I’m going to the Citadel.’ The Admiralty was constructing an underground fortress, the Citadel, on Horse Guards Parade and Crighton was in the process of moving his office over.

‘I’ll see you later then,’ Ursula said. ‘My carriage awaits and Maurice is pawing the ground.’

‘Ring,’ Crighton reminded her and Ursula said, ‘Oh, yes, of course, I nearly forgot.’ She had started wearing a wedding ring when not at work, for appearances’ sake, ‘Tradesmen, and so on.’ The boy who delivered the milk, the woman who came in to clean twice a week, she didn’t want them thinking she was in an illicit relationship. (She had surprised herself with this bashfulness.)

‘You can imagine how many questions there would be if they saw
that
,’ she said, slipping the ring off and leaving it on the hall table.

Crighton kissed her lightly on the cheek and said, ‘Have a nice time.’

‘No guarantee of that,’ she said.

‘Still not caught yourself a man?’ Izzie asked Ursula. ‘Of course,’ she said, turning brightly to Sylvie, ‘you have – how many grandchildren now, seven, eight?’

‘Six. Perhaps
you’re
a grandmother, Izzie.’

‘What?’ Maurice said. ‘How could she be?’

‘Anyway,’ Izzie said airily, ‘it takes the pressure off Ursula to produce one.’

‘Produce?’ Ursula said, a forkful of salmon in aspic suspended on its way to her mouth.

‘Looks like you’re left on the shelf,’ Maurice said.

‘Pardon?’ The fork returned to the plate.

‘Always the bridesmaid …’

‘Once,’ Ursula said. ‘I have been a bridesmaid once only, to Pamela.’

‘I’ll have that if you’re not eating it,’ Jimmy said, filching the salmon.

‘I was, actually.’

‘Even worse then,’ Maurice said. ‘Nobody even wants you as a bridesmaid except for your sister.’ He sniggered, more schoolboy than man. He was, annoyingly, seated too far away for her to kick him beneath the table.

‘Manners, Maurice,’ Edwina murmured. How many times would he disappoint you in a day if you were married to him, Ursula wondered? It seemed to her that in the search for arguments against marriage the existence of Maurice presented the very best one of all. Of course, Edwina’s nose was currently out of joint on account of the
driver
, who turned out to be a rather attractive ATS girl in uniform. Sylvie, to the girl’s embarrassment (her name was Penny but everyone immediately forgot this), insisted that she join them at the table when she would clearly have been more comfortable staying with the car, or in the kitchen with Bridget. She was stuck at the cramped end of the table with the evacuees and was the object of constant frosty scrutiny from Edwina. Maurice, on the other hand, studiously ignored her. Ursula tried to read some meaning into this. She wished Pamela were here, she was very good at deciphering people, although not perhaps as good as Izzie. (‘So, Maurice has been a naughty boy, I see. Mind you, she’s a looker. Women in uniform, what man can resist?’)

Philip and Hazel sat passively between their parents. Sylvie had never been particularly fond of Maurice’s children whereas she seemed to delight in her evacuees, Barry and Bobby (‘my two busy bees’), currently crawling beneath the Regency Revival dining table, giggling in a rather manic fashion. ‘Full of mischief,’ Sylvie said indulgently. The evacuees, as everyone else referred to them, as if they were entirely defined by their status, had been scrubbed and polished into apparent innocence by Bridget and Sylvie but nothing could disguise their impish nature. (‘What little horrors,’ Izzie said with a shudder.) Ursula rather liked them, they reminded her of the small Millers. If they had been dogs their tails would have been constantly wagging.

Sylvie now had a pair of real puppies as well, excitable black Labradors who were also brothers. They were called Hector and Hamish but seemed to be known collectively and indistinguishably as ‘the dogs’. The dogs and the evacuees appeared to have contributed to a new shabbiness in Fox Corner. Sylvie herself seemed more reconciled now to this war than she had ever been to the last one. Hugh less so. He had been ‘pushed’ into training the Home Guard and had only this morning after Sunday service been instructing the ‘ladies’ of the local church in the use of the stirrup pump.

‘Is that suitable for the Sabbath?’ Edwina asked. ‘I’m sure God’s on our side, but …’ she tailed off, incapable of sustaining a theological position despite being ‘a devout Christian’, which meant, according to Pamela, that she slapped her children hard and made them eat for breakfast what they left at tea.

‘Of course it’s suitable,’ Maurice said. ‘In my role organizing the civil defence—’

‘I don’t consider myself to be “on the shelf” as you so charmingly put it,’ Ursula interrupted him irritably. Again, she experienced a fleeting wish for Crighton’s be-medalled, braided presence. How horrified Edwina would be to know of Egerton Gardens. (‘And how is the Admiral?’ Izzie asked later in the garden, sotto voce, like a conspirator, for, of course, she knew. Izzie knew everything and if she didn’t know it she could mouse it out with ease. Like Ursula, she had the character for espionage. ‘He’s not an admiral,’ Ursula said. ‘But he is well, thank you.’)

‘You do all right on your own,’ Teddy said to Ursula. ‘
Contracted to thine own bright eyes
, and so on.’ Teddy had faith in poetry, as if merely to quote from Shakespeare would mollify a situation. Ursula thought the sonnet he was quoting from was about being selfish but didn’t say so as Teddy meant it kindly. Unlike everyone else, it seemed, all of whom appeared quite fixed on her unmarried status.

‘She’s only thirty, for heaven’s sake,’ Izzie said, putting in her oar again. (If only they would all be quiet, Ursula thought.) ‘After all,’ Izzie persisted, ‘I was over forty when I married.’

‘And where
is
your husband?’ Sylvie asked, looking around the Regency Revival – both leaves extended to accommodate their numbers. She feigned perplexity (it didn’t suit her). ‘I don’t seem to see him here.’