Life After Life (35 page)

One of the few things, perhaps the only thing Sylvie and Izzie had in common, was their antipathy towards Hugh’s mother. ‘Your mother too,’ Hugh pointed out to Izzie and Izzie said, ‘Oh, no, she found me by the side of the road. She often told me so. I was so naughty that even the gypsies didn’t want me.’

Hugh came to watch Maurice and Ursula shooting and said, ‘Why, little bear, you’re a real Annie Oakley.’

‘You know,’ Sylvie said, appearing suddenly and startling Ursula into full wakefulness, ‘long, lazy days like these will never come again in your life. You think they will, but they won’t.’

‘Unless I become incredibly rich,’ Ursula said. ‘Then I could be idle all day long.’

‘Perhaps,’ Sylvie said, ‘but summer would still have to come to an end one day.’ She sank down on the grass next to Ursula and picked up the Kleist. ‘A suicidal romantic,’ she said dismissively. ‘Are you really going to do Modern Languages? Your father says Latin might be more useful.’

‘How can it be useful? Nobody speaks it,’ Ursula said reasonably. This was an argument that had been rumbling genteelly all summer. She stretched her arms above her head. ‘I shall go and live in Paris for a year and speak nothing but French. That will be very
useful
there.’

‘Oh, Paris,’ Sylvie shrugged. ‘Paris is rather overrated.’

‘Berlin, then.’

‘Germany’s a mess.’

‘Vienna.’

‘Stuffy.’

‘Brussels,’ Ursula said. ‘No one can object to Brussels.’

It was true, Sylvie could think of nothing to say about Brussels and their grand tour of Europe came to an abrupt halt.

‘After university anyway,’ Ursula said. ‘That’s
years
away yet, you can stop worrying.’

‘University won’t teach you how to be a wife and mother,’ Sylvie said.

‘What if I don’t want to be a wife and mother?’

Sylvie laughed. ‘Now you’re just talking nonsense to provoke. There’s tea on the lawn,’ she said, rousing herself reluctantly. ‘And cake. And, unfortunately, Izzie.’

Ursula went for a walk along the lane before supper, Jock happily trotting ahead. (He was a wonderfully cheerful dog, it was hard to believe that Izzie could have chosen so well.) It was the kind of summer evening that made Ursula want to be alone. ‘Oh,’ Izzie said, ‘you’re at an age when a girl is simply
consumed
by the sublime.’ Ursula wasn’t sure what she meant (‘No one is ever sure what she means,’ Sylvie said) but she thought she understood a little. There was a strangeness in the shimmering air, a sense of
imminence
that made Ursula’s chest feel full, as if her heart was growing. It was a kind of high holiness – she could think of no other way of describing it. Perhaps it was the future, she thought, coming nearer all the time.

She was sixteen, on the brink of everything. She had even been kissed, on her birthday at that, by the rather alarming American friend of Maurice’s. ‘Just one kiss,’ she told him before batting him away when he got too fresh with her. Unfortunately he stumbled over his huge feet and fell backwards into a cotoneaster, which looked rather uncomfortable and certainly undignified. She told Millie, who hooted with laughter. Still, as Millie said, a kiss was a kiss.

Her walk took her to the station where she said hello to Fred Smith, who doffed his railwayman’s cap as if she were already a grown-up.

The imminence remained imminent, receded even, as she watched his train
huff-huff-huff
off to London. She walked back and met Nancy, grubbing for things for her nature collection, and they walked companionably together before they were overtaken by Benjamin Cole on his bicycle. He stopped and dismounted and said, ‘Shall I escort you home, ladies?’ rather in the way that Hugh might have done and Nancy giggled.

Ursula was glad that the heat of the afternoon had already made her cheeks pink because she could feel herself blushing. She grabbed some cow parsley from the hedgerow and fanned herself (ineffectually) with it. She had not, after all, been so wrong about the imminence.

Benjamin (‘Oh, do call me Ben,’ he said. ‘Only my parents call me Benjamin these days’) walked with them as far as the Shawcrosses’ gate where he said, ‘Goodbye, then,’ and climbed back on his bicycle for the short ride home.

‘Oh,’ Nancy whispered, disappointed on her behalf, ‘I thought maybe he would walk you home, just the two of you.’

‘Am I so obvious?’ Ursula asked, her spirits drooping.

‘You are rather. Never mind.’ Nancy patted her on the arm as if she were the elder by four years rather than Ursula. And then, ‘I’m late, I think, I don’t want to miss dinner,’ she said and, clutching her foraged treasure, she skipped along the path towards her house, singing
tra-la-la
. Nancy was a girl who really did sing
tra-la-la
. Ursula wished she was that kind of girl. She turned to go, she supposed she was late for supper too, but then she heard the mad ringing of a bicycle bell announcing Benjamin (Ben!) zooming towards her. ‘I forgot to say,’ he said, ‘we’re having a party next week – Saturday afternoon – Mother said to ask you. It’s Dan’s birthday, she wants some girls to dilute the boys, I think that was her phrase. She thought maybe you and Millie. Nancy’s a bit young, isn’t she?’

‘Yes, she is,’ Ursula agreed quickly. ‘But I’d love to come. So would Millie, I’m sure. Thank you.’

Imminence had returned to the world.

She watched him cycle away, whistling as he went. When she turned round she nearly bumped into a man who seemed to have appeared out of nowhere and was hovering, waiting for her. He tipped his cap and muttered, ‘Evening, miss.’ He was a rough-looking fellow and Ursula took a step back. ‘Tell me the way to the station, miss?’ he said and she pointed down the lane and said, ‘It’s that way.’

‘Care to show me the way, miss?’ he said, moving closer to her again.

‘No,’ she said, ‘no thank you.’ Then his hand suddenly shot out and he grabbed her forearm. She managed to tug her arm away and set off running, not daring to look behind until she reached her doorstep.

‘All right, little bear?’ Hugh asked as she flung herself into the porch. ‘You look all puffed out,’ he said.

‘No, I’m fine, really,’ she said. Hugh would only worry if she told him about the man.

‘Veal cutlets
à la Russe
,’ Mrs Glover said as she put a large white china dish on the table. ‘I’m only telling you because last time I cooked it someone said they couldn’t begin to imagine what it was.’

‘The Coles are having a party,’ Ursula said to Sylvie. ‘Millie and I are invited.’

‘Lovely,’ Sylvie said, distracted by the contents of the white porcelain dish, much of which would later be fed to a less discerning (or, as Mrs Glover would have it, ‘less fussy’) West Highland terrier.

The party was a disappointment. It was a rather daunting affair with endless games of charades (Millie in her element, needless to say) and quizzes to which Ursula knew most of the answers but was left unheard, beaten by the ferociously competitive speed of the Cole boys and their friends. Ursula felt invisible and the only intimacy that she shared with Benjamin (he no longer seemed like Ben) was when he asked her if she would like some fruit cup and then forgot to come back with any. There was no dancing but piles of food and Ursula comforted herself picking and choosing from an impressive selection of desserts. Mrs Cole, patrolling the food, said to her, ‘Goodness, you’re such a little scrap of a thing, where do you put all that food?’

Such a little scrap of a thing, Ursula thought as she tramped dejectedly home, that no one even seemed to notice her.

‘Did you get cake?’ Teddy asked eagerly when she came in the door.

‘Masses,’ she said. They sat on the terrace and shared the large slice of birthday cake doled out on departure by Mrs Cole, Jock receiving his fair share. When a large dog fox trotted on to the twilit lawn Ursula tossed a piece in its direction but it regarded the cake with the disdain of a carnivore.

The Land of Begin Again

August 1933

‘ER KOMMT! ER KOMMT!
’ ONE of the girls shouted.

‘He’s coming? Finally?’ Ursula said, glancing at Klara.

‘Apparently. Thank goodness. Before we die of hunger and boredom,’ she said.

They were both equally bemused and amused by the younger girls’ hero-worshipping antics. They had been waiting by the roadside for the best part of a hot afternoon, with nothing to eat or drink except for a pail of milk that two of the girls had fetched from a farm nearby. Some of the girls had heard a rumour that the Führer would be arriving today at his mountain retreat, and they had been waiting patiently for hours now. Several of the girls had taken a siesta on the grass verge, but none of them had any intention of giving up without a glimpse of the Führer.

There was some cheering further down the steep, crooked road that led up to Berchtesgaden and they all jumped to their feet. A big black car swept past them and some of the girls squealed with excitement but ‘he’ wasn’t in it. Then a second car, a magnificent open-topped black Mercedes, came into view, a swastika pennant fluttering on the bonnet. It drove slower than the previous car and did indeed contain the new Chancellor of the Reich.

The Führer gave an abbreviated version of his salute, a funny little flap of the hand backwards so that he looked as if he were cupping his ear to hear them better as they shouted out to him. At the sight of him, Hilde, standing next to Ursula, said simply, ‘Oh,’ investing the single syllable with religious ecstasy. And then, just as quickly, it was all over. Hanne crossed her hands over her chest, looking like a rather constipated saint. ‘My life is fulfilled,’ she laughed.

‘He looks better in his photographs,’ Klara murmured.

The girls were all in remarkably high spirits, had been all day, and under their
Gruppenführerin
’s orders (Adelheid, a blonde Amazon, an admirably competent eighteen-year-old) they now quickly formed themselves into a squad and started cheerfully on the long march back to the youth hostel, singing as they went. (‘They sing
all
the time,’ Ursula wrote to Millie. ‘It’s all a little too
lustig
for my liking. I feel like I’m in the chorus of a particularly jolly folk opera.’)

Their repertoire was varied – folk songs, quaint love songs and rousing, rather savage, patriotic anthems about flags dipped in blood, as well as the obligatory sing-songs around the campfire. They especially liked
Schunkeln
– linking arms and swaying to songs. When Ursula was pushed into rendering a song she gave them ‘Auld Lang Syne’, perfect for
Schunkeln
.

Hilde and Hanne were Klara’s younger sisters, keen members of the BDM, the Bund Deutscher Mädel – the girls’ equivalent of the Hitler-Jugend (‘
Ha Jot
, we call them,’ Hilde said, and she and Hanne fell about giggling at the idea of handsome boys in uniform).

Ursula had heard of neither the Hitler-Jugend nor the BDM before arriving in the Brenner household but in the two weeks she had been living there she had heard little else from Hilde and Hanne. ‘It’s a healthy hobby,’ their mother, Frau Brenner, said. ‘It promotes peace and understanding between young people. No more wars. And it keeps them away from boys.’ Klara, like Ursula a recent graduate – she had been an art student at the
Akademie
– was indifferent to her sisters’ obsession but had offered to be a chaperone on their
Bergwanderung
, their summer camping trip, hiking from one
Jugendherberge
to the next in the Bavarian mountains. ‘You’ll come, won’t you?’ Klara said to Ursula. ‘I’m sure we’ll have fun and you’ll see some of the countryside. And if you don’t you’ll be stuck in town with Mutti and Vati.’

‘I think it’s like the Girl Guides,’ Ursula wrote to Pamela.

‘Not quite,’ Pamela wrote back.

Ursula was not intending to spend long in Munich. Germany was no more than a detour in her life, part of her adventurous year in Europe. ‘It will be my own grand tour,’ she said to Millie, ‘although I’m afraid it’s a little second-rate, a “not quite so grand tour”.’ The plan was to take in Bologna rather than Rome or Florence, Munich not Berlin and Nancy instead of Paris (Nancy Shawcross much amused by this choice) – all cities where her tutors from university knew of good homes in which she could lodge. To keep herself she was to do a little teaching, although Hugh had arranged for a modest but regular money order to be sent to her. Hugh was relieved that she would be spending her time ‘in the provinces’, where ‘people are, on the whole, better behaved’. (‘He means duller,’ Ursula said to Millie.) Hugh had completely vetoed Paris, he had a particular aversion to the city, and was hardly more keen on Nancy which was still uncompromisingly
French
. (‘Because it’s in France,’ Ursula pointed out.) He had seen enough of the continent during the Great War, he said, he couldn’t see what all the hullabaloo was about.

Ursula had, despite Sylvie’s reservations, studied for a degree in Modern Languages – French and German and a little Italian (very little). Recently graduated and failing to think of anything else, she had applied and been given a place on a teacher-training course. She had deferred for a year, saying that she wanted an opportunity to see a little of the world before ‘settling down’ to a lifetime at the blackboard. That was her rationale anyway, the one that she paraded for parental scrutiny, whereas her true hope was that something would happen in the course of her time abroad that would mean she need never take up the place. What that ‘something’ was she had no idea (‘Love perhaps,’ Millie said wistfully). Anything really that would mean she didn’t end up as an embittered spinster in a girls’ grammar school, spooling her way through the conjugation of foreign verbs, chalk dust falling from her clothes like dandruff. (She based this portrait on her own schoolmistresses.) It wasn’t a profession that had garnered much enthusiasm in her immediate circle either.