Life After Life (50 page)

‘All those names,’ Teddy said, gazing at the Cenotaph. ‘All those lives. And now again. I think there is something wrong with the human race. It undermines everything one would like to believe in, don’t you think?’

‘No point in thinking,’ she said briskly, ‘you just have to get on with life.’ (She really was turning into Miss Woolf.) ‘We only have one after all, we should try and do our best. We can never get it
right
, but we must
try
.’ (The transformation was complete.)

‘What if we had a chance to do it again and again,’ Teddy said, ‘until we finally did get it right? Wouldn’t that be wonderful?’

‘I think it would be exhausting. I would quote Nietzsche to you but you would probably thump me.’

‘Probably,’ he said amiably. ‘He’s a Nazi, isn’t he?’

‘Not exactly. Do you still write poetry, Teddy?’

‘Can’t find the words any more. Everything I try feels like sublimation. Making pretty images out of war. I can’t find the heart of it.’

‘The dark, beating, bloody heart?’

‘Maybe you should write,’ he laughed.

She wasn’t going out on patrol while Teddy was here, Miss Woolf had taken her off the roster. The raids were more sporadic now. There had been bad raids in March and April and they seemed all the worse for their having had a bit of a breather from the bombs. ‘It’s funny,’ Miss Woolf said, ‘one’s nerves are wired so tightly when it’s relentless that it’s almost easier to deal with.’

There had been a decided lull at Ursula’s post. ‘I think Hitler’s more interested in the Balkans,’ Miss Woolf said.

‘He’s going to turn on Russia,’ Crighton told her with some authority. Millie was on another ENSA tour and they had the Kensington flat to themselves.

‘But that would be madness.’

‘Well, the man
is
insane, what do you expect?’ He sighed and said, ‘Let’s not talk about the war.’ They were drinking Admiralty whisky and playing cribbage, like an old married couple.

Teddy walked her as far as Exhibition Road and her office and said, ‘I imagined your “War Room” would be a rather grand affair – porticos and pillars – not a bunker.’

‘Maurice has the porticos.’

As soon as she was inside she was pounced upon by Ivy Jones, one of the teleprinter operators just coming on duty, who said, ‘You’re a dark horse, Miss Todd, keeping that gorgeous man a secret,’ and Ursula thought, this is what comes of being too friendly with staff. ‘Must dash,’ she said, ‘I’m a slave to the Daily Situation Report.’

Her own ‘girls’, Miss Fawcett and her ilk, filed and collated and sent the buff folders to her so she could formulate summaries, daily, weekly, hourly sometimes. Daily logs, damage logs, situation reports, it was never-ending. Then it all had to be typed up and put into more buff folders and be signed off by her before the folders went on their journey to someone else, someone like Maurice.

‘We’re just cogs in a machine really, aren’t we?’ Miss Fawcett said to her and Ursula said, ‘But remember, without the cog there is no machine.’

Teddy took her out for a drink. It was a warm evening and the trees were full of blossom so that for a moment it felt as if the war was over.

He didn’t want to talk about flying, didn’t want to talk about the war, didn’t even want to talk about Nancy. Where was she? Doing something she couldn’t talk about, apparently. It seemed nobody wanted to talk about anything any more.

‘Well, let’s talk about Dad,’ he said, and so they did and it felt as if Hugh had finally been given the wake he deserved.

Teddy caught the train to Fox Corner next morning, he was staying there for a few nights, and Ursula said, ‘Will you take another evacuee with you?’ and handed over Lucky. He was in the flat all day while she was at work but she often took him to the post if she was on duty and everyone treated him as a kind of mascot. Even Mr Bullock, who did not seem like a dog-lover, would come in with scraps and bones for him. There were times when the dog seemed to eat better than she did. Nonetheless, London in wartime was no place for a dog, she told Teddy. ‘All the noise, it must be terribly alarming.’

‘I like this dog,’ he said, rubbing the dog’s head. ‘He’s a very straightforward kind of dog.’

She went to Marylebone to see them off. Teddy tucked the little dog under one arm and gave her a salute, sweet and ironic at the same time, and boarded the train. She felt almost as sad to see the dog go as she did Teddy.

They had been too optimistic. There was a terrible raid in May.

Their flat in Phillimore Gardens was hit. Neither Ursula nor Millie was there, thank goodness, but the roof and the upper storey were destroyed. Ursula simply moved back in and camped there for a while. The weather wasn’t bad and in some peculiar way she quite enjoyed it. There was still water, although no electricity, and someone at work lent her an old tent so she slept under canvas. The last time she had done that was in Bavaria when she had accompanied the Brenner girls on their BDM summer expedition to the mountains and she had shared a tent with Klara, the eldest. They had grown very fond of each other but she hadn’t heard from Klara since war was declared.

Crighton was sanguine about her
al fresco
arrangement, ‘like sleeping on deck under the stars in the Indian Ocean’. She felt a pang of envy, she hadn’t even been to Paris. The Munich–Bologna–Nancy axis had defined the edges of the unknown world for her. She and her friend Hilary – the girl who slept in a cupboard in the War Rooms – had planned a holiday cycling through France but war had put paid to it. Everyone was stuck on the little sceptred isle. If you thought about it too much you could start to feel quite claustrophobic.

When Millie returned from her ENSA tour she declared that Ursula had gone quite mad and insisted they find somewhere else and so they moved to a shabby place in Lexham Gardens that she knew she would never learn to like. (‘You and I could live together if you wanted,’ Crighton said. ‘A little flat in Knightsbridge?’ She demurred.)

That wasn’t the worst, of course. Their post received a direct hit in the same raid and both Herr Zimmerman and Mr Simms were killed.

At Herr Zimmerman’s funeral a string quartet, all refugees, played Beethoven. Unlike Miss Woolf, Ursula thought that it would take more than the great composer’s works to heal their wounds. ‘I saw them play at the Wigmore Hall before the war,’ Miss Woolf whispered. ‘They’re very good.’

After the funeral Ursula went in search of Fred Smith at his fire station and they rented a room in a nasty little hotel near Paddington. Later, after the sex, which had the same compelling quality as before, they were rocked to sleep by the sound of trains coming and going and she thought, he must miss that sound.

When they woke he said, ‘I’m sorry I was a complete arse last time we were together.’ He went and found them two mugs of tea – she supposed he had charmed someone in the hotel, it didn’t seem like the kind of place to have a kitchen, let alone room service. He did have a natural charm, the same way that Teddy did, it came from a kind of straightness in their character. Jimmy’s charm was different, more dishonest perhaps.

They sat up in bed and drank their tea and smoked cigarettes. She was thinking of Donne’s poem, ‘The Relic’, one of her favourites – the
bracelet of bright hair about the bone
– but refrained from quoting, considering how badly it had gone down last time. How funny though it would be if the hotel were hit and no one understood who they were or what they were doing here together, conjoined in a bed that had become their grave. She had grown very morbid since Argyll Road. It had affected her in a different way to other incidents. What would she like on her headstone, she wondered idly? ‘Ursula Beresford Todd, stalwart to the last’.

‘Do you know your problem, Miss Todd?’ Fred Smith said, stubbing out his cigarette. He took hold of her hand and kissed her open palm and she thought, seize this moment because it’s a sweet one and said, ‘No, what’s my problem?’ and never did find out because the siren went off and he said, ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck, I’m supposed to be on duty,’ and threw his clothes on, gave her a hasty kiss and flew out of the room. She never saw him again.

She was reading through the Home Security War Diary for the awful early hours of 11 May –

Time of Origin – 0045. Form of Origin – Teleprinter. In or Out – In. Subject – South West India Dock Office, wrecked by H.E
. And Westminster Abbey, the Houses of Parliament, De Gaulle’s head -quarters, the Mint, the Law Courts. She had seen St Clement Dane’s herself – blazing like a monstrous chimney fire on the Strand. And all the ordinary people living their precious ordinary lives in Bermondsey, Islington, Southwark. The list went on and on. She was interrupted by Miss Fawcett who said, ‘Message for you, Miss Todd,’ and handed her a piece of paper.

A girl she knew who knew a girl in the fire service had sent her a copy of an AFS report, a little note added, ‘He was a friend of yours, wasn’t he? Sorry …’

Frederick Smith, fireman, crushed when a wall fell while attending a fire in Earl’s Court
.

Bloody fool, Ursula thought. Bloody, bloody fool.

November 1943

IT WAS MAURICE who brought the news to her. His arrival coincided with that of the tea-trolley bearing elevenses. ‘Can I have a word?’ he said.

‘Do you want tea?’ she said, getting up from her desk. ‘I’m sure we can spare you some of ours, vastly inferior though it must be to the Orange Pekoe and Darjeeling and whatnot that you get in your place. And I can’t imagine our biscuits can hold a candle to yours.’ The tea-lady hovered, unimpressed by this exchange with an interloper from the airy regions.

‘No, no tea, thank you,’ he said, surprisingly polite and subdued. It struck her that Maurice was nearly always simmering with suppressed fury (what a strange condition to live your life in), in some ways he reminded her of Hitler (she had heard that Maurice ranted at secretaries. ‘Oh, that’s so unfair!’ Pamela said, ‘but it does make me laugh’).

Maurice had never got his hands dirty. Never been to an incident, never pulled apart a man like a cracker or knelt on a matted bundle of fabric and flesh that had once been a baby.

What was he doing here, was he going to start pontificating again about her love life? It never crossed her mind that he was here to say, ‘I’m sorry to have to tell you this’ (as if this were an official announcement) ‘but Ted has caught one, I’m afraid.’

‘What?’ She couldn’t untangle the meaning. Caught what? ‘I don’t know what you mean, Maurice.’

‘Ted,’ he said. ‘Ted’s plane has gone down.’

Teddy had been safe. He was ‘tour expired’ and was instructing at an OTU. He was a squadron leader with a DFC (Ursula, Nancy and Sylvie had been to the Palace, bursting with pride). And then he had asked to go back on ops. (‘I just felt I had to.’) The girl she knew in the Air Ministry – Anne – told her that one in forty aircrew would survive a second tour of duty.

‘Ursula?’ Maurice said. ‘Do you understand what I’m saying to you? We’ve lost him.’

‘Then we’ll find him.’

‘No. Officially he’s “missing in action”.’

‘Then he’s not
dead
,’ Ursula said. ‘Where?’

‘Berlin, a couple of nights ago.’

‘He bailed out, and he’s been taken captive,’ Ursula said, as if stating a fact.

‘No, I’m afraid not,’ Maurice said. ‘He went down in flames, no one got out.’

‘How do you
know
that?’

‘He was seen, an eyewitness, a fellow pilot.’

‘Who? Who was it who saw him?’

‘I don’t know.’ He was beginning to grow impatient.

‘No,’ she said again. And then again, no. Her heart started racing and her mouth went dry. Her vision blurred and dotted, a pointillist painting. She was going to faint.

‘Are you all right?’ she heard Maurice say. Am I all right, she thought, am I all right? How could I be all right?

Maurice’s voice sounded a long way off. She heard him shout for a girl. A chair was brought, a glass of water fetched. The girl said, ‘Here, Miss Todd, put your head between your knees.’ The girl was Miss Fawcett, a nice girl. ‘Thank you, Miss Fawcett,’ she murmured.

‘Mother took it very hard as well,’ Maurice said, as if bemused by grief. He had never cared for Teddy the way they all did.

‘Well,’ he said, patting her on the shoulder, she tried not to flinch, ‘I’d better get back to the office, I expect I’ll see you at Fox Corner,’ almost casually, as if the worst part of the conversation were over and they could get on with some blander chat.

‘Why?’

‘Why what?’

She sat up straight. The water in the glass trembled slightly. ‘Why will you see me at Fox Corner?’ She sensed Miss Fawcett still hovering solicitously.

‘Well,’ Maurice said, ‘a family gathers on occasions such as these. After all, there won’t be a funeral.’

‘There won’t?’

‘No, of course not. No body,’ he said. Did he shrug? Did he? She was shivering, she thought she might faint after all. She wished someone would hold her. Not Maurice. Miss Fawcett took the glass from her hand. Maurice said, ‘I’ll give you a lift down, of course. Mother sounded most awfully cut up,’ he added.

He’d told her on the telephone? How dreadful, she thought numbly. It hardly mattered, she supposed, how one was given the news. And yet to have it conveyed by Maurice in his three-piece pinstripe, leaning against her desk, now inspecting his fingernails, waiting for her to say she was fine and he could go …

‘I’m fine. You can go.’

Miss Fawcett brought her hot, sweet tea and said, ‘I’m so sorry, Miss Todd. Would you like me to come home with you?’

‘That’s very kind of you,’ Ursula said, ‘but I’ll be all right. Do you think you could fetch my coat for me?’

He was twisting his uniform cap in his hands. They were making him nervous, just by their very presence. Roy Holt was drinking beer from a big dimpled-glass beer mug, great draughts with every mouthful as if he were very thirsty. He was Teddy’s friend, the witness to his death. The ‘fellow pilot’. Last time Ursula was here, visiting Teddy, was the summer of ’42 and they had sat in the beer garden and eaten ham sandwiches and pickled eggs.