Life After Life (54 page)

He had eventually flushed his fugitive sister out from Hôtel d’Alsace in St Germain, a degenerate
endroit
, in Hugh’s estimation, the scene of Oscar Wilde’s demise, which said everything you needed to know about the place.

An unseemly tussle had taken place not only with Izzie but also with the bounder from whose arms Hugh wrestled her before hauling her, kicking and screaming, into the handsome two-door Renault taxi that he had paid to wait outside the hotel. Hugh thought it would be rather fine to own a motor car. Could he afford one on his salary? Could he learn to drive one? How difficult could it be?

They had eaten some rather decent, pink French lamb on the boat and Izzie had demanded champagne, which he allowed her as he was far too worn out with the whole elopement business to bother with yet another fight. It was tempting to toss her over the rails, into the dark-grey waters of the Channel.

He had telegraphed his mother, Adelaide, from Calais, informing her of Izzie’s misfortune as he thought it might be best if she were prepared before setting eyes on her youngest daughter, whose condition was plain for all the world to see.

Their fellow diners on the boat presumed they were a married couple and many pretty compliments on her impending motherhood were passed Izzie’s way. Hugh supposed it was better to let them think this, appalling though it was, rather than for these complete strangers to discover the truth. Thus he found himself taking part in an absurd charade for the duration of the crossing, in the course of which he was forced to deny the existence of his real wife and children and pretend that Izzie was his child bride. He became, to all intents and purposes, the very villain who had seduced a girl barely out of the nursery (forgetting, perhaps, that his own wife was only seventeen when he proposed to her).

Izzie, of course, threw herself into this mockery with glee, taking her revenge on Hugh by making him as uncomfortable as possible, addressing him as
mon cher mari
and other extremely irritating blandishments.

‘What a lovely young wife you have,’ a man, a Belgian, chortled while Hugh was taking the air on deck and indulging in a post-prandial cigarette. ‘Hardly out of the cradle herself and soon to be a mother. It’s the best way – getting them young – then you can mould them to how you want them.’

‘Your English is remarkable, sir,’ Hugh said, throwing the stub of his cigarette into the sea and walking away. A lesser man would have resorted to fisticuffs. He might, if pressed, fight for the honour of his country, but he would be damned if he would fight for the besmirched honour of his feckless sister. (Although it would be undeniably pleasant to mould a woman to one’s exact requirements, like his bespoke suits from his tailor in Jermyn Street.)

It had been difficult to find the right wording for the telegram to his mother and he had finally settled on I SHALL BE IN HAMPSTEAD BY MIDDAY STOP ISOBEL IS WITH ME STOP SHE IS WITH CHILD STOP. It was a rather bald message and he should perhaps have spent the extra money on some mitigating adverbs. ‘Unfortunately’ might have been one. The telegram (unfortunately) had the opposite to the desired effect and when they disembarked in Dover a reply was waiting for him. DO NOT BRING HER TO MY HOUSE UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES STOP, the final STOP carrying a leaden weight of certainty which was not to be challenged. Which did rather leave Hugh at a loss as to what exactly he
should
do with Izzie. She was, despite appearances, still only a child herself, only sixteen, he could hardly abandon her on the streets. Anxious to return to Fox Corner as soon as possible, he found himself carting her along with him.

When they finally arrived, as iced as snowmen, it was an excitable Bridget who opened the door to him at midnight and said, ‘Oh, no, I was hoping you were going to be the doctor, so I was.’ His third child, it seemed, was on its way.
Her
way, he thought fondly, looking down at the tiny crumpled features. Hugh rather liked babies.

‘But what are we to
do
with her?’ Sylvie fretted. ‘She’s not giving birth under my roof.’

‘
Our
roof.’

‘She’ll have to give it away.’

‘The child is part of our family,’ Hugh said. ‘The same blood runs in its veins as in my children.’

‘
Our
children.’

‘We’ll say the child is adopted,’ Hugh said. ‘An orphaned relative. People won’t question, why should they?’

In the end the baby
was
born beneath the roof of Fox Corner, a boy, and once Sylvie saw him she was unable to discard him so easily. ‘He’s a delightful little thing really,’ she said. Sylvie found all babies delightful.

Izzie had not been allowed beyond the garden for the remainder of her pregnancy. She was being kept a prisoner, she said, ‘like the Count of Monte Cristo’. She handed the baby over as soon as he was born and showed no more interest in him, as if the whole affair – the pregnancy, the confinement – had been a provoking task that they had coerced her into undertaking and now she had fulfilled her part of the bargain and was free to go. After a fortnight of lying around in bed being waited upon by a disgruntled Bridget she was put on a train back to Hampstead, from whence she was packed off to a finishing school in Lausanne.

Hugh was right, no one questioned the sudden appearance of this surplus child. Mrs Glover and Bridget were sworn to secrecy, an oath that was sweetened, unknown to Sylvie, with cash. Hugh knew the value of money, he wasn’t a banker for nothing. Dr Fellowes could, one hoped, be relied upon for his professional discretion.

‘Roland,’ Sylvie said. ‘I’ve always rather liked that name.
The Song of Roland
– he was a French knight.’

‘Died in battle, I expect?’ Hugh said.

‘Most knights do, don’t they?’

The silver hare spun and shone and shimmered before her eyes. The leaves on the beech danced, the garden budded, blossomed, fruited, without any help from her at all.
Rock-a-bye baby
, Sylvie sang.
Down will fall baby, cradle and all
. Ursula was not put off by this threat and continued on her small but dauntless journey, alongside her companion, Roland.

He was a sweet-natured child and it took some time for Sylvie to notice that he was ‘not quite all there’, as she put it to Hugh one evening when he returned from a difficult day at the bank. He knew there was no point in sharing these fiscal problems with Sylvie, yet sometimes he liked to imagine coming home from work to a wife who was fascinated by ledgers and balance sheets, the rising price of tea, the unsteady market in wool. A wife ‘moulded’ to requirements instead of the beautiful, clever and somewhat contrary one he was wedded to.

He had secluded himself in the growlery, sitting at his desk with a large malt whisky and a small cigar, hoping to be left in peace. To no avail: Sylvie swept in and sat opposite him, like a customer in the bank looking for a loan, and said, ‘I think Izzie’s child may be a simpleton.’ Up until now he had always been Roland, now, apparently defective, he was Izzie’s once more.

Hugh dismissed her opinion but there was no denying that as time went on Roland didn’t progress the way the others did. He was slow to learn and didn’t seem to possess a child’s natural curiosity about the world. You could sit him on a hearth rug with a rag-book or a set of wooden bricks and he would still be there half an hour later gazing contentedly at the fire (well guarded against children) or Queenie the cat sitting next to him, attending to her toilette (less well guarded and much prone to malevolence). Roland could be set to any simple task, and spent much of his time willingly fetching and carrying for the girls, Bridget, even Mrs Glover was not above sending him on simple errands, a bag of sugar from the pantry, a wooden spoon from the jar. It seemed unlikely that he would be going to Hugh’s old school or entering Hugh’s old college, and Hugh grew fonder of the boy for that somehow.

‘Perhaps we should get him a dog,’ he suggested. ‘A dog always brings the best out in a boy.’ Bosun arrived, a large friendly animal with a tendency to herd and protect, and discerned immediately that he had been put in charge of something important.

At least the boy was placid, Hugh thought, unlike his dratted mother, or his own two eldest children who fought incessantly with each other. Ursula, of course, was different to all of them. She was watchful, as if she were trying to drink in the whole world through those little green eyes that were both his and hers. She was rather unnerving.

Mr Winton’s easel was set up to face the sea. He was quite pleased with what he had so far, the blues and greens and whites – and murky browns – of the Cornish seaside. Several passers-by paused in their journeys across the sands to observe the painting-in-progress. He hoped, in vain, for compliments.

A little fleet of white-sailed yachts skimmed the horizon, a race of some kind, Mr Winton presumed. He smudged some Chinese white on his own painted horizon and stood back to admire the results. Mr Winton saw yachts, others might have seen blobs of white paint. They would contrast rather well, he thought, with some figures on the seashore. The two little girls so intent on building a sandcastle would be perfect. He bit the tip of his brush as he gazed at his canvas. How to do it best, he wondered?

The sandcastle was Ursula’s suggestion. They should build, she said to Pamela, the best sandcastle ever. She had conjured up such a vivid image of this sandy citadel – moats and turrets and battlements – that Pamela could almost see the medieval ladies in their wimples waving to the knights as they clattered away on their horses over the drawbridge (a piece of driftwood was to be sought out for this purpose). They had set about this task with undivided energy although they were still at the heavy-engineering stage, digging a double moat that would eventually, when the tide turned, fill with seawater to protect those wimpled ladies from violent siege (by someone like Maurice, inevitably). Roland, their ever-obliging minion, was dispatched to scour the beach for decorative pebbles and the all-important drawbridge.

They were further along the beach from Sylvie and Bridget, who were immersed in their books while the new baby, Edward – Teddy – was sleeping on a blanket on the sand beneath the protection of a parasol. Maurice was dredging in rock pools at the far end of the beach. He had made new companions, rough local boys with whom he went swimming and scrabbling up cliffs. Boys were just boys to Maurice. He had not yet learned to evaluate them by accent and social standing.

Maurice had an indestructible quality and no one ever seemed to worry about him, least of all his mother.

Bosun, unfortunately, had been left behind with the Coles.

In time-honoured fashion, the sand from the moat was piled up in a central mound, the building material for the proposed fortress. Both girls, by now hot and sticky from their exertions, took a moment to stand back and contemplate this formless heap. Pamela felt more doubtful now about the turrets and battlements, the wimpled ladies seemed even more unlikely. The mound reminded Ursula of something, but what? Something familiar, yet nebulous and undefinable, no more than a shape in her brain. She was prone to these sensations, as if a memory was being tugged reluctantly out of its hiding place. She presumed it was the same for everyone.

Then this feeling was replaced by fear, a shadow of a thrill too, the kind that came with a thunderstorm rolling in, or a sea fog creeping towards the shore. Hazard could be anywhere, in the clouds, the waves, the little yachts on the horizon, the man painting at his easel. She set off at a purposeful trot to take her fears to Sylvie and have them soothed.

Ursula was a peculiar child, full of troublesome notions, in Sylvie’s opinion. She was forever answering Ursula’s anxious questions –
What would we do if the house caught fire? Our train crashed? The river flooded?
Practical advice, Sylvie had discovered, was the best way to allay these fears rather than dismissing them as unlikely (
Why, dear, we would gather up our belongings and we would climb on the roof until the water receded
).

Pamela, meanwhile, returned stoically to digging the moat. Mr Winton was entirely absorbed in the close brushwork necessary for Pamela’s sunhat. What a happy coincidence that those two little girls had chosen to build their sandcastle in the middle of his composition. He thought he might call it
The Diggers
. Or
The Sand Diggers
.

Sylvie was dozing over
The Secret Agent
and rather resented being woken. ‘What is it?’ she said. She glanced along the beach and saw Pamela digging industriously. Distant yelling and wild whooping suggested Maurice.

‘Where’s Roland?’ she asked.

‘Roland?’ Ursula said, looking around for their willing slave and failing to see him anywhere. ‘He’s looking for a drawbridge.’ Sylvie was on her feet now, anxiously scanning the beach.

‘A what?’

‘A drawbridge,’ Ursula repeated.

They concluded that he must have spotted a piece of wood in the sea and obediently waded out to collect it. He had no real understanding of danger and did not know how to swim, of course. If Bosun had been on watch on the beach he would have dog-paddled out into the waves, heedless of any peril, and snatched Roland back. In his absence,
Archibald Winton, an amateur watercolourist from Birmingham
, as the local paper referred to him, had attempted to rescue the child (
Roland Todd, aged four, on holiday with his family
). He had cast aside his paintbrush and swum out to sea and pulled the boy from the water,
but, alas, to no avail
. This clipping was carefully cut out and preserved for appreciation in Birmingham. In the course of three column inches Mr Winton had become both a hero and an artist. He imagined himself saying modestly, ‘Why, it was nothing,’ and – of course – it
was
nothing, for no one was saved.