Life After Life (57 page)

‘Maurice shot the fox?’ Teddy said, his face a picture of disappointment.

And so it went on from there, a bad-tempered argument between everyone at the dinner table just because of a dead fox, Hugh thought. They’re vermin, he felt like saying but didn’t want to fuel the furore of emotions that had been unleashed. Instead, he said, ‘Please, let’s not talk about it over dinner, it’s difficult enough trying to digest this stuff.’ But talk about it they would. He tried to ignore them, ploughing his way through the veal cutlets (had Mrs Glover ever tasted them herself, he wondered?). He was relieved that they were interrupted by a knock at the door.

‘Ah, Major Shawcross,’ Hugh said, ‘do come in.’

‘Oh, goodness, I don’t want to interrupt you at table,’ Major Shawcross said, looking awkward, ‘I just wondered if your Teddy had seen our Nancy.’

‘Nancy?’ Teddy said.

‘Yes,’ Major Shawcross said. ‘We can’t find her anywhere.’

They didn’t meet any more in the copse, or the lane or the meadow. Hugh imposed a strict curfew after Nancy’s body was found and anyway both Ursula and Ben were stricken with guilty horror. If they had come home when they were supposed to, if they had crossed that field even five minutes earlier instead of lingering, they might have saved her. But by the time they meandered ignorantly back Nancy was already dead, lying in the cattle trough in the top corner of the field. So, indeed, just like Romeo and Juliet it had ended in death. Nancy, sacrificed for their love.

‘It’s a terrible thing,’ Pamela said to her. ‘But you’re not responsible, why are you behaving as though you are?’

Because she was. She knew it now.

Something was riven, broken, a lightning fork cutting open a swollen sky.

In the October half-term she went to stay with Izzie for a few days. They were sitting in the Russian Tea Room in South Kensington. ‘A terrifically right-wing clientele here,’ Izzie said, ‘but they do the most wonderful pancake things.’ There was a samovar. (Was it the samovar that set her off, with its shades of Dr Kellet? It would seem absurd if it was.) They had finished their tea and Izzie said, ‘Just hang on a sec, I’m going to powder my nose. Ask for the bill, will you?’

Ursula was waiting patiently for her to return when suddenly the terror descended, swift as a predatory hawk. An anticipatory dread of something unknown but enormously threatening. It was coming for her, here among the polite tinkle of teaspoon on saucer. She stood up, knocking over her chair. She felt dizzy and there was a veil of fog in front of her face. Like bomb-dust, she thought, yet she had never been bombed.

She pushed through the veil, out of the Russian Tea Room on to Harrington Road. She started to run and kept on running, on to the Brompton Road and then, blindly, into Egerton Gardens.

She had been here before. She had never been here before.

There was always something just out of sight, just around a corner, something she could never chase down – something that was chasing
her
down. She was both the hunter and the hunted. Like the fox. She carried on and then tripped on something, falling straight on to her nose. The pain was extraordinary. Blood everywhere. She sat on the pavement and cried with the agony of it all. She hadn’t realized there was anyone on the street but then from behind her a man’s voice said, ‘Oh, my, how awful for you. Let me help you. You have blood all over your nice turquoise scarf. Is that the colour, or is it aquamarine? My name’s Derek, Derek Oliphant.’

She knew that voice. She didn’t know that voice. The past seemed to
leak
into the present, as if there were a fault somewhere. Or was it the future spilling into the past? Either way it was nightmarish, as if her inner dark landscape had become manifest. The inside become the outside. Time was out of joint, that was for certain.

She staggered to her feet but didn’t dare to look round. Ignoring the awful pain, she ran on and on. She was in Belgravia before she finally flagged completely. Here too, she thought. She had been here before. She had never been here before. I give in, she thought. Whatever it is, it can have me. She sank to her knees on the hard pavement and curled up in a ball. A fox without a hole.

She must have passed out because when she opened her eyes she was in a bed in a room painted white. There was a big window and outside the window she could see a horse-chestnut tree that had not yet shed its leaves. She turned her head and saw Dr Kellet.

‘You broke your nose,’ Dr Kellet said. ‘We thought you must have been attacked by someone.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I fell.’

‘A vicar found you. He took you in a taxi to St George’s Hospital.’

‘But what are
you
doing here?’

‘Your father got in touch with me,’ Dr Kellet said. ‘He wasn’t sure who else to contact.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Well, when you arrived at St George’s you wouldn’t stop screaming. They thought something terrible must have happened to you.’

‘This isn’t St George’s, is it?’

‘No,’ he said kindly. ‘This is a private clinic. Rest, good food and so on. They have lovely gardens. I always think a lovely garden helps, don’t you?’

‘Time isn’t circular,’ she said to Dr Kellet. ‘It’s like a … palimpsest.’

‘Oh dear,’ he said. ‘That sounds very vexing.’

‘And memories are sometimes in the future.’

‘You are an old soul,’ he said. ‘It can’t be easy. But your life is still ahead of you. It must be lived.’ He was not her doctor, he had retired, he said, he was ‘merely a visitor’.

The sanatorium made her feel as if she had a mild case of consumption. She sat on the sunny terrace during the day and read countless books and orderlies ferried food and drink to her. She wandered through the gardens, had polite conversation with doctors and psychiatrists, talked to her fellow patients (on her floor, at any rate. The truly mad were in the attic, like Mrs Rochester). There were even fresh flowers in her room and a bowl of apples. It must be costing a fortune for her to stay here, she thought.

‘This must be very expensive,’ she said to Hugh when he visited, which he did often.

‘Izzie is paying,’ he said. ‘She insisted.’

Dr Kellet lit his meerschaum thoughtfully. They were sitting on the terrace. Ursula thought she would be quite happy to spend the rest of her life here. It was so gloriously unchallenging.

‘
And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge
…’ Dr Kellet said.

‘…
and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing
,’ Ursula provided.

‘
Caritas
, of course, is love. But you will know that.’

‘I’m not without charity,’ Ursula said. ‘Why are we quoting Corinthians? I thought you were a Buddhist.’

‘Oh, I am nothing,’ Dr Kellet said. ‘And everything too, of course,’ he added – rather elliptically, in Ursula’s opinion.

‘The question is,’ he said, ‘do you have enough?’

‘Enough what?’ The conversation had quite got away from her now but Dr Kellet was busy with the demands of the meerschaum and didn’t answer. Tea interrupted them.

‘They do excellent chocolate cake here,’ Dr Kellet said.

‘All better, little bear?’ Hugh said as he helped her gently into the car. He had brought the Bentley to pick her up.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Absolutely.’

‘Good. Let’s get home. The house isn’t the same without you.’

She had wasted so much precious time but she had a plan now, she thought, as she lay awake in the dark, in her own bed at Fox Corner. The plan would involve snow, no doubt. The silver hare, the dancing green leaves. And so on. German, not the Classics, and afterwards a course in shorthand and typing and perhaps the study of Esperanto on the side, just in case utopia should come to pass. The membership of a local shooting club and an application for an office job somewhere, working for a while, salting money away – nothing untoward. She didn’t want to draw attention to herself, she would heed her father’s advice, although he hadn’t given it to her yet, she would keep her head below the parapet and her light under a bushel. And then, when she was ready, she would have enough to live on while she embedded herself deep in the heart of the beast, from whence she would pluck out the black tumour that was growing there, larger every day.

And then one day she would be walking down Amalienstrasse and pause outside Photo Hoffmann and gaze at the Kodaks and Leicas and Voigtländers in the windows and she would open the shop door and hear the little bell clanging to announce her arrival to the girl working behind the counter who will probably say
Guten Tag, gnädiges Fräulein
, or perhaps she will say
Grüss Gott
because this is 1930 when people can still address you with
Grüss Gott
and
Tschüss
instead of endless
Heil Hitlers
and absurd martial salutes.

And Ursula will hold out her old box Brownie and say, ‘I don’t seem to be able to spool the film on,’ and perky seventeen-year-old Eva Braun will say, ‘Let me have a look for you.’

Her heart swelled with the high holiness of it all. Imminence was all around. She was both warrior and shining spear. She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

When everyone was asleep and the house was quiet, Ursula got out of bed and climbed on the chair at the open window of the little attic bedroom.

It’s time, she thought. A clock struck somewhere in sympathy. She thought of Teddy and Miss Woolf, of Roland and little Angela, of Nancy and Sylvie. She thought of Dr Kellet and Pindar.
Become such as you are, having learned what that is
. She knew what that was now. She was Ursula Beresford Todd and she was a witness.

She opened her arms to the black bat and they flew to each other, embracing in the air like long-lost souls. This is love, Ursula thought. And the practice of it makes it perfect.

Be Ye Men of Valour

December 1930

URSULA KNEW ALL about Eva. She knew how much she liked fashion and make-up and gossip. She knew that she could skate and ski and loved to dance. And so Ursula lingered over the expensive frocks in Oberpollinger with her before visiting a café for coffee and cake, or an ice-cream in the Englischer Garten where they would sit and watch the children on the carousel. She went to the skating rink with Eva and her sister Gretl. She was invited to dinner at the Brauns’ table. ‘Your English friend is very nice,’ Frau Braun told Eva.

She told them that she was improving her German before she settled down to teach at home. Eva sighed with boredom at the idea.

Eva loved to be photographed and Ursula took many, many photographs of her on her box Brownie and then they spent their evenings sticking them in albums and admiring the different poses that Eva had struck. ‘You should be in films,’ Ursula told Eva and she was ridiculously flattered. Ursula had mugged up on celebrities, Hollywood and British as well as German, on the latest songs and dances. She was an older woman, interested in a fledgling. She took Eva under her wing and Eva was bowled over by her new sophisticated friend.