Life After Life (8 page)

For pudding they had jam roly-poly and custard, the jam from the summer’s raspberries. The summer was a dream now, Sylvie said.

‘Dead baby,’ Maurice said, in that horribly off-hand manner that boarding school had only served to foster. He shovelled pudding into his mouth and said, ‘That’s what we call jam roly-poly at school.’

‘Manners, Maurice,’ Sylvie warned. ‘And please, don’t be so vile.’

‘Dead baby?’ Ursula said, putting her spoon down and gazing in horror at the dish in front of her.

‘The Germans eat them,’ Pamela said gloomily.

‘Puddings?’ Ursula puzzled. Didn’t everyone eat puddings, even the enemy?

‘No,
babies
,’ Pamela said. ‘But only Belgian ones.’

Sylvie looked at the roly-poly, the round, red seam of jam like blood, and shivered. This morning she had watched Mrs Glover snapping poor old Henrietta’s neck backwards over a broom handle, the bird dispatched with the indifference of a state executioner. Needs must, I suppose, Sylvie thought. ‘We’re at war,’ Mrs Glover said, ‘it’s not the time to be squeamish.’

Pamela would not let the subject rest. ‘
Was
it, Mummy?’ she insisted quietly. ‘Was it Henrietta?’

‘No, darling,’ Sylvie said. ‘On my word of honour, that was not Henrietta.’

An urgent rapping at the back door prevented further discussion. They all sat still, staring at each other, as if they had been caught in the middle of a crime. Ursula didn’t really know why. ‘Don’t let it be bad news,’ Sylvie said. It was. Seconds later there was a terrible scream from the kitchen. Sam Wellington, the old boot, was dead.

‘This terrible war,’ Sylvie murmured.

Pamela gave Ursula the remains of one of her dun-coloured balls of four-ply lambswool and Ursula promised that Queen Solange would be delivered of a little mat for Pamela’s water glass in gratitude for her rescue.

When they went to bed that night they placed the crinoline lady and Queen Solange side by side on the bedside cabinet, valiant survivors of an encounter with the enemy.

Armistice

June 1918

TEDDY’S BIRTHDAY. BORN beneath the sign of the crab. An enigmatic sign, Sylvie said, even though she thought such things were ‘bunkum’. ‘For you are four,’ Bridget said, which was perhaps a kind of joke.

Sylvie and Mrs Glover were preparing a little tea-party, ‘a surprise’. Sylvie liked all her children, Maurice not so much perhaps, but she doted entirely on Teddy.

Teddy didn’t even know it was his birthday as for days now they had been under strict instructions not to mention it. Ursula couldn’t believe how difficult it was to keep a secret. Sylvie was an adept. She told them to take ‘the birthday boy’ out while she got things ready. Pamela complained that
she
had never had a surprise party and Sylvie said, ‘Of course you have, you just don’t remember.’ Was this true? Pamela frowned at the impossibility of knowing. Ursula had no idea whether or not she had ever had a surprise party or even a party that wasn’t a surprise. The past was a jumble in her mind, not the straight line that it was for Pamela.

Bridget said, ‘Come on, we’ll all go for a walk,’ and Sylvie said, ‘Yes, take some jam to Mrs Dodds, why don’t you?’ Sylvie, sleeves rolled up, hair scarved, had spent all day yesterday helping Mrs Glover make jam, boiling up copper pans of raspberries from the garden with the sugar that they had been hoarding from their ration. ‘Like working in a munitions factory,’ Sylvie said, as she funnelled the boiling jam into one glass jar after another. ‘Hardly,’ Mrs Glover muttered to herself.

The garden had produced a bumper crop, Sylvie had read books on how to cultivate fruit and declared that she was quite the gardener now. Mrs Glover said darkly that berries were easy, wait until she tried her hand at cauliflowers. For the heavy work in the garden Sylvie employed Clarence Dodds, once a pal of Sam Wellington’s, the old boot. Before the war Clarence had been an under-gardener at the Hall. He had been invalided out of the army and now wore a tin mask on half of his face and said he wanted to work in a grocer’s shop. Ursula first came across him when he was preparing a bed for carrots and she gave an impolite little scream when he turned round and she saw his face for the first time. The mask had one wide-open eye painted blue to match the real one. ‘Enough to frighten the horses, isn’t it?’ he said and smiled. She wished he hadn’t because his mouth wasn’t covered by the mask. His lips were puckered and strange as if they were an afterthought, stitched on after he was born.

‘One of the lucky ones,’ he said to her. ‘Artillery fire, it’s the devil.’ It didn’t look very lucky to Ursula.

The carrots had barely sprigged their feathery tops above ground when Bridget started walking out with Clarence. By the time Sylvie was grubbing up the first of the King Edwards, Bridget and Clarence were engaged and, as Clarence couldn’t afford a ring, Sylvie gave Bridget a gypsy ring that she said she’d ‘had for ever’ and never wore. ‘It’s just a trinket really,’ she said, ‘it’s not worth much,’ although Hugh had bought it for her in New Bond Street after Pamela was born and had not stinted on the cost.

Sam Wellington’s photograph was banished to an old wooden crate in the shed. ‘I can’t keep it,’ Bridget said fretfully to Mrs Glover, ‘but I can hardly throw it away, can I now?’

‘You could bury it,’ Mrs Glover suggested but the idea gave Bridget the shivers. ‘Like black magic.’

They set off for Mrs Dodds’s house, laden with jam, as well as a magnificent bouquet of maroon sweet peas that Sylvie was very proud of having grown. ‘The variety is “Senator”, in case Mrs Dodds is interested,’ she told Bridget.

‘She won’t be,’ Bridget said.

Maurice wasn’t with them, of course. He had set off on his bicycle after breakfast, a picnic lunch in his knapsack, and had disappeared for the day with his friends. Ursula and Pamela took very little interest in Maurice’s life and he took none whatsoever in theirs. Teddy was a quite different kind of brother, loyal and affectionate as a dog and petted accordingly.

Clarence’s mother was still employed at the Hall in ‘a semi-feudal capacity’, according to Sylvie, and had a cottage on the estate, a cramped, ancient thing that smelt of stale water and old plaster. Distemper on the damp ceiling ballooned like loose skin. Bosun had died of distemper the previous year and was buried beneath a Bourbon rose that Sylvie had ordered especially to mark his grave. ‘It’s called “Louise Odier”,’ she said. ‘If you’re interested.’ They had another dog now, a wriggly black lurcher puppy called Trixie who might as well have been called Trouble because Sylvie was always laughing and saying, ‘Uh-oh, here comes trouble.’ Pamela had seen Mrs Glover giving Trixie a well-aimed kick with her big-booted foot and Sylvie had ‘to have a word’. Bridget wouldn’t let Trixie come to Mrs Dodds’s house, she said she would never hear the end of it. ‘She doesn’t believe in dogs,’ Bridget said.

‘Dogs are hardly an article of faith,’ Sylvie said.

Clarence met them at the entrance gate to the estate. The Hall itself was miles away, at the end of a long avenue of elms. The Daunts had lived there for centuries and popped up occasionally to open fêtes and bazaars and fleetingly grace the annual Christmas party in the village hall. They had their own chapel so were never seen in church, although now they were never seen at all because they had lost three sons, one after the other, to the war and had more or less retreated from the world.

It was impossible not to stare at Clarence’s tin face (‘galvanized copper’, he corrected them). They lived in terror that he would remove the mask. Did he take it off to go to bed at night? If Bridget married him would she see the horror beneath? ‘It’s not so much what’s there,’ they had overheard Bridget say to Mrs Glover, ‘as what’s
not
there.’

Mrs Dodds (‘Old Mother Dodds’ Bridget called her, like something from a nursery rhyme) made tea for the grown-ups, tea that Bridget later reported to be ‘as weak as lamb’s water’. Bridget liked her tea ‘strong enough for the teaspoon to stand up in it’. Neither Pamela nor Ursula could decide what lamb’s water might be but it sounded nice. Mrs Dodds gave them creamy milk, ladled from a big enamel pitcher and still warm from the Hall’s dairy. It made Ursula feel sick. ‘Lady Bountiful,’ Mrs Dodds muttered to Clarence when they handed her the jam and the sweet peas and he said, ‘
Mother
,’ chidingly. Mrs Dodds passed the flowers over to Bridget, who remained holding the sweet peas like a bride until Mrs Dodds said to her, ‘Put them in water, you daft girl.’

‘Cake?’ Clarence’s mother said and doled out thin slices of gingerbread that seemed as damp as her cottage. ‘It’s nice to see children,’ Mrs Dodds said, looking at Teddy as if he were a rare animal. Teddy was a steadfast little boy and was not put off his milk and cake. He had a moustache of milk and Pamela wiped it off with her handkerchief. Ursula suspected that Mrs Dodds didn’t really think it was nice to see children, indeed she suspected that on the subject of children she was in agreement with Mrs Glover. Except for Teddy, of course. Everyone liked Teddy. Even Maurice. Occasionally.

Mrs Dodds examined the gypsy ring newly adorning Bridget’s hand, pulling Bridget’s finger towards her as if she was pulling a wishbone. ‘Rubies and diamonds,’ she said. ‘Very fancy.’

‘Tiny stones,’ Bridget said defensively. ‘Just a trinket really.’

The girls helped Bridget wash the tea things and left Teddy to fend for himself with Mrs Dodds. They washed up in a big stone sink in the scullery that had a pump instead of a tap. Bridget said that when she was a girl ‘in County Kilkenny’ they had to walk to a well to get water. She arranged the sweet peas prettily in an old Dundee marmalade jar and left it on the wooden draining board. When they had dried the crockery with one of Mrs Dodds’s thin, worn tea-towels (damp, of course), Clarence asked them if they would like to go over to the Hall to see the walled garden. ‘You should stop going back over there, son,’ Mrs Dodds said to him, ‘it only upsets you.’

They entered via an old wooden door in a wall. The door was stiff and Bridget gave a little scream when Clarence took his shoulder to it and shoved it open. Ursula was expecting something wonderful – sparkling fountains and terraces, statues, walks and arbours and flowerbeds as far as the eye could see – but it wasn’t much more than an overgrown field, brambles and thistles rambling everywhere.

‘Aye, it’s a jungle,’ Clarence said. ‘This used to be the kitchen garden, twelve gardeners worked at the Hall before the war.’ Only the roses climbing on the walls were still flourishing, and the fruit trees in the orchard that were laden with fruit. Plums were rotting on the branches. Excited wasps darted everywhere. ‘They haven’t picked this year,’ Clarence said. ‘Three sons at the Hall, all dead in this bloody war. I suppose they didn’t much feel like plum pie.’

‘Tsk,’ Bridget said. ‘Language.’

There was a glasshouse with hardly any glass and inside it they could see the withered peach and apricot trees. ‘Damned shame,’ Clarence said and Bridget tsked again and said, ‘Not in front of the children,’ just like Sylvie did. ‘Everything gone to seed,’ Clarence said, ignoring her. ‘I could weep.’

‘Well, you could get your job back here at the Hall,’ Bridget said. ‘I’m sure they’d be glad. It’s not as if you can’t work just as well with …’ She hesitated and gestured vaguely in the direction of Clarence’s face.

‘I don’t want my job back,’ he said gruffly. ‘My days as some rich nob’s servant are over. I miss the garden, not the life. The garden was a thing of beauty.’

‘We could get our own little garden,’ Bridget said. ‘Or an allotment.’ Bridget seemed to spend a lot of time trying to cheer Clarence up. Ursula supposed she was rehearsing for marriage.

‘Yes, why don’t we do that?’ Clarence said, sounding grim at the prospect. He picked up a small, sour apple that had fallen early and bowled it hard overarm like a cricketer. It landed on the glasshouse and shattered one of the few remaining panes. ‘Bugger,’ Clarence said and Bridget flapped her hand at him and hissed, ‘Children.’

(‘A thing of beauty,’ Pamela said appreciatively that night, as they flannelled their faces before bed with the heavy bar of carbolic. ‘Clarence is a poet.’)

As they trailed their way home Ursula could still smell the scent of the sweet peas they had left behind in Mrs Dodds’s kitchen. It seemed an awful waste to leave them there unappreciated. By then Ursula had forgotten all about the birthday tea and was almost as surprised as Teddy when they got back to the house and found the hallway decorated with flags and bunting and a beaming Sylvie bearing a gift-wrapped present that was unmistakably a toy aeroplane.

‘Surprise,’ she said.

11 November 1918

‘SUCH A MELANCHOLY time of year,’ Sylvie said to no one in particular.

The leaves still lay thick on the lawn. The summer was a dream again. Every summer, it was beginning to seem to Ursula, was a dream. The last of the leaves were falling and the big beech was almost a skeleton. The Armistice seemed to have made Sylvie even more despondent than the war. (‘All those poor boys, gone for ever. The peace won’t bring them back.’)