Life After Life (9 page)

They had the day off school because of the great victory and they were turned outside into the morning drizzle to play. They had new neighbours, Major and Mrs Shawcross, and they spent a good deal of the damp morning peering through gaps in the holly hedge trying to get a glimpse of the Shawcrosses’ daughters. There were no other girls their age in the neighbourhood. The Coles only had boys. They weren’t rough like Maurice, they had nice manners and were never horrible to Ursula and Pamela.

‘I think they’re playing hide-and-seek,’ Pamela reported back from the Shawcross front. Ursula tried to see through the hedge and got scratched in the face by the vicious holly. ‘I think they’re the same age as us,’ Pamela said. ‘There’s even a little one for you, Teddy.’ Teddy raised his eyebrows and said, ‘Oh.’ Teddy liked girls. Girls liked Teddy. ‘Oh, wait, there’s another one,’ Pamela said. ‘They’re multiplying.’

‘Bigger or smaller?’ Ursula asked.

‘Smaller, another girl. More of a baby. Being carried by an older one.’ Ursula was growing confused by the mathematics of so many girls.

‘Five!’ Pamela said breathlessly, reaching a final total apparently. ‘Five girls.’

By this time Trixie had managed to wriggle through the bottom of the hedge and they heard the excited squeals that accompanied her appearance on the other side of the holly.

‘I say,’ Pamela said, raising her voice, ‘can we have our dog back?’

Lunch was boiled toad in the hole and a queen of puddings. ‘Where have you been?’ Sylvie asked. ‘Ursula, you have twigs in your hair. You look like a pagan.’

‘Holly,’ Pamela said. ‘We’ve been next door. We met the Shawcross girls. Five of them.’

‘I know.’ Sylvie counted them off on her fingers. ‘Winnie, Gertie, Millie, Nancy and …’

‘Beatrice,’ Pamela supplied.

‘Were you invited in?’ Mrs Glover, a stickler for propriety, asked.

‘We found a hole in the hedge,’ Pamela said.

‘That’s where those damn foxes are getting through,’ Mrs Glover grumbled, ‘they’re coming from the copse,’ and Sylvie frowned at Mrs Glover’s language but said nothing as, officially, they were in celebration mood. Sylvie, Bridget and Mrs Glover were ‘toasting the peace’ with glasses of sherry. Neither Sylvie nor Mrs Glover seemed to have much of a taste for jubilation. Both Hugh and Izzie were still away at the Front and Sylvie said she wouldn’t believe Hugh was safe until he walked through the door. Izzie had driven an ambulance throughout the war but none of them could imagine this. George Glover was being ‘rehabilitated’ in a home somewhere in the Cotswolds. Mrs Glover had travelled to visit him but was disinclined to talk about what she had found, other than to say that George was no longer really George. ‘I don’t think any of them are themselves any more,’ Sylvie said. Ursula tried to imagine not being Ursula but was defeated by the impossibility of the task.

Two girls from the Women’s Land Army had taken George’s place on the farm. They were both horsey types from Northamptonshire and Sylvie said that if she’d known they were going to let women work with Samson and Nelson she would have applied for the job herself. The girls had come to tea on several occasions, sitting in the kitchen in their muddy puttees, to Mrs Glover’s disgust.

Bridget had her hat on ready to go out when Clarence appeared shyly at the back door, mumbling a greeting to Sylvie and Mrs Glover. The ‘happy couple’, as Mrs Glover referred to them without any hint of congratulation, were catching the train up to London to take part in the victory celebrations. Bridget was giddy with excitement. ‘Sure now you don’t want to come with us, Mrs Glover? I’ll bet there’ll be some high jinks to be had.’ Mrs Glover rolled her eyes like a discontented cow. She was ‘avoiding crowds’ on account of the influenza epidemic. She had a nephew who had dropped dead in the street, perfectly healthy at breakfast and ‘dead by noon’. Sylvie said they mustn’t be scared of the influenza. ‘Life must go on,’ she said.

After Bridget and Clarence left for the station, Mrs Glover and Sylvie sat at the kitchen table and drank another sherry. ‘High jinks, indeed,’ Mrs Glover said. By the time Teddy appeared, Trixie eager on his tail, and announced that he was starving and ‘Had they forgotten lunch?’ the meringue on top of the queen of puddings had collapsed and was all burnt. The final casualty of the war.

They had tried, and failed, to stay awake for Bridget’s return, falling asleep over their bedtime reading. Pamela was in the spell of
At the Back of the North Wind
while Ursula was working her way through
The Wind in the Willows
. She was particularly fond of Mole. She was a mysteriously slow reader and writer (‘Practice makes perfect, dear’) and liked it best when Pamela read out loud to her. They both liked fairy stories and had all of the Andrew Lang books, all twelve colours, bought by Hugh for birthdays and Christmases. ‘Things of beauty,’ Pamela said.

Bridget’s noisy return woke Ursula and she, in turn, roused Pamela and they both tiptoed downstairs where a merry Bridget and a more sober Clarence regaled them with tales of the festivities, of the ‘sea of people’ and of the gay crowd shouting themselves hoarse for the King (‘We want the King! We want the King!’ Bridget demonstrated enthusiastically) until he appeared on the balcony of Buckingham Palace. ‘And the bells,’ Clarence added, ‘never heard anything like it. All the bells of London ringing out the peace.’

‘A thing of beauty,’ Pamela said.

Bridget had lost her hat somewhere amid the throng as well as several hairpins and the top button of her blouse. ‘Lifted off my feet in the crush,’ she said happily.

‘Goodness, what a racket,’ Sylvie said, appearing in the kitchen, sleepy and lovely in her lacy wrap, her hair in a great fraying rope down her back. Clarence blushed and looked at his boots. Sylvie made cocoa for them all and listened indulgently to Bridget until even the novelty of being up at midnight couldn’t keep any of them awake.

‘Back to normal tomorrow,’ Clarence said, giving Bridget a daring peck on the cheek before making his way back to his mother. It was, altogether, a day out of the ordinary.

‘Do you think Mrs Glover will be cross that we didn’t wake her?’ Sylvie whispered to Pamela on the way up the stairs.

‘Furious,’ Pamela said and they both laughed like conspirators, like women.

When she fell asleep again Ursula dreamed of Clarence and Bridget. They were walking in an overgrown garden, looking for Bridget’s hat. Clarence was crying, real tears on the good side of his face while on the mask there were painted tears, like artificial raindrops on a picture of a windowpane.

When Ursula woke up the next morning she was burning hot and aching all over and ‘Boiling, like a lobster,’ Mrs Glover said, brought in for a second opinion by Sylvie. Bridget was also laid up in bed. ‘Hardly surprising,’ Mrs Glover said, folding disapproving arms beneath her ample yet uninviting bosom. Ursula hoped she would never have to be nursed by Mrs Glover.

Ursula’s breathing was harsh and raspy, her breath thickening in her chest. The world boomed and receded like the sea in a giant shell. Everything was rather pleasantly fuzzy. Trixie lay on the bed at her feet while Pamela read to her from
The Red Fairy Book
, but the words came and went meaninglessly. Pamela’s face loomed in and out of focus. Sylvie came and tried to feed her beef tea but her throat felt too small and she sputtered it out, all over the bed sheets.

There was the sound of tyres on gravel and Sylvie said to Pamela, ‘That will be Dr Fellowes,’ and rose swiftly, adding, ‘Stay with Ursula, Pammy, but don’t let Teddy in here, will you?’

The house was more silent than usual. When Sylvie didn’t come back, Pamela said, ‘I’ll go and look for Mummy. I won’t be long.’ Ursula heard murmurings and cries drifting from somewhere in the house but they meant nothing to her.

She was sleeping a strange restless kind of sleep when Dr Fellowes appeared suddenly by the side of the bed. Sylvie sat on the other side of the bed and held Ursula’s hand, saying, ‘Her skin is lilac. Like Bridget’s.’ Lilac skin sounded rather nice, like
The Lilac Fairy Book
. Sylvie’s voice seemed funny, choked up and panicked like the time she saw the telegram boy coming up the path but it turned out to be only a telegram from Izzie wishing Teddy a happy birthday. (‘Thoughtless,’ Sylvie said.)

Ursula couldn’t breathe and yet she could smell her mother’s perfume and hear her voice murmuring gently in her ear like a bee-buzz on a summer’s day. She was too tired to open her eyes. She heard Sylvie’s skirts rustle as she left her bedside, followed by the sound of the window opening. ‘I’m trying to get you some air,’ Sylvie said, returning to Ursula’s side and holding her against her crisp seersucker blouse with its safe scents of laundry starch and roses. The woody fragrance of bonfire smoke drifted through the window and into the little attic room. She could hear the clopping of hooves followed by the rattle of the coal as the coalman emptied his sacks into the coal shed. Life was going on. A thing of beauty.

One breath, that was all she needed, but it wouldn’t come.

Darkness fell swiftly, at first an enemy, but then a friend.

Snow

11 February 1910

A BIG WOMAN with the forearms of a stoker woke Dr Fellowes by clattering a cup and saucer down on the pot table next to his bed and yanking open the curtains even though it was still dark outside. It took him a moment to remember that he was in the freezing-cold guest bedroom at Fox Corner and that the rather intimidating woman bearing the cup and saucer was the Todds’ cook. Dr Fellowes searched the dusty archive of his brain for a name that he knew had come to him easily a few hours earlier.

‘It’s Mrs Glover,’ she said, as if reading his mind.

‘So it is. She of the excellent pickles.’ His head felt full of straw. He was uncomfortably aware that beneath the frugal covers he was wearing only his combinations. The bedroom grate, he noted, was cold and empty.

‘You’re needed,’ Mrs Glover said. ‘There’s been an accident.’

‘An accident?’ Dr Fellowes echoed. ‘Something has happened to the baby?’

‘A farmer trampled by a bull.’

Armistice

12 November 1918

URSULA WOKE UP with a start. It was dark in the bedroom but she could hear noises somewhere downstairs. A door closing, giggling and shuffling. She caught the high-pitched cackle that was Bridget’s unmistakable laugh and the rumbling bass note of a man. Bridget and Clarence back from London.

Ursula’s first instinct was to clamber out of bed and shake Pamela awake so that they could go downstairs and interrogate Bridget about the high jinks, but something stopped her. As she lay listening to the dark, a wave of something horrible washed over her, a great dread, as if something truly treacherous were about to happen. The same feeling she had had when she’d followed Pamela into the sea when they were on holiday in Cornwall, just before the war. They had been rescued by a stranger. After that Sylvie made sure they all went to the swimming baths in town and took lessons, from an ex-major in the Boer War who barked orders at them until they were too frightened to sink. Sylvie often retold the tale as if it were a hilarious escapade (‘The heroic Mr Winton!’) when in fact Ursula still clearly recalled the terror.

Pamela mumbled something in her sleep and Ursula said, ‘Ssh.’ Pamela mustn’t wake up. They mustn’t go downstairs. They mustn’t see Bridget. Ursula didn’t know why this was so, where this awful sense of dread came from, but she pulled the blankets over her head to hide from whatever was out there. She hoped it was out there and not inside her. She thought she would feign sleep but within minutes the real thing came.

In the morning they ate in the kitchen because Bridget was in bed, feeling ill. ‘Hardly surprising,’ Mrs Glover said unsympathetically, doling out porridge. ‘I dread to think what time she staggered in.’

Sylvie came down from upstairs with a tray that hadn’t been touched. ‘I really don’t think Bridget is well, Mrs Glover,’ she said.

‘Too much drink,’ Mrs Glover scoffed, cracking eggs as if she were punishing them. Ursula coughed and Sylvie glanced sharply at her. ‘I think we should call Dr Fellowes out,’ Sylvie said to Mrs Glover.