Life After Life

by Kate Atkinson

  It was surrounded at a discreet distance by similar houses. There was a meadow and a copse and a bluebell wood beyond with a stream running through it. The train station, no more than a halt, would allow Hugh to be at his banker’s desk in less than an hour.

  ‘Sleepy hollow,’ Hugh laughed as he gallantly carried Sylvie across the threshold. It was a relatively modest dwelling (nothing like Mayfair) but nonetheless a little beyond their means, a fiscal recklessness that surprised them both.

  ‘We should give the house a name,’ Hugh said. ‘The Laurels, the Pines, the Elms.’

  ‘But we have none of those in the garden,’ Sylvie pointed out. They were standing at the French windows of the newly purchased house, looking at a swathe of overgrown lawn. ‘We must get a gardener,’ Hugh said. The house itself was echoingly empty. They had not yet begun to fill it with the Voysey rugs and Morris fabrics and all the other aesthetic comforts of a twentieth-century house. Sylvie would have quite happily lived in Liberty’s rather than the as-yet-to-be-named marital home.

  ‘Greenacres, Fairview, Sunnymead?’ Hugh offered, putting his arm around his bride.

  ‘No.’

  The previous owner of their unnamed house had sold up and gone to live in Italy. ‘Imagine,’ Sylvie said dreamily. She had been to Italy when she was younger, a grand tour with her father while her mother went to Eastbourne for her lungs.

  ‘Full of Italians,’ Hugh said dismissively.

  ‘Quite. That’s rather the attraction,’ Sylvie said, unwinding herself from his arm.

  ‘The Gables, the Homestead?’

  ‘Do stop,’ Sylvie said.

  A fox appeared out of the shrubbery and crossed the lawn. ‘Oh, look,’ Sylvie said. ‘How tame it seems, it must have grown used to the house being unoccupied.’

  ‘Let’s hope the local hunt isn’t following on its heels,’ Hugh said. ‘It’s a scrawny beast.’

  ‘It’s a vixen. She’s a nursing mother, you can see her teats.’

  Hugh blinked at such blunt terminology falling from the lips of his recently virginal bride. (One presumed. One hoped.)

  ‘Look,’ Sylvie whispered. Two small cubs sprang out on to the grass and tumbled over each other in play. ‘Oh, they’re such handsome little creatures!’

  ‘Some might say vermin.’

  ‘Perhaps they see us as verminous,’ Sylvie said. ‘Fox Corner – that’s what we should call the house. No one else has a house with that name and shouldn’t that be the point?’

  ‘Really?’ Hugh said doubtfully. ‘It’s a little whimsical, isn’t it? It sounds like a children’s story. The House at Fox Corner.’

  ‘A little whimsy never hurt anyone.’

  ‘Strictly speaking though,’ Hugh said, ‘can a house be a corner? Isn’t it at one?’

  So this is marriage, Sylvie thought.

  Two small children peered cautiously round the door. ‘Here you are,’ Sylvie said, smiling. ‘Maurice, Pamela, come and say hello to your new sister.’

  Warily, they approached the cradle and its contents as if unsure as to what it might contain. Sylvie remembered a similar feeling when viewing her father’s body in its elaborate oak and brass coffin (charitably paid for by fellow members of the Royal Academy). Or perhaps it was Mrs Glover they were chary of.

  ‘Another girl,’ Maurice said gloomily. He was five, two years older than Pamela and the man of the family for as long as Hugh was away. ‘On business,’ Sylvie informed people although in fact he had crossed the Channel post-haste to rescue his foolish youngest sister from the clutches of the married man with whom she had eloped to Paris.

  Maurice poked a finger in the baby’s face and she woke up and squawked in alarm. Mrs Glover pinched Maurice’s ear. Sylvie winced but Maurice accepted the pain stoically. Sylvie thought that she really must have a word with Mrs Glover when she was feeling stronger.

  ‘What are you going to call her?’ Mrs Glover asked.

  ‘Ursula,’ Sylvie said. ‘I shall call her Ursula. It means little she-bear.’

  Mrs Glover nodded non-committally. The middle classes were a law unto themselves. Her own strapping son was a straightforward George. ‘Tiller of the soil, from the Greek,’ according to the vicar who christened him and George was indeed a ploughman on the nearby Ettringham Hall estate farm, as if the very naming of him had formed his destiny. Not that Mrs Glover was much given to thinking about destiny. Or Greeks, for that matter.

  ‘Well, must be getting on,’ Mrs Glover said. ‘There’ll be a nice steak pie for lunch. And an Egyptian pudding to follow.’

  Sylvie had no idea what an Egyptian pudding was. She imagined pyramids.

  ‘We all have to keep up our strength,’ Mrs Glover said.

  ‘Yes indeed,’ Sylvie said. ‘I should probably feed Ursula again for just the same reason!’ She was irritated by her own invisible exclamation mark. For reasons she couldn’t quite fathom, Sylvie often found herself impelled to adopt an overly cheerful tone with Mrs Glover, as if trying to restore some kind of natural balance of humours in the world.

  Mrs Glover couldn’t suppress a slight shudder at the sight of Sylvie’s pale, blue-veined breasts surging forth from her foamy lace peignoir. She hastily shooed the children ahead of her out of the room. ‘Porridge,’ she announced grimly to them.

  ‘God surely wanted this baby back,’ Bridget said when she came in later that morning with a cup of steaming beef tea.

  ‘We have been tested,’ Sylvie said, ‘and found not wanting.’

  ‘This time,’ Bridget said.

  May 1910

  ‘A TELEGRAM,’ HUGH said, coming unexpectedly into the nursery and ruffling Sylvie out of the pleasant doze she had fallen into while feeding Ursula. She quickly covered herself up and said, ‘A telegram? Is someone dead?’ for Hugh’s expression hinted at catastrophe.

  ‘From Wiesbaden.’

  ‘Ah,’ Sylvie said. ‘Izzie has had her baby then.’

  ‘If only the bounder hadn’t been married,’ Hugh said. ‘He could have made an honest woman of my sister.’

  ‘An honest woman?’ Sylvie mused. ‘Is there such a thing?’ (Did she say that out loud?) ‘And anyway, she’s so very young to be married.’

  Hugh frowned. It made him seem more handsome. ‘Only two years younger than you when you married me,’ he said.

  ‘Yet so much older somehow,’ Sylvie murmured. ‘Is all well? Is the baby well?’

  It had turned out that Izzie was already noticeably enceinte by the time Hugh caught up with her and dragged her on to the boat train back from Paris. Adelaide, her mother, said she would have preferred it if Izzie had been kidnapped by white slave traders rather than throwing herself into the arms of debauchery with such enthusiasm. Sylvie found the idea of the white slave trade rather attractive – imagined herself being carried off by a desert sheikh on an Arabian steed and then lying on a cushioned divan, dressed in silks and veils, eating sweetmeats and sipping on sherbets to the bubbling sound of rills and fountains. (She expected it wasn’t really like that.) A harem of women seemed like an eminently good idea to Sylvie – sharing the burden of a wife’s duties and so on.

  Adelaide, heroically Victorian in her attitudes, had barred the door, literally, at the sight of her youngest daughter’s burgeoning belly and dispatched her back across the Channel to wait out her shame abroad. The baby would be adopted as swiftly as possible. ‘A respectable German couple, unable to have their own child,’ Adelaide said. Sylvie tried to imagine giving away a child. (‘And will we never hear of it again?’ she puzzled. ‘I certainly hope not,’ Adelaide said.) Izzie was now to be packed off to a finishing school in Switzerland, even though it seemed she was already finished, in more ways than one.

  ‘A boy,’ Hugh said, waving the telegram like a flag. ‘Bouncing, etcetera.’

  Ursula’s own first spring had unfurled. Lying in her pram beneath the beech tree, she had watched the patterns that the light made flickering through the tender green leaves as the b
reeze delicately swayed the branches. The branches were arms and the leaves were like hands. The tree danced for her. Rock-a-bye baby, Sylvie crooned to her, in the tree-top.

  I had a little nut tree, Pamela sang lispingly, and nothing would it bear, but a silver nutmeg and a golden pear.

  A tiny hare dangled from the hood of the carriage, twirling around, the sun glinting off its silver skin. The hare sat upright in a little basket and had once adorned the top of the infant Sylvie’s rattle, the rattle itself, like Sylvie’s childhood, long since gone.

  Bare branches, buds, leaves – the world as she knew it came and went before Ursula’s eyes. She observed the turn of seasons for the first time. She was born with winter already in her bones, but then came the sharp promise of spring, the fattening of the buds, the indolent heat of summer, the mould and mushroom of autumn. From within the limited frame of the pram hood she saw it all. To say nothing of the somewhat random embellishments the seasons brought with them – sun, clouds, birds, a stray cricket ball arcing silently overhead, a rainbow once or twice, rain more often than she would have liked. (There was sometimes a tardiness to rescuing her from the elements.)

  Once there had even been the stars and a rising moon – astonishing and terrifying in equal measure – when she had been forgotten one autumn evening. Bridget was castigated. The pram was outside, whatever the weather, for Sylvie had inherited a fixation with fresh air from her own mother, Lottie, who when younger had spent some time in a Swiss sanatorium, spending her days wrapped in a rug, sitting on an outdoor terrace, gazing passively at snowy Alpine peaks.

  The beech shed its leaves, papery bronze drifts filling the sky above her head. One boisterously windy November day a threatening figure appeared, peering into the baby carriage. Maurice, making faces at Ursula and chanting, ‘Goo, goo, goo,’ before prodding the blankets with a stick. ‘Stupid baby,’ he said before proceeding to bury her beneath a soft pile of leaves. She started to fall asleep again beneath her new leafy cover but then a hand suddenly swatted Maurice’s head and he yelled, ‘Ow!’ and disappeared. The silver hare pirouetted round and round and a big pair of hands plucked her from the pram and Hugh said, ‘Here she is,’ as if she had been lost.

  ‘Like a hedgehog in hibernation,’ he said to Sylvie.

  ‘Poor old thing,’ she laughed.

  Winter came again. She recognized it from the first time around.

  June 1914

  URSULA ENTERED HER fifth summer without further mishap. Her mother was relieved that the baby, despite (or perhaps because of) her daunting start in life, grew, thanks to Sylvie’s robust regime (or perhaps in spite of it) into a steady-seeming sort of child. Ursula didn’t think too much, the way Pamela sometimes did, nor did she think too little, as was Maurice’s wont.

  A little soldier, Sylvie thought as she watched Ursula trooping along the beach in the wake of Maurice and Pamela. How small they all looked – they were small, she knew that – but sometimes Sylvie was taken by surprise by the breadth of her feelings for her children. The smallest, newest, of them all – Edward – was confined to a wicker Moses basket next to her on the sand and had not yet learned to cry havoc.

  They had taken a house in Cornwall for a month. Hugh stayed for the first week and Bridget for the duration. Bridget and Sylvie managed the cooking between them (rather badly) as Sylvie gave Mrs Glover the month off so that she could go and stay in Salford with one of her sisters who had lost a son to diphtheria. Sylvie sighed with relief as she stood on the platform and watched Mrs Glover’s broad back disappearing inside the railway carriage. ‘You had no need to see her off,’ Hugh said.

  ‘For the pleasure of seeing her go,’ Sylvie said.

  There was hot sun and boisterous sea breezes and a hard unfamiliar bed in which Sylvie lay undisturbed all night long. They bought meat pies and fried potatoes and apple turnovers and ate them sitting on a rug on the sand with their backs against the rocks. The rental of a beach hut took care of the always tricky problem of how to feed a baby in public. Sometimes Bridget and Sylvie took off their boots and daringly dabbled their toes in the water, other times they sat on the sand beneath enormous sunshades and read their books. Sylvie was reading Conrad, while Bridget had a copy of Jane Eyre that Sylvie had given her as she had not thought to bring one of her usual thrilling gothic romances. Bridget proved to be an animated reader, frequently gasping in horror or stirred to disgust and, at the end, delight. It made The Secret Agent seem quite dry by comparison.

  She was also an inland creature and spent a lot of time fretting about whether the tide was coming in or going out, seemingly incapable of understanding its predictability. ‘It changes a little every day,’ Sylvie explained patiently.

  ‘But what on earth for?’ a baffled Bridget asked.

  ‘Well …’ Sylvie had absolutely no idea. ‘Why not?’ she concluded crisply.

  The children were returning from fishing with their nets in the rock pools at the far end of the beach. Pamela and Ursula stopped halfway along and began to paddle at the water’s edge but Maurice picked up the pace, sprinting towards Sylvie before flinging himself down in a flurry of sand. He was holding a small crab by its claw and Bridget screeched in alarm at the sight of it.

  ‘Any meat pies left?’ he asked.

  ‘Manners, Maurice,’ Sylvie admonished. He was going to boarding school after the summer. She was rather relieved.

  ‘Come on, let’s go and jump over the waves,’ Pamela said. Pamela was bossy but in a nice way and Ursula was nearly always happy to fall in with her plans and even if she wasn’t she still went along with them.

  A hoop bowled past them along the sand, as if blown by the wind, and Ursula wanted to run after it and reunite it with its owner, but Pamela said, ‘No, come on, let’s paddle,’ and so they put their nets down on the sand and waded into the surf. It was a mystery that no matter how hot they were in the sun the water was always freezing. They yelped and squealed as usual before holding hands and waiting for the waves to come. When they did they were disappointingly small, no more than a ripple with a lacy frill. So they waded out further.

  The waves weren’t waves at all now, just the surge and tug of a swell that lifted them and then moved on past them. Ursula gripped hard on to Pamela’s hand whenever the swell approached. The water was already up to her waist. Pamela pushed further out into the water, a figurehead on a prow, ploughing through the buffeting waves. The water was up to Ursula’s armpits now and she started to cry and pull on Pamela’s hand, trying to stop her from going any further. Pamela glanced back at her and said, ‘Careful, you’ll make us both fall over,’ and so didn’t see the huge wave cresting behind her. Within a heartbeat, it had crashed over both of them, tossing them around as lightly as though they were leaves.

  Ursula felt herself being pulled under, deeper and deeper, as if she were miles out to sea, not within sight of the shore. Her little legs bicycled beneath her, trying to find purchase on the sand. If she could just stand up and fight the waves, but there was no longer any sand to stand on and she began to choke on water, thrashing around in panic. Someone would come, surely? Bridget or Sylvie, and save her. Or Pamela – where was she?

  No one came. And there was only water. Water and more water. Her helpless little heart was beating wildly, a bird trapped in her chest. A thousand bees buzzed in the curled pearl of her ear. No breath. A drowning child, a bird dropped from the sky.

  Darkness fell.

  Snow

  11 February 1910

  BRIDGET REMOVED THE breakfast tray and Sylvie said, ‘Oh, leave the little snowdrop. Here, put it on my bedside table.’ She kept the baby with her too. The fire was blazing now and the bright snow-light from the window seemed both cheerful and oddly portentous at the same time. The snow was drifting against the walls of the house, pressing in on them, burying them. They were cocooned. She imagined Hugh tunnelling heroically through the snow to reach home. He had been away three days now, looking for his sister, Isobel. Yest
erday (how long ago that seemed now) a telegram had arrived from Paris, saying, THE QUARRY HAS GONE TO GROUND STOP AM IN PURSUIT STOP, although Hugh was not really a hunting man. She must send her own telegram. What should she say? Something cryptic. Hugh liked puzzles. WE WERE FOUR STOP YOU ARE GONE BUT WE ARE STILL FOUR STOP (Bridget and Mrs Glover did not count in Sylvie’s tally). Or something more prosaic. BABY HAS ARRIVED STOP ALL WELL STOP. Were they? All well? The baby had nearly died. She had been deprived of air. What if she wasn’t quite right? They had triumphed over death this night. Sylvie wondered when death would seek his revenge.

  Sylvie finally fell asleep and dreamed that she had moved to a new house and was looking for her children, roaming the unfamiliar rooms, shouting their names, but she knew they had disappeared for ever and would never be found. She woke with a start and was relieved to see that at least the baby was still by her side in the great white snowfield of the bed. The baby. Ursula. Sylvie had had the name ready, Edward if it had turned out to be a boy. The naming of children was her preserve, Hugh seemed indifferent to what they were called although Sylvie supposed he had his limits. Scheherazade perhaps. Or Guinevere.

  Ursula opened her milky eyes and seemed to fix her gaze on the weary snowdrop. Rock-a-bye baby, Sylvie crooned. How calm the house was. How deceptive that could be. One could lose everything in the blink of an eye, the slip of a foot. ‘One must avoid dark thoughts at all costs,’ she said to Ursula.

  War

  June 1914

  MR WINTON – ARCHIBALD – had set up his easel on the sand and was attempting to render a seascape in watery marine smears of blue and green – Prussians and Cobalt Blues, Viridian and Terre Verte. He daubed a couple of rather vague seagulls in the sky, sky that was virtually indistinguishable from the waves below. He imagined showing the picture on his return home, saying, ‘In the style of the Impressionists, you know.’