Life After Life

by Kate Atkinson

‘Yes, Pamela.’

  ‘Pamela is with Bridget?’

  ‘Yes,’ Sylvie said. ‘Bridget. What is the matter with you?’

  Ursula ran out of the house. She could hear Sylvie shouting after her but she didn’t stop. She had never run so fast in all of her eight years, not even when Maurice was chasing her to give her a Chinese burn. She ran up the lane in the direction of Mrs Dodds’s cottage, splashing through the mud so that by the time Pamela and Bridget were in sight ahead of her she was filthy from head to toe.

  ‘What is the matter?’ Pamela asked anxiously. ‘Is it Daddy?’ Bridget made the sign of the cross. Ursula threw her arms round Pamela and collapsed in tears.

  ‘Whatever is it? Tell me,’ Pamela said, caught up now in the dread.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Ursula sobbed. ‘I just felt so worried about you.’

  ‘What a goose,’ Pamela said affectionately, hugging her.

  ‘I have a bit of a headache,’ Bridget said. ‘Let’s get back to the house.’

  Darkness soon fell again.

  Snow

  11 February 1910

  ‘A MIRACLE, SAYS the Fellowes feller,’ Bridget said to Mrs Glover as they toasted the new baby’s arrival over their morning teapot. As far as Mrs Glover was concerned miracles belonged inside the pages of the Bible, not amid the carnage of birth. ‘Maybe she’ll stop at three,’ she said.

  ‘Now why would she be going and doing that when she has such lovely healthy babies and there’s enough money in the house for anything they want?’

  Mrs Glover, ignoring the argument, heaved herself up from the table and said, ‘Well, I must get on with Mrs Todd’s breakfast.’ She took a bowl of kidneys soaking in milk from the pantry and commenced removing the fatty white membrane, like a caul. Bridget glanced at the milk, white marbled with red, and felt uncharacteristically squeamish.

  Dr Fellowes had already breakfasted – on bacon, black pudding, fried bread and eggs – and left. Men from the village had arrived and tried to dig his car out and when that had failed someone ran for George and he had come to the rescue, riding on the back of one of his big Shires. St George slipped briefly into Mrs Glover’s mind and hastily slipped out again as being too fanciful. With not inconsiderable difficulty, Dr Fellowes was hoisted up behind Mrs Glover’s son and the pair had ridden off, ploughing snow, not earth.

  A farmer had been trampled by a bull, but was alive still. Mrs Glover’s own father, a dairyman, had been killed by a cow. Mrs Glover, young but doughty and not yet acquainted with Mr Glover, had come across her father lying dead in the milking shed. She could still see the blood on the straw and the surprised look on the face of the cow, her father’s favourite, Maisie.

  Bridget warmed her hands on the teapot and Mrs Glover said, ‘Well, I’d better to see to my kidneys. Find me a flower for Mrs Todd’s breakfast tray.’

  ‘A flower?’ Bridget puzzled, looking through the window at the snow. ‘In this weather?’

  Armistice

  11 November 1918

  ‘OH, CLARENCE,’ SYLVIE said, opening the back door. ‘Bridget’s had a bit of an accident, I’m afraid. She tripped and fell over the step. Just a sprained ankle, I think, but I doubt that she’ll be able to go up to London for the celebrations.’

  Bridget was sipping a brandy, sitting in Mrs Glover’s chair, a big high-backed Windsor, by the stove. Her ankle was propped up on a stool, and she was enjoying the drama of her tale.

  ‘I was just coming in the kitchen door, so I was. I’d been hanging out washing although I don’t know why I bothered because it started to rain again, when I felt hands shoving me in the back. And then there I was, sprawled all over the ground, in agony. Small hands,’ she added. ‘Like the hands of a little ghost child.’

  ‘Oh, really,’ Sylvie said. ‘There are no ghosts in this house, children or otherwise. Did you see anything, Ursula? You were in the garden, weren’t you?’

  ‘Oh, the silly girl just tripped,’ Mrs Glover said. ‘You know how clumsy she is. Well, anyway,’ she said with some satisfaction, ‘that’s put paid to your London high jinks.’

  ‘Not so,’ Bridget said stoutly. ‘I’m not missing this day for anything. Come on, Clarence. Give me your arm. I can hobble.’

  Darkness, and so on.

  Snow

  11 February 1910

  ‘“URSULA”, BEFORE YOU ask,’ Mrs Glover said, dumping spoonfuls of porridge into bowls in front of Maurice and Pamela, who were sitting at the big wooden table in the kitchen.

  ‘Ursula,’ Bridget said appreciatively. ‘That’s a good name. Did she like the snowdrop?’

  Armistice

  11 November 1918

  EVERYTHING FAMILIAR SOMEHOW. ‘It’s called déjà vu,’ Sylvie said. ‘It’s a trick of the mind. The mind is a fathomless mystery.’ Ursula was sure that she could recall lying in the baby carriage beneath the tree. ‘No,’ Sylvie said, ‘no one can remember being so small,’ yet Ursula remembered the leaves, like great green hands, waving in the breeze and the silver hare that hung from the carriage hood, turning and twisting in front of her face. Sylvie sighed. ‘You do have a very vivid imagination, Ursula.’ Ursula didn’t know whether this was a compliment or not but it was certainly true that she often felt confused between what was real and what was not. And the terrible fear – fearful terror – that she carried around inside her. The dark landscape within. ‘Don’t dwell on such things,’ Sylvie said sharply when Ursula tried to explain. ‘Think sunny thoughts.’

  And sometimes, too, she knew what someone was about to say before they said it or what mundane incident was about to occur – if a dish was about to be dropped or an apple thrown through a glasshouse, as if these things had happened many times before. Words and phrases echoed themselves, strangers seemed like old acquaintances.

  ‘Everyone feels peculiar from time to time,’ Sylvie said. ‘Remember, dear – sunny thoughts.’

  Bridget lent a more willing ear, declaring that Ursula ‘had the second sight’. There were doorways between this world and the next, she said, but only certain people could pass through them. Ursula didn’t think that she wanted to be one of those people.

  Last Christmas morning, Sylvie had handed Ursula a box, nicely wrapped and ribboned, the contents quite invisible, and said, ‘Happy Christmas, dear,’ and Ursula said, ‘Oh, good, a dining set for the dolls’ house,’ and was immediately in trouble for having sneaked a preview of the presents.

  ‘But I never,’ she insisted obstinately to Bridget later in the kitchen, where Bridget was trying to affix little white-paper crowns on the footless legs of the Christmas goose. (The goose made Ursula think of a man in the village, a boy really, who had had both his feet blown off at Cambrai.) ‘I didn’t look, I just knew.’

  ‘Ah, I know,’ Bridget said. ‘For sure, you have the sixth sense.’

  Mrs Glover, wrestling with the plum pudding, snorted her disapproval. She was of the opinion that five senses were too many, let alone adding on another one.

  They were shut out in the garden for the morning. ‘So much for victory celebrations,’ Pamela said as they sheltered from the drizzle beneath the beech tree. Only Trixie was having a good time. She loved the garden, mainly because of the number of rabbits which, despite the best attentions of the foxes, continued to enjoy all the benefits of the vegetable garden. George Glover had given two babies to Ursula and Pamela before the war. Ursula convinced Pamela that they had to keep them indoors and they hid them in their bedroom cupboard and fed them with an eye-dropper they found in the medicine cabinet until they hopped out one day and frightened Bridget out of her wits.

  ‘A fait accompli,’ Sylvie said when she was presented with the rabbits. ‘You can’t keep them in the house though. You’ll have to ask Old Tom to build a hutch for them.’

  The rabbits had escaped long ago, of course, and had multiplied happily. Old Tom had laid down poison and traps to little avail. (‘Goodness,’ Sylvie said, looking out one morning at the rabbits contente
dly breakfasting on the lawn. ‘It’s like Australia out there.’) Maurice, who was learning to shoot in the junior ATC at school, had spent all of last summer’s long holiday taking potshots at them from his bedroom window with Hugh’s neglected old Westley Richards wildfowler. Pamela was so furious with him that she put some of his own itching powder (he was forever in joke shops) in his bed. Ursula immediately got the blame and Pamela had to own up, even though Ursula had been quite ready to take it on the chin. That was the kind of person Pamela was – always very stuck on being fair.

  They heard voices in the garden next door – they had new neighbours they were yet to meet, the Shawcrosses – and Pamela said, ‘Come on, let’s go and see if we can catch a look. I wonder what they’re called.’

  Winnie, Gertie, Millie, Nancy and baby Bea, Ursula thought but said nothing. She was getting as good at keeping secrets as Sylvie.

  Bridget gripped her hatpin between her teeth and lifted her arms to adjust her hat. She had sewn a new bunch of paper violets on to it, especially for the victory. She was standing at the top of the stairs, singing K-K-Katy to herself. She was thinking of Clarence. When they were married (‘in the spring,’ he said, although it had been ‘before Christmas’ not so long ago) she would be leaving Fox Corner. She would have her own little household, her own babies.

  Staircases were very dangerous places, according to Sylvie. People died on them. Sylvie always told them not to play at the top of the stairs.

  Ursula crept along the carpet runner. Took a quiet breath and then, both hands out in front of her, as if trying to stop a train, she threw herself at the small of Bridget’s back. Bridget whipped her head round, mouth and eyes wide in horror at the sight of Ursula. Bridget went flying, toppling down the stairs in a great flurry of arms and legs. Ursula only just managed to stop herself from following in her wake.

  Practice makes perfect.

  ‘The arm’s broken, I’m afraid,’ Dr Fellowes said. ‘You took quite a tumble down those stairs.’

  ‘She’s always been a clumsy girl,’ Mrs Glover said.

  ‘Someone pushed me,’ Bridget said. A great bruise bloomed on her forehead, she was holding her hat, the violets crushed.

  ‘Someone?’ Sylvie echoed. ‘Who? Who would push you downstairs, Bridget?’ She looked around the faces in the kitchen. ‘Teddy?’ Teddy put his hand over his mouth as if he was trying to stop words escaping. Sylvie turned to Pamela. ‘Pamela?’

  ‘Me?’ Pamela said, piously holding both of her outraged hands over her heart like a martyr. Sylvie looked at Bridget, who made a little inclination of her head towards Ursula.

  ‘Ursula?’ Sylvie frowned. Ursula stared blankly ahead, a conscientious objector about to be shot. ‘Ursula,’ Sylvie said severely, ‘do you know something about this?’

  Ursula had done a wicked thing, she had pushed Bridget down the stairs. Bridget might have died and she would have been a murderer now. All she knew was that she had to do it. The great sense of dread had come over her and she had to do it.

  She ran out of the room and hid in one of Teddy’s secret hiding places, the cupboard beneath the stairs. After a while the door opened and Teddy crept in and sat on the floor next to her. ‘I don’t think you pushed Bridget,’ he said and slipped his small, warm hand into hers.

  ‘Thank you. I did though.’

  ‘Well, I still love you.’

  She might never have come out of that cupboard but the front-door bell clanged and there was a sudden great commotion in the hallway. Teddy opened the door to see what was happening. He ducked back in and reported, ‘Mummy’s kissing a man. She’s crying. He’s crying as well.’ Ursula put her head out of the cupboard to witness this phenomenon. She turned in astonishment to Teddy. ‘I think it might be Daddy,’ she said.

  Peace

  February 1947

  URSULA TRAVERSED THE street cautiously. The road surface was treacherous – crimped and rucked by ridges and crevasses of ice. The pavements were even more perilous, no more than massifs of ugly, hard-packed snow, or, worse, toboggan runs ironed by the neighbourhood children who had nothing better to do than enjoy themselves because the schools were closed. Oh, God, Ursula thought, how mean-spirited I’ve become. The bloody war. The bloody peace.

  By the time she had put her key in the lock of the street door she was exhausted. A shopping trip had never seemed such a challenge previously, even in the worst days of the Blitz. The skin on her face was whipped raw by the biting wind and her toes were numb with cold. The temperature hadn’t risen above zero for weeks, colder even than ’41. Ursula imagined at some future date trying to recall this glacial chill and knew she would never be able to conjure it up. It was so physical, you expected bones to shatter, skin to crackle. Yesterday she had seen two men trying to open a manhole in the road with what looked like a flamethrower. Perhaps there would be no future of thaw and warmth, perhaps this was the beginning of a new Ice Age. First fire and then ice.

  It was as well, she thought, that the war had robbed her of any care for fashion. She was wearing, in order, from inner to outer – a short-sleeved vest, a long-sleeved vest, a long-sleeved pullover, a cardigan and stretched on top of it all her shabby old winter coat, bought new in Peter Robinson’s two years before the war. Not to mention, of course, the usual drab underwear, a thick tweed skirt, grey wool stockings, gloves and mittens, a scarf, a hat and her mother’s old fur-lined boots. Pity any man who was suddenly moved to ravish her. ‘Chance’d be a fine thing, eh?’ Enid Barker, one of the secretaries, said over the balm and succour of the tea-urn. Enid had auditioned for the part of plucky young London woman somewhere around 1940 and had been playing it with gusto ever since. Ursula chided herself for more unkind thoughts. Enid was a good sort. Terrifically skilled at typing tabulations, something Ursula had never quite got the hang of when she was at secretarial college. She had done a typing and shorthand course, years ago now – everything before the war seemed like ancient history (her own). She had been surprisingly adept. Mr Carver, the man who ran the secretarial college, had suggested that her shorthand was good enough for her to train as a court reporter at the Old Bailey. That would have been a quite different life, perhaps a better one. Of course, there was no way of knowing these things.

  She trudged up the unlit stairs to her flat. She lived on her own now. Millie had married an American USAF officer and moved to New York State (‘Me – a war bride! Who’d a thunk it?’). A thin layer of soot and what seemed to be grease coated the walls of the stairway. It was an old building, in Soho of all places (‘needs must’ she heard her mother’s voice say). The woman who lived upstairs had a great many gentleman callers and Ursula had become accustomed to the creaking bedsprings and strange noises that came through the ceiling. She was pleasant though, always ready with a cheery greeting and never missed her turn at sweeping the stairs.

  The building had been Dickensian in its dinginess to begin with and was now even more neglected and unloved. But then, the whole of London looked wretched. Grimy and grim. She remembered Miss Woolf saying that she didn’t think ‘poor old London’ would ever be clean again. (‘Everything is so awfully shabby.’) Perhaps she was right.

  ‘You wouldn’t think we had won the war,’ Jimmy said when he came to visit, spivvy in his American clothes, shiny and bright with promise. She readily forgave her little brother his New World élan, he had had a hard war. Hadn’t they all? ‘A long and hard war,’ Churchill had promised. How right he had been.

  It was a temporary billet. She had the money for something better but the truth was she didn’t really care. It was just one room, a window above the sink, a hot-water geyser, shared toilet down the hall. Ursula still missed the old flat in Kensington that she had shared with Millie. They had been bombed out in the big raid of May ’41. Ursula had thought of Bessie Smith singing like a fox without a hole but she had actually moved back in for a few weeks, living without a roof. It was chilly but she was a good camper. She had learned with the Bund Deutsche
r Mädel, although it wasn’t the kind of fact that you bandied about in those dark days.

  But here was a lovely surprise waiting for her. A gift from Pammy – a wooden crate filled with potatoes, leeks, onions, an enormous emerald-green Savoy cabbage (a thing of beauty) and on the top, half a dozen eggs, nestled in cotton wool inside an old trilby of Hugh’s. Lovely eggs, brown and speckled, as precious as unpolished gemstones, tiny feathers stuck here and there. From Fox Corner, with love the label attached to the crate read. It was like receiving a Red Cross parcel. How on earth had it got here? There were no trains running and Pamela was almost certainly snowed in. Even more puzzling was how her sister had managed to dig up this wintry harvest when Earth stood hard as iron.

  When she opened the door she found a scrap of paper on the floor. She had to put her spectacles on to read it. It was a note from Bea Shawcross. Visited but you weren’t in. Will pop by again. Bea xxx. Ursula was sorry she had missed Bea’s visit, it would have been a nicer way to spend a Saturday afternoon than wandering in the dystopian West End. She was immensely cheered by nothing more than the sight of a cabbage. But then the cabbage – unexpectedly as was always the wont of these moments – uprooted an unwanted memory of the little parcel in the cellar at Argyll Road and she was plunged back into gloom. She was so up and down these days. Honestly, she chided herself, buck up, for heaven’s sake.

  It felt even colder inside the flat. She had developed chilblains, horrid painful things. Even her ears were cold. She wished she had some earmuffs, or a balaclava, like the grey woollen ones that Teddy and Jimmy used to wear to school. There was a line in ‘The Eve of St Agnes’, what was it? Something about the stone effigies in the church in icy hoods and mails. It used to make her feel cold every time she recited it. Ursula had learned the whole poem at school, a feat of memory that was probably beyond her now, and what, after all, had been the point if she couldn’t even remember a complete line? She had a sudden longing for Sylvie’s fur coat, a neglected mink, like a large friendly animal, that now belonged to Pamela. Sylvie had chosen death on VE Day. While other women were scratching together food for tea-parties and dancing in the streets of Britain, Sylvie had lain down on the bed that had been Teddy’s when he was a child and swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills. No note, but her intention and motivation were quite clear to the family that she left behind. There had been a horrible funeral tea for her at Fox Corner. Pamela said it was the coward’s way out, but Ursula wasn’t so sure. She thought it showed a rather admirable clarity of purpose. Sylvie was another casualty of war, another statistic.