Life After Life

by Kate Atkinson

  ‘Reincarnation is at the heart of Buddhist philosophy,’ Dr Kellet would say, sucking on his meerschaum pipe. All conversations with Dr Kellet were punctuated by this object, whether by gesture – a great deal of pointing with both mouthpiece and Turk’s-head bowl (fascinating in itself) – or the necessary ritual of emptying, filling, tamping, lighting and so on. ‘Have you heard of Buddhism?’ She hadn’t.

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Ten.’

  ‘Still quite new. Perhaps you’re remembering another life. Of course, the disciples of the Buddha don’t believe that you keep coming back as the same person in the same circumstances, as you feel you do. You move on, up or down, sideways occasionally, I expect. Nirvana is the goal. Non-being, as it were.’ At ten it seemed to Ursula that perhaps being should be the goal. ‘Most ancient religions,’ he continued, ‘adhered to an idea of circularity – the snake with its tail in its mouth, and so on.’

  ‘I’ve been confirmed,’ she said, trying to be helpful. ‘Church of England.’

  Dr Kellet had come to Sylvie recommended by Mrs Shawcross via Major Shawcross, their next-door neighbour. Kellet had done a lot of good work, the major said, with men who ‘needed help’ after they returned from the war (there was a suggestion that the major himself had ‘needed help’). Ursula’s path crossed occasionally with some of these other patients. Once there was a dejected young man who stared at the carpet in the waiting room speaking quietly to himself, another who tapped his foot restlessly in time to something only he could hear. Dr Kellet’s receptionist, Mrs Duckworth, who was a war widow and had been a nurse during the war, was always very nice to Ursula, offering her peppermints and asking her about her family. One day a man blundered into the waiting room, although the doorbell downstairs had never rung. He looked bewildered and a little wild but he just stood stock-still in the middle of the room, staring at Ursula as if he’d never seen a child before, until Mrs Duckworth led him to a chair and sat down next to him and then put her arm round him and said, ‘Now, now, Billy what is it?’ the way a nice mother would have done and Billy laid his head on her chest and began to sob.

  If Teddy ever cried when he was younger, Ursula could never bear it. It seemed to open up a chasm inside, something deep and dreadful and full of sorrow. All she ever wanted was to make sure he never felt like crying again. The man in Dr Kellet’s waiting room had the same effect on her. (‘That’s how motherhood feels every day,’ Sylvie said.)

  Dr Kellet came out of his room at that moment and said, ‘Come along, Ursula, I’ll see to Billy later,’ but when Ursula finished her appointment Billy was no longer in the waiting room. ‘Poor man,’ Mrs Duckworth said sadly.

  The war, Dr Kellet said to Ursula, had made many people search for meaning in new places – ‘Theosophy, Rosicrucianism, anthroposophy, spiritualism. Everyone needs to make sense of their loss.’ Dr Kellet himself had sacrificed a son, Guy, a captain in the Royal West Surreys, lost at Arras. ‘One must hold on to the idea of sacrifice, Ursula. It can be a higher calling.’ He showed her a photograph, not one taken in uniform, just a snapshot really, of a boy in cricket whites, standing proudly behind his bat. ‘Could have played for the county,’ Dr Kellet said sadly. ‘I like to think of him – of all of them – playing a never-ending game in heaven. A perfect afternoon in June, always just before they break for tea.’

  It seemed a shame for all the young men never to have their tea. Bosun was in heaven, along with Sam Wellington, the old boot, and Clarence Dodds, who had died with astonishing speed of the Spanish flu the day after the Armistice. Ursula couldn’t imagine any of them playing cricket.

  ‘Of course, I don’t believe in God,’ Dr Kellet said. ‘But I believe in heaven. One has to,’ he added, rather bleakly. Ursula wondered how all of this was supposed to fix her.

  ‘From a more scientific point of view,’ he said, ‘perhaps the part of your brain responsible for memory has a little flaw, a neurological problem that leads you to think that you are repeating experiences. As if something had got stuck.’ She wasn’t really dying and being reborn, he said, she just thought she was. Ursula couldn’t see what the difference was. Was she stuck? And if so, where?

  ‘But we don’t want it to result in you killing the poor servants, do we?’

  ‘But it was such a long time ago,’ Ursula said. ‘It’s not as if I’ve tried to kill anyone since.’

  ‘Down in the dumps,’ Sylvie said at their first meeting with Dr Kellet, the only time she had been to the Harley Street rooms with Ursula although she had clearly already talked to him without Ursula. Ursula wondered very much what had been said about her. ‘And she’s rather forlorn all the time,’ Sylvie continued. ‘I can understand an adult feeling like that—’

  ‘Can you?’ Dr Kellet said, leaning forward, the meerschaum indicating interest. ‘Do you?’

  ‘I’m not the problem,’ Sylvie said with her most gracious smile.

  I’m a problem, Ursula thought? And anyway she hadn’t been killing Bridget, she was saving her. And if she wasn’t saving her perhaps she was sacrificing her. Hadn’t Dr Kellet himself said sacrifice was a higher calling?

  ‘If I were you I would stick to traditional moral guidelines,’ he said. ‘Fate isn’t in your hands. That would be a very heavy burden for a little girl.’ He got up from his chair and put another shovel of coal on the fire.

  ‘There are some Buddhist philosophers (a branch referred to as Zen) who say that sometimes a bad thing happens to prevent a worse thing happening,’ Dr Kellet said. ‘But, of course, there are some situations where it’s impossible to imagine anything worse.’ Ursula supposed he was thinking of Guy, lost at Arras and then denied his tea and cucumber sandwiches for eternity.

  ‘Try this,’ Izzie said, squirting a perfume atomizer in Ursula’s direction. ‘Chanel Number 5. It’s quite the thing. She’s quite the thing. Her strange, synthetic perfumes.’ She laughed as if she had made a great joke and sprayed another invisible cloud around the bathroom. It was quite different from the flowery scents that Sylvie anointed herself with.

  They had finally arrived at Izzie’s flat in Basil Street (‘rather a dull endroit but handy for Harrods’). Izzie’s bathroom was pink and black marble (‘I designed it myself, delicious, isn’t it?’) and was all sharp lines and hard corners. Ursula hated to think what would happen if you slipped and fell in here.

  Everything in the flat seemed to be new and shiny. It was nothing like Fox Corner, where the slow-seeming tick of the grandfather clock in the hall counted time and the patina of years shone on the parquet floors. The Meissen figures with their missing fingers and chipped toes, the Staffordshire dogs with accidentally lopped-off ears, bore no resemblance to the Bakelite bookends and onyx ashtrays in Izzie’s rooms. In Basil Street everything looked so new it seemed to belong in a shop. Even the books were new, novels and volumes of essays and poetry by writers Ursula had never heard of. ‘One must keep up with the times,’ Izzie said.

  Ursula regarded herself in the bathroom mirror. Izzie stood behind her, Mephistopheles to her Faustus, and said, ‘Goodness, you’re turning out to be quite pretty,’ before rearranging her hair into different styles. ‘You must have it cut,’ she said, ‘you should come to my coiffeur. He’s really very good. You’re in danger of looking like a milkmaid, when really I think you’re going to turn out to be deliciously wicked.’

  Izzie danced around the bedroom singing I wish I could shimmy like my sister Kate. ‘Can you shimmy? Look, it’s easy.’ It wasn’t and they collapsed in laughter on the satin eiderdown of the bed. ‘Gort to ’ave fun, ’aven’t yew?’ Izzie said in an atrocious mock-Cockney accent. The bedroom was a terrible mess, clothes everywhere, satin petticoats, crêpe de Chine nightdresses, silk stockings, partnerless shoes lying abandoned on the carpet, a dusting of Coty powder over everything. ‘You can try things on if you want,’ Izzie said carelessly. ‘Although you’re rather small compared to me. Jolie et petite.’ Ursula declined, fearing enchantment.
They were the kind of clothes that might turn you into someone else.

  ‘What shall we do?’ Izzie said, suddenly bored. ‘We could play cards? Bezique?’ She danced through to the living room and tripped her way towards a large shining chrome object that looked as if it belonged on the bridge of an ocean liner and turned out to be a cocktail cabinet. ‘A drink?’ She looked doubtfully at Ursula. ‘No, don’t tell me, you’re only thirteen.’ She sighed, lit a cigarette and looked at the clock. ‘We’re too late to catch a matinee, too early for an evening performance. London Calling! is on at the Duke of York’s, it’s supposed to be very amusing. We could go, you could get a later train home.’

  Ursula fingered the keys on the Royal typewriter that sat on a desk at the window. ‘My trade,’ Izzie said. ‘Perhaps I should put you in this week’s column.’

  ‘Really? What would you say?’

  ‘I don’t know, make something up, I expect,’ she said. ‘That’s what writers do.’ She took out a record from the cabinet of the gramophone and put it on the turntable. ‘Listen to this,’ she said. ‘You’ve never heard anything like it.’

  It was true, she hadn’t. It started with a piano, but nothing like the Chopin and Liszt that Sylvie played so nicely (and Pamela in such a pedestrian fashion).

  ‘They call it honky-tonk, I believe,’ Izzie said. A woman began to sing, raw and American. She sounded as if she had spent her life in a prison cell. ‘Ida Cox,’ Izzie said. ‘She’s a Negress. Isn’t she extraordinary?’

  She was.

  ‘Singing about how wretched it is to be a woman,’ Izzie said, lighting up another cigarette and sucking hard. ‘If only one could find someone really filthy rich to marry. A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of. Do you know who said that? No? Well you should.’ She was suddenly irritable, a not completely domesticated animal. The phone rang and she said, ‘Saved by the bell,’ and proceeded to have a feverishly animated conversation with the unseen, unheard caller. She ended the call by saying, ‘That would be delish, darling, meet you in half an hour.’ And to Ursula, ‘I would offer you a lift but I’m going to Claridge’s and it’s simply miles from Marylebone and after that I have a party to go to in Lowndes Square so I can’t possibly see you to the station. You can Tube it to Marylebone, can’t you? You know how? The Piccadilly line to Piccadilly Circus and then change to the Bakerloo to Marylebone. Come on, I’ll walk out with you.’

  When they reached the street Izzie breathed deeply as if she’d been released from unwanted confinement. ‘Ah, twilight,’ she said. ‘The violet hour. Lovely, isn’t it?’ She kissed Ursula on the cheek and said, ‘It was marvellous seeing you, we have to do this again. Are you all right from here? Tout droit on to Sloane Street, turn left and Bob’s your uncle, there’s Knightsbridge Tube station. Toodle-oo then.’

  ‘Amor fati,’ Dr Kellet said, ‘have you heard of that?’ It sounded like he had said, ‘A more fatty.’ Ursula was puzzled – both herself and Dr Kellet were on the lean side. Nietzsche (‘a philosopher’), he said, was drawn to it. ‘A simple acceptance of what comes to us, regarding it as neither bad nor good.’

  ‘Werde, der du bist, as he would have it,’ Dr Kellet continued, knocking the ashes from his pipe on to the hearth from where Ursula supposed someone else would sweep them up. ‘Do you know what that means?’ Ursula wondered how many ten-year-old girls Dr Kellet had actually encountered before. ‘It means become who you are,’ he said, adding more shreds of tobacco to the meerschaum. (The being before the non-being, Ursula supposed.) ‘Nietzsche got that from Pindar. . Do you know Greek?’ He had quite lost her now. ‘It means – become such as you are, having learned what that is.’

  Ursula thought he said ‘from Pinner’, which was where Hugh’s old nanny had retired to, living with her sister above a shop in an old building on the high street. Hugh had driven Ursula and Teddy out there in his splendid Bentley one Sunday afternoon. Nanny Mills was rather frightening (although not to Hugh apparently), spending a lot of time quizzing Ursula about her manners and inspecting Teddy’s ears for dirt. Her sister was nicer and plied them with glasses of elderflower cordial and slices of milk fadge spread with blackberry jelly. ‘How is Isobel?’ Nanny Mills asked, her mouth set like a prune. ‘Izzie is Izzie,’ Hugh said, which if you repeated it very quickly, as Teddy did later, sounded like a small swarm of wasps. Izzie, apparently, had become herself a long time ago.

  It seemed unlikely that Nietzsche had obtained anything from Pinner, least of all his beliefs.

  ‘Nice time with Izzie?’ Hugh asked when he picked her up from the station. There was something reassuring about the sight of Hugh in his grey homburg and long dark-blue wool overcoat. He scrutinized her for any visible change. She thought it best not to tell him that she had taken the Tube on her own. It had been a terrifying adventure, a dark night in the forest, but one which, like any good heroine, she had survived. Ursula shrugged. ‘We went to Simpson’s for lunch.’

  ‘Hm,’ Hugh said as if trying to decipher a meaning from this.

  ‘We listened to a Negress singing.’

  ‘In Simpson’s?’ Hugh puzzled.

  ‘On Izzie’s gramophone.’

  ‘Hm,’ again. He opened the car door for her and she settled into the lovely leathery seat of the Bentley, almost as reassuring as Hugh himself. Sylvie regarded the car as ‘ruinously’ extravagant. It was breathtakingly expensive. The war had made Sylvie parsimonious: slivers of soap were collected and boiled down for the laundry, sheets turned side to middle, hats refurbished. ‘We would live on eggs and chickens if she had her way,’ Hugh laughed. He, on the other hand, had become less prudent since the war, ‘perhaps not the best trait for a banker to develop’, Sylvie said. ‘Carpe diem,’ Hugh said and Sylvie said, ‘You were never one for seizing.’

  ‘Izzie has a car now,’ Ursula offered. ‘Does she?’ Hugh said. ‘I’m sure it’s not as splendid as this beast.’ He patted the dashboard of the Bentley fondly. As they drove away from the station he said quietly, ‘She’s not to be trusted.’

  ‘Who?’ (Mother? The car?)

  ‘Izzie.’

  ‘No, you’re probably right,’ Ursula agreed.

  ‘How did you find her?’

  ‘Oh, you know. Incurable. Izzie is Izzie, after all.’

  When they returned to the house they found Teddy and Jimmy playing a tidy game of dominos on the table in the morning room while Pamela was next door with Gertie Shawcross. Winnie was slightly older than Pamela and Gertie slightly younger and Pamela divided her time equally between them but rarely both at the same time. Ursula, devoted to Millie, found it an odd arrangement. Teddy loved all the Shawcross girls but his heart was in Nancy’s small hands.

  Of Sylvie there was no sign. ‘Don’t know,’ Bridget said, rather indifferently, when Hugh enquired.

  Mrs Glover had left them a rather utilitarian mutton stew keeping warm in the range. Mrs Glover no longer lived with them at Fox Corner. She rented a little house in the village so that she could look after George as well as them. George hardly ever left the house. Bridget referred to him as a ‘poor soul’ and it was hard to disagree with that description. If it was good weather (or even not particularly good weather at all) he sat in a big ugly bath-chair at the front door and watched the world pass him by. His handsome head (‘Leonine, once,’ Sylvie said sadly) hung down on his chest and a long thread of drool dangled from his mouth. ‘Poor devil,’ Hugh said. ‘Better off if he’d been killed.’

  Sometimes one or other of them tagged along when Sylvie – or a more reluctant Bridget – visited him during the day. It seemed odd that they would go to his home to see him while his own mother stayed in their home looking after them. Sylvie would fuss with the blanket across his legs and fetch him a glass of beer and then wipe his mouth the way you did with Jimmy.

  There were other war veterans in the neighbourhood, visible thanks to their limps or missing limbs. All those unclaimed arms and legs lost in the fields of Flanders �
�� Ursula imagined them pushing roots down into the mud and shoots up to the sky and growing once again into men. An army of men marching back for revenge. (‘Ursula has morbid thoughts,’ she heard Sylvie say to Hugh. Ursula had become a great eavesdropper, it was the only way to find out what people were really thinking. She didn’t hear Hugh’s answer as Bridget came crashing into the room in a fury because the cat – Hattie, one of Queenie’s offspring, possessed of the same character as her mother – had stolen the poached salmon that was to have been their lunch.)

  There were those, too, who, like the men in Dr Kellet’s waiting room, had less visible injuries. There was an ex-soldier in the village called Charles Chorley who had served with the Buffs and had come through the war without a scratch and then one day in the spring of 1921 he had stabbed his wife and three children where they lay sleeping in their beds and then shot himself in the head with a Mauser he had taken from a German soldier he had killed at Bapaume. (‘Terrible mess,’ Dr Fellowes reported. ‘These chaps should think about the people who have to clean up afterwards.’)

  Bridget, of course, had her ‘own cross to bear’, having lost Clarence. Like Izzie, Bridget was resigned to spinsterhood although she embraced it in a less giddy fashion. They had all attended Clarence’s funeral, even Hugh. Mrs Dodds had been her usual restrained self and had flinched when Sylvie placed a comforting hand on her arm, but after they had shuffled away from the gaping hole of the grave (not a thing of beauty, not at all) Mrs Dodds said to Ursula, ‘Part of him died during the war. This was just the rest of him catching up,’ and she put her finger to the corner of her eye and dabbed at a trace of moisture there – a tear would have been too generous a description. Ursula didn’t know why she had been chosen for this confidence, possibly simply because she was the nearest person. Certainly no response was expected, or received.

  ‘Ironic, one might say,’ Sylvie said, ‘for Clarence to have survived the war and to die of an illness.’ (‘What would I have done if one of you had caught the influenza?’ she often said.)