Life After Life

by Kate Atkinson

  ‘Oh,’ Izzie said, when she arrived and caught sight of this athletic trio through the window, ‘I say, they’re rather gorgeous, aren’t they? Can I have one?’

  Izzie, swathed from head to toe in fox fur, said, ‘I brought gifts,’ an unnecessary announcement as she was laden with all kinds of different-shaped parcels in expensive wrapping ‘for my favourite niece’. Ursula glanced at Pamela and gave a rueful shrug. Pamela rolled her eyes. Ursula hadn’t seen Izzie in months, not since a fleeting visit to Swiss Cottage in the car with Hugh to drop off a crate full of vegetables from Fox Corner’s bountiful late-summer garden. (‘A marrow?’ Izzie said, inspecting the contents of the box. ‘What on earth am I supposed to do with that?’)

  Prior to that she had visited for a long weekend but had more or less ignored everyone except Teddy, whom she took off for long walks and quizzed relentlessly. ‘I think she’s singled him out from the herd,’ Ursula told Pamela. ‘Why?’ Pamela said. ‘So she can eat him?’

  When questioned (closely by Sylvie), Teddy was mystified as to why he had received special attention. ‘She just asked me what I did, what school was like, what my hobbies were, what I liked to eat. My friends. Stuff like that.’

  ‘Maybe she wants to adopt him,’ Hugh said to Sylvie. ‘Or sell him. I’m sure Ted would bring a good price.’ And Sylvie, fiercely, ‘Don’t say things like that, not even in jest.’ But then Teddy was dropped by Izzie as swiftly as he’d been picked up by her and they had thought no more of it.

  The first of Ursula’s presents to be unwrapped was a recording by Bessie Smith which Izzie immediately placed on the gramophone, home usually to Elgar and, Hugh’s favourite, The Mikado. ‘The “St Louis Blues”,’ Izzie said instructively. ‘Listen to that cornet! Ursula loves this music.’ (‘Do you?’ Hugh asked Ursula. ‘I had no idea.’) Then a lovely tooled red-leather edition of Dante in translation was produced. This was followed by a satin and lace bedjacket from Liberty’s – ‘as you know, a shop of which your mother is inordinately fond’. This was pronounced ‘far too grown-up’ by Sylvie, ‘Ursula wears flannelette.’ Next a bottle of Shalimar (‘new by Guerlain, divine’) which received a similar verdict from Sylvie.

  ‘So speaks the child bride,’ Izzie said.

  ‘’I was eighteen, not sixteen,’ a tight-lipped Sylvie said. ‘One day we must talk about what you got up to at sixteen, Isobel.’

  ‘What?’ Pamela said eagerly.

  ‘Il n’avait pas d’importance,’ Izzie said dismissively. Finally, from this cornucopia, a bottle of champagne. (‘And definitely far too young for that!’)

  ‘Better get that on ice,’ Izzie said, handing it to Bridget.

  A perplexed Hugh glared at Izzie. ‘Did you steal all this?’ he asked.

  ‘Hey, darkie music,’ Howie said when the three boys returned from the outdoors, crowding into the drawing room and smelling vaguely of bonfires and something else, less definable (‘Essence of stag,’ Izzie murmured, sniffing the air). Bessie Smith was now on her third go round and Hugh said, ‘It begins to grow on one after a while.’ Howie did some kind of odd dance to the music, vaguely barbaric, and then whispered something in Gilbert’s ear. Gilbert laughed, rather crudely for someone with blue blood, albeit foreign, and Sylvie clapped her hands and said, ‘Boys, how about some potted shrimps?’ and marshalled them into the dining room when she noticed, too late, the dirty footprints they had tracked through the house.

  ‘They didn’t fight in the war,’ Hugh said, as if that explained their muddy spoor.

  ‘And that’s a good thing,’ Sylvie said firmly. ‘No matter how unsatisfactory they turn out.’

  ‘Now,’ Izzie said when the cake was cut and apportioned, ‘I have one last gift—’

  ‘For goodness’, sake, Izzie,’ Hugh interrupted, unable to contain his exasperation any longer. ‘Who is paying for this? You have no money, your debts are piled to the rafters. You promised you would learn economy.’

  ‘Please,’ Sylvie said. Any discussion of money (even Izzie’s) in front of strangers filled her with reticent horror. A sudden dark cloud passed over her heart. It was Tiffin, she knew.

  ‘I am paying,’ Izzie said, very grandly. ‘And this is not a present for Ursula, it is for Teddy.’

  ‘Me?’ Teddy said, startled on to centre stage. He had been thinking what a jolly good cake it was and wondering what the chances of a second piece were and certainly had no desire to be pushed into the limelight.

  ‘Yes, you, darling boy,’ Izzie said. Teddy visibly shrank away from both Izzie and the present that she put on the table in front of him. ‘Go on,’ Izzie said encouragingly, ‘unwrap it. It won’t explode.’ (But it would.)

  Gingerly, Teddy removed the expensive paper. Unwrapped, the present turned out to be exactly what it looked like when wrapped – a book. Ursula, sitting opposite, tried to decipher the upside-down title. The Adventures of …

  ‘The Adventures of Augustus,’ Teddy read out loud, ‘by Delphie Fox.’ (‘Delphie?’ Hugh queried.)

  ‘Why is everything an “adventure” with you?’ Sylvie said irritably to Izzie.

  ‘Because life is an adventure, of course.’

  ‘I would say it was more of an endurance race,’ Sylvie said. ‘Or an obstacle course.’

  ‘Oh, my dear,’ Hugh said, suddenly solicitous, ‘not that bad, surely?’

  ‘Anyway,’ Izzie said, ‘back to Teddy’s present.’

  The thick card of the cover was green, the lettering and line drawings were gold – illustrations of a boy, roughly Teddy’s age, wearing a schoolboy’s cap. He was accompanied by a catapult and a small dog, a scruffy West Highland terrier. The boy was dishevelled and had a wild look on his face. ‘That’s Augustus,’ Izzie said to Teddy. ‘What do you think? I’ve based him on you.’

  ‘Me?’ Teddy said, horrified. ‘But I don’t look like that. It’s not even the right dog.’

  Something astonishing. ‘Give anyone a lift back to town?’ Izzie asked casually.

  ‘You haven’t got another car?’ Hugh moaned.

  ‘I parked it at the foot of the drive,’ Izzie said sweetly, ‘so as not to annoy you.’ They all trooped down the drive to inspect the car, Pamela, still on her crutches, hobbling tardily behind. ‘The poor and the maimed, the halt and the blind,’ she said to Millie and Millie laughed and said, ‘For a scientist you know your Bible.’

  ‘Best to know your enemy,’ Pamela said.

  It was cold and none of them had thought to put their coats on. ‘But really quite mild for this time of year,’ Sylvie said. ‘Not like when you were born. Goodness, I’ve never seen snow like that.’

  ‘I know,’ Ursula said. The snow the day she was born was a legend in the family. She had heard the story so often that she thought she could remember it.

  ‘It’s just an Austin,’ Izzie said. ‘An open-road tourer – four doors though – but nowhere near as costly as a Bentley, goodness, it’s positively a vehicle for hoi polloi compared to your indulgence, Hugh.’ ‘On tick, no doubt,’ Hugh said. ‘Not at all, paid up in full, in cash. I have a publisher, I have money, Hugh. You don’t need to worry about me any more.’

  While everyone was admiring (or not, in the case of Hugh and Sylvie) the cherry-bright vehicle, Millie said, ‘I have to go, I have a dancing exhibition tonight. Thank you very much for a lovely tea, Mrs Todd.’

  ‘Come on, I’ll walk you back,’ Ursula said.

  On the return home, through the well-worn shortcut at the bottom of the gardens, Ursula had an unexpected encounter – this was the something amazing, not the Austin tourer – when she almost tripped over Howie, on his hands and knees, rooting among the bushes. ‘Looking for the ball,’ he said apologetically. ‘It was your kid brother’s. I think we lost it in the’ – he sat back on his heels and looked around helplessly at the berberis and buddleia – ‘Shrubbery,’ Ursula supplied. ‘We aspire to it.’

  ‘Huh?’ he said, standing up in one clean move and suddenly towering above her.
He looked as though he boxed. Indeed there was a bruise below his eye. Fred Smith, who used to be the butcher’s boy but now worked on the railways, was a boxer. Maurice had taken a couple of his pals to cheer Fred on in an amateur bout in the East End. Apparently it had dissolved into a boozy riot. Howie smelt of bay rum – Hugh’s scent – and there was something polished and new about him, like a freshly minted coin.

  ‘Did you find it?’ she asked. ‘The ball?’ She sounded squeaky to her own ears. She had thought Gilbert was the handsome one out of the two but faced with Howie’s clean-limbed, uncomplicated strength, like a large animal, she felt stupid.

  ‘How old are you?’ he asked.

  ‘Sixteen,’ she said. ‘It’s my birthday. You ate cake.’ Clearly she wasn’t the only stupid one.

  ‘Hoo-ee,’ he said, an ambiguous kind of word (closely related to his own name, she noted) although it seemed to signal amazement as if reaching sixteen was a feat. ‘You’re shivering,’ he said.

  ‘It’s freezing out here.’

  ‘I can warm you up,’ he said and then – the something astonishing – he took her by the shoulders and pulled her towards him and – an action that necessitated bending down quite a bit – pushed his big lips against hers. ‘Kiss’ seemed too courtly a word for what Howie was doing. He prodded his enormous tongue, like an ox’s, against the portcullis of her teeth and she was amazed to realize that he was expecting her to open her mouth and let the tongue in. She would choke, for sure. Mrs Glover’s tongue press in the kitchen came unwontedly to mind.

  Ursula was debating what to do, the bay rum and the lack of oxygen were making her dizzy, when they heard Maurice shouting, quite nearby, ‘Howie! Leaving without you, chum!’ Ursula’s mouth was released and, without a word to her, Howie yelled, ‘Coming!’ so loudly that her ears hurt. Then he let go of her and set off, crashing through the bushes, leaving Ursula gasping for air.

  She wandered back to the house in a daze. Everyone was still on the drive, even though it felt like hours had passed but she supposed it was only minutes really, like in the best fairy stories. In the dining room, the ruins of the cake were being licked delicately by Hattie. The Adventures of Augustus, lying on the table, had a smear of icing on it. Ursula’s heart was still palpitating from the shock of Howie’s advances. To be kissed on her sixteenth birthday, and in such an unlooked-for way, seemed a considerable accomplishment. She was surely passing beneath the triumphal arch that led to womanhood. If only it had been Benjamin Cole, then it would have been perfect!

  Teddy, ‘the kid’, himself appeared, very browned off and said, ‘They lost my ball.’

  ‘I know,’ Ursula said.

  He opened the book at the title page where, in a flamboyant hand, Izzie had inscribed, To my nephew, Teddy. My own darling Augustus.

  ‘What rot,’ Teddy said, scowling. Ursula picked up a half-drunk glass of champagne the rim of which was adorned with red lipstick and poured half of it into a jelly glass that she handed to Teddy. ‘Cheers,’ she said. They chinked their glasses and drained them to the dregs.

  ‘Happy birthday,’ Teddy said.

  May 1926

  BY THE BEGINNING of the month, Pamela, off her crutches and back to playing tennis, had learned that she had failed her Cambridge exam. ‘I panicked,’ she said, ‘I saw questions I didn’t know and I went to pieces and flunked it. I should have swotted more or if I’d just stayed calm and thought it through I could probably have made a good fist of it.’

  ‘There are other universities if you’re so set on being a bluestocking,’ Sylvie said. Sylvie, although she never quite came out and said it, thought academia was pointless for girls. ‘After all, woman’s highest calling is to be a mother and a wife.’

  ‘You’d have me slave over a hot stove rather than a Bunsen burner?’

  ‘What did science ever do for the world, apart from make better ways of killing people?’ Sylvie said.

  ‘Well, it’s a crying shame about Cambridge,’ Hugh said. ‘Maurice is set to get a first and he’s a complete dolt.’ To make up for Pamela’s disappointment he bought her a Raleigh loop-frame roadster and Teddy asked what he would get if he failed an exam. Hugh laughed and said, ‘Careful, that’s Augustus talk.’

  ‘Oh, please, don’t,’ Teddy said, mortified at any mention of the book. The Adventures of Augustus had, to everyone’s chagrin but particularly Teddy’s, proved a roaring success, ‘flying off the bookshelves’ and reprinted three times so far, according to Izzie who had already earned a ‘fat little royalty cheque’ and moved into a flat in Ovington Square. She had also done an interview for a newspaper in which she mentioned her ‘prototype’, her ‘charming rogue of a nephew’.

  ‘But not my name,’ Teddy said, hanging on to hope. He got a conciliation gift from Izzie in the shape of a new dog. Trixie had died a few weeks previously and Teddy had been in mourning ever since. The new dog was a Westie, like Augustus’s dog – not a breed that any of them would have chosen. He had already been christened by Izzie – Jock, naturally, the name engraved on the tag on his expensive collar.

  Sylvie suggested changing his name to Pilot (‘Charlotte Brontë’s dog,’ she said to Ursula. (‘One day,’ Ursula said to Pamela, ‘my communion with our mother will consist entirely of the names of the great writers of the past,’ and Pamela said, ‘I think it probably already does.’)

  The little dog already answered to Jock and it seemed wrong to confuse him, so Jock he remained, and in time they all grew to love him best of any of their dogs despite his annoying provenance.

  Maurice turned up on a Saturday morning, this time with only Howie in tow and no sign of Gilbert, who had been sent down for ‘an indiscretion’. When Pamela said, ‘What indiscretion?’ Sylvie said that it was the definition of an indiscretion that you didn’t speak of it afterwards.

  Ursula had thought of Howie quite often since their last encounter. It was not so much the physical Howie – the Oxford bags, the soft-collared shirt, the brilliantined hair – but the fact that he had been thoughtful enough to try to find Teddy’s lost ball. Being kind modified the extraordinary, alarming otherness of him, which was threefold – large, male and American. Despite her ambivalent feelings she couldn’t help but experience a slight thrill when she saw him hop effortlessly out of his open-top car, parked outside the front door of Fox Corner.

  ‘Hey,’ he said when he caught sight of her and she realized her imaginary beau didn’t even know her name.

  A pot of coffee and a plate of scones were hastily conjured up by Sylvie and Bridget. ‘We’re not staying,’ Maurice said to Sylvie, who said, ‘Thank goodness, I don’t have enough to stretch to feed two hulking young men.’

  ‘We’re going up to London to help out with the strike,’ Maurice said. Hugh expressed surprise. He hadn’t realized, he said, that Maurice’s politics put him on the side of the workers and Maurice in turn expressed surprise that his father could even think this was the case. They were going to drive buses and trains, and whatever else it took ‘to keep the country running’.

  ‘I didn’t know you knew how to drive a train, Maurice,’ Teddy said, suddenly finding his brother interesting.

  ‘Well, a stoker, then,’ Maurice said irritably, ‘it can’t be that difficult.’

  ‘They’re not called stokers, they’re called firemen,’ Pamela said, ‘and it’s a very skilled job. Ask your friend Smithy.’ A remark which for some reason got Maurice even hotter under the collar.

  ‘You’re trying to shore up a civilization that’s in its death throes,’ Hugh said, as casually as if he were remarking on the weather. ‘There’s really no point.’

  Ursula left the room at this juncture, if there was one thing she found more tedious than thinking about politics it was talking about politics.

  And then. Astonishing. Again. As she was skipping up the back stairs on her way to the attic bedroom to fetch something, something innocent – a book, a handkerchief, afterwards she would never remember what – sh
e was almost sent flying by Howie on his way down. ‘I was looking for a bathroom,’ he said.

  ‘Well, we only have one,’ Ursula said, ‘and it’s not up these—’ but before the sentence was finished she found herself pinned awkwardly against the neglected floral wallpaper of the back stairs, a pattern that had been up since the house was built. ‘Pretty girl,’ he said. His breath smelt of mint. And then she was again subjected to pushing and shoving from the outsized Howie. But this time it was not his tongue trying to jam its way into her mouth but something inexpressibly more intimate.

  She tried to say something but before a sound came out his hand clamped over her mouth, over half her face in fact, and he grinned and said, ‘Ssh,’ as if they were conspirators in a game. With his other hand he was fiddling with her clothes and she squealed in protest. Then he was butting up against her, the way the bullocks in the Lower Field did against the gate. She tried to struggle but he was twice, three times her size even and she might as well have been a mouse in Hattie’s jaws.

  She tried to see what he was doing but he was pressed so tightly against her that all she could see was his big square jaw and the slight brush of stubble, unnoticeable from a distance. Ursula had seen her brothers naked, knew what they had between their legs – wrinkled cockles, a little spout – and it seemed to have little to do with this painful piston-driven thing that was now ramming inside her like a weapon of war. Her own body breached. The arch that led to womanhood did not seem so triumphal any more, merely brutal and completely uncaring.

  And then Howie gave a great bellow, more ox than Oxford man, and was hitching himself back together and grinning at her. ‘English girls,’ he said, shaking his head and laughing. He wagged his finger at her, almost disapproving, as if she had engineered the disgusting thing that had just happened and said, ‘You really are something!’ He laughed again and bounded down the stairs, taking them three at a time, as though his descent had been barely interrupted by their strange tryst.