The work was a chore – endless bills of lading and customs forms and balance sheets. The goods themselves – rum, cocoa, sugar – and the exotic places they came from seemed at odds with the daily tedium of the office. She supposed she was a little cog in the big wheel of Empire. ‘Nothing wrong with being a cog,’ Maurice said, himself a big wheel now in the Home Office. ‘The world needs cogs.’ She didn’t want to be a cog, but Belgravia seemed to have put paid to anything grander.
Ursula knew how the drinking had started. Nothing dramatic, just something as small and domestic as a boeuf bourguignon she had planned for Pamela when she came to stay for the weekend a few months ago. She was still working in the lab in Glasgow and wanted to do some shopping for her wedding. Harold hadn’t moved yet either, he was due to take up his post at the Royal London in a few weeks. ‘We’ll have a nice weekend, just the two of us,’ Pamela said.
‘Hilda’s away,’ Ursula lied easily. ‘Gone to Hastings for the weekend with her mother.’ There was no reason not to tell Pamela the truth of her arrangement with Hilda, Pamela had always been the one person she could be honest with, and yet something held her back.
‘Splendid,’ Pamela said. ‘I’ll drag Hilda’s mattress through to your bedroom and it’ll be like old times.’
‘Are you looking forward to being married?’ Ursula asked as they lay in bed. It wasn’t really like old times at all.
‘Of course I am, why would I be doing it otherwise? I like the idea of marriage. There is something smooth and round and solid about it.’
‘Like a pebble?’ Ursula said.
‘A symphony. Well, more of a duet, I suppose.’
‘It’s not like you to wax poetic.’
‘I like what our parents have,’ Pamela said simply.
‘Do you?’ It was a while since Pamela had spent much time with Hugh and Sylvie. Perhaps she didn’t know what they had these days. Dissonance rather than harmony.
‘Have you met anyone?’ Pamela asked cautiously.
‘No. No one.’
‘Not yet,’ Pamela said in her most encouraging manner.
The boeuf bourguignon had, naturally, required burgundy and in her lunch hour Ursula had dropped into the wine merchant’s that she passed every day on her way to work in the City. It was an ancient place, the wood of the interior gave the impression that it had been soaked in wine over the centuries and the dark bottles with their beautiful labels seemed to hold out the promise of something that went beyond their contents. The wine merchant picked out a bottle for her, some people used inferior wine for cooking, he said, but the only use one should have for inferior wine was vinegar. He himself was acerbic and rather overwhelming. He afforded the bottle the tenderness of care due a baby, lovingly wrapping it in tissue paper and passing it to Ursula to cradle in her basket-weave shopper where her purchase remained concealed from the office during the afternoon, in case they suspected her of being a secret lush.
The burgundy was bought before the beef and that evening Ursula thought she would open the wine and try a glass, seeing as it had been lauded so highly by the wine merchant. Of course, she’d had alcohol before, she was no teetotaller, after all, but she had never drunk alone. Never uncorked an expensive bottle of burgundy and poured a glass just for herself (dressing gown, curlers, a cosy gas fire). It was like stepping into a warm bath on a cold night, the deep, mellow wine suddenly enormously comforting. This was Keats’s beaker full of the warm South, was it not? Her habitual despondency seemed to evaporate a little so she had another glass. When she stood up she felt quite swimmy and laughed at herself. ‘Tiddly,’ she said to no one and found herself wondering about getting a dog. It would be someone to talk to. A dog like Jock would greet her every day with cheerful optimism and perhaps some of that would rub off on her. Jock was gone now, a heart attack, the vet said. ‘And he had such a strong little heart,’ Teddy said, himself heartbroken. He had been replaced by a sad-eyed whippet that seemed too delicate for the rough and tumble of a dog’s life.
Ursula rinsed the glass and put the cork back in the bottle, leaving plenty for the beef tomorrow before tottering off to bed.
She fell fast asleep and didn’t wake until the alarm, which made a change from the usual restlessness. Drink, and leave the world unseen. When she woke she realized that she couldn’t possibly look after a dog.
Next day at work, the tedium of filling in ledgers all afternoon was cheered by the thought of the half-bottle sitting on her kitchen draining board. After all, she could buy another bottle for the beef.
‘That good, eh?’ the wine merchant said when she appeared again two days later.
‘No, no,’ she laughed, ‘I haven’t cooked the meal yet. It struck me that I should have something equally good to drink with it.’ She realized she couldn’t come back here, to this lovely shop, there was a limit to how many boeuf bourgignons someone was likely to cook.
For Pamela, Ursula made an abstemious cottage pie, followed by baked apples and custard. ‘I brought you a present from Scotland,’ Pamela said and produced a bottle of malt whisky.
Once the malt had been drunk she found another wine merchant, one who treated his wares with less veneration. ‘For a boeuf bourguignon,’ she said, although he showed no interest in its purpose. ‘I’ll take two, actually. I’m cooking for a lot of people.’ A couple of bottles of Guinness from the public house on the corner, ‘For my brother,’ she said, ‘he popped in unexpectedly.’ Teddy wasn’t quite eighteen, she doubted he was a drinker. A couple of days later the same. ‘Your brother round again, miss?’ the publican said. He winked at her and she flushed.
An Italian restaurant in Soho that she ‘happened to be passing’ happily sold her a couple of bottles of Chianti without question. ‘Sherry from the wood’ – she could take a jug to the Co-op at the end of the road and they would fill it up from the barrel. (‘For my mother.’) Rum from public houses a long way from the flat (‘for my father’). She was like a scientist experimenting with the various forms of alcohol, but she knew what she liked best, that first bottle of blushful Hippocrene, the blood-red wine. She plotted how to get a case delivered (‘for a family celebration’).
She had become a secret drinker. It was a private act, intimate and solitary. The very thought of a drink made her heart thud with both fear and anticipation. Unfortunately, between the restrictive licensing laws and the horror of humiliation, a young woman from Bayswater could have considerable difficulty in supplying her addiction. It was easier for the rich, Izzie had an account somewhere, Harrods probably, that simply delivered the stuff to her door.
She had dipped her toe in the waters of Lethe and the next thing she knew she was drowning, from sobriety to being a drunkard in a matter of weeks. It was both shameful and a way of annihilating shame. Every morning she woke up and thought, not tonight, I won’t take a drink tonight, and every afternoon the longing built as she imagined walking into her flat at the end of the day and being greeted by oblivion. She had read sensationalist accounts of the opium dens of Limehouse and wondered if they were true. Opium sounded better than burgundy for eclipsing the pain of existence. Izzie could probably supply her with the location of a Chinese opium den, she had ‘kicked the gong around’, she had reported blithely, but it wasn’t really the kind of thing Ursula felt she could ask. It might not lead to Nirvana (she had proved an apt pupil of Dr Kellet after all), it might lead to a new Belgravia.
Izzie was occasionally allowed back into the family fold (‘Weddings and funerals only,’ Sylvie said. ‘Not christenings’). She had been invited to Pamela’s wedding but to Sylvie’s profound relief had sent her apologies. ‘Weekend in Berlin,’ she said. She knew someone with a plane (thrilling) who was going to fly her there. Ursula visited Izzie occasionally. They had the horror of Belgravia in common, a memory that would unite them for evermore, although they never spoke of it.
In her stead there was a wedding present, a box of silver cake forks, a gift that Pamela was amused by. �
��How mundane,’ she said to Ursula. ‘She never ceases to surprise.’
‘Nearly finished,’ the Neasden dressmaker said through a mouthful of pins.
‘I suppose I am getting a bit plump,’ Ursula said, looking in the mirror at the yellow satin straining to accommodate her pot belly. ‘Perhaps I should join the Women’s League of Health and Beauty.’
Stone-cold sober, she tripped on her way home from work. It was a miserable November evening a few months after Pamela’s wedding, wet and dark, and she simply hadn’t seen the pavement slab the edge of which had been lifted slightly by a tree root. Her hands were full – books from the library and grocery shopping, all acquired hastily in a lunch hour – and her instinct was to save the groceries and the books rather than herself. The result was that her face slammed into the pavement, the full force taken by her nose.
The pain stunned her, she had never experienced anything that came close to it before. She knelt on the ground and held her arms around herself, shopping and books now abandoned to the wet pavement. She could hear herself moaning – keening – and could do nothing to stop the noise.
‘Oh, my,’ a man’s voice said, ‘how awful for you. Let me help you. You have blood all over your nice peach scarf. Is that the colour, or is it salmon?’
‘Peach,’ Ursula murmured, polite despite the pain. She had never given much thought to the mohair muffler around her neck. There seemed to be a lot of blood. She could feel her whole face swelling and could smell the blood, thick and rusty, in her nose but the pain had lessened a degree or two.
The man was rather nice-looking, not very tall but he had sandy hair and blue eyes, and clean, polished-looking skin stretched over good cheekbones. He helped her to her feet. His hand in hers was firm and dry. ‘My name’s Derek, Derek Oliphant,’ he said.
‘Elephant?’
‘Oliphant.’
Three months later they were married.
Derek’s origins were in Barnet and as unremarkable to Sylvie as Harold’s before him. That was, of course, the essence of his appeal for Ursula. He taught history at Blackwood, a minor public school for boys (‘the children of aspirant shopkeepers’, Sylvie said dismissively) and courted Ursula with concerts in the Wigmore Hall and walks on Primrose Hill. They took long bike rides that ended up in pleasant pubs in the outer suburbs, a half-pint of mild for him, a lemonade for her.
Her nose proved to be broken. (‘Oh, poor you,’ Pamela wrote. ‘And you had such a nice nose.’) Before he escorted her to a hospital, Derek had led her into a public house nearby to get cleaned up a little. ‘Let me get you a brandy,’ he said when she sat down and she said, ‘No, no, I’m fine, I’ll just have a glass of water. I’m not much of a drinker,’ even though the previous evening she had blacked out on the floor of her bedroom in Bayswater, courtesy of a bottle of gin she had stolen from Izzie’s house. She had no qualms about thieving from Izzie, Izzie had taken so much from her. Belgravia, and so on.
Ursula stopped drinking almost as suddenly as she had started. She supposed she had had a hollow inside her that had been scooped out in Belgravia. She had tried to fill it with alcohol but now it was being replenished with her feelings for Derek. What were those feelings? Mostly relief that someone wanted to look after her, someone who knew nothing of her shameful past. ‘I’m in love,’ she wrote rather deliriously to Pamela. ‘Hurrah,’ Pamela wrote back.
‘Sometimes,’ Sylvie said, ‘one can mistake gratitude for love.’
Derek’s mother still lived in Barnet but his father was dead, as was a younger sister. ‘A horrible accident,’ Derek said. ‘She fell into the fire when she was four years old.’ Sylvie had always been very particular about fireguards. Derek himself had nearly drowned when he was a boy, he said after Ursula had offered up her own incident in Cornwall. It was one of the few adventures in her life where she felt she had played an almost entirely innocent part. And Derek? A rough tide, an upturned rowing boat, an heroic swim to shore. No Mr Winton necessary. ‘I rescued myself,’ he said.
‘He’s not entirely ordinary then,’ Hilda said, offering Ursula a cigarette. She hesitated but declined, not ready to take on another addiction. She was in the middle of packing up her goods and chattels. She could hardly wait to leave Bayswater behind. Derek was in digs in Holborn but was finalizing the purchase of a house for them.
‘I’ve written to the landlord, by the way,’ Hilda said. ‘Told him we’re both moving out. Ernie’s wife’s giving him a divorce, did I say?’ She yawned. ‘He’s popped the question. Thought I might take him up on it. We’ll both be respectable married women. I can come and visit you in – where is it again?’
‘Wealdstone.’
The wedding party, in a register office, was, according to Derek’s wishes, restricted to his mother and to Hugh and Sylvie. Pamela was disconcerted not to be invited. ‘We didn’t want to wait,’ Ursula said. ‘And Derek didn’t want any fuss.’
‘And don’t you want fuss?’ Pamela asked. ‘Isn’t that the point of a wedding?’
No, she didn’t want a fuss. She was going to belong to someone, safe at last, that was all that counted. Being a bride was nothing, being a wife was everything. ‘We wanted it all to be simple,’ she said resolutely. (‘And cheap, by the looks of it,’ Izzie said. Another set of mundane silver cake forks was dispatched.)
‘He seems like a pleasant enough chap,’ Hugh said at what passed for a reception – a three-course luncheon in a restaurant close to the register office.
‘He is,’ Ursula agreed. ‘Very pleasant.’
‘Still, it’s a bit of a rum do, little bear,’ Hugh said. ‘Not like Pammy’s wedding, is it? Half of the Old Kent Road seemed to turn out for that. And poor Ted was very put out not to be invited today. As long as you’re happy, though,’ he added encouragingly, ‘that’s the main thing.’
Ursula wore a dove-grey suit for the ceremony. Sylvie had provided corsages for everyone made from hothouse roses from a florist. ‘Not my roses, sadly,’ she said to Mrs Oliphant. ‘Gloire des Mousseux, if you’re interested.’
‘Very nice, I’m sure,’ Mrs Oliphant said, in a way that didn’t sound much like a compliment.
‘Marry in haste, repent at leisure,’ Sylvie murmured to no one in particular before a restrained sherry toast to the bride and bridegroom.
‘Have you?’ Hugh asked her mildly. ‘Repented?’ Sylvie pretended not to hear. She was in a particularly discordant mood. ‘Change of life, I believe,’ an embarrassed Hugh whispered to Ursula.
‘Me too,’ she whispered back. Hugh squeezed her hand and said, ‘That’s my girl.’
‘And does Derek know you’re not intact?’ Sylvie asked when she was alone with Ursula in the Ladies’ powder room. They were sitting on little padded stools, repairing their lipstick in the mirror. Mrs Oliphant remained at the table, having no lipstick to repair.
‘Intact?’ Ursula echoed, staring at Sylvie in the mirror. What did that mean, that she was flawed? Or broken?
‘One’s maidenhood,’ Sylvie said. ‘Deflowering,’ she added impatiently when she saw Ursula’s blank expression. ‘For someone who is far from innocent you seem remarkably naïve.’
Sylvie used to love me, Ursula thought. And now she didn’t. ‘Intact,’ Ursula repeated again. She had never even considered this question. ‘How will he tell?’
‘The blood, of course,’ Sylvie said, rather testily.
Ursula thought of the wisteria wallpaper. The deflowering. She hadn’t known there was a connection. She thought the blood was a wound, not the breaching of the arch.
‘Well, he might not realize,’ Sylvie sighed. ‘I’m sure he won’t be the first husband to be deceived on his wedding night.’
‘Fresh warpaint?’ Hugh said easily when they returned to the table. Ted had inherited Hugh’s smile. Derek and Mrs Oliphant shared the same frown. Ursula wondered what Mr Oliphant had been like. He was seldom mentioned.
‘Vanity, thy name is woman,’ Derek said with what seemed like
a forced joviality. He was not, Ursula noticed, as comfortable in social situations as she had first thought. She smiled at him, feeling a new bond. She was marrying a stranger, she realized. (‘Everyone marries a stranger,’ Hugh said.)
‘The word is “frailty”, actually,’ Sylvie said pleasantly. ‘Frailty, thy name is woman. Hamlet. Many people misquote it for some reason.’
A shadow passed over Derek’s face but then he laughed it off. ‘I bow to your superior learning, Mrs Todd.’
Their new house in Wealdstone had been chosen for its location, relatively near to the school where Derek taught. He had an inheritance, ‘a very small sum’ from his seldom-mentioned father’s investments. It was a ‘sound’ terrace in Masons Avenue, half-timbered in the Tudor style with leaded lights and a stained-glass panel in the front door depicting a galleon in full sail, although Wealdstone seemed a long way from any ocean. The house had all modern conveniences as well as shops close by, a doctor, a dentist and a park for children to play in, in fact everything a young wife (and mother, ‘one day very soon’, according to Derek) could want.
Ursula could see herself eating breakfast with Derek in the mornings before waving him off to work, could see herself pushing their children in prams then pushchairs then swings, bathing them in the evening and reading bedtime stories in their pretty bedroom. She and Derek would sit quietly in the lounge in the evenings listening to the wireless. He could work on the book he was writing, a school textbook – ‘From Plantagenets to Tudors’. (‘Gosh,’ Hilda said. ‘Sounds thrilling.’) Wealdstone was a long way from Belgravia. Thank goodness.
The rooms this married life was to be carried out in remained in her imagination until after their honeymoon, as Derek had bought and furnished the house without her ever having seen it.
Life After Life Page 16
