Life After Life

by Kate Atkinson

  ‘Fornicating?’ Ursula said, surprised by the word. So biblical. Teddy came into the room, a dishtowel casually over his shoulder. ‘What’s all this?’ he said, and then, ‘Get your hands off her.’

  ‘Is this him?’ Derek asked Ursula. ‘Is this the man you’re whoring around London with?’ and without waiting for an answer he smashed her head on to the coffee table and she slid to the ground. The pain in her head was terrible and grew worse rather than lessened, as if she were in a vice being tightened all the time. Derek lifted the heavy onyx ashtray high as if it were a chalice, careless of the cigarette butts that showered on to the carpet. Ursula knew her brain wasn’t working properly because she should have been cowering in terror but all she could think about was that this was rather like the incident with the poached egg and how silly life was. Teddy yelled something at Derek and Derek threw the ashtray at him instead of breaking open Ursula’s skull with it. Ursula couldn’t see whether or not the ashtray hit Teddy because Derek grabbed her by her hair, lifted her head up and cracked it back on to the coffee table. A bolt of lightning flashed in front of her eyes but the pain began to fade.

  She slipped down on to the carpet, unable to move. There was so much blood in her eyes that she could barely see. The second time that her head hit the table she had felt something give way, the instinct to life perhaps. She knew from the awkward shuffling and grunting dance on the carpet around her that Derek and Teddy were fighting. At least Teddy was on his feet and not lying unconscious but she didn’t want him to fight, she wanted him to run away, out of harm’s way. She didn’t mind dying, she really didn’t, as long as Teddy was safe. She tried to say something but it came out as guttural nonsense. She was very cold and tired. She remembered feeling this way in the hospital, after Belgravia. Hugh had been there, he had held on to her hand and kept her in this life.

  Ambrose was still on the wireless, Sam Browne was singing ‘The Sun Has Got His Hat On’. It was a jolly song to leave life to. Not what you expected.

  The black bat was coming for her. She didn’t want to go. The blackness edged around her. Easeful death. It was so cold. It will snow tonight, she thought, even though it isn’t winter yet. It was already snowing, cold flakes dissolving on her skin like soap. Ursula put out a hand for Teddy to hold but this time nothing could stop her fall into the dark night.

  11 February 1926

  ‘OW! WHAT D’YA do that for?’ Howie yelled, rubbing his cheek where Ursula had punched him in a very unladylike way.

  ‘You have one hell of a right cross for a little girl,’ Howie said, almost admiringly. He made another grab for her which she jinked as neatly as a cat. As she did so, she spotted Teddy’s ball, lurking deep within the recesses of a cotoneaster. A well-aimed kick connected with Howie’s shin and gave her enough time to rescue the ball from the clutches of the reluctant bush.

  ‘I just wanted a kiss,’ Howie said, sounding absurdly hurt. ‘It wasn’t like I was trying to rape you or anything.’ The brutal word hung in the chilly air. Ursula might have blushed, should have blushed at the word but she felt a certain possession of it. She sensed it was what boys like Howie did to girls like Ursula. All girls, especially those celebrating their sixteenth birthdays, had to be cautious when walking through the dark, wild wood. Or, in this case, the shrubbery at the bottom of Fox Corner’s garden. Howie rewarded her by looking somewhat shamefaced.

  ‘Howie!’ they heard Maurice shouting. ‘Leaving without you, chum!’

  ‘You had better go,’ Ursula said. A small triumph for her new womanhood.

  ‘I found your ball,’ she said to Teddy.

  ‘Excellent,’ Teddy said. ‘Thank you. Shall we have more of your birthday cake?’

  August 1926

  IL SE TENAIT devant un miroir long, appliqué au mur entre les deux fenêtres, et contemplait son image de très beau et très jeune homme, ni grand ni petit, le cheveu bleuté comme un plumage de merle.

  She could barely keep her eyes open to read. It was beautifully hot and time treacled past every day with nothing more to do than read books and go for long walks – mainly in the vain hope of bumping into Benjamin Cole, or indeed any of the Cole boys, who had all grown into darkly handsome youths. ‘They could pass for Italian,’ Sylvie said. But why would they want to pass for anything other than themselves?

  ‘You know,’ Sylvie said, discovering her lying beneath the apple trees, Chéri drowsily abandoned on the warm grass, ‘long, lazy days like these will never come again in your life. You think they will, but they won’t.’

  ‘Unless I become incredibly rich,’ Ursula said. ‘Then I could be idle all day long.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Sylvie said, unwilling to renounce her newly habitual dysphoric stance. ‘But summer would still come to an end one day.’ She sank down on the grass next to Ursula. Her skin was freckled from working in the garden. Sylvie was always up with the sun. Ursula would have been happy to sleep all day. Sylvie leafed idly through the Colette and said, ‘You should do more with your French.’

  ‘I could live in Paris.’

  ‘Perhaps not that,’ Sylvie said.

  ‘Do you think I should apply to university when I finish school?’

  ‘Oh, really, dear, what’s the point? It won’t teach you how to be a wife and mother.’

  ‘What if I don’t want to be a wife and mother?’

  Sylvie laughed. ‘Now you’re just talking nonsense to provoke.’ She stroked Ursula’s cheek. ‘You always were such a funny little thing. There’s tea on the lawn,’ she said, rousing herself reluctantly. ‘And cake. And, unfortunately, Izzie.’

  ‘Darling,’ Izzie said when she saw Ursula coming across the lawn towards her. ‘You’ve quite grown since I last saw you. You’re a woman now, and so pretty!’

  ‘Not quite,’ Sylvie said. ‘We were just discussing her future.’

  ‘Were we?’ Ursula said. ‘I thought we were discussing my French. I need more of an education,’ she said to Izzie.

  ‘How serious,’ Izzie said. ‘At sixteen you should be head over heels in love with some unsuitable boy.’ I am, Ursula thought, I am in love with Benjamin Cole. She supposed he was unsuitable. (‘A Jew?’ she imagined Sylvie saying. Or a Catholic, or a coalminer (or anyone foreign), a shop assistant, a clerk, a groom, a tram-driver, a school-teacher. The unsuitable males were legion.)

  ‘Were you?’ Ursula asked Izzie.

  ‘Was I what?’ Izzie puzzled.

  ‘In love when you were sixteen?’

  ‘Oh, tremendously.’

  ‘What about you?’ Ursula said to Sylvie.

  ‘Goodness, no,’ Sylvie said.

  ‘But at seventeen you must have been in love,’ Izzie said to Sylvie.

  ‘Must I?’

  ‘When you met Hugh, of course.’

  ‘Of course.’

  Izzie leaned towards Ursula and dropped her voice to a conspirator’s whisper. ‘I eloped when I was about your age.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ Sylvie said to Ursula. ‘She did no such thing. Ah, here comes Bridget with the tea-tray.’ Sylvie turned to Izzie. ‘Was there a particular reason for your visit, or have you merely come to annoy?’

  ‘I was driving nearby, I thought I’d drop in. I’ve got something I wanted to ask you.’

  ‘Oh, dear,’ Sylvie said wearily.

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ Izzie said.

  ‘Oh, dear.’

  ‘Would you stop saying that, Sylvie.’

  Ursula poured tea and sliced cake. She sensed a battle. Izzie was rendered temporarily speechless by a mouthful of cake. It was not one of Mrs Glover’s airier sponges.

  ‘As I said’ – she swallowed with difficulty – ‘I’ve been thinking – and don’t say anything, Sylvie. The Adventures of Augustus is still wildly successful, I’m writing a book every six months. It’s quite crazy. And I have the house in Holland Park, and I have money, but of course no husband. Nor do I have a child.’

  ‘Really?’ Sylvie said. ‘Are you sure?’ />
  Izzie ignored her. ‘No one to share my good fortune with. So, I was thinking, why don’t I adopt Jimmy?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘She’s unbelievable,’ Sylvie hissed at Hugh. Izzie was still out on the lawn, entertaining Jimmy by reading from an unfinished manuscript she had in her oversized handbag. ‘Augustus Goes to the Seaside’.

  ‘Why doesn’t she want to adopt me?’ Teddy said. ‘After all, it’s me that’s supposed to be Augustus.’

  ‘Do you want to be adopted by Izzie?’ Hugh puzzled.

  ‘Good lord, no,’ Teddy said.

  ‘No one is being adopted,’ Sylvie said furiously. ‘Go and have a word with her, Hugh.’

  In the kitchen, Ursula went looking for an apple and found Mrs Glover thumping slices of veal with a meat tenderizer. ‘I imagine that they’re the heads of the Boche,’ she said.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘The ones that sent the gas over that did for poor George’s lungs.’

  ‘What’s for dinner? I’m starving.’ Ursula had grown rather callous about George Glover’s lungs, she had heard so much of them that they seemed to have a life of their own, rather like Sylvie’s mother’s lungs, organs that seemed to have more character than their owner.

  ‘Veal cutlets à la Russe,’ Mrs Glover said, flipping the meat over and pounding again. ‘The Ruskies are just as bad, mind you.’ Ursula wondered if Mrs Glover had ever actually met anyone from another country.

  ‘Well, there are a lot of Jews in Manchester,’ Mrs Glover said.

  ‘Did you meet any?’

  ‘Meet? Why would I meet them?’

  ‘Jews aren’t necessarily foreign, though, are they? The Coles next door are Jewish.’

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ Mrs Glover said, ‘they’re as English as you and me.’ Mrs Glover had a certain fondness for the Cole boys, based on their excellent manners. Ursula wondered if it was worth arguing. She took another apple and Mrs Glover returned to her pounding.

  Ursula ate the apple sitting on a bench in a secluded corner of the garden, one of Sylvie’s favourite hideaways. The words ‘Veal cutlets à la Russe’ drifted sleepily through her brain. And then suddenly she was on her feet, her heart knocking in her chest, a sudden familiar but long-forgotten terror triggered – but by what? It was so at odds with the peaceful garden, the late-afternoon warmth on her face, Hattie, the cat, washing herself lazily on the sunny path.

  There were no terrible portents of doom, nothing to suggest all was not well in the world but nonetheless Ursula flung the apple core into the bushes and fled from the garden, through the gate and into the lane, the old demons snapping at her heels. Hattie paused in her toilette and viewed the swinging gate with disdain.

  Perhaps it was a train disaster, perhaps she would have to rip off her petticoats like the girls in The Railway Children to signal the driver, but no, as she reached the station the 5.30 to London was drawing quietly alongside the platform in the safe stewardship of Fred Smith and his driver.

  ‘Miss Todd?’ he said, tipping the brim of his railwayman’s cap. ‘Are you all right? You look worried.’

  ‘I’m fine, Fred, thank you for asking.’ Just in a state of mortal dread, nothing to fret about. Fred Smith didn’t look as if he had ever suffered a moment of mortal dread.

  She walked back along the lane, still drenched with the nameless fear. Halfway along she met Nancy Shawcross and said, ‘Hello there, what are you up to?’ and Nancy said, ‘Oh, just looking for things for my nature book. I’ve got some oak leaves and some tiny baby acorns.’

  The fear started to drain from Ursula’s body and she said, ‘Come on, then, I’ll walk back home with you.’

  As they approached the dairy herd’s field a man climbed over the five-bar gate and landed heavily among the cow parsley. He tipped his cap at Ursula and mumbled, ‘Evening, miss,’ before carrying on in the direction of the station. He had a limp that made him walk rather comically, like Charlie Chaplin. Another veteran of the war perhaps, Ursula thought.

  ‘Who was that? Nancy asked.

  ‘I have no idea,’ Ursula said. ‘Oh, look, there on the road, a dead devil’s-coach-horse beetle. Is that any good to you?’

  A Lovely Day Tomorrow

  2 September 1939

  ‘MAURICE SAYS IT will be over in a few months.’ Pamela rested her plate on the neat dome that contained her next baby. She was hoping for a girl.

  ‘You’re going to go on for ever until you produce one, aren’t you?’ Ursula said.

  ‘Till the crack of doom,’ Pamela agreed cheerfully. ‘So, we were invited, much to my surprise. Sunday lunch in Surrey, the full works. Their rather strange children, Philip and Hazel—’

  ‘I think I’ve only met them twice.’

  ‘You’ve probably met them more than that, you just didn’t notice them. Maurice said he’d invited us over so that the “cousins could get to know each other better” but the boys didn’t take to them at all. Philip and Hazel have no idea how to play. And their mother was being a martyr to the roast beef and apple pie. Edwina’s a martyr to Maurice as well. Martyrdom would suit her, of course, she’s quite violently Christian considering she’s C of E.’

  ‘I would hate to be married to Maurice, I don’t know how she puts up with it.’

  ‘She’s grateful to him, I think. He’s given her Surrey. A tennis court, friends in the Cabinet, lots of roast beef. They entertain a lot – the great and the good. Some women would suffer for that. Even suffer Maurice.’

  ‘I expect he’s a great test of her Christian tolerance.’

  ‘A great test of Harold’s beliefs in general. He had a scrap with Maurice over welfare, another one with Edwina about predestination.’

  ‘She believes in that? I thought she was an Anglican.’

  ‘I know. She has no sense of logic though. She’s remarkably stupid, I suppose that’s why he married her. Why do you think Maurice says the war will only last a few months? Is that just departmental bluster? Do we believe everything he says? Do we believe anything he says?’

  ‘Well, generally speaking, no,’ Ursula said. ‘But he is a big chief in the Home Office, so he ought to know, presumably. Home Security, new department as of this week.’

  ‘You too?’ Pamela asked.

  ‘Yes, me too. The ARP Department is now a ministry, we’re all still getting used to the idea of being grown-ups.’

  When Ursula left school at eighteen she had not gone to Paris, nor, despite the exhortations of some of her teachers, had she applied to Oxbridge and done a degree in any languages, dead or alive. She had not in fact gone further than High Wycombe and a small secretarial college. She was eager to get on and earn her independence rather than be cloistered in another institution. ‘Time’s winged chariot, and all that,’ she said to her parents.

  ‘Well, we all get on,’ Sylvie said, ‘one way or another. And in the end we all arrive at the same place. I hardly see that it matters how we get there.’

  It seemed to Ursula that how you got there was the whole point but there was nothing to be gained from arguing with Sylvie on the days when she was mired in gloom. ‘I shall be able to get an interesting job,’ Ursula said, brushing off her parents’ objections, ‘working in a newspaper office or perhaps a publishing house.’ She imagined a Bohemian atmosphere, men in tweed jackets and cravats, women smoking in a sophisticated manner while sitting at their Royals.

  ‘Anyway, good for you,’ Izzie said to Ursula, over a rather superior afternoon tea at the Dorchester to which she had invited both Ursula and Pamela (‘She must want something,’ Pamela said).

  ‘And who wants to be a boring old bluestocking?’ Izzie said.

  ‘Me,’ Pamela said.

  It turned out that Izzie did have an ulterior motive. Augustus was so successful that Izzie’s publisher had asked her to produce ‘something similar’ for girls. ‘But not books based on a naughty girl,’ she said. ‘That apparently won’t do. They want a gung-ho sort, hockey-captain k
ind of thing. Lots of japes and scrapes but always towing the line, nothing that will frighten the horses.’ She turned to Pamela and said sweetly, ‘So I thought of you, dear.’

  The college had been run by a man called Mr Carver, a man who was a great disciple of both Pitman’s and Esperanto and who tried to make his ‘girls’ wear blindfolds when they were practising their touch-typing. Ursula, suspecting there was more to it than monitoring their skills, led a revolt of Mr Carver’s ‘girls’. ‘You’re such a rebel,’ one of them – Monica – said admiringly. ‘Well, not really,’ Ursula said. ‘Just being sensible, you know.’

  She was. She had become a sensible sort.

  At Mr Carver’s college Ursula had proved to have a surprising aptitude for typing and shorthand, although the men who interviewed her for the job in the Home Office, men she would never see again, clearly believed that her proficiency in the Classics would somehow stand her in better stead when opening and closing filing-cabinet drawers and conducting endless searches among a sea of buff-coloured folders. It wasn’t quite the ‘interesting job’ she had envisaged but it kept her attention and over the next ten years she rose slowly through the ranks, in the bridled way that women did. (‘One day a woman will be Prime Minister,’ Pamela said. ‘Maybe even in our lifetime.’) Now Ursula had her own junior clericals to chase down the buff folders for her. She supposed that was progress. Since ’36 she’d been working in the Air Raid Precautions Department.

  ‘You’ve not heard rumours then?’ Pamela said.

  ‘I’m a lowly squaw, I hear nothing but rumours.’

  ‘Maurice can’t say what he does,’ Pamela grumbled. ‘Couldn’t possibly talk about what goes on within the “hallowed walls”. He actually used that term – hallowed walls. You would think he had signed the Official Secrets Act with his blood and pledged his soul as warranty.’

  ‘Oh, well, we all have to do that,’ Ursula said, helping herself to cake. ‘De rigueur, don’t you know. Personally, I suspect Maurice just goes around counting things.’