Life After Life

by Kate Atkinson

  ‘And feeling very pleased with himself. He’s going to love the war, lots of power and no personal danger.’

  ‘Lots of things to count.’ They both laughed. It struck Ursula that they seemed very merry for people on the brink of dreadful conflict. They were in the garden of Pamela’s house in Finchley, a Saturday afternoon with the tea things set out on a spindly bamboo table. They were eating cake, almond speckled with chopped-up pieces of chocolate, an old recipe of Mrs Glover’s handed down on a piece of paper that was covered in greasy fingerprints. In places, the paper was as transparent as a dirty windowpane.

  ‘Make the most of it,’ Pamela said, ‘there’ll be no more cake, I expect.’ She fed a piece to Heidi, an unprepossessing mongrel rescued from Battersea. ‘Did you know that people are putting their pets down, thousands of them?’

  ‘That’s horrible.’

  ‘As if they weren’t part of the family,’ Pamela said, rubbing the top of Heidi’s head. ‘She’s much nicer than the boys. Better behaved too.’

  ‘How were your evacuees?’

  ‘Grubby.’ Despite her condition, Pamela had spent most of the morning organizing evacuees at Ealing Broadway while Olive, her mother-in-law, looked after the boys.

  ‘You would be so much more help to the war effort than someone like Maurice,’ Ursula said. ‘If it were up to me I would make you Prime Minister. You’d make a much better job of it than Chamberlain.’

  ‘Well, that’s true.’ Pamela put down her tea plate and took up her knitting – something pink and lacy. ‘If it’s a boy I’m just going to pretend it’s a girl.’

  ‘And aren’t you going to leave?’ Ursula asked. ‘You’re not going to keep the boys in London, are you? You could go and stay at Fox Corner, I don’t expect the Germans will be much bothered with bombing sleepy hollow.’

  ‘And stay with Mother? Lord, no. I have a friend from university, Jeanette, a vicar’s daughter, not that that’s relevant, I suppose. There’s a cottage that belonged to her grandmother, up in Yorkshire, Hutton-le-Hole, dot on the map, that kind of place. She’s going up there with her two boys and suggested I join her with my three.’ Pamela had given birth in quick succession to Nigel, Andrew and Christopher. She had taken to motherhood with gusto. ‘Heidi will love it too. It sounds utterly primitive, no electricity, no running water. Wonderful for the boys, they can run around like savages. It’s hard to be a savage in Finchley.’

  ‘I expect some people manage,’ Ursula said.

  ‘How’s “the man”?’ Pamela asked. ‘“The Man from the Admiralty”.’

  ‘You can use his name,’ Ursula said, brushing cake crumbs off her skirt. ‘The antirrhinums don’t have ears.’

  ‘You never know these days. Has he said anything?’

  Ursula had been involved with Crighton – ‘the Man from the Admiralty’ – for a year now (she dated it from Munich). They had met at an inter-departmental meeting. He was fifteen years older than Ursula, rather dashing and with a vaguely wolfish air that was barely offset by his marriage to an industrious wife (Moira) and their clutch of three girls, all at a private school. ‘I shan’t leave them, no matter what,’ he told her after the first time they had made love in the rather basic quarters of his ‘emergency bolthole’.

  ‘But I don’t want you to,’ Ursula said, although as a declaration of his intent she thought it might have been better if he had let it precede the act rather than provide its coda.

  ‘The bolthole’ (she suspected that she was not the first woman to have seen the inside of it at Crighton’s invitation) was a flat provided by the Admiralty for the nights when Crighton stayed in town rather than ‘hiking’ all the way back to Moira and the girls in Wargrave. The bolthole wasn’t his exclusively and when it wasn’t available he ‘trekked out’ to Ursula’s flat in Argyll Road where they spent long evenings in her single bed (he had a sailor’s practical attitude towards confined spaces) or on her sofa, pursuing the ‘delights of the flesh’ as he put it, before he ‘slogged his way’ back to Berkshire. Any journey on land, even a couple of stops on the Tube, had an expeditionary quality for Crighton. He was a naval man at heart, Ursula supposed, and would have been happier sailing a skiff to the Home Counties rather than making his way overland. They did once take a little boat out to Monkey Island and have a picnic on the banks of the river. ‘Like a normal couple,’ he said apologetically.

  ‘What then, if not love?’ Pamela asked.

  ‘I like him.’

  ‘I like the man who delivers my groceries,’ Pamela said. ‘But I don’t share my bed with him.’

  ‘Well, I can assure you he means a good deal more to me than a tradesman.’ They were almost arguing. ‘And he’s not a callow youth,’ she continued for the defence. ‘He’s a proper person, he comes whole, all … ready-made. You know?’

  ‘Ready-made with a family,’ Pamela said, rather crotchety now. She looked quizzical and said, ‘But doesn’t your heart beat a little faster at the sight of him?’

  ‘Perhaps a little faster,’ Ursula conceded generously, sidestepping the argument, suspecting that she would never be able to explain the forensics of adultery to Pamela. ‘Who would have thought that out of everyone in our family, you would turn out to be the romantic?’

  ‘Oh, no, I think that’s Teddy,’ Pamela said. ‘I just like to believe that there are nuts and bolts that hold our society together – especially now – and that marriage is part of that.’

  ‘Nothing romantic about nuts and bolts.’

  ‘I admire you, really,’ Pamela said. ‘Being your own woman. Not following the herd and so on. I just don’t want you to be hurt.’

  ‘Believe me, neither do I. Pax?’

  ‘Pax,’ Pamela agreed readily. Laughing, she said, ‘My life would be so dull without your salacious reports from the front line. What a deal of vicarious excitement I derive from your love life – or whatever you want to call it.’

  There had been nothing salacious about their outing to Monkey Island, they had sat chastely on a tartan blanket and eaten cold chicken and drunk warm red wine. ‘The blushful Hippocrene,’ Ursula said and Crighton laughed and said, ‘That sounds suspiciously like literature to me. I have no poetry in me. You should know that.’

  ‘I do.’

  The thing about Crighton was that there always seemed to be more of him than he ever revealed. She had overheard someone in the office refer to him as ‘the Sphinx’ and he did indeed wear an air of reticence that hinted at unexplored depths and suppressed secrets – some childhood harm, some magnificent obsession. His cryptic self, she thought, peeling a hard-boiled egg and dipping it into a little screw of paper that contained salt. Who had packed this picnic – not Crighton, surely? Not Moira, heaven forfend.

  He had grown rather remorseful over the clandestine nature of their relationship. She had brought a little excitement into what had become a rather tedious life, he said. He had been at Jutland with Jellicoe, he had ‘seen much’ and now he was ‘little better than a bureaucrat’. He was restless, he said.

  ‘You’re either about to declare your love for me,’ Ursula said, ‘or tell me that it’s all over.’ There was fruit – peaches nestling inside tissue paper.

  ‘It’s a fine balance,’ he said, with a rueful smile. ‘I am teetering.’ Ursula laughed, the word didn’t suit him.

  He embarked on a tale about Moira, something to do with her life in the village and her need for committee work, and Ursula drifted off, more interested in the discovery of a Bakewell tart that had apparently been magicked from a kitchen somewhere deep in the Admiralty. (‘We’re well looked after,’ he said. Like Maurice, she thought. The privileges of men in power, unavailable to those adrift on the sea of buff.)

  If Ursula’s older female colleagues had got wind of the affair, there would have been a stampede for the smelling salts, especially if they had known just who in the Admiralty it was that she was dallying with (Crighton was rather senior). Ursula was good, very good, at keeping s
ecrets.

  ‘Your reputation for discretion precedes you, Miss Todd,’ Crighton had said when introduced to her.

  ‘Goodness,’ Ursula said, ‘that makes me sound so dull.’

  ‘Intriguing, rather. I suspect you would make a good spy.’

  ‘And how was Maurice? In himself?’ Ursula asked.

  ‘Maurice is very well “in himself”, in that he is himself and will never change.’

  ‘Invitations to Sunday lunch in Surrey never come my way.’

  ‘Count yourself lucky.’

  ‘In fact I hardly ever see him. You wouldn’t think we worked in the same ministry. He walks the airy corridors of power—’

  ‘The hallowed walls.’

  ‘The hallowed walls. And I scurry around in a bunker.’

  ‘Are you? In a bunker?’

  ‘Well, it’s above ground. In South Ken, you know – in front of the Geological Museum. Not Maurice, he prefers his Whitehall office to our War Room.’

  When she had applied originally for a job in the Home Office, Ursula had rather presumed that Maurice would put in a good word for her but instead he had blustered on about nepotism and having to be seen to be above any suspicion of favouritism, ‘Caesar’s wife and so on,’ he said. ‘And I take it Maurice is Caesar in this conceit, rather than Caesar’s wife?’ Pamela said. ‘Oh, don’t put that idea into my head,’ Ursula laughed. ‘Maurice as a woman, imagine.’

  ‘Ah, but a Roman woman. That would suit him more. What was Coriolanus’s mother called?’

  ‘Volumnia.’

  ‘Oh, and I know what I had to tell you – Maurice invited a friend to lunch,’ Pamela said. ‘From his Oxford days, that big American chap. Do you remember?’

  ‘I do!’ Ursula struggled to come up with the name. ‘Oh, darn, what was he called … something American. He tried to kiss me on my sixteenth birthday.’

  ‘The swine!’ Pamela laughed. ‘You never said.’

  ‘Hardly what you want from a first kiss. More like a rugby tackle. He was a bit of a lout.’ Ursula laughed. ‘I think I hurt his pride – or perhaps more than his pride.’

  ‘Howie,’ Pamela said. ‘Only now he’s Howard – Howard S. Landsdowne III to give him his full title, apparently.’

  ‘Howie,’ Ursula mused. ‘I had quite forgotten. What’s he doing now?’

  ‘Something diplomatic. He’s even more secretive than Maurice. At the embassy, Kennedy’s a god to him. I think Howie rather admires old Adolf.’

  ‘Maurice, too, probably, if he weren’t quite so foreign. I saw him once at a Blackshirt meeting.’

  ‘Maurice? Never! Perhaps he was spying, I can imagine him as an agent provocateur. What were you doing there?’

  ‘Oh, you know, espionage, like Maurice. No, really just happenstance.’

  ‘So many startling revelations for one pot of tea. Are there more to come? Should I brew another pot?’

  Ursula laughed. ‘No, I think that’s it.’

  Pamela sighed. ‘It’s bloody, isn’t it?’

  ‘What, about Harold?’

  ‘Poor man, I suppose he’ll have to stay here. They can’t really call up hospital doctors, can they? They’ll need them if we’re bombed and gassed. We will be bombed and gassed, you do know that, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Ursula said, as offhand as if they were talking about the weather.

  ‘What an awful thought.’ Pamela sighed again, abandoning her needles and stretching her arms above her head. ‘It’s such a glorious day. It’s hard to believe this is probably the last ordinary day we’ll have for a long time.’

  Ursula had been due to begin her annual leave on Monday. She had planned a week of leisurely day trips – Eastbourne and Hastings or perhaps as far afield as Bath or Winchester – but with war about to be declared it seemed impossible to think of going anywhere. She felt suddenly listless at the idea of what might lie ahead. She had spent the morning on Kensington High Street, stocking up – batteries for her torch, a new hot-water bottle, candles, matches, endless amounts of black paper, as well as tins of baked beans and potatoes, vacuum-packed coffee. She had bought clothes too, a good woollen frock for eight pounds, a green velvet jacket for six, stockings and a pair of nice tan leather brogues that looked made to last. She had felt pleased with herself for resisting a yellow crêpe de Chine tea dress, patterned with little black swallows. ‘My winter coat’s only two years old,’ she said to Pamela, ‘it’ll see the war out, surely?’

  ‘Goodness, I would hope so.’

  ‘It’s all so horrid.’

  ‘I know,’ Pamela said, cutting more cake. ‘It’s vile. It makes me so cross. Going to war is madness. Have more cake, why don’t you? May as well, while the boys are still at Olive’s. They’ll come in and go through the place like locusts. God knows how we’ll manage with rationing.’

  ‘You’ll be in the country – you can grow things. Keep chickens. A pig. You’ll be all right.’ Ursula felt miserable at the thought of Pamela going away.

  ‘You should come.’

  ‘I should stay, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Oh, good, here’s Harold,’ Pamela said when Harold appeared, carrying a big bunch of dahlias wrapped in damp newspaper. She half rose to greet him and he kissed her on the cheek and said, ‘Don’t get up.’ He kissed Ursula as well and presented the dahlias to Pamela.

  ‘A girl was selling them on the street corner, in Whitechapel,’ he said. ‘Very Pygmalion. Said they came from her grandfather’s allotment.’ Crighton had given Ursula roses once but they had quickly drooped and faded. She rather envied Pamela her robust allotment flowers.

  ‘So, anyway,’ Harold said, when he had poured himself a lukewarm cup of tea from the pot, ‘we’re already evacuating patients who are well enough to be moved. They’re definitely going to declare war tomorrow. In the morning. It’s probably timed so that the nation can get down on its collective knees in church and pray for deliverance.’

  ‘Oh, yes, war is always so Christian, isn’t it?’ Pamela said sarcastically. ‘Especially when one is English. I have several friends in Germany,’ she said to Ursula. ‘Good people.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Are they the enemy now?’

  ‘Don’t get upset, Pammy,’ Harold said. ‘Why is it so quiet, what have you done with the boys?’

  ‘Sold them,’ Pamela said, perking up. ‘Three for the price of two.’

  ‘You ought to stay the night, Ursula,’ Harold said kindly. ‘You shouldn’t be on your own tomorrow. It’ll be one of those awful days. Doctor’s orders.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Ursula said. ‘But I’ve already got plans.’

  ‘Good for you,’ Pamela said, picking up her knitting again. ‘We mustn’t behave as if the world is coming to an end.’

  ‘Even if it is?’ Ursula said. She wished now that she’d bought the yellow crêpe de Chine.

  November 1940

  SHE WAS ON her back, lying in a shallow pool of water, a fact that didn’t worry her so much at first. The worst thing was the awful smell. It was a combination of different things, none of them good, and Ursula was trying to separate them into their components. The fetid stench of gas (domestic) for one, and, for another, the stink of sewage, disgustingly rank, that was making her gag. Added to that was a complex cocktail of damp, old plaster and brick dust, all mixed with the traces of human habitation – wallpaper, clothes, books, food – and the sour, alien smell of explosive. In short, the essence of a dead house.

  It was as if she were lying at the bottom of a deep well. Through a hazy veil of dust, like fog, she could make out a patch of black sky and a pared fingernail of moon that she remembered noticing earlier in the evening when she had looked out of the window. That seemed a long time ago.

  The window itself, or at least the frame, was still there, way, way above her, not where it should be at all. It was definitely her window, she recognized the curtains, charred rags now, flapping in the breeze. They were – had been – a thick jacq
uard brocade from John Lewis’s that Sylvie had helped her pick out. The flat in Argyll Road was rented as furnished but Sylvie declared the curtains and rugs to be ‘completely shoddy’ and subbed Ursula for new ones when she moved in.

  At the time Millie had suggested that she move in with her in Phillimore Gardens. Millie was still playing ingénues and said she expected to go from Juliet to the Nurse with nothing in between. ‘It would be fun,’ Millie said, ‘to share digs,’ but Ursula wasn’t so sure that Millie’s idea of fun coincided with her own. She often felt rather dull and sober against Millie’s brightness. A dunnock keeping company with a kingfisher. And sometimes Millie burnt just a little too brightly.

  This was just after Munich and Ursula had already started her affair with Crighton and it seemed more practical to live on her own. Looking back, she realized that she had accommodated Crighton’s needs a great deal more than he had hers, as if Moira and the girls somehow trumped her own existence.

  Think about Millie, she told herself, think about the curtains, think about Crighton if you must. Anything except her present predicament. Especially the gas. It seemed particularly important to try to take her mind off the gas.

  After their purchases in soft furnishings Sylvie and Ursula had taken afternoon tea in John Lewis’s restaurant, served by a grimly efficient waitress. ‘I’m always so glad,’ Sylvie murmured, ‘that I don’t have to take a turn at being other people.’

  ‘You’re very good at being yourself,’ Ursula said, aware that it didn’t necessarily sound like a compliment.

  ‘Well, I’ve had years of practice.’

  It was a very good afternoon tea, the kind you couldn’t get any more in department stores. And then John Lewis itself was destroyed, no more than the black toothless skull of a building. (‘How awful,’ Sylvie wrote, moved in a way that she didn’t appear to have been by the dreadful raids on the East End.) It was up and running again in days, ‘Blitz spirit’ everyone said, but really, what was the alternative?

  Sylvie had been in a good mood that day, and they had drawn closer over the subject of curtains and the idiocy of people who thought that Chamberlain’s silly little piece of paper meant anything at all.