Life After Life

by Kate Atkinson

  It was very quiet and Ursula wondered if her eardrums were shattered. How did she get here? She remembered looking out of the window in Argyll Road – the window that was so far away now – and seeing the sickle moon. And before that she had been sitting on the sofa, doing some sewing, turning the collar on a blouse, with the wireless tuned to a short-wave German station. She was taking a German evening class (know your enemy) but was finding it difficult to decipher anything beyond the occasional violent noun (Luftangriffe, Verluste) in the broadcast. In despair at her lack of proficiency, she had turned the wireless off and put Ma Rainey on the gramophone. Before she left for America, Izzie had bequeathed Ursula her collection of records, an impressive archive of female American blues artistes. ‘I don’t listen to that stuff any more,’ Izzie said. ‘It’s very passé. The future lies with something a little more soigné.’ Izzie’s Holland Park house was shut up now, everything covered in dustsheets. She had married a famous playwright and they had decamped to California in the summer. (‘Cowards, the pair of them,’ Sylvie said.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Hugh said, ‘I’m sure if I could sit out the war in Hollywood I would.’)

  ‘That’s interesting music I hear you listening to,’ Mrs Appleyard said to Ursula one day as they passed on the stairs. The wall between their flats was paper-thin and Ursula said, ‘I’m sorry. I don’t mean to disturb you,’ although she could well have added that she heard Mrs Appleyard’s baby bawling its head off day and night and that was very disturbing. The baby at four months old was big for its age, fat and ruddy, as if it had leeched all the life out of Mrs Appleyard.

  Mrs Appleyard – the deadweight of the baby asleep in her arms, its head on her shoulder – waved a dismissive hand and said, ‘Don’t be concerned, it doesn’t bother me.’ She was lugubriously East European, a refugee of some kind, Ursula supposed, although her English was precise. Mr Appleyard had disappeared some months ago, gone for a soldier, perhaps, but Ursula hadn’t asked as the marriage had been clearly (and audibly) unhappy. Mrs Appleyard was pregnant when her husband left and, as far as Ursula could tell (or hear), he had never been back to meet his squawking infant.

  Mrs Appleyard must have been pretty once but day by day she grew thinner and sadder until it seemed as though only the (very) solid burden of the baby and its needs kept her tethered to everyday life.

  In the bathroom that they shared on the first floor there was always an enamel pail in which the baby’s foul-smelling nappies lay soaking before being boiled in a pan on Mrs Appleyard’s two-ring stove. On the neighbouring ring there was usually to be found a pan of cabbage and, perhaps as a result of this twin boiling, she always carried on her person a faint perfume of old vegetables and damp laundry. Ursula recognized it, it was the smell of poverty.

  The Misses Nesbit, nesting on the top floor, fretted a good deal about Mrs Appleyard and the baby in the way that old maids were inclined to. The two Nesbits, Lavinia and Ruth, slight spinsters, lived in the attic rooms (‘beneath the eaves, like swallows’, they twittered). They might as well have been twins for all the difference between them and Ursula had to make a tremendous effort to remember which was which.

  They were long retired – they had both been telephonists in Harrods – and were a frugal pair, their only indulgence being an impressive collection of costume jewellery, purchased mainly from Woolworths in their lunch hour, during their ‘working years’. Their flat smelt quite different to Mrs Appleyard’s, lavender water and Mansion House polish – the scent of old ladies. Ursula sometimes did shopping for both the Nesbits and Mrs Appleyard. Mrs Appleyard was always ready at the door with the exact money that she owed (she knew the price of everything) and a polite ‘thank you’, but the Nesbits were forever trying to inveigle Ursula inside with weak tea and stale biscuits.

  Below them, on the second floor, were to be found Mr Bentley (‘a queer fish’, they were all agreed) whose flat smelt (appropriately) of the finnan haddock he boiled in milk for his supper, and next door to him the aloof Miss Hartnell (whose flat smelt of nothing at all) who was a housekeeper at the Hyde Park Hotel and rather severe, as if nothing could ever hope to meet her standards. She made Ursula feel distinctly wanting.

  ‘Disappointed in love, I believe,’ Ruth Nesbit whispered in mitigation to Ursula, clamping her bird-boned hand on her chest as if her own frail heart might be about to jump ship and attach itself to someone unsuitable. Both the Misses Nesbit were deeply sentimental about love, never having experienced its rigours. Miss Hartnell looked more as if she would mete out disappointment than receive it.

  ‘I also have some records,’ Mrs Appleyard said with the earnestness of a conspirator. ‘But, alas, no gramophone.’ Mrs Appleyard’s ‘alas’ seemed freighted with all the tragedy of a broken continent. It could hardly bear the weight it was asked to carry.

  ‘Well, do please feel welcome to come and play them on mine,’ Ursula said, rather hoping that the downtrodden Mrs Appleyard wouldn’t take up the offer. She wondered what kind of music Mrs Appleyard possessed. It seemed impossible that it could be anything very jolly.

  ‘Brahms,’ Mrs Appleyard said, answering the unasked question. ‘And Mahler.’ The baby shifted restlessly as if disturbed by the prospect of Mahler. Whenever Ursula met Mrs Appleyard on the stairs or the landing, the baby was asleep. It was as if there were two babies, the one inside the flat who never stopped crying and the one outside who never started.

  ‘Would you mind holding Emil for a moment while I find my keys?’ Mrs Appleyard asked, handing the cumbersome child over without waiting for an answer.

  ‘Emil,’ Ursula murmured. She hadn’t thought of the baby as having a name. Emil was, as usual, dressed for some kind of Arctic winter, bulked out with nappies and rubber knickers and romper suits and all kinds of knitted and beribboned garments. Ursula wasn’t a stranger to babies, both she and Pamela had mothered Teddy and Jimmy with the same enthusiasm they accorded puppies and kittens and rabbits, and she was the very picture of a doting aunt where Pamela’s boys were concerned, but Mrs Appleyard’s baby was of a less appealing order. The Todd babies smelt sweetly of milk and talcum powder and the fresh air that their clothes were dried in, whereas Emil had a slightly gamey scent.

  Mrs Appleyard rummaged for her keys in her large battered handbag, an item that looked as if it, too, had crossed Europe from a faraway country (of which Ursula, patently, knew nothing). With a great sigh, Mrs Appleyard finally located the keys at the bottom of the bag. The baby, perhaps sensing the proximity of the threshold, squirmed in Ursula’s arms as if preparing itself for the transition. It opened its eyes and looked rather quarrelsome.

  ‘Thank you, Miss Todd,’ Mrs Appleyard said, reclaiming the baby. ‘It was nice talking to you.’

  ‘Ursula,’ Ursula said. ‘Do please call me Ursula.’

  Mrs Appleyard hesitated before saying, almost shyly, ‘Eryka. E-r-y-k-a.’ They had lived next door to each other for a year now but this was the nearest they had come to intimacy.

  Almost as soon as her door closed the baby began its customary roaring. ‘Does she stick pins in it?’ Pamela wrote. Pamela produced placid babies. ‘They don’t tend to turn feral until they’re two,’ she said. She had given birth to another boy, Gerald, just before last Christmas. ‘Better luck next time,’ Ursula said when she saw her. She had taken a train north to visit the new arrival, a long and challenging journey, most of which was spent in the guard’s van, on a train packed with soldiers on their way to a training camp. She had been subjected to a barrage of sexual innuendo which had started as amusing and ended as tedious. ‘Not exactly perfect gentle knights,’ she said to Pamela when she finally arrived, the last part of the journey being accomplished in a donkey-cart as if time had slipped into some other century, some other country even.

  Poor Pammy was bored with the phoney war and with being shut up with so many little boys, ‘like being a matron in a boys’ school’. Not to mention Jeanette who had proved to be ‘a bit of a sl
acker’ (not to mention a moaner and a snorer). ‘One expects better of a vicar’s daughter,’ Pamela wrote, ‘although goodness knows why.’ She had decamped back to Finchley in the spring but since the nightly raids had started she had retreated with her brood to Fox Corner ‘for the duration’, despite her previous misgivings about living with Sylvie. Harold, now at St Thomas’s, was working on the front line. The nurses’ home there had been bombed a couple of weeks ago and five nurses killed. ‘Every night is hell,’ Harold reported. It was the same report that Ralph gave from the bombsites.

  Ralph! Of course, Ralph. Ursula had quite forgotten him. He had been in Argyll Road too. Was he there when the bomb exploded? Ursula struggled to turn her head to look around, as if she would find him among the wreckage. There was no one, she was alone. Alone and corralled in a cage of smashed wooden beams and jagged rafters, the dust settling all around her, in her mouth, her nostrils, her eyes. No, Ralph had already left when the sirens went.

  Ursula was no longer bedded by her man from the Admiralty. The declaration of war had brought on a sudden flush of guilt in her lover. They must stop their affair, Crighton said. The temptations of the flesh were apparently secondary to martial pursuits – as if she were Cleopatra about to destroy his Antony for love. There was enough excitement in the world now, it seemed, without the added hazards of ‘keeping a mistress’. ‘I’m a mistress?’ Ursula said. She had not thought of herself as sporting a scarlet letter, a rubric that belonged to a racier woman, surely?

  The balance had shifted. Crighton had teetered. And apparently tottered. ‘Very well,’ she had said equably. ‘If that’s what you want.’ She had begun to suspect by then that there was not, in fact, a different, more intriguing Crighton hidden beneath the enigmatic surface. He was not so very inscrutable, after all. Crighton was Crighton – Moira, the girls, Jutland, although not necessarily in that order.

  Despite the fact that the end of the affair was at his instigation, he was cut up. Wasn’t she? ‘You’re very cool,’ he said.

  But she had never been ‘in love’ with him, she said. ‘And I expect we can still be friends.’

  ‘I don’t think that we can, I’m afraid,’ Crighton said, already wistful for what was now history.

  Nonetheless, she had spent the following day dutifully crying for her loss. Her liking for him had not been quite the negligent emotion that Pamela seemed to think. Then she dried her tears, washed her hair and went to bed with a plate of Bovril on toast and a bottle of 1929 Château Haut-Brion that she had filched from Izzie’s excellent wine cellar, left casually behind in Melbury Road. Ursula had the keys to Izzie’s house. ‘Just help yourself to anything you can find,’ Izzie had said. So she did.

  It was rather a shame though, Ursula thought, that she no longer had assignations with Crighton. The war made indiscretions easier. The blackout was the perfect screen for illicit liaisons, and the disruption of the bombing – when it finally started – would have provided him with plenty of excuses for not being in Wargrave with Moira and the girls.

  Instead, Ursula was having an entirely above-board relationship with a fellow student on her German course. After the initial class (Guten Tag. Mein Name ist Ralph. Ich bin dreizig Jahre alt) the two of them had retired to the Kardomah on Southampton Row, almost invisible behind a wall of sandbags these days. It turned out that he worked in the same building as she did, on the bomb-damage maps.

  It was only as they left the class – held in a stuffy room, three floors up in Bloomsbury – that Ursula noticed that Ralph was limping. Wounded at Dunkirk, he said, before she could ask. Shot in the leg while waiting in the water to get into one of the little boats that were shuttling back and forth between the shore and the bigger boats. He was hauled on board by a fisherman from Folkestone who was shot in the neck minutes later. ‘There,’ he said to Ursula, ‘now we don’t need to talk about it again.’

  ‘No, I don’t suppose we do,’ Ursula said. ‘But how awful.’ She had watched the newsreels, of course. ‘We played a bad hand well,’ Crighton said. Ursula had run into him in Whitehall not long after the evacuation of the troops. He missed her, he said. (He was teetering again, she thought.) Ursula was determinedly nonchalant, said she had reports she needed to take to the War Cabinet Office, clutching buff folders to her chest like a cuirass. She had missed him too. It seemed important not to let him see that.

  ‘You liaise with the War Cabinet?’ Crighton said, rather impressed.

  ‘Just an assistant to an under-secretary. Actually, not even to the assistant, just another “girl” like me.’

  The conversation had gone on long enough, she decided. He was gazing at her in a way that made her want to feel his arms around her. ‘Must push off,’ she said brightly, ‘there’s a war on, you know.’

  Ralph was from Bexhill, gently sardonic, left-wing, utopian. (‘Aren’t all socialists utopians?’ Pamela said.) Ralph was nothing like Crighton, who with hindsight seemed rather too powerful.

  ‘Being courted by a Red?’ Maurice asked, coming across her within the hallowed walls. She felt sought out by him. ‘It might not look good for you if anyone knew.’

  ‘He’s hardly a card-carrying communist,’ she said.

  ‘Still,’ Maurice said, ‘at least he won’t be betraying battleship positions in his pillow talk.’

  What did that mean? Did Maurice know about Crighton?

  ‘Your personal life isn’t personal, not while there’s a war on,’ he said with a look of distaste. ‘And why, by the way, are you learning German? Are you awaiting the invasion? Getting ready to welcome the enemy?’

  ‘I thought you were accusing me of being a communist, not a fascist,’ Ursula said crossly. (‘What an ass,’ Pamela said. ‘He’s just terrified of anything that might reflect badly on him. Not that I’m defending him. Heaven forbid.’)

  From her position at the bottom of the well, Ursula could see that most of the insubstantial wall between her flat and Mrs Appleyard’s had disappeared. Looking up through the fractured floorboards and the shattered beams she could see a dress hanging limply on a coat hanger, hooked to a picture rail. It was the picture rail in the Millers’ lounge on the ground floor, Ursula recognized the wallpaper of sallow, overblown roses. She had seen Lavinia Nesbit on the stairs wearing the dress only this evening, when it had been the colour of pea soup (and equally limp). Now it was a grey bomb-dust shade and had migrated down a floor. A few yards from her head she could see her own kettle, a big brown thing, surplus to requirements in Fox Corner. She recognized it from the thick twine wound around the handle one day long ago by Mrs Glover. Everything was in the wrong place now, including herself.

  Yes, Ralph had been in Argyll Road. They had eaten – bread and cheese – accompanied by a bottle of beer. Then she had done the crossword, yesterday’s Telegraph. Recently Ursula had been forced to buy a pair of spectacles for close work, rather ugly things. It was only after she had brought them home that she realized they were almost identical to the pair that one of the Misses Nesbit wore. Was this her fate too, she thought, contemplating her bespectacled reflection in the mirror above the fireplace? Would she, too, end up as an old maid? The proper sport of boys and girls. And could you be an old maid if you had worn the scarlet letter? Yesterday an envelope had mysteriously appeared on her desk while she was snatching a sandwich lunch in St James’s Park. She saw her name in Crighton’s handwriting (he had a surprisingly nice italic hand) and tore the whole thing to bits and threw it in the bin without reading it. Later, when all the clerical assistants were flocking like pigeons around the tea-trolley, she had retrieved the scraps and pieced them together.

  I have mislaid my gold cigarette case. You know the one – my father gave it me after Jutland. You wouldn’t have come across it by any chance, would you?

  Yours, C.

  But he was never hers, was he? On the contrary, he belonged to Moira. (Or perhaps the Admiralty.) She dropped the pieces of paper back in the bin. The cigarette case was in her
handbag. She had found it beneath her bed a few days after he had left her.

  ‘Penny for them?’ Ralph said.

  ‘Not worth it, trust me.’

  Ralph was stretched out next to her, resting his head on the arm of the sofa, his socked feet in her lap. Although he looked as though he were asleep he gave a murmured response every time she tossed a clue in his direction. ‘A Roland for an Oliver? How about “paladin”?’ she said. ‘What do you think?’

  An odd thing had happened to her yesterday. She had been on the Tube, she didn’t like the Tube, before the bombing she cycled everywhere but it was difficult with so much glass and rubble around. She had been doing the Telegraph crossword, trying to pretend she wasn’t underground. Most people felt safer underground but Ursula didn’t like the idea of confinement. There had been an incident only a couple of days previously of a bomb falling on to an Underground entrance, the blast had travelled down and into the tunnels and the result was pretty awful. She wasn’t sure that it had made the papers, these things were so bad for morale.

  On the Tube, a man sitting next to her had suddenly leaned across – she had shrunk back – and, nodding at her half-filled grid, said, ‘You’re rather good at that. Can I give you my card? Pop into my office if you like. I’m recruiting clever girls.’ I bet you are, she thought. He got off at Green Park, tipping his hat to her. The card had an address in Whitehall but she had thrown it away.

  Ralph shook two cigarettes from a packet and lit them both. He passed one to her and said, ‘You’re a clever thing, aren’t you?’

  ‘Pretty much,’ she said. ‘That’s why I’m in the Intelligence Department and you’re in the Map Room.’

  ‘Ha, ha, clever and funny.’

  There was an easy camaraderie between them, that of pals more than lovers. They respected each other’s character and made few demands. It helped that they both worked in the War Room. There were a lot of things they never had to explain to each other.