Life After Life

by Kate Atkinson

  ‘Do you know your problem, Miss Todd?’ Fred Smith said, stubbing out his cigarette. He took hold of her hand and kissed her open palm and she thought, seize this moment because it’s a sweet one and said, ‘No, what’s my problem?’ and never did find out because the siren went off and he said, ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck, I’m supposed to be on duty,’ and threw his clothes on, gave her a hasty kiss and flew out of the room. She never saw him again.

  She was reading through the Home Security War Diary for the awful early hours of 11 May –

  Time of Origin – 0045. Form of Origin – Teleprinter. In or Out – In. Subject – South West India Dock Office, wrecked by H.E. And Westminster Abbey, the Houses of Parliament, De Gaulle’s head -quarters, the Mint, the Law Courts. She had seen St Clement Dane’s herself – blazing like a monstrous chimney fire on the Strand. And all the ordinary people living their precious ordinary lives in Bermondsey, Islington, Southwark. The list went on and on. She was interrupted by Miss Fawcett who said, ‘Message for you, Miss Todd,’ and handed her a piece of paper.

  A girl she knew who knew a girl in the fire service had sent her a copy of an AFS report, a little note added, ‘He was a friend of yours, wasn’t he? Sorry …’

  Frederick Smith, fireman, crushed when a wall fell while attending a fire in Earl’s Court.

  Bloody fool, Ursula thought. Bloody, bloody fool.

  November 1943

  IT WAS MAURICE who brought the news to her. His arrival coincided with that of the tea-trolley bearing elevenses. ‘Can I have a word?’ he said.

  ‘Do you want tea?’ she said, getting up from her desk. ‘I’m sure we can spare you some of ours, vastly inferior though it must be to the Orange Pekoe and Darjeeling and whatnot that you get in your place. And I can’t imagine our biscuits can hold a candle to yours.’ The tea-lady hovered, unimpressed by this exchange with an interloper from the airy regions.

  ‘No, no tea, thank you,’ he said, surprisingly polite and subdued. It struck her that Maurice was nearly always simmering with suppressed fury (what a strange condition to live your life in), in some ways he reminded her of Hitler (she had heard that Maurice ranted at secretaries. ‘Oh, that’s so unfair!’ Pamela said, ‘but it does make me laugh’).

  Maurice had never got his hands dirty. Never been to an incident, never pulled apart a man like a cracker or knelt on a matted bundle of fabric and flesh that had once been a baby.

  What was he doing here, was he going to start pontificating again about her love life? It never crossed her mind that he was here to say, ‘I’m sorry to have to tell you this’ (as if this were an official announcement) ‘but Ted has caught one, I’m afraid.’

  ‘What?’ She couldn’t untangle the meaning. Caught what? ‘I don’t know what you mean, Maurice.’

  ‘Ted,’ he said. ‘Ted’s plane has gone down.’

  Teddy had been safe. He was ‘tour expired’ and was instructing at an OTU. He was a squadron leader with a DFC (Ursula, Nancy and Sylvie had been to the Palace, bursting with pride). And then he had asked to go back on ops. (‘I just felt I had to.’) The girl she knew in the Air Ministry – Anne – told her that one in forty aircrew would survive a second tour of duty.

  ‘Ursula?’ Maurice said. ‘Do you understand what I’m saying to you? We’ve lost him.’

  ‘Then we’ll find him.’

  ‘No. Officially he’s “missing in action”.’

  ‘Then he’s not dead,’ Ursula said. ‘Where?’

  ‘Berlin, a couple of nights ago.’

  ‘He bailed out, and he’s been taken captive,’ Ursula said, as if stating a fact.

  ‘No, I’m afraid not,’ Maurice said. ‘He went down in flames, no one got out.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘He was seen, an eyewitness, a fellow pilot.’

  ‘Who? Who was it who saw him?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He was beginning to grow impatient.

  ‘No,’ she said again. And then again, no. Her heart started racing and her mouth went dry. Her vision blurred and dotted, a pointillist painting. She was going to faint.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she heard Maurice say. Am I all right, she thought, am I all right? How could I be all right?

  Maurice’s voice sounded a long way off. She heard him shout for a girl. A chair was brought, a glass of water fetched. The girl said, ‘Here, Miss Todd, put your head between your knees.’ The girl was Miss Fawcett, a nice girl. ‘Thank you, Miss Fawcett,’ she murmured.

  ‘Mother took it very hard as well,’ Maurice said, as if bemused by grief. He had never cared for Teddy the way they all did.

  ‘Well,’ he said, patting her on the shoulder, she tried not to flinch, ‘I’d better get back to the office, I expect I’ll see you at Fox Corner,’ almost casually, as if the worst part of the conversation were over and they could get on with some blander chat.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why what?’

  She sat up straight. The water in the glass trembled slightly. ‘Why will you see me at Fox Corner?’ She sensed Miss Fawcett still hovering solicitously.

  ‘Well,’ Maurice said, ‘a family gathers on occasions such as these. After all, there won’t be a funeral.’

  ‘There won’t?’

  ‘No, of course not. No body,’ he said. Did he shrug? Did he? She was shivering, she thought she might faint after all. She wished someone would hold her. Not Maurice. Miss Fawcett took the glass from her hand. Maurice said, ‘I’ll give you a lift down, of course. Mother sounded most awfully cut up,’ he added.

  He’d told her on the telephone? How dreadful, she thought numbly. It hardly mattered, she supposed, how one was given the news. And yet to have it conveyed by Maurice in his three-piece pinstripe, leaning against her desk, now inspecting his fingernails, waiting for her to say she was fine and he could go …

  ‘I’m fine. You can go.’

  Miss Fawcett brought her hot, sweet tea and said, ‘I’m so sorry, Miss Todd. Would you like me to come home with you?’

  ‘That’s very kind of you,’ Ursula said, ‘but I’ll be all right. Do you think you could fetch my coat for me?’

  He was twisting his uniform cap in his hands. They were making him nervous, just by their very presence. Roy Holt was drinking beer from a big dimpled-glass beer mug, great draughts with every mouthful as if he were very thirsty. He was Teddy’s friend, the witness to his death. The ‘fellow pilot’. Last time Ursula was here, visiting Teddy, was the summer of ’42 and they had sat in the beer garden and eaten ham sandwiches and pickled eggs.

  Roy Holt was from Sheffield where the air still belonged to Yorkshire but was perhaps not so good. His mother and sister had been killed in the awful raids in December 1940 and he said he wasn’t going to rest until he’d dropped a bomb directly on Hitler’s head.

  ‘Good for you,’ Izzie said. She had a peculiar way with young men, Ursula noticed, both maternal and flirtatious at the same time (where once she had simply been flirtatious). It was rather disturbing to watch.

  As soon as she heard the news, Izzie left Cornwall post-haste for London and then commandeered a car and a fistful of petrol coupons from a ‘man she knew’ in the government, to take them both to Fox Corner, and then, onwards, to make the journey to Teddy’s airfield. (‘You’ll never manage the train,’ she said, ‘you’ll be far too upset.’) ‘Men she knew’ was generally a euphemism for ex-lovers (‘What did you do to get this?’ a surly garage owner had asked when they filled up at his pumps on the road north. ‘I slept with someone terribly important,’ Izzie said sweetly).

  Ursula hadn’t seen Izzie since Hugh’s funeral, since her astonishing confession that she had a child, and Ursula thought that perhaps she should reintroduce the subject on the drive to Yorkshire (awkward to do) as Izzie had been so upset and presumably had no one else to talk to about it. But when Ursula said, ‘Do you want to talk more about your baby?’ Izzie said, ‘Oh, that,’ as if it was something trivial. ‘Forget I ever said any
thing, I was just being morbid. Shall we stop for tea somewhere, I could demolish a scone, couldn’t you?’

  Yes, they had gathered at Fox Corner, and no, there was no ‘body’. By then the status of Teddy and his crew had changed from ‘missing in action’ to ‘missing, presumed dead’. There was no hope, Maurice said, they must stop thinking there was hope. ‘There’s always hope,’ Sylvie said.

  ‘No,’ Ursula said, ‘sometimes there really isn’t.’ She thought of the baby. Emil. What would Teddy look like? Blackened and charred and shrunk like an ancient piece of wood? Maybe there was nothing left at all, no ‘body’. Stop it, stop it, stop it. She breathed. Think of him as a little boy, playing with his planes and trains – no, actually that was worse. Much worse.

  ‘It’s hardly a surprise,’ Nancy said grimly. They were sitting outside on the terrace. They had drunk rather too much of Hugh’s good malt. It felt peculiar to be drinking his whisky when he himself was gone. It was kept in a cut-glass decanter on the desk in the growlery, and it was the first time she had drunk it when it had not been poured by his own hand. (‘Fancy a drop of the good stuff, little bear?’)

  ‘He’d flown so many missions,’ Nancy said, ‘the odds were against him.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘He expected it,’ Nancy said. ‘Accepted it, even. They have to, all those boys do. I sound sanguine, I know,’ she continued quietly, ‘but my heart is split in two. I loved him so much. Love him so much. I don’t know why I use the past tense. It’s not as if love dies with the beloved. I love him more now because I feel so damn sorry for him. He’ll never marry, never have children, never have the wonderful life that was his birthright. Not all this,’ she said, waving a hand around to indicate Fox Corner, the middle class, England in general, ‘but because he was such a good man. Sound and true, like a great bell, I think.’ She laughed. ‘Silly, I know. I know you’re the one that understands. And I can’t cry, I don’t even want to cry. My tears would never do justice to this loss.’

  Nancy hadn’t wanted to talk, Teddy had once said, and now she wanted to do nothing but talk. Ursula herself had barely talked but wept continually. She had hardly gone an hour without finding the tears streaming unstoppably. Her eyes were still swollen and sore. Crighton had been awfully good, cradling her and shushing her, making endless cups of tea, tea purloined from the Admiralty, she supposed. He didn’t deliver platitudes, didn’t say everything will be all right, time will heal, he’s in a better place – none of that rubbish. Miss Woolf was wonderful too. She came and sat with Crighton, never questioning who he might be, and held her hand and stroked her hair and allowed her to be an inconsolable child.

  That was over now, she thought, finishing her whisky. Now there was just nothing. A vast, featureless landscape of nothing, as far as the horizon of her mind. Despair behind, and Death before.

  ‘Will you do something for me?’ Nancy asked.

  ‘Yes, of course. Anything.’

  ‘Will you find out if there’s a scrap of hope that he’s alive? Surely there’s a chance, however small, that he’s been taken captive. I thought you might know someone in the Air Ministry—’

  ‘Well, I know a girl …’

  ‘Or perhaps Maurice knows someone, someone who could be … definitive.’ She stood up suddenly, swaying slightly from the whisky, and said, ‘I have to go.’

  ‘We’ve met before,’ Roy Holt said to her.

  ‘Yes, I came up to visit last year,’ Ursula said. ‘I stayed here, at the White Hart, they have rooms, but I suppose you know that. This is “your” pub, isn’t it? The aircrew, I mean.’

  ‘We were all drinking in the bar, I remember,’ Roy Holt said.

  ‘Yes, it was a very jolly evening.’

  Maurice was no use, of course, but Crighton had tried. It was always the same story. Teddy had gone down in flames, no one jumped.

  ‘You were the last person who saw him,’ Ursula said.

  ‘I don’t think about it really,’ Roy Holt said. ‘He was a good bloke, Ted, but it happens all the time. They don’t come back. They’re there at tea and they’re not there at breakfast. You mourn for a minute and then you don’t think about it. Do you know the statistics?’

  ‘I do actually.’

  He shrugged and said, ‘Maybe after the war, I don’t know. I don’t know what you want me to tell you.’

  ‘We just want to know,’ Izzie said gently, ‘that he didn’t bail out. That he is dead. You were under attack, in extreme circumstances, you may not have seen the whole sorry drama play itself out.’

  ‘He’s dead, believe me,’ Roy Holt said. ‘The whole crew. The plane was ablaze from front to back. Most of them were probably already dead. I could see him, the planes were very close, still in formation. He turned and looked at me.’

  ‘Looked at you?’ Ursula said. Teddy in the last moments of his life, knowing he was going to die. What did he think about – the meadow and the copse and the stream that ran through the bluebell wood? Or the flames that were going to consume him – another martyr for England?

  Izzie reached out and clutched her hand. ‘Steady,’ she said.

  ‘I was only bothered about getting away from them. His kite was going out of control, I didn’t want the bugger crashing into us.’ He shrugged. He looked incredibly young and incredibly old at the same time.

  ‘You should get on with your lives,’ he said rather roughly, and then less so added, ‘I brought the dog. I thought you might want it back.’

  Lucky was asleep at Ursula’s feet, he had been deliriously happy when he saw her. Teddy hadn’t left him at Fox Corner, instead he had taken him north, to his base. ‘With a name and a reputation like his, what else could I do?’ he wrote. He sent a photograph of his crew, lounging in old armchairs, Lucky sitting proudly to attention on Teddy’s knee.

  ‘But he’s your lucky mascot,’ Ursula protested. ‘Isn’t that like asking for bad luck? Giving him away, I mean.’

  ‘We’ve had nothing but bad luck since Ted went,’ Roy Holt said morosely. ‘He was Ted’s dog,’ he added more kindly, ‘faithful unto the last, as they say. He’s pining something rotten, you should take him. The lads can’t bear to see him hanging around on the airfield, waiting for Ted to come back. It just reminds them that it’s probably going to be them next time.’

  ‘I can’t bear it,’ she said to Izzie as they drove away. It was what Miss Woolf said when Tony died, she remembered. Just how much was one expected to bear? The dog was sitting contentedly on her lap, sensing something of Ted about her perhaps. Or so she liked to think.

  ‘What else is there to do?’ Izzie said.

  Well, one could kill oneself. And she might have done but how could she leave the dog behind? ‘Is that ridiculous?’ she asked Pamela.

  ‘No, not ridiculous,’ Pamela said. ‘The dog is all that’s left of Teddy.’

  ‘Sometimes I feel that he is Teddy.’

  ‘Now that is ridiculous.’

  They were sitting on the lawn at Fox Corner, two weeks or so after VE Day. (‘Now begins the hard part,’ Pamela said.) They hadn’t celebrated. Sylvie had marked the day by taking an overdose of sleeping pills. ‘Selfish, really,’ Pamela said. ‘After all, we’re her children too.’

  She had embraced the truth in her own inimitable way and lain down on Teddy’s childhood bed and swallowed a whole bottle of pills, washed down with the last of Hugh’s whisky. It was Jimmy’s room too, but he hardly seemed to count to her. Now two of Pamela’s boys slept in that room and played with Teddy’s old train set, laid out in Mrs Glover’s old attic room.

  They lived at Fox Corner, the boys and Pamela and Harold. To everyone’s surprise, Bridget made good on her threat to return to Ireland. Sylvie, enigmatic to the last, left behind her own version of a delayed action bomb. When her will was read they discovered that there was some money – stocks and shares and so on, Hugh wasn’t a banker for nothing – that was to be divided equally but Pamela was to inherit Fox Corner. ‘But w
hy me?’ Pamela puzzled. ‘I was no more of a favourite than anyone else.’

  ‘None of us were favourites,’ Ursula said, ‘only Teddy. I suppose if he’d lived she would have left it to him.’

  ‘If he’d lived she wouldn’t be dead.’

  Maurice was incandescent, Jimmy was not back from the war and when he did return he didn’t seem to care too much one way or the other. Ursula wasn’t entirely indifferent to the snub (a small word for a rather large betrayal) but she thought Pamela was the perfect person to live at Fox Corner and she was glad it was in her stewardship. Pamela wanted to sell and divide the proceeds but Harold, to Ursula’s surprise, talked her out of it. (And it was difficult to talk Pamela out of things.) Harold had always disliked Maurice, for his politics as much as his person, and Ursula suspected this was his way of punishing Maurice for, well, for being Maurice. It was all rather Forsterian and it would have been easy to develop a grudge but Ursula chose not to.

  The contents were to be divided among them. Jimmy wanted nothing, he already had his passage booked to New York and a job secured in an advertising agency, thanks to someone he met during the war, ‘A man I know,’ he said, an echo of Izzie. Maurice, on the other hand, having decided not to contest the will (‘even though I would be successful, of course’), sent a removal van and virtually looted the house. None of the contents of the van ever turned up in Maurice’s own house so they presumed he sold them, out of spite more than anything. Pamela cried for Sylvie’s nice rugs and ornaments, the Regency Revival dining table, some very good Queen Anne chairs, the grandfather clock in the hall, ‘Things we grew up with,’ but it seemed to appease Maurice and prevented an outbreak of total war.

  Ursula took Sylvie’s little carriage clock. ‘I want nothing else,’ she said. ‘Only to be always welcome here.’

  ‘As you will be. You know that.’

  February 1947

  WONDERFUL! LIKE A Red Cross package, she wrote and propped the old postcard of the Brighton Pavilion on the mantelpiece next to Sylvie’s clock, next to Teddy’s photograph. She would put the card in with the afternoon post tomorrow. It would take for ever to reach Fox Corner, of course.