Life After Life Read online

Sylvie gestured to Pamela who obediently followed her mother’s mute orders and trailed round the table after Bridget, turning the cutlery the right way round. Bridget couldn’t tell her right from her left or her up from her down.

  Pamela’s support for the expeditionary force had taken the form of a mass production of dun-coloured mufflers of extraordinary and impractical lengths. Sylvie was pleasantly surprised by her elder daughter’s capacity for monotony. It would stand her in good stead for her life to come. Sylvie lost a stitch and muttered an oath that startled Pamela and Bridget. ‘What news?’ she asked at last, reluctantly.

  ‘Bombs have been dropped on Norfolk,’ Bridget said, proud of her information.

  ‘Bombs?’ Sylvie said, looking up from her knitting. ‘In Norfolk?’

  ‘A Zeppelin raid,’ Bridget said authoritatively. ‘That’s the Hun for you. They don’t care who they kill. They’re wicked, so they are. They eat Belgian babies.’

  ‘Well …’ Sylvie said, hooking the lost stitch, ‘that might be a slight exaggeration.’

  Pamela hesitated, dessert fork in one hand, spoon in the other, as if she was about to attempt an attack on one of Mrs Glover’s heavyweight puddings. ‘Eat?’ she echoed in horror. ‘Babies?’

  ‘No,’ Sylvie said crossly. ‘Don’t be silly.’

  Mrs Glover shouted for Bridget from the depths of the kitchen and Bridget flew to her command. Sylvie could hear Bridget yelling, in turn, up the stairs to the other children, ‘Yer tea is on the table!’

  Pamela sighed the sigh of someone with a lifetime behind them already and sat at the table. She stared blankly at the cloth and said, ‘I miss Daddy.’

  ‘Me too, darling,’ Sylvie said. ‘Me too. Now don’t be a goose, go and tell the others to wash their hands.’

  At Christmas, Sylvie had packaged up a great box of goods for Hugh: the inevitable socks and gloves; one of Pamela’s endless mufflers and, as an antidote to this, a two-ply cashmere comforter knitted by Sylvie and baptized with her favourite perfume, La Rose Jacqueminot, to remind him of home. She imagined Hugh on the battlefield wearing the comforter next to his skin, a gallant jousting knight sporting a lady’s favour. This daydream of chivalry was a comfort in itself, preferable to the glimpses of something darker. They had spent a wintry weekend in Broadstairs, bundled in gaiters, bodices and balaclavas, and heard the booming of the great guns across the water.

  The Christmas box also contained a plum cake baked by Mrs Glover, a tin of somewhat misshapen peppermint creams made by Pamela, cigarettes, a bottle of good malt whisky and a book of poetry – an anthology of English verse, mostly pastoral and not too taxing – as well as little hand-made gifts from Maurice (a balsa-wood plane) and a drawing from Ursula of blue sky and green grass and the tiny distorted figure of a dog. ‘Bosun,’ Sylvie wrote helpfully across the top. She had no idea whether or not Hugh had received the box.

  Christmas was a dull affair. Izzie came and talked a great deal about nothing (or rather herself) before announcing that she had joined the Voluntary Aid Detachment and was leaving for France as soon as the festivities were over.

  ‘But, Izzie,’ Sylvie said, ‘you can’t nurse or cook or type or do anything useful.’ The words came out harsher than she intended, but really Izzie was such a cuckoo. (‘Flibbertigibbet’ was Mrs Glover’s verdict.)

  ‘That’s it then,’ Bridget said when she heard of Izzie’s call to alms, ‘we’ll have lost the war by Lent.’ Izzie never mentioned her baby. He had been adopted in Germany and Sylvie supposed he was a German citizen. How strange that he was only a little younger than Ursula but, officially, he was the enemy.

  Then at New Year, one by one, all the children came down with chickenpox. Izzie was on the next train to London as soon as the first spot erupted on Pamela’s face. So much for Florence Nightingale, Sylvie said irritably to Bridget.

  Ursula, despite her clumsy, stubby fingers, had now joined in the household’s knitting frenzy. For Christmas she received a wooden French knitting doll called La Reine Solange which Sylvie said meant ‘Queen Solange’ although she was ‘doubtful’ that there ever was a Queen Solange in history. Queen Solange was painted in regal colours and wore an elaborate yellow crown, the points of which held her wool. Ursula was a devoted subject and spent all of her spare time, of which she had oceans at her disposal, creating long serpentine lengths of wool that had no purpose except to be coiled into mats and lopsided tea-cosies. (‘Where are the holes for the spout and the handle?’ Bridget puzzled.)

  ‘Lovely, dear,’ Sylvie said, examining one of the little mats that was slowly uncurling in her hands, like something waking from a long sleep. ‘Practice makes perfect, remember.’

  ‘Yer tea is on the table!’

  Ursula ignored the call. She was in thrall to majesty, sitting on her bed, features scrunched up in concentration as she hooked wool around Queen Solange’s crown. It was an old bit of fawn worsted but ‘needs must’, Sylvie said.

  Maurice should have been back at school but his chickenpox had been the worst of all of them and his face was still covered in little scars as if a bird had pecked at him. ‘Another few days at home, young man,’ Dr Fellowes said, but, in Ursula’s eyes, Maurice seemed bursting with rude health.

  He paced restlessly round the room, bored as a caged lion. He found one of Pamela’s slippers beneath the bed and kicked it around like a football. Then he picked up a china ornament, the figure of a crinolined lady that was precious to Pamela, and tossed it so high in the air that it glanced off the vaseline glass shade of the light with an alarming ting. Ursula dropped her knitting, her hands flying to her mouth in horror. The crinolined lady found a soft landing on the pouchy quilt of Pamela’s satin eiderdown but not before Maurice had snatched up the discarded knitting doll instead and started running around with it, pretending it was an aeroplane. Ursula watched as poor Queen Solange flew round the room, the tail of wool that protruded from her innards streaming out behind her like a thin banner.

  And then Maurice did something truly wicked. He opened the attic window, letting in a blast of unwelcome cold air, and sent the little wooden doll soaring out into the hostile night.

  Ursula immediately hauled a chair over to the window, climbed aboard and peered out. Illuminated in the pool of light that flooded from the window, she spotted Queen Solange, stranded on the slates in the valley between the two attic roofs.

  Maurice, a Red Indian now, was jumping from one bed to the other, emitting war whoops. ‘Yer tea is on the table!’ Bridget bellowed more urgently from the foot of the stairs. Ursula ignored both of them, her heroine heart beating loudly as she clambered out of the window – no easy task – determined to rescue her sovereign. The slates were slick with ice and Ursula had barely placed her small, slippered foot on the slope beneath the window before it slid out from under her. She let out a little cry, held out a hand towards the knitting queen as she raced past her, feet first, a tobogganer without a toboggan. There was no parapet to buffer her descent, nothing at all to stop her being propelled into the black wings of night. A kind of rush, a thrill almost, as she was launched into the bottomless air and then nothing.

  Darkness fell.

  Snow

  11 February 1910

  THE PICCALILLI WAS the lurid colour of jaundice. Dr Fellowes ate at the kitchen table by the light of an annoyingly smoky oil lamp. He smeared the piccalilli on to buttered bread and topped it with a thick slice of fatty ham. He thought of the flitch of bacon resting coolly in his own pantry. He had chosen the pig himself, pointing it out to the farmer, seeing not a living creature but an anatomy lesson – an assembly of loin chops and hock, cheek and belly and huge joints of gammon for boiling. Flesh. He thought of the baby he had rescued from the jaws of death with a snip of his surgical scissors. ‘The miracle of life,’ he said dispassionately to the rough little Irish maid. (‘Bridget, sir.’) ‘I am to stay the rest of the night,’ he added. ‘On account of the snow.’

  He could think of many plac
es he would rather be than Fox Corner. Why was it called that? Why would you celebrate the habitation of such a wily beast? Dr Fellowes had ridden with the hunt, dashing in scarlet, when a young man. He wondered if the girl would skip into his room in the morning with a tray of tea and toast. Imagined her pouring hot water from the jug into the washbasin and soaping him down in front of the bedroom fire the way his mother had done, decades ago. Dr Fellowes was obstinately faithful to his wife but his thoughts roamed far and wide.

  Bridget led him upstairs with a candle. The candle flared and flickered wildly as he followed the maid’s scrawny backside up to a chilly guest room. She lit him his own candle on top of the pot cupboard and then disappeared into the dark maw of the hall with a hasty ‘Good night, sir.’

  He lay in the cold bed, the piccalilli repeating unpleasantly. He wished he was at home, next to the slack, warm body of Mrs Fellowes, a woman to whom nature had denied elegance and who always smelled vaguely of fried onions. Not necessarily a disagreeable thing.

  War

  20 January 1915

  ‘WILL YER GET a move on?’ Bridget said crossly. She was standing impatiently in the doorway, holding Teddy. ‘How many times do I have to tell you, yer tea is on the table.’ Teddy squirmed in the tight brace of her arms. Maurice paid no heed, deeply involved as he was in the intricacies of a Red Indian war dance. ‘Get down from that window, Ursula, for the love of God. And why is it open? It’s freezing, you’ll catch yer death.’

  Ursula had been about to plunge out of the window in Queen Solange’s wake, intent on delivering her from the no man’s land of the roof, when something made her hesitate. A little doubt, a faltering foot and the thought that the roof was very high and the night very wide. And then Pamela had appeared and said, ‘Mummy says you’re to wash your hands for tea,’ closely followed by Bridget stomping up the stairs with her unyielding refrain, Yer tea’s on the table! and all hope of royal rescue was lost. ‘And as for you, Maurice,’ Bridget continued, ‘you’re little more than a savage.’

  ‘I am a savage,’ he said. ‘I’m an Apache.’

  ‘You could be the King of the Hottentots as far as I’m concerned but YER TEA IS STILL ON THE TABLE.’

  Maurice gave a last defiant battle cry before clattering noisily down the stairs and Pamela used an old lacrosse-net tied on to a walking cane to trawl Queen Solange back from the icy depths of the roof.

  Tea was a boiled chicken. Teddy had a coddled egg. Sylvie sighed. Many meals involved chickens in one way or another now that they kept their own. They had a henhouse and a wired run on what was to have been an asparagus bed before the war. Old Tom had left them now, although Sylvie heard that ‘Mr Ridgely’ still worked for their neighbours, the Coles. Perhaps, after all, he did not like being called ‘Old Tom’.

  ‘This isn’t one of our chickens, is it?’ Ursula asked.

  ‘No, darling,’ Sylvie said. ‘It isn’t.’

  The chicken was tough and stringy. Mrs Glover’s cooking hadn’t been the same since George was injured in a gas attack. He was still in a field hospital in France and when Sylvie enquired how badly he was injured she said she didn’t know. ‘How awful,’ Sylvie said. Sylvie thought that if she had a wounded son, far from home, she would have to go on a quest to find him. Nurse and heal her poor boy. Perhaps not Maurice, but Teddy, certainly. The thought of Teddy lying wounded and helpless made her eyes prick with tears.

  ‘Are you all right, Mummy?’ Pamela asked.

  ‘Absolutely,’ Sylvie said, fishing the wishbone out of the chicken carcass and offering it to Ursula, who said she didn’t know how to wish. ‘Well, generally speaking, we wish for our dreams to come true,’ Sylvie said.

  ‘But not my dreams?’ Ursula said, a look of alarm on her face.

  ‘But not my dreams?’ Ursula said, thinking of the giant lawn-mower that chased her through the night and the Red Indian tribe that tied her to stakes and surrounded her with bows and arrows.

  ‘This is one of our chickens, isn’t it?’ Maurice said.

  Ursula liked the chickens, liked the warm straw and featheriness of the henhouse, liked reaching under the solid warm bodies to find an even warmer egg.

  ‘It’s Henrietta, isn’t it?’ Maurice persisted. ‘She was old. Ready for the pot, Mrs Glover said.’

  Ursula inspected her plate. She was particularly fond of Henrietta. The tough white slice of meat gave no clues.

  ‘Henrietta?’ Pamela squeaked in alarm.

  ‘Did you kill her?’ Maurice asked Sylvie eagerly. ‘Was it very bloody?’

  They had already lost several chickens to the foxes. Sylvie said she was surprised at how stupid chickens were. No more stupid than people, Mrs Glover said. The foxes had taken Pamela’s baby rabbit too, last summer. George Glover had rescued two and Pamela had insisted on making a nest for hers out in the garden but Ursula had rebelled and brought her little rabbit inside and placed it in the dolls’ house where it knocked everything over and left droppings like tiny liquorice balls. When Bridget discovered it she removed it to an outhouse and it was never seen again.

  For pudding they had jam roly-poly and custard, the jam from the summer’s raspberries. The summer was a dream now, Sylvie said.

  ‘Dead baby,’ Maurice said, in that horribly off-hand manner that boarding school had only served to foster. He shovelled pudding into his mouth and said, ‘That’s what we call jam roly-poly at school.’

  ‘Manners, Maurice,’ Sylvie warned. ‘And please, don’t be so vile.’

  ‘Dead baby?’ Ursula said, putting her spoon down and gazing in horror at the dish in front of her.

  ‘The Germans eat them,’ Pamela said gloomily.

  ‘Puddings?’ Ursula puzzled. Didn’t everyone eat puddings, even the enemy?

  ‘No, babies,’ Pamela said. ‘But only Belgian ones.’

  Sylvie looked at the roly-poly, the round, red seam of jam like blood, and shivered. This morning she had watched Mrs Glover snapping poor old Henrietta’s neck backwards over a broom handle, the bird dispatched with the indifference of a state executioner. Needs must, I suppose, Sylvie thought. ‘We’re at war,’ Mrs Glover said, ‘it’s not the time to be squeamish.’

  Pamela would not let the subject rest. ‘Was it, Mummy?’ she insisted quietly. ‘Was it Henrietta?’

  ‘No, darling,’ Sylvie said. ‘On my word of honour, that was not Henrietta.’

  An urgent rapping at the back door prevented further discussion. They all sat still, staring at each other, as if they had been caught in the middle of a crime. Ursula didn’t really know why. ‘Don’t let it be bad news,’ Sylvie said. It was. Seconds later there was a terrible scream from the kitchen. Sam Wellington, the old boot, was dead.

  ‘This terrible war,’ Sylvie murmured.

  Pamela gave Ursula the remains of one of her dun-coloured balls of four-ply lambswool and Ursula promised that Queen Solange would be delivered of a little mat for Pamela’s water glass in gratitude for her rescue.

  When they went to bed that night they placed the crinoline lady and Queen Solange side by side on the bedside cabinet, valiant survivors of an encounter with the enemy.

  Armistice

  June 1918

  TEDDY’S BIRTHDAY. BORN beneath the sign of the crab. An enigmatic sign, Sylvie said, even though she thought such things were ‘bunkum’. ‘For you are four,’ Bridget said, which was perhaps a kind of joke.

  Sylvie and Mrs Glover were preparing a little tea-party, ‘a surprise’. Sylvie liked all her children, Maurice not so much perhaps, but she doted entirely on Teddy.

  Teddy didn’t even know it was his birthday as for days now they had been under strict instructions not to mention it. Ursula couldn’t believe how difficult it was to keep a secret. Sylvie was an adept. She told them to take ‘the birthday boy’ out while she got things ready. Pamela complained that she had never had a surprise party and Sylvie said, ‘Of course you have, you just don’t remember.’ Was this true? Pamela frowned at the impossib
ility of knowing. Ursula had no idea whether or not she had ever had a surprise party or even a party that wasn’t a surprise. The past was a jumble in her mind, not the straight line that it was for Pamela.

  Bridget said, ‘Come on, we’ll all go for a walk,’ and Sylvie said, ‘Yes, take some jam to Mrs Dodds, why don’t you?’ Sylvie, sleeves rolled up, hair scarved, had spent all day yesterday helping Mrs Glover make jam, boiling up copper pans of raspberries from the garden with the sugar that they had been hoarding from their ration. ‘Like working in a munitions factory,’ Sylvie said, as she funnelled the boiling jam into one glass jar after another. ‘Hardly,’ Mrs Glover muttered to herself.

  The garden had produced a bumper crop, Sylvie had read books on how to cultivate fruit and declared that she was quite the gardener now. Mrs Glover said darkly that berries were easy, wait until she tried her hand at cauliflowers. For the heavy work in the garden Sylvie employed Clarence Dodds, once a pal of Sam Wellington’s, the old boot. Before the war Clarence had been an under-gardener at the Hall. He had been invalided out of the army and now wore a tin mask on half of his face and said he wanted to work in a grocer’s shop. Ursula first came across him when he was preparing a bed for carrots and she gave an impolite little scream when he turned round and she saw his face for the first time. The mask had one wide-open eye painted blue to match the real one. ‘Enough to frighten the horses, isn’t it?’ he said and smiled. She wished he hadn’t because his mouth wasn’t covered by the mask. His lips were puckered and strange as if they were an afterthought, stitched on after he was born.

  ‘One of the lucky ones,’ he said to her. ‘Artillery fire, it’s the devil.’ It didn’t look very lucky to Ursula.

  The carrots had barely sprigged their feathery tops above ground when Bridget started walking out with Clarence. By the time Sylvie was grubbing up the first of the King Edwards, Bridget and Clarence were engaged and, as Clarence couldn’t afford a ring, Sylvie gave Bridget a gypsy ring that she said she’d ‘had for ever’ and never wore. ‘It’s just a trinket really,’ she said, ‘it’s not worth much,’ although Hugh had bought it for her in New Bond Street after Pamela was born and had not stinted on the cost.