Life After Life Page 6

  Sam Wellington’s photograph was banished to an old wooden crate in the shed. ‘I can’t keep it,’ Bridget said fretfully to Mrs Glover, ‘but I can hardly throw it away, can I now?’

  ‘You could bury it,’ Mrs Glover suggested but the idea gave Bridget the shivers. ‘Like black magic.’

  They set off for Mrs Dodds’s house, laden with jam, as well as a magnificent bouquet of maroon sweet peas that Sylvie was very proud of having grown. ‘The variety is “Senator”, in case Mrs Dodds is interested,’ she told Bridget.

  ‘She won’t be,’ Bridget said.

  Maurice wasn’t with them, of course. He had set off on his bicycle after breakfast, a picnic lunch in his knapsack, and had disappeared for the day with his friends. Ursula and Pamela took very little interest in Maurice’s life and he took none whatsoever in theirs. Teddy was a quite different kind of brother, loyal and affectionate as a dog and petted accordingly.

  Clarence’s mother was still employed at the Hall in ‘a semi-feudal capacity’, according to Sylvie, and had a cottage on the estate, a cramped, ancient thing that smelt of stale water and old plaster. Distemper on the damp ceiling ballooned like loose skin. Bosun had died of distemper the previous year and was buried beneath a Bourbon rose that Sylvie had ordered especially to mark his grave. ‘It’s called “Louise Odier”,’ she said. ‘If you’re interested.’ They had another dog now, a wriggly black lurcher puppy called Trixie who might as well have been called Trouble because Sylvie was always laughing and saying, ‘Uh-oh, here comes trouble.’ Pamela had seen Mrs Glover giving Trixie a well-aimed kick with her big-booted foot and Sylvie had ‘to have a word’. Bridget wouldn’t let Trixie come to Mrs Dodds’s house, she said she would never hear the end of it. ‘She doesn’t believe in dogs,’ Bridget said.

  ‘Dogs are hardly an article of faith,’ Sylvie said.

  Clarence met them at the entrance gate to the estate. The Hall itself was miles away, at the end of a long avenue of elms. The Daunts had lived there for centuries and popped up occasionally to open fêtes and bazaars and fleetingly grace the annual Christmas party in the village hall. They had their own chapel so were never seen in church, although now they were never seen at all because they had lost three sons, one after the other, to the war and had more or less retreated from the world.

  It was impossible not to stare at Clarence’s tin face (‘galvanized copper’, he corrected them). They lived in terror that he would remove the mask. Did he take it off to go to bed at night? If Bridget married him would she see the horror beneath? ‘It’s not so much what’s there,’ they had overheard Bridget say to Mrs Glover, ‘as what’s not there.’

  Mrs Dodds (‘Old Mother Dodds’ Bridget called her, like something from a nursery rhyme) made tea for the grown-ups, tea that Bridget later reported to be ‘as weak as lamb’s water’. Bridget liked her tea ‘strong enough for the teaspoon to stand up in it’. Neither Pamela nor Ursula could decide what lamb’s water might be but it sounded nice. Mrs Dodds gave them creamy milk, ladled from a big enamel pitcher and still warm from the Hall’s dairy. It made Ursula feel sick. ‘Lady Bountiful,’ Mrs Dodds muttered to Clarence when they handed her the jam and the sweet peas and he said, ‘Mother,’ chidingly. Mrs Dodds passed the flowers over to Bridget, who remained holding the sweet peas like a bride until Mrs Dodds said to her, ‘Put them in water, you daft girl.’

  ‘Cake?’ Clarence’s mother said and doled out thin slices of gingerbread that seemed as damp as her cottage. ‘It’s nice to see children,’ Mrs Dodds said, looking at Teddy as if he were a rare animal. Teddy was a steadfast little boy and was not put off his milk and cake. He had a moustache of milk and Pamela wiped it off with her handkerchief. Ursula suspected that Mrs Dodds didn’t really think it was nice to see children, indeed she suspected that on the subject of children she was in agreement with Mrs Glover. Except for Teddy, of course. Everyone liked Teddy. Even Maurice. Occasionally.

  Mrs Dodds examined the gypsy ring newly adorning Bridget’s hand, pulling Bridget’s finger towards her as if she was pulling a wishbone. ‘Rubies and diamonds,’ she said. ‘Very fancy.’

  ‘Tiny stones,’ Bridget said defensively. ‘Just a trinket really.’

  The girls helped Bridget wash the tea things and left Teddy to fend for himself with Mrs Dodds. They washed up in a big stone sink in the scullery that had a pump instead of a tap. Bridget said that when she was a girl ‘in County Kilkenny’ they had to walk to a well to get water. She arranged the sweet peas prettily in an old Dundee marmalade jar and left it on the wooden draining board. When they had dried the crockery with one of Mrs Dodds’s thin, worn tea-towels (damp, of course), Clarence asked them if they would like to go over to the Hall to see the walled garden. ‘You should stop going back over there, son,’ Mrs Dodds said to him, ‘it only upsets you.’

  They entered via an old wooden door in a wall. The door was stiff and Bridget gave a little scream when Clarence took his shoulder to it and shoved it open. Ursula was expecting something wonderful – sparkling fountains and terraces, statues, walks and arbours and flowerbeds as far as the eye could see – but it wasn’t much more than an overgrown field, brambles and thistles rambling everywhere.

  ‘Aye, it’s a jungle,’ Clarence said. ‘This used to be the kitchen garden, twelve gardeners worked at the Hall before the war.’ Only the roses climbing on the walls were still flourishing, and the fruit trees in the orchard that were laden with fruit. Plums were rotting on the branches. Excited wasps darted everywhere. ‘They haven’t picked this year,’ Clarence said. ‘Three sons at the Hall, all dead in this bloody war. I suppose they didn’t much feel like plum pie.’

  ‘Tsk,’ Bridget said. ‘Language.’

  There was a glasshouse with hardly any glass and inside it they could see the withered peach and apricot trees. ‘Damned shame,’ Clarence said and Bridget tsked again and said, ‘Not in front of the children,’ just like Sylvie did. ‘Everything gone to seed,’ Clarence said, ignoring her. ‘I could weep.’

  ‘Well, you could get your job back here at the Hall,’ Bridget said. ‘I’m sure they’d be glad. It’s not as if you can’t work just as well with …’ She hesitated and gestured vaguely in the direction of Clarence’s face.

  ‘I don’t want my job back,’ he said gruffly. ‘My days as some rich nob’s servant are over. I miss the garden, not the life. The garden was a thing of beauty.’

  ‘We could get our own little garden,’ Bridget said. ‘Or an allotment.’ Bridget seemed to spend a lot of time trying to cheer Clarence up. Ursula supposed she was rehearsing for marriage.

  ‘Yes, why don’t we do that?’ Clarence said, sounding grim at the prospect. He picked up a small, sour apple that had fallen early and bowled it hard overarm like a cricketer. It landed on the glasshouse and shattered one of the few remaining panes. ‘Bugger,’ Clarence said and Bridget flapped her hand at him and hissed, ‘Children.’

  (‘A thing of beauty,’ Pamela said appreciatively that night, as they flannelled their faces before bed with the heavy bar of carbolic. ‘Clarence is a poet.’)

  As they trailed their way home Ursula could still smell the scent of the sweet peas they had left behind in Mrs Dodds’s kitchen. It seemed an awful waste to leave them there unappreciated. By then Ursula had forgotten all about the birthday tea and was almost as surprised as Teddy when they got back to the house and found the hallway decorated with flags and bunting and a beaming Sylvie bearing a gift-wrapped present that was unmistakably a toy aeroplane.

  ‘Surprise,’ she said.

  11 November 1918

  ‘SUCH A MELANCHOLY time of year,’ Sylvie said to no one in particular.

  The leaves still lay thick on the lawn. The summer was a dream again. Every summer, it was beginning to seem to Ursula, was a dream. The last of the leaves were falling and the big beech was almost a skeleton. The Armistice seemed to have made Sylvie even more despondent than the war. (‘All those poor boys, gone for ever. The peace won’t
bring them back.’)

  They had the day off school because of the great victory and they were turned outside into the morning drizzle to play. They had new neighbours, Major and Mrs Shawcross, and they spent a good deal of the damp morning peering through gaps in the holly hedge trying to get a glimpse of the Shawcrosses’ daughters. There were no other girls their age in the neighbourhood. The Coles only had boys. They weren’t rough like Maurice, they had nice manners and were never horrible to Ursula and Pamela.

  ‘I think they’re playing hide-and-seek,’ Pamela reported back from the Shawcross front. Ursula tried to see through the hedge and got scratched in the face by the vicious holly. ‘I think they’re the same age as us,’ Pamela said. ‘There’s even a little one for you, Teddy.’ Teddy raised his eyebrows and said, ‘Oh.’ Teddy liked girls. Girls liked Teddy. ‘Oh, wait, there’s another one,’ Pamela said. ‘They’re multiplying.’

  ‘Bigger or smaller?’ Ursula asked.

  ‘Smaller, another girl. More of a baby. Being carried by an older one.’ Ursula was growing confused by the mathematics of so many girls.

  ‘Five!’ Pamela said breathlessly, reaching a final total apparently. ‘Five girls.’

  By this time Trixie had managed to wriggle through the bottom of the hedge and they heard the excited squeals that accompanied her appearance on the other side of the holly.

  ‘I say,’ Pamela said, raising her voice, ‘can we have our dog back?’

  Lunch was boiled toad in the hole and a queen of puddings. ‘Where have you been?’ Sylvie asked. ‘Ursula, you have twigs in your hair. You look like a pagan.’

  ‘Holly,’ Pamela said. ‘We’ve been next door. We met the Shawcross girls. Five of them.’

  ‘I know.’ Sylvie counted them off on her fingers. ‘Winnie, Gertie, Millie, Nancy and …’

  ‘Beatrice,’ Pamela supplied.

  ‘Were you invited in?’ Mrs Glover, a stickler for propriety, asked.

  ‘We found a hole in the hedge,’ Pamela said.

  ‘That’s where those damn foxes are getting through,’ Mrs Glover grumbled, ‘they’re coming from the copse,’ and Sylvie frowned at Mrs Glover’s language but said nothing as, officially, they were in celebration mood. Sylvie, Bridget and Mrs Glover were ‘toasting the peace’ with glasses of sherry. Neither Sylvie nor Mrs Glover seemed to have much of a taste for jubilation. Both Hugh and Izzie were still away at the Front and Sylvie said she wouldn’t believe Hugh was safe until he walked through the door. Izzie had driven an ambulance throughout the war but none of them could imagine this. George Glover was being ‘rehabilitated’ in a home somewhere in the Cotswolds. Mrs Glover had travelled to visit him but was disinclined to talk about what she had found, other than to say that George was no longer really George. ‘I don’t think any of them are themselves any more,’ Sylvie said. Ursula tried to imagine not being Ursula but was defeated by the impossibility of the task.

  Two girls from the Women’s Land Army had taken George’s place on the farm. They were both horsey types from Northamptonshire and Sylvie said that if she’d known they were going to let women work with Samson and Nelson she would have applied for the job herself. The girls had come to tea on several occasions, sitting in the kitchen in their muddy puttees, to Mrs Glover’s disgust.

  Bridget had her hat on ready to go out when Clarence appeared shyly at the back door, mumbling a greeting to Sylvie and Mrs Glover. The ‘happy couple’, as Mrs Glover referred to them without any hint of congratulation, were catching the train up to London to take part in the victory celebrations. Bridget was giddy with excitement. ‘Sure now you don’t want to come with us, Mrs Glover? I’ll bet there’ll be some high jinks to be had.’ Mrs Glover rolled her eyes like a discontented cow. She was ‘avoiding crowds’ on account of the influenza epidemic. She had a nephew who had dropped dead in the street, perfectly healthy at breakfast and ‘dead by noon’. Sylvie said they mustn’t be scared of the influenza. ‘Life must go on,’ she said.

  After Bridget and Clarence left for the station, Mrs Glover and Sylvie sat at the kitchen table and drank another sherry. ‘High jinks, indeed,’ Mrs Glover said. By the time Teddy appeared, Trixie eager on his tail, and announced that he was starving and ‘Had they forgotten lunch?’ the meringue on top of the queen of puddings had collapsed and was all burnt. The final casualty of the war.

  They had tried, and failed, to stay awake for Bridget’s return, falling asleep over their bedtime reading. Pamela was in the spell of At the Back of the North Wind while Ursula was working her way through The Wind in the Willows. She was particularly fond of Mole. She was a mysteriously slow reader and writer (‘Practice makes perfect, dear’) and liked it best when Pamela read out loud to her. They both liked fairy stories and had all of the Andrew Lang books, all twelve colours, bought by Hugh for birthdays and Christmases. ‘Things of beauty,’ Pamela said.

  Bridget’s noisy return woke Ursula and she, in turn, roused Pamela and they both tiptoed downstairs where a merry Bridget and a more sober Clarence regaled them with tales of the festivities, of the ‘sea of people’ and of the gay crowd shouting themselves hoarse for the King (‘We want the King! We want the King!’ Bridget demonstrated enthusiastically) until he appeared on the balcony of Buckingham Palace. ‘And the bells,’ Clarence added, ‘never heard anything like it. All the bells of London ringing out the peace.’

  ‘A thing of beauty,’ Pamela said.

  Bridget had lost her hat somewhere amid the throng as well as several hairpins and the top button of her blouse. ‘Lifted off my feet in the crush,’ she said happily.

  ‘Goodness, what a racket,’ Sylvie said, appearing in the kitchen, sleepy and lovely in her lacy wrap, her hair in a great fraying rope down her back. Clarence blushed and looked at his boots. Sylvie made cocoa for them all and listened indulgently to Bridget until even the novelty of being up at midnight couldn’t keep any of them awake.

  ‘Back to normal tomorrow,’ Clarence said, giving Bridget a daring peck on the cheek before making his way back to his mother. It was, altogether, a day out of the ordinary.

  ‘Do you think Mrs Glover will be cross that we didn’t wake her?’ Sylvie whispered to Pamela on the way up the stairs.

  ‘Furious,’ Pamela said and they both laughed like conspirators, like women.

  When she fell asleep again Ursula dreamed of Clarence and Bridget. They were walking in an overgrown garden, looking for Bridget’s hat. Clarence was crying, real tears on the good side of his face while on the mask there were painted tears, like artificial raindrops on a picture of a windowpane.

  When Ursula woke up the next morning she was burning hot and aching all over and ‘Boiling, like a lobster,’ Mrs Glover said, brought in for a second opinion by Sylvie. Bridget was also laid up in bed. ‘Hardly surprising,’ Mrs Glover said, folding disapproving arms beneath her ample yet uninviting bosom. Ursula hoped she would never have to be nursed by Mrs Glover.

  Ursula’s breathing was harsh and raspy, her breath thickening in her chest. The world boomed and receded like the sea in a giant shell. Everything was rather pleasantly fuzzy. Trixie lay on the bed at her feet while Pamela read to her from The Red Fairy Book, but the words came and went meaninglessly. Pamela’s face loomed in and out of focus. Sylvie came and tried to feed her beef tea but her throat felt too small and she sputtered it out, all over the bed sheets.

  There was the sound of tyres on gravel and Sylvie said to Pamela, ‘That will be Dr Fellowes,’ and rose swiftly, adding, ‘Stay with Ursula, Pammy, but don’t let Teddy in here, will you?’

  The house was more silent than usual. When Sylvie didn’t come back, Pamela said, ‘I’ll go and look for Mummy. I won’t be long.’ Ursula heard murmurings and cries drifting from somewhere in the house but they meant nothing to her.

  She was sleeping a strange restless kind of sleep when Dr Fellowes appeared suddenly by the side of the bed. Sylvie sat on the other side of the bed and held Ursula’s hand, saying, ‘Her skin is lila
c. Like Bridget’s.’ Lilac skin sounded rather nice, like The Lilac Fairy Book. Sylvie’s voice seemed funny, choked up and panicked like the time she saw the telegram boy coming up the path but it turned out to be only a telegram from Izzie wishing Teddy a happy birthday. (‘Thoughtless,’ Sylvie said.)

  Ursula couldn’t breathe and yet she could smell her mother’s perfume and hear her voice murmuring gently in her ear like a bee-buzz on a summer’s day. She was too tired to open her eyes. She heard Sylvie’s skirts rustle as she left her bedside, followed by the sound of the window opening. ‘I’m trying to get you some air,’ Sylvie said, returning to Ursula’s side and holding her against her crisp seersucker blouse with its safe scents of laundry starch and roses. The woody fragrance of bonfire smoke drifted through the window and into the little attic room. She could hear the clopping of hooves followed by the rattle of the coal as the coalman emptied his sacks into the coal shed. Life was going on. A thing of beauty.

  One breath, that was all she needed, but it wouldn’t come.

  Darkness fell swiftly, at first an enemy, but then a friend.

  Snow

  11 February 1910

  A BIG WOMAN with the forearms of a stoker woke Dr Fellowes by clattering a cup and saucer down on the pot table next to his bed and yanking open the curtains even though it was still dark outside. It took him a moment to remember that he was in the freezing-cold guest bedroom at Fox Corner and that the rather intimidating woman bearing the cup and saucer was the Todds’ cook. Dr Fellowes searched the dusty archive of his brain for a name that he knew had come to him easily a few hours earlier.