Life After Life Page 7

‘It’s Mrs Glover,’ she said, as if reading his mind.

  ‘So it is. She of the excellent pickles.’ His head felt full of straw. He was uncomfortably aware that beneath the frugal covers he was wearing only his combinations. The bedroom grate, he noted, was cold and empty.

  ‘You’re needed,’ Mrs Glover said. ‘There’s been an accident.’

  ‘An accident?’ Dr Fellowes echoed. ‘Something has happened to the baby?’

  ‘A farmer trampled by a bull.’

  Armistice

  12 November 1918

  URSULA WOKE UP with a start. It was dark in the bedroom but she could hear noises somewhere downstairs. A door closing, giggling and shuffling. She caught the high-pitched cackle that was Bridget’s unmistakable laugh and the rumbling bass note of a man. Bridget and Clarence back from London.

  Ursula’s first instinct was to clamber out of bed and shake Pamela awake so that they could go downstairs and interrogate Bridget about the high jinks, but something stopped her. As she lay listening to the dark, a wave of something horrible washed over her, a great dread, as if something truly treacherous were about to happen. The same feeling she had had when she’d followed Pamela into the sea when they were on holiday in Cornwall, just before the war. They had been rescued by a stranger. After that Sylvie made sure they all went to the swimming baths in town and took lessons, from an ex-major in the Boer War who barked orders at them until they were too frightened to sink. Sylvie often retold the tale as if it were a hilarious escapade (‘The heroic Mr Winton!’) when in fact Ursula still clearly recalled the terror.

  Pamela mumbled something in her sleep and Ursula said, ‘Ssh.’ Pamela mustn’t wake up. They mustn’t go downstairs. They mustn’t see Bridget. Ursula didn’t know why this was so, where this awful sense of dread came from, but she pulled the blankets over her head to hide from whatever was out there. She hoped it was out there and not inside her. She thought she would feign sleep but within minutes the real thing came.

  In the morning they ate in the kitchen because Bridget was in bed, feeling ill. ‘Hardly surprising,’ Mrs Glover said unsympathetically, doling out porridge. ‘I dread to think what time she staggered in.’

  Sylvie came down from upstairs with a tray that hadn’t been touched. ‘I really don’t think Bridget is well, Mrs Glover,’ she said.

  ‘Too much drink,’ Mrs Glover scoffed, cracking eggs as if she were punishing them. Ursula coughed and Sylvie glanced sharply at her. ‘I think we should call Dr Fellowes out,’ Sylvie said to Mrs Glover.

  ‘For Bridget?’ Mrs Glover said. ‘The girl’s as healthy as a horse. Dr Fellowes will give you short shrift when he smells the alcohol on her.’

  ‘Mrs Glover,’ Sylvie said in the tone she used when she was being very serious about something and wanted to make sure people were listening (Don’t trail muddy footprints into the house, never be unkind to other children, no matter how provoking they are). ‘I really do think Bridget is ill.’ Mrs Glover seemed suddenly to understand.

  ‘Can you see to the children?’ Sylvie said. ‘I am going to telephone for Dr Fellowes and then I’ll go up and sit with Bridget.’

  ‘Aren’t the children going to school?’ Mrs Glover asked.

  ‘Yes, of course they are,’ Sylvie said. ‘Although perhaps not. No – yes – they are. Or should they?’ She hovered, fretfully indecisive, in the kitchen doorway while Mrs Glover waited with surprising patience for her to come to a conclusion.

  ‘I think keep them at home, for today,’ Sylvie said finally. ‘Crowded schoolrooms and so on.’ She took a deep breath and stared at the ceiling. ‘But keep them down here, just now.’ Pamela raised her eyebrows at Ursula. Ursula raised hers back although she wasn’t sure what they were trying to communicate to each other. Horror mainly, she supposed, at being put in Mrs Glover’s care.

  They had to sit at the kitchen table so Mrs Glover could ‘keep an eye on them’ and then, despite their violent protests, she bade them get out their schoolbooks and do work – sums for Pamela, letters for Teddy (Q is for quail, R is for rain) and Ursula was set to practise her ‘atrocious’ handwriting. Ursula thought it vastly unfair that someone who wrote nothing more than shopping lists in a blunt hand (suet, stove blacking, mutton chops and Dinneford’s magnesia) should be passing judgement on her own painful script.

  Mrs Glover meanwhile was more than fully occupied with pressing a calf’s tongue, removing the gristle and bone and rolling it up before squeezing it into the tongue press, an altogether more fascinating activity to observe than writing out Quick wafting zephyrs vex bold Jim or The five boxing wizards jumped quickly. ‘I would hate to be in any school where she was mistress,’ Pamela muttered, wrestling with equations.

  They were all distracted by the advent of the butcher’s boy, ringing his bicycle bell noisily to announce his arrival. He was a fourteen-year-old called Fred Smith whom both the girls and Maurice admired tremendously. The girls signalled their ardour by calling him ‘Freddy’ while Maurice called him ‘Smithy’ in comradely approval. Pamela had once declared that Maurice had a pash on Fred and Mrs Glover, who happened to hear, slapped Pamela in passing on the back of her legs with a balloon whisk. Pamela was very put out and had no idea what she had been punished for. Fred Smith himself addressed the girls deferentially as ‘Miss’ and Maurice as ‘Master Todd’, although he took no interest in any of them. To Mrs Glover he was ‘young Fred’ and to Sylvie he was ‘the butcher’s boy’, sometimes ‘that nice butcher’s boy’ to distinguish him from the previous butcher’s boy, Leonard Ash, ‘a sneaky rogue’ according to Mrs Glover, who had caught him stealing eggs from the henhouse. Leonard Ash died in the Battle of the Somme after lying about his age when he enlisted and Mrs Glover said he got what was coming to him, which seemed a rough kind of justice.

  Fred handed over a white-paper package to Mrs Glover and said, ‘Your tripe,’ and then deposited the long soft body of a hare on the wooden draining board. ‘Hung for five days. It’s a beauty, Mrs Glover,’ and even Mrs Glover, disinclined to praise in the best of circumstances, acknowledged the hare’s superiority by opening a cake tin and allowing Fred to choose the biggest rock bun from within its usually clam-like innards.

  Mrs Glover, her tongue now safely in the press, immediately began skinning the hare, a distressing yet hypnotic process to witness, and it was only when the poor creature was stripped of its fur and exposed, naked and shiny, that anyone noticed Teddy’s absence.

  ‘Go and fetch him,’ Mrs Glover said to Ursula. ‘And you can all have a glass of milk and a rock bun, although goodness knows you’ve done nothing to deserve it.’

  Teddy was fond of hide-and-seek and, when he didn’t respond to his name being called, Ursula looked in his secret places, behind the drawing-room curtains, beneath the dining-room table, and when she could find no sign of him she set off up the stairs to the bedrooms.

  A forceful clanging of the front-door bell echoed up the stairs in her wake. From the turn in the stairs she saw Sylvie appear in the hallway and open the door to Dr Fellowes. Ursula supposed her mother must have come down the back stairs rather than appearing by magic. Dr Fellowes and Sylvie engaged in an intense, whispered conversation, about Bridget, presumably, but Ursula couldn’t catch any of the words.

  Not in Sylvie’s room (they had long ago ceased to think of it as a room that belonged to two parents). Not in Maurice’s room, so generously sized for someone who spent more than half his life living at school. Not in the guest bedroom or the second guest bedroom nor in Teddy’s own little back bedroom that was almost entirely taken up with his train set. Not in the bathroom or the linen cupboard. Nor was there any sign of Teddy under the beds or in the wardrobes or in the many cupboards, nor – his favourite trick – as still as a corpse beneath Sylvie’s big eiderdown.

  ‘There’s cake downstairs, Teddy,’ she offered up to the empty rooms. The promise of cake, true or not, was normally enough to flush Teddy out from cover.

  Ursula trudged u
p the dark narrow wooden staircase that led to the attic bedrooms and as soon as she had placed her foot on the first tread she experienced a sudden pinch of fear in her insides. She had no idea where it came from, or why.

  ‘Teddy! Teddy, where are you?’ Ursula tried to raise her voice but the words came out in a whisper.

  Not in the bedroom she shared with Pamela, not in Mrs Glover’s old room. Not in the boxroom, once a nursery and now home to chests and trunks and packing cases of old clothes and toys. Only Bridget’s room remained unexplored.

  The door was ajar and Ursula had to force her feet to walk towards it. Something terrible was beyond that open door. She didn’t want to see it, but she knew she must.

  ‘Teddy!’ she said, overcome with relief at the sight of him. Teddy was sitting on Bridget’s bed, his birthday aeroplane on his knee. ‘I’ve been looking everywhere for you,’ Ursula said. Trixie was lying on the floor next to the bed and sprang up eagerly when she saw her.

  ‘I thought it might make Bridget feel better,’ Teddy said, stroking the plane. Teddy had great faith in the healing power of toy trains and aeroplanes. (He was, he assured them, going to be a pilot when he grew up.) ‘I think Bridget’s asleep but her eyes are open,’ he said.

  They were. Wide open, staring sightlessly at the ceiling. There was a watery blue film across those disturbing eyes and her skin had a strange lilac hue. Cobalt Violet in Ursula’s Winsor and Newton water-colour set. She could see the tip of Bridget’s tongue sticking out of her mouth and had a momentary vision of Mrs Glover pushing the calf’s tongue into the press.

  Ursula had never seen a dead body but she knew without any doubt that Bridget had now become one. ‘Get off the bed, Teddy,’ she said cautiously, as if her brother were a wild creature about to bolt. She started to tremble all over. It wasn’t just that Bridget was dead, although that was bad enough, but there was something more perilous here. The unadorned walls, the thin jacquard bedspread on the iron bedstead, the enamelled brush and comb set on the dressing table, the rag rug on the floor, all suddenly grew immensely threatening as if they were not really the objects they seemed. Ursula heard Sylvie and Dr Fellowes on the stairs. Sylvie’s tones were urgent, Dr Fellowes’s less concerned.

  Sylvie came in and gasped, ‘Oh dear God,’ when she saw them in Bridget’s room. She snatched Teddy off the bed and then pulled Ursula by the arm out into the passage. Trixie, tail wagging eagerly at the excitement, bounded after them. ‘Go to your room,’ Sylvie said. ‘No, go to Teddy’s room. No, go to my room. Go now,’ she said, sounding frantic, not at all the Sylvie they were used to. Sylvie went back into Bridget’s room and closed the door decisively. They could hear only murmured exchanges between Sylvie and Dr Fellowes and eventually Ursula said, ‘Come on,’ to Teddy and took his hand. He allowed her to lead him docilely back down the stairs to Sylvie’s bedroom. ‘Did you say cake?’ he asked.

  ‘Teddy’s skin is the same colour as Bridget’s,’ Sylvie said. Her stomach hollowed out with terror. She knew what she was looking at. Ursula was merely pale, although her closed eyelids were dark and her skin glistened with a strange, sickly sheen.

  ‘Heliotrope cyanosis,’ Dr Fellowes said, taking Teddy’s pulse. ‘And see those mahogany spots on his cheeks? This is the more virulent strain, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Stop, please stop,’ Sylvie hissed. ‘Do not lecture me like a medical student. I am their mother.’ How she hated Dr Fellowes at that moment. Bridget was lying in her bed upstairs, still warm but as dead as the marble on a tomb. ‘The influenza,’ Dr Fellowes continued relentlessly. ‘Your maid was mixing with crowds of people yesterday in London – perfect conditions for the infection to spread. It can take them in the blink of an eye.’

  ‘But not this one,’ Sylvie said fiercely, clutching Teddy’s hand. ‘Not my child. Not my children,’ she amended, reaching across to stroke Ursula’s burning forehead.

  Pamela hovered in the doorway and Sylvie shooed her away. Pamela started to cry but Sylvie had no time for tears. Not now, not in the face of death.

  ‘There must be something I can do,’ she said to Dr Fellowes.

  ‘You can pray.’

  ‘Pray?’

  Sylvie did not believe in God. She considered the biblical deity to be an absurd, vengeful figure (Tiffin and so on), no more real than Zeus or the great god Pan. She went to church dutifully every Sunday, however, and avoided alarming Hugh with her heretical thoughts. Needs must, and so on. She prayed now, with desperate conviction but no faith, and she suspected it made no difference either way.

  When a pale bloody kind of froth, like cuckoo-spit, bubbled from Teddy’s nostrils Sylvie made a noise like a wounded animal. Mrs Glover and Pamela were listening at the other side of the door and in a rare moment of unity they clutched each other’s hands. Sylvie snatched Teddy from the bed and held him tightly to her breast and howled with pain.

  Dear God, Dr Fellowes thought, the woman grieved like a savage.

  They sweated together in a tangle of Sylvie’s linen bed sheets. Teddy was spreadeagled across the pillows. Ursula wanted to hold him close but he was too hot so she held one of his ankles instead, as if she was trying to stop him running away. Ursula’s lungs felt as if they were full of custard, she imagined it thick and yellow and sweet.

  Teddy was gone by nightfall. Ursula knew the moment he died, she felt it inside her. She heard just one wretched moan from Sylvie and then someone lifted Teddy out of the bed and even though he was just a little boy it was as if something weighty had gone from her side and Ursula was alone in the bed. She could hear Sylvie’s choking sobs, an awful noise, as if someone had hacked off one of her limbs.

  Every breath squeezed the custard stuff in her lungs. The world was fading and she began to have a stirring sense of anticipation, as if it were Christmas or her birthday, and then the black bat night approached and enfolded her in his wings. One last breath and then no more. She held out a hand to Teddy, forgetting that he wasn’t there any more.

  Darkness fell.

  Snow

  11 February 1910

  SYLVIE LIT A candle. Winter dark, five o’clock in the morning by the little gold carriage clock on the bedroom mantelpiece. The clock, an English one (‘Better than a French one,’ her mother had instructed), had been one of her parents’ wedding presents. When the creditors came to call after the society portraitist’s death his widow hid the clock beneath her skirts, bemoaning the passing of the crinoline. Lottie appeared to chime on the quarter, disconcerting the creditors. Luckily they were not in the room when she struck the hour.

  The new baby was asleep in her cradle. Words from Coleridge suddenly came into Sylvie’s mind: Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side. Which poem was that?

  The fire in the grate had died down, leaving only the smallest flame still dancing on the coals. The baby began to make mewling sounds and Sylvie climbed gingerly out of bed. Childbirth was a brutal affair. If she had been in charge of designing the human race she would have gone about things quite differently. (A golden shaft of light through the ear for conception perhaps and a well-fitting hatch somewhere modest for escape nine months later.) She left the warmth of her bed and retrieved Ursula from the cradle. And then, suddenly, breaking the snow-muffled silence, she thought she heard the soft nicker of a horse and felt a little buzz of electric pleasure in her soul at this unlikely sound. She carried Ursula over to the window and drew one of the heavy curtains back far enough to see out. The snow had obliterated everything familiar, the world outside was shawled in white. And there below was the fantastic sight of George Glover riding bareback on one of his great Shires (Nelson, if she wasn’t mistaken) up the wintry drive. He looked magnificent, like a hero of old. Sylvie closed the curtains and decided that the tribulations of the night had probably affected her brain and were making her hallucinate.

  She took Ursula back into bed with her and the baby rooted around for her nipple. Sylvie believed in wet-nursing her own children. The idea of glas
s bottles and rubber teats seemed unnatural somehow but that didn’t mean that she didn’t feel like a cow being milked. The baby was slow and floundering, confounded by the new. How long before breakfast, Sylvie wondered?

  Armistice

  11 November 1918

  DEAR BRIDGET, I have locked and bolted the doors. There is a gang of thieves – should the ‘i’ come before the ‘e’? Ursula chewed the end of her pencil until it splintered. Undecided, she crossed out ‘thieves’ and wrote ‘robbers’ instead. There is a gang of robbers in the village. Please can you stay with Clarence’s mother? For good measure she added and also I have a headache so don’t knock. She signed it Mrs Todd. Ursula waited until there was no one in the kitchen and then went outside and pinned the note to the back door.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Mrs Glover asked as she came back inside. Ursula jumped, Mrs Glover could move as quietly as a cat.

  ‘Nothing,’ Ursula said. ‘Looking to see if Bridget was coming yet.’

  ‘Heavens,’ Mrs Glover said, ‘she’ll be back on the last train, not for hours yet. Now shift yourself, it’s long past your bedtime. It’s Liberty Hall here.’

  Ursula didn’t know what Liberty Hall meant but it sounded like rather a good place to live.

  Next morning there was no Bridget in the house. Nor, more puzzlingly, was there any sign of Pamela. Ursula felt overwhelmed by a relief as inexplicable as the panic that had led her to write the note the previous night.

  ‘There was a silly note on the door last night, a prank,’ Sylvie said. ‘Bridget was locked out. You know, it looks just like your handwriting, Ursula, I don’t suppose you can explain that?’

  ‘No, I can’t,’ Ursula said stoutly.

  ‘I sent Pamela to Mrs Dodds to fetch Bridget home,’ Sylvie said.

  ‘You sent Pamela?’ Ursula echoed in horror.