Life After Life (20 page)

She watched Fred climb back into the cab of his locomotive. The stationmaster stalked along the platform, slamming the carriage doors with a finality that suggested they would never be opened again. Steam flared from the funnel and Fred Smith stuck his head out of the cab and shouted, ‘Look smart there, Miss Todd, or you’ll be left behind,’ and she stepped obediently on board.

The stationmaster’s whistle chirped, short at first and then a longer call, and the train shuffled out of the station. Ursula sat on the warm plush of the seats and contemplated the future. She supposed she could get lost among the other fallen women crying woe on the streets of London. Curl up on a park bench and freeze to death overnight, except that it was the height of summer and she was unlikely to freeze. Or wade into the Thames and drift gently on the tide, past Wapping and Rotherhithe and Greenwich and on to Tilbury and out to sea. How puzzled her family would be if her drowned body was hooked from the deep. She imagined Sylvie, frowning over her darning,
But she only went for a walk, she said she was going to pick the wild raspberries in the lane
. Ursula thought guiltily of the white china pudding basin she had abandoned in the hedgerow, intending to collect it on her return. It was half full of the sour little berries and her fingers were still stained red.

She spent the afternoon walking through the great parks of London, through St James’s and Green Park, past the Palace and into Hyde Park and on to Kensington Gardens. It was extraordinary how far you could go in London and barely touch a pavement or cross a road. She had no money on her, of course – a ridiculous mistake, she realized now – and couldn’t even buy a cup of tea in Kensington. There was no Fred Smith here to ‘see her all right’. She was hot and tired and dusty and felt as parched as the grass in Hyde Park.

Could you drink the water in the Serpentine? Shelley’s first wife had drowned herself here but Ursula supposed that on a day like this – crowds of people enjoying the sunshine – it would be almost impossible to avoid another Mr Winton jumping in and rescuing her.

She knew where she was going, of course. It was inevitable somehow.

‘Good God, what happened to you?’ Izzie said, throwing her front door wide dramatically as if she had been expecting someone more interesting. ‘You look a fright.’

‘I’ve been walking all afternoon,’ Ursula said. ‘I have no money,’ she added. ‘And I think I’m going to have a baby.’

‘You’d better come in then,’ Izzie said.

And now here she was, sitting on an uncomfortable chair in a large house in Belgravia in what must have once been the dining room. Now, devoid of any purpose except waiting, it was nondescript. The Dutch still life above the fireplace and the bowl of dusty-looking chrysanthemums on a Pembroke table provided no clue as to what might happen elsewhere in the house. It was hard to connect any of this to the odious rendezvous with Howie on the back stairs. Who would have thought it could be so easy to slip from one life to another. Ursula wondered what Dr Kellet would have made of her predicament.

After her unexpected arrival in Melbury Road, Izzie had put her to bed in her spare bedroom and Ursula had lain sobbing beneath the shiny satin cover, trying not to listen to Izzie’s unlikely lies on the phone in the hallway –
I know! She just turned up on the doorstep, the lamb … wanted to see me … pay a visit, museums and so on, the theatre, nothing risqué … now don’t be a termagant, Hugh
… It was just as well that Izzie hadn’t spoken to Sylvie, she would have been given short shrift there. The upshot was that she was to be allowed to stay for a few days for
museums and so on
.

Phone call finished, Izzie came into the bedroom carrying a tray.

‘Brandy,’ she said. ‘And buttered toast. All I could rustle up at short notice, I’m afraid. You are such a fool,’ she sighed. ‘There are ways, you know, things that one can do, prevention better than cure and so on.’ Ursula had no idea what Izzie was talking about.

‘And you must get rid of it,’ Izzie continued. ‘We are agreed on that, aren’t we?’ A question which produced a heartfelt ‘yes’ from Ursula.

A woman in a nurse’s uniform opened the door of the Belgravia waiting room and looked in. Her uniform was so starched it would have stood up quite well without her inside it.

‘This way,’ she said stiffly, without addressing Ursula by name. Ursula followed as meek as a lamb to the slaughter.

Izzie, efficient rather than sympathetic, had dropped her off in the car (‘Good luck’) with a promise that she would return ‘later’. Ursula had no idea what was to happen in the interim between Izzie’s ‘Good luck’ and her ‘later’ but she presumed it would be unpleasant. A foul-tasting syrup or a kidney dish full of large pills perhaps. And undoubtedly a good talking-to about her morals and her character. She hardly cared, as long as in the end the clock could be put back. How big was the baby, she wondered? Her brief research in the Shawcrosses’ encyclopaedia had given few clues. She supposed it would come out with a certain amount of difficulty and be wrapped in a shawl before being placed in a cradle and tended carefully until it was ready to be given to a nice couple who longed to have a baby as much as Ursula longed not to have one. And then she would be able to catch the train home, walk along Church Lane and retrieve the white china bowl with its harvest of raspberries, before entering Fox Corner as if nothing had happened beyond
museums and so on
.

It was a room like any other really. There were curtains, swagged and tasselled, at the tall windows. The curtains looked as though they were left over from the previous life of the house, as did the marble fireplace that now held a gas fire and, on the mantelpiece, a plain-faced clock with large numbers. The green linoleum underfoot and the operating table in the middle of the room were equally incongruous. The room smelt like the science laboratory at school. Ursula wondered about the brutish array of shining metal instruments that were laid out on a linen cloth on a trolley. They seemed to have more to do with butchery than babies. There was no sign of a cradle waiting anywhere. Her heart began to flutter.

A man, older than Hugh, in a long white doctor’s smock hurried into the room as if he were on his way somewhere else and ordered Ursula up on to the operating table with her feet ‘in the stirrups’.

‘Stirrups?’ Ursula repeated. Surely horses were not involved. The request was baffling until the starched nurse pushed her down and hooked her feet up. ‘I’m having an operation?’ Ursula protested. ‘But I’m not ill.’ The nurse placed a mask over her face. ‘Count from ten down to one,’ she said. ‘Why?’ Ursula tried to ask, but the word had barely formed in her brain before the room and everything in it disappeared.

The next thing she knew she was in the passenger seat of Izzie’s Austin, gazing woozily through the windscreen.

‘You’ll be right as rain in no time,’ Izzie said. ‘Don’t worry, they’ve doped you up. You’ll feel queer for a bit.’ How did Izzie know so much about this appalling process?

Back in Melbury Road, Izzie helped her into bed and she slept deeply beneath the shiny satin cover in the spare bedroom. It was dark outside when Izzie came in with a tray. ‘Oxtail soup,’ she said cheerfully. ‘I got it from a tin.’ Izzie smelt of alcohol, something sweet and cloying, and underneath her make-up and her bright demeanour she looked exhausted. Ursula supposed she must be a terrible burden to her. She struggled to sit up. The smell of the alcohol and the oxtail was too much and she vomited all over the shiny satin.

‘Oh, God,’ Izzie said, holding her hand over her mouth. ‘I’m really not cut out for this kind of thing.’

‘What happened to the baby?’ Ursula asked.

‘What?’

‘What happened to the baby?’ Ursula repeated. ‘Did they give it to someone nice?’

She woke in the night and vomited again and fell back to sleep without either cleaning it up or calling out to Izzie. When she woke in the morning she was too hot. Far too hot. Her heart was knocking in her chest and each breath was hard to come by. She tried to get out of bed but her head was swimming and her legs wouldn’t hold her. After that everything was a blur. Izzie must have called Hugh because she felt a cool hand on her clammy forehead and when she opened her eyes he was smiling reassuringly at her. He was sitting on the bed, still in his overcoat. She was sick all over it.

‘We’ll get you to a hospital,’ he said, unperturbed by the mess. ‘You’ve got a bit of an infection.’ Somewhere in the background Izzie was putting up a fierce protest. ‘I’ll be prosecuted,’ she hissed at Hugh and Hugh said, ‘Good, I hope they put you in jail and throw away the key.’ He lifted Ursula up in his arms and said, ‘Quicker to take the Bentley, I think.’ Ursula felt weightless, as if she was going to float away. The next thing she knew she was on a cavernous hospital ward and Sylvie was there, her face tight and awful. ‘How could you?’ she said. She was glad when evening came and Sylvie changed places with Hugh.

It was Hugh who was with her when the black bat came. The hand of night was held out to her and Ursula rose to meet it. She was relieved, almost glad, she could feel the shining, luminous world beyond calling, the place where all the mysteries would be revealed. The darkness enveloped her, a velvet friend. Snow was in the air, as fine as talcum, as icy as the east wind on a baby’s skin – but then Ursula fell back into the hospital bed, her hand rejected.

There was a brilliant slant of light across the pale green of the hospital counterpane. Hugh was asleep, his face slack and tired. He was sitting in an awkward position in a chair next to the bed. One trouser leg had ridden up slightly and Ursula could see a wrinkled grey lisle sock and the smooth skin of her father’s shin. He had once been like Teddy, she thought, and one day Teddy would be like him. The boy within the man, the man within the boy. It made her want to weep.

Hugh opened his eyes and when he saw her he smiled weakly and said, ‘Hello, little bear. Welcome back.’

August 1926

THE PEN SHOULD be held lightly, and in such a manner as to permit of the shorthand characters being easily written. The wrist must not be allowed to rest on the notebook or desk
.

The rest of the summer was wretched. She sat beneath the apple trees in the orchard and tried to read a Pitman’s shorthand instruction book. It had been decided she would do a typing and shorthand course rather than return to school. ‘I can’t go back,’ she said. ‘I just can’t.’

There was little escape from the chill that Sylvie brought with her every time she entered a room and discovered Ursula in it. Both Bridget and Mrs Glover were puzzled as to why the ‘serious illness’ that Ursula had contracted in London while staying with her aunt seemed to have made Sylvie so distant from her daughter when they might have expected the opposite. Izzie, of course, was barred for ever.
Persona non grata in perpetuam
. No one knew the truth of what had happened except for Pamela who had wormed the whole story out of Ursula, bit by bit.

‘But he
forced
himself on you,’ she fumed, ‘how can you think it was your fault?’

‘But the consequences …’ Ursula murmured.

Sylvie blamed her entirely, of course. ‘You’ve thrown away your virtue, your character, everyone’s good opinion of you.’

‘But no one knows.’

‘
I
know.’

‘You sound like someone in one of Bridget’s novels,’ Hugh said to Sylvie. Had Hugh read one of Bridget’s novels? It seemed unlikely. ‘In fact,’ Hugh said, ‘you sound rather like my own mother.’ (‘It seems dreadful now,’ Pamela said, ‘but this too will pass.’)

Even Millie was fooled by her lies. ‘Blood poisoning!’ she said. ‘How dramatic. Was hospital ghastly? Nancy said that Teddy told her that you nearly died. I’m sure nothing so exciting will ever happen to me.’

What a world of difference there was between dying and nearly dying. One’s whole life, in fact. Ursula felt she had no use for the life she had been saved for. ‘I’d like to see Dr Kellet again,’ she said to Sylvie.

‘He’s retired, I believe,’ Sylvie said indifferently.

Ursula still wore her hair long, mostly to please Hugh, but one day she went into Beaconsfield with Millie and had her hair chopped short. It was a penitent act that made her feel rather like a martyr or a nun. She supposed that was how she would live out the rest of her life, somewhere between the two.

Hugh seemed surprised rather than saddened. She supposed a haircut was a mild travesty compared to Belgravia. ‘Good gracious,’ he said, when she sat down at the dinner table to unappetizing veal cutlets
à la Russe
. (‘Looks like the dog’s dinner,’ Jimmy said, although Jimmy, a boy of magnificent appetite, would have quite happily eaten Jock’s dinner.)

‘You look like a completely different person,’ Hugh said.

‘That can only be a good thing, can’t it?’ Ursula said.

‘I liked the old Ursula,’ Teddy said.

‘Well, it seems as though you’re the only one who does,’ Ursula muttered. Sylvie made a noise that fell short of a word and Hugh said to Ursula, ‘Oh, come, I think you’re—’

But she never did find out what Hugh thought of her because the loud rapping of the front-door knocker announced a rather anxious Major Shawcross enquiring as to whether Nancy was with them. ‘Sorry to interrupt your dinner,’ he said, hovering in the doorway of the dining room.

‘She isn’t here,’ Hugh said, although Nancy’s absence was obvious.

Major Shawcross frowned at the cutlets on their plates. ‘She went to gather some leaves in the lane,’ he said. ‘For her scrapbook. You know what she’s like.’ This addressed to Teddy, Nancy’s twin soul. Nancy loved nature, forever collecting twigs and pine cones, shells and stones and bones, like the totems of an ancient religion. ‘A child of nature,’ Mrs Shawcross called her (‘As if that were a good thing,’ Sylvie said).

‘She wanted oak leaves,’ Major Shawcross said. ‘We don’t have any oaks in our garden.’

There was a short discussion about the demise of the English oak, followed by a thoughtful silence. Major Shawcross cleared his throat. ‘She’s been gone about an hour, according to Roberta. I’ve walked the length of the lane, up and back, shouting her name. I can’t think where she might be. Winnie and Millie are out searching as well.’ Major Shawcross was beginning to look rather sick. Sylvie poured a glass of water and handed it to him. ‘Sit down,’ she said. He didn’t. Of course, Ursula thought, he was thinking of Angela.