Life After Life (52 page)

Benjamin Cole was a member of the Israeli parliament now. He had fought in the Jewish Brigade at the end of the war and then joined the Stern Gang, in Palestine, to fight for a homeland. He had been such an upstanding kind of boy that it had been odd to think of him becoming a terrorist.

They had met up for a drink during the war but it was an awkward encounter. The romantic impulses of her girlhood had long since faded whereas his relative indifference to her as a member of the female sex had turned on its head. She had barely finished her (weak) gin and lemon when he suggested they ‘go somewhere’.

She was indignant. ‘Do I look like a woman of such easy virtue?’ she asked Millie afterwards.

‘Well, why not?’ Millie shrugged. ‘We could be killed by a bomb tomorrow.
Carpe diem
and all that.’

‘That seems to be everyone’s excuse for bad behaviour,’ Ursula grumbled. ‘If people believed in eternal damnation they might not be seizing the day quite so much.’ She had had a bad day at the office. One of the filing clerks had received the news that her boyfriend’s ship had gone down and she had had hysterics and an important piece of paper had been lost in the sea of buff which caused more anguish, if of a different order, so she had not seized the day with Benjamin Cole, despite him pressing his suit urgently on her. ‘I’ve always sensed something between us, haven’t you?’ he said.

‘Too late, I’m afraid,’ she said, gathering up her bag and coat. ‘Catch me next time round.’ She thought about Dr Kellet and his theories of reincarnation and wondered what she would like to come back as. A tree, she thought. A fine big tree, dancing in the breeze.

The BBC turned its attention to Downing Street. Someone or other had resigned. She had heard tittle-tattle in the office but couldn’t be bothered to listen.

She was eating her supper – a Welsh rarebit – off a tray on her knee. She usually ate like this in the evening. It seemed ridiculous to lay the table and put out vegetable dishes and table mats and all the other paraphernalia of dining for just one person. And then what? Eat in silence, or hunched over a book? There were people who saw TV dinners as the beginning of the end of civilization. (Did her robust defence of them indicate that perhaps she was of the same mind?) They obviously didn’t live on their own. And really the beginning of the end of civilization had happened a long time ago. Sarajevo perhaps, Stalingrad at the latest. There were some who would say the end started at the beginning, in the Garden.

And what was so wrong with watching television anyway? One couldn’t go out to the theatre or the cinema (or the pub for that matter) every night. And when one lived alone one’s only conversation inside the home was with a cat, which tended to be a one-sided affair. Dogs were different, but she hadn’t had a dog since Lucky. He had died in the summer of ’49, of old age, the vet said. Ursula had always thought of him as a young dog. They buried him at Fox Corner and Pamela bought a rose, a deep red, and planted it for his headstone. The garden at Fox Corner was a veritable graveyard for dogs. Wherever you went there would be a rose bush with a dog beneath, although only Pamela could remember who was where.

And what was the alternative to television anyway? (She wasn’t letting the argument die, even though it was with herself.) A jigsaw puzzle? Really? There was reading, of course, but one didn’t always want to come in from a trying day at work, full of messages and memos and agendas, and then tire one’s eyes out with even more words. The wireless, records, all good of course, but still
solipsistic
in some way. (Yes, she was protesting too much.) At least with television one didn’t have to
think
. Not such a bad thing.

Her supper was later than usual because she had been attending her own retirement do – not unlike attending one’s own funeral, except one could walk away afterwards. It had been a modest affair, no more than drinks at a local pub, but pleasant and she was relieved it had finished early (where others might feel badly done by). She didn’t officially retire until Friday but she thought it would be easier on the staff to get the whole thing over and done with on a weekday. They might resent giving up their Friday evening.

Beforehand, in the office, they had presented her with a carriage clock engraved
To Ursula Todd, in gratitude for her many years of loyal service
. Ye gods, she thought, what a tedious epitaph. It was a traditional kind of gift, and she didn’t have the heart to say that she already had one, and a much better one at that. But they also gave her a pair of (good) tickets for the Proms, for a performance of Beethoven’s Choral, which was thoughtful – she suspected the hand of Jacqueline Roberts, her secretary.

‘You’ve helped to pave the way for women in senior positions in the civil service,’ Jacqueline said quietly to her, handing her a Dubonnet, her preferred drink these days. Not
that
senior unfortunately, she thought. Not in
charge
. That was still for the Maurices of this world.

‘Well, cheers,’ she said, chinking her glass against Jacqueline’s port and lemon. She didn’t drink a great deal, the occasional Dubonnet, a nice bottle of burgundy at the weekend. Not like Izzie, still inhabiting the house in Melbury Road, wandering through its many rooms like a dipsomaniac Miss Havisham. Ursula visited her every Saturday morning with a bag of groceries, most of which seemed to get thrown out. No one read the
Adventures of Augustus
any more. Teddy would have been relieved and yet Ursula was sorry, as if another little part of him had been forgotten by the world.

‘You’ll probably get a gong now, you know,’ Maurice said, ‘now that you’re retired. An MBE or something.’ He had been knighted in the last round of honours. (‘God,’ Pamela said, ‘what’s the country coming to?’) He had sent each member of his family a framed photograph of himself, bowing beneath the Queen’s sword in the ballroom of the Palace. ‘Oh, the hubris of the man,’ Harold laughed.

Miss Woolf would have been the perfect companion for the Choral at the Albert Hall. The last time Ursula had seen her was there, at the Henry Wood seventy-fifth-birthday concert in ’44. She was killed a few months later in the Aldwych rocket attack. Anne, the girl from the Air Ministry, was killed in the same attack. She had been with a group of female colleagues who were sunbathing on the ministry roof, eating their packed lunches. It was a long time ago now. And it was yesterday.

Ursula was supposed to have met up with her in St James’s Park at lunchtime. The Air Ministry girl – Anne – had something to tell her, she said, and Ursula had wondered if it might be some information about Teddy. Perhaps they had found wreckage or a body. She had long since accepted that he was gone for ever, they would have heard by now if he was a POW or had managed to escape to Sweden.

At the last minute fate had intervened in the shape of Mr Bullock, who had turned up unexpectedly on her doorstep the previous evening (how did he know her address?) to ask if she would accompany him to court to vouch for his good character. He was on trial for some kind of black market fraud, which came as no surprise. She was his second choice, after Miss Woolf, but Miss Woolf had been made a District Warden and was responsible for the lives of two hundred and fifty thousand people, all of whom ranked higher in her estimation than Mr Bullock. His black market ‘escapades’ had turned her against him in the end. None of the wardens that Ursula had known from her post were still there by ’44.

She was rather alarmed to find that Mr Bullock was appearing at the Old Bailey, she had presumed it was some petty misdemeanour fit only for the magistrates’ court. She had waited, in vain, all morning to be called and just as the court got up to recess for lunch she had heard the dull thud of an explosion but hadn’t known it was the rocket wreaking carnage in the Aldwych. Mr Bullock, needless to say, was found innocent of all charges.

Crighton had gone with her to Miss Woolf’s funeral. He was a rock, but in the end he had stayed in Wargrave.

‘
Their bodies are buried in peace; but their name liveth for evermore
,’ the minister boomed as if the congregation was hard of hearing. ‘Ecclesiasticus 44: 14.’ Ursula didn’t think that was really true. Who would remember Emil or Renee? Or poor little Tony, Fred Smith. Miss Woolf herself. Ursula had forgotten the names of most of the dead already. And all those airmen, all those young lives lost. When Teddy died he was CO of his squadron and he was only twenty-nine. The youngest CO was twenty-two. Time had accelerated for those boys, as it had for Keats.

They sang ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’, Crighton had a rather fine baritone that she had never heard before. She felt sure that Miss Woolf would have preferred Beethoven to the rousing battle hymns of the church.

Miss Woolf had hoped that Beethoven might heal the post-war world but the howitzers pointed at Jerusalem seemed like the final defeat of her optimism. Ursula was now the same age as Miss Woolf had been at the outbreak of the last war. Ursula had thought of her as old. ‘And now
we’re
old,’ she said to Pamela.

‘Speak for yourself. And you’re not even sixty yet. That’s not old.’

‘Feels like it.’

Once her children were grown enough and no longer needed her constant oversight, Pamela had become one of those women who did good works. (Ursula was not critical, quite the opposite.) She became a JP and eventually a chief magistrate, was active on charity boards and last year had won a place on the local council as an independent. And there was the house to keep up (although she had ‘a woman who does’) and the enormous garden. In 1948, when the NHS was born, Harold had taken over Dr Fellowes’s old practice. The village had grown around them, more and more houses. The meadow gone, the copse too, many of the fields from Ettringham Hall’s home farm had been sold off to a developer. The Hall itself was empty and rather neglected. (There was talk of a hotel.) The little railway station had been given the death sentence by Beeching and had closed two months ago, despite an heroic campaign to keep it going, spearheaded by Pamela.

‘But it is still lovely around here,’ she said. ‘A five-minute walk and you’re in open countryside. And the wood hasn’t been touched. Yet.’

Sarah. She would take Sarah to the Proms with her. Pamela’s reward for patience – a daughter born in 1949. She was to take up a place at Cambridge after the summer – science, she was clever, an all-rounder like her mother. Ursula was enormously fond of Sarah. Being an aunt had helped to seal over the empty cavern in her heart from Teddy’s loss. She thought often these days – if only she had had a child of her own … She had had affairs over the years, albeit nothing too thrilling (the fault, the lack of ‘commitment’, mainly on her own side, of course) but she had never been pregnant, never been a mother or a wife and it was only when she realized that it was too late, that it could never be, that she understood what it was that she had lost. Pamela’s life would go on after she was dead, her descendants spreading through the world like the waters of a delta, but when Ursula died she would simply end. A stream that ran dry.

There had been flowers too, also Jacqueline’s doing, Ursula suspected. They had survived the evening in the pub, thank goodness. Lovely pink lilies that were now sitting on her sideboard, the scent perfuming the room. The living room was west-facing and soaked up the evening sun. It was still light outside, the trees in the shared gardens in their best new leaf. It was a very nice flat, near the Brompton Oratory, and she had put all of the money that Sylvie left her into the purchase of it. There was a small kitchen and bathroom, both modern, but she had eschewed the modern when it came to décor. After the war she had bought simple, tasteful antique furniture when no one wanted that kind of thing. There were fitted carpets throughout in a pale willow green and the curtains were the same fabric as the suite covers – a Morris print, one of the more subtle ones. The walls were painted in a pale-lemon emulsion that made the place seem light and airy even on rainy days. There were a few pieces of Meissen and Worcester – sweetmeat dishes and a garniture set – also picked up cheaply after the war, and she always had flowers, Jacqueline knew that.

The only crude note was sounded by a pair of Staffordshire foxes, garish orange creatures, each of which had a dead rabbit drooping in its jaws. She had picked them up in Portobello Road for next to nothing years ago. They had made her think of Fox Corner.

‘I love coming here,’ Sarah said. ‘You have such nice things and it’s always so clean and tidy, nothing like home.’

‘You can afford to be clean and tidy when you live on your own,’ Ursula said, but flattered by the compliment. She supposed she should make a will, leave her worldly goods to someone. She would like Sarah to have the flat but the memory of the debacle over Fox Corner when Sylvie died made her hesitate. Should one show such outright favouritism? Possibly not. She must divide her estate between all seven of her nieces and nephews, even the ones she didn’t like or never saw. Jimmy, of course, had never married or had children. He lived in California now. ‘He’s a homosexual, you do know that, don’t you?’ Pamela said. ‘He’s always had those proclivities.’ It was information, not censure, but there was still a mild prurience in her words and the faintest trace of smugness, as if she were better able to cope with liberal views. Ursula wondered if she knew about Gerald and
his
‘proclivities’.

‘Jimmy’s just Jimmy,’ she said.

The previous week, she had come back from lunch and found a copy of
The Times
sitting on her desk. It had been neatly folded so that only the obituaries were on show. Crighton’s had a photograph of him in uniform, taken before she knew him. She had forgotten how handsome he was. It was quite a big piece, mentioned Jutland, of course. She learned that his wife Moira had ‘predeceased’ him, that he was a grandfather several times over and a keen golfer. He had always hated golf, she wondered when his conversion had taken place. And who on earth had left
The Times
on her desk? Who all these years later would have thought to tell her? She had no idea and supposed she never would now. There was a time during their affair, when he had been in the habit of leaving notes on her desk, rather smutty little
billets-doux
that appeared as if by magic. Perhaps the same invisible hand had delivered
The Times
, all these years later.