Not the End of the World

by Kate Atkinson

  By the time Olivia had roused them all it was nearly half past seven. They got their own breakfast, except for Olivia, who was hoisted onto a cushion and served cereal and milk by Amelia and fingers of toast by Julia. Olivia was theirs, their very own pet lamb, because their mother was worn out by the afterthought and their father was a great mathematician.

  Julia, stuffing herself with food (Rosemary swore that Julia had a Labrador hiding inside her), managed to slice herself with the bread knife but was dissuaded from wailing and waking their parents by Sylvia clamping her hand over her mouth, like a surgical mask. At least one incident a day involving blood was the norm—they were the most accidentprone children in the world, according to their mother, who suffered endless trips to Addenbrooke’s with them—Amelia cartwheeling her way to a broken arm, a scalded foot for Sylvia (trying to fill a hot water bottle), a split lip for Julia (jumping off the garage roof), Julia, again, walking through a glass door—watched by Amelia and Sylvia in dumbfounded disbelief (how could she not see it?), and Sylvia’s strange fainting episodes, of course—vertical to horizontal with no warning, her skin drained of blood, her lips dry—a rehearsal for death, betrayed only by a slight vibration of the eyelid.

  The only one who was immune to this communal clumsiness was Olivia, who in her whole three years had sustained nothing much worse than a few bruises. As for the others, their mother said she may as well have finished her nurse training, what with the amount of time she spent at the hospital.

  Most thrilling of all, of course, was the day that Julia cut off her finger (Julia did seem strangely attracted to sharp objects). Julia, five years old at the time, wandered into the kitchen unnoticed by their mother, and the first Rosemary knew about the amputated finger was when she turned round from aggressively chopping carrots and noticed a shocked Julia holding her hand aloft in mute astonishment, exhibiting her wound like a martyred child saint. Rosemary threw a tea towel over the bloody hand, scooped up Julia, and ran to a neighbor, who drove them in a screech of overexcited brakes to the hospital, leaving Sylvia and Amelia with the problem of what to do with the tiny, pale finger, abandoned on the kitchen linoleum.

  (An ever-resourceful Sylvia thrust the finger into a bag of frozen peas and Sylvia and Amelia caught a bus to the hospital, Sylvia clutching the defrosting peas all the way as if Julia’s life depended on them.)

  Their first plan for the day was to walk along the river to Grantchester. They had gone on this expedition at least twice a week since the holidays began, giving Olivia a piggyback when she grew tired. It was an adventure that took them most of the day because there were so many distractions to explore—on the riverbank, in the fields, even in other people’s back gardens. Rosemary’s only admonition was don’t go in the river, but they invariably set off with their swimming costumes concealed under their dresses and shorts and hardly a trip went by without them stripping off and plunging into the river. They felt grateful to the afterthought for transforming their normally prudent mother into such a careless guardian. No other child of their acquaintance was enjoying such a hazardous existence that summer.

  On one or two occasions Rosemary had given them money to buy afternoon tea at the Orchard Tea Rooms (where they were not the most welcome of guests), but mostly they took a hastily put together picnic that was usually eaten before they were even past Newnham. But not today, today the sun had traveled even closer to Cambridge and had them trapped in the garden. They tried to be energetic, playing a halfhearted game of hide-and-seek, but no one found a good hiding place, even Sylvia settled for nothing more creative than the nest of dry timothy grass behind the black currant bushes at the bottom of the garden—Sylvia, who had once stayed hidden and undiscovered for a record three hours (stretched like a sloth along a high, smooth branch of the beech tree in Mrs. Rain’s garden opposite), only found after she fell asleep and plummeted from the tree, acquiring a greenstick fracture to her arm when she hit the ground. Their mother had a tremendous argument with Mrs. Rain, who wanted to have Sylvia arrested for trespassing (Stupid woman). They were always sneaking into Mrs. Rain’s garden, stealing the sour apples from her orchard, and playing tricks on her because she was a witch and therefore deserved to be maltreated by them.

  After an apathetic lunch of tuna salad they began a game of rounders, but Amelia tripped and had a nosebleed and then Sylvia and Julia had a fight that ended in Sylvia slapping Julia and after that they contented themselves with making daisy chains to plait into Olivia’s hair and to collar Rascal with. Soon even this was too much effort and Julia crawled into the shade under the hydrangea bushes and fell asleep, curled up with the dog, while Sylvia took Olivia and Blue Mouse into the tent and read to them. The tent, an ancient thing that had been left in the shed by the previous owners of the house, had been pitched on the lawn since the beginning of the good weather, and they vied for space with one another inside its mildewed canvas walls, where it was even hotter and more airless than in the garden. Within minutes, Sylvia and Olivia had fallen asleep, the book forgotten.

  Amelia, dreamy and languid with heat, lay on her back on the scorched grass and fired earth of the lawn, staring up at the endless, cloudless blue, pierced only by the giant hollyhocks that grew like weeds in the garden. She watched the reckless, skydiving swallows and listened to the pleasing buzz and hum of the insect world. A ladybird crawled across the freckled skin of her arm. A hot-air balloon drifted lazily overhead and she wished she could be bothered to wake Sylvia and tell her about it.

  Rosemary’s blood was running sluggishly in her veins. She drank a glass of tap water at the kitchen sink and looked out the window at the garden. A hot-air balloon was crossing the sky, moving like a bird caught on a thermal. Her children all seemed to be asleep. This unwonted tranquility made her feel an unexpected twinge of affection for the baby inside her. If they would all sleep all the time she wouldn’t mind being their mother. Except for Olivia, she wouldn’t want Olivia to sleep all the time.

  When Victor proposed to her fourteen years ago, Rosemary had no idea what being the wife of a college lecturer would entail, but she had imagined it would involve wearing what her mother called “day dresses” and going to garden parties on the Backs and strolling elegantly across the plush green of the courts while people murmured, “That’s the famous Victor Land’s wife. He would be nothing without her, you know.”

  And, of course, the life of a lecturer’s wife had turned out to be nothing like she had imagined. There were no garden parties on the Backs, and there was certainly no elegant strolling across the college courts, where the grass was afforded the kind of veneration usually associated with religious artifacts. Not long after she was first married she had been invited to join Victor in the Master’s garden, where it soon grew apparent that Victor’s colleagues were of the opinion that he had married (horribly) beneath him (“A nurse,” someone whispered, in a way that made it seem like a profession only slightly more respectable than a streetwalker). But one thing was true—Victor would be nothing without her, but he was also nothing with her. At that very moment he was toiling in the cool dark of his study, the heavy chenille curtains closed against the summer, lost in his work, work that never came to fruition, never changed the world or made his name. He was not great in his field, merely good. This gave her a certain satisfaction.

  Great mathematical discoveries were made before the age of thirty, she now knew, courtesy of one of Victor’s colleagues. Rosemary herself was only thirty-two. She couldn’t believe how young that sounded and how old it felt.

  She supposed Victor had married her because he thought she was domesticated—her mother’s loaded tea tables probably misled him, but Rosemary had never made so much as a plain scone when she lived at home, and since she was a nurse he probably presumed she would be a nurturing and caring person—and she might have presumed that herself in those days, but now she didn’t feel capable of nurturing a kitten, let alone four, soon to be five, children, to say nothing of a great math
ematician.

  Furthermore, she suspected the great work was a fake. She had seen the papers on his desk when she dusted in that hole, and his reckonings looked not dissimilar to her father’s intense calculations of racing form and betting odds. Victor didn’t strike her as a gambler. Her father had been a gambler, to her mother’s despair. She remembered going with him to Newmarket once when she was a child. He had lifted her onto his shoulders and they had stood by the winning post. She had been terrified by the noise as the horses thundered down the homestretch and the crowd at the stand side grew frenzied, as though the world might be about to end rather than a 30/1 outsider winning by a short head. Rosemary couldn’t imagine Victor anywhere as spirited as a racecourse, nor could she see him in the smoky commonalty of a betting shop.

  Julia emerged from beneath the hydrangeas looking querulous with heat. How was Rosemary ever going to turn them back into English schoolchildren when the new term began? Their open-air life had transformed them into gypsies, their skin brown and scratched, their sunscorched hair thick and tangled, and they seemed to be permanently filthy, no matter how many baths they took. A drowsy Olivia stood at the opening of the tent and Rosemary’s heart gave a little twitch. Olivia’s face was grubby and her bleached plaits were askew and looked as if they had dead flowers entwined in them. She was whispering a secret into Blue Mouse’s ear. Olivia was her only beautiful child. Julia, with her dark curls and snub nose, was pretty but her character wasn’t, Sylvia—poor Sylvia, what could you say? And Amelia was somehow… bland, but Olivia, Olivia was spun from light. It seemed impossible that she was Victor’s child, although, unfortunately, there was no doubting the fact. Olivia was the only one she loved, although God knows she tried her best with the others. Everything was from duty, nothing from love. Duty killed you in the end.

  It was very wrong, it was as if the love she should have had for the others had been siphoned off and given to Olivia instead, so that she loved her youngest child with a ferocity that didn’t always seem natural. Sometimes she wanted to eat Olivia, to bite into a tender forearm or a soft calf muscle, even to devour her whole like a snake and take her back inside her where she would be safe. She was a terrible mother, there was no doubt about it, but she didn’t even have the strength to feel guilty. Olivia caught sight of her and waved.

  Their appetites were listless at teatime and they picked at the unseasonable lamb hot pot that Rosemary had spent too much time making. Victor emerged, blinking in the daylight like a cave dweller, and ate everything in front of him and then asked for more, and Rosemary wondered what he would look like when he was dead. She watched him eating, the fork traveling up and down to his lips with robotic rhythm, his huge hands, like paddles, wrapped around the cutlery. He had farmer’s hands, it was one of the things she had first noticed about him. A mathematician should have slender, elegant hands. She should have known from his hands. She felt sick and crampy. Maybe she would lose the baby. What a relief that would be.

  Rosemary rose from the table abruptly and announced bedtime. Normally there would be protests but Julia’s breathing was labored and her eyes were red from too much sun and grass—she had all kinds of summer allergies—and Sylvia seemed to be in the grip of some form of sunstroke, she was sick and weepy and said her head hurt, although that didn’t stop her from being hysterical when Rosemary told her to go to bed early.

  Almost every night that summer the eldest three had asked if they could sleep outside in the tent, and every night Rosemary said no on the principle that it was bad enough they looked like gypsies without living like them, and it didn’t matter if gypsies lived in caravans—as Sylvia was at pains to point out—Rosemary was trying her best to retain good government in this family, against all the odds and without any help from a husband, for whom the quotidian demands of meals and housework and child care were meaningless and who had only married her in order to have someone who would look after him and it made her feel worse when Amelia said, “Are you alright, Mummy?” because Amelia was the most neglected of all of them. Which is why Rosemary sighed, took two paracetamol and a sleeping tablet—which was probably a lethal cocktail for the baby inside her—and said to her most forgotten child, If you want you can sleep in the tent with Olivia tonight.

  The dewy grass and canvas smell of the tent was a thrilling thing to wake up to—better certainly than Julia’s breath, which always seemed to grow sour in the night. Olivia’s own indefinable scent was just detectable. Amelia kept her eyes closed against the light. The sun already felt high in the sky and she waited for Olivia to wake and climb under the old eiderdown that was making do as a sleeping bag, but it was Rascal rather than Olivia who finally roused her by licking her face.

  There was no sign of Olivia, only an empty shell of covers as if she’d been winkled out of them, and Amelia felt disappointed that Olivia had got up without waking her. She walked barefoot across the dew-wet grass, Rascal trotting at her heels, and tried the back door of the house, which turned out to be locked—apparently her mother hadn’t thought to give Amelia a key. What kind of a parent locks her own children out of their home?

  It was quiet and felt very early but Amelia had no idea what time it was. She wondered if Olivia had got into the house somehow because there was no sign of her in the garden. She called her name and was startled by the tremor in her voice. She hadn’t realized she was worried until she heard it. She knocked on the back door for a long time but there was no answer, so she ran along the path at the side of the house—the little wicket gate was open, giving Amelia more cause for alarm—and into the street, shouting, “Olivia!” more forcefully now. Rascal, sensing entertainment, began to bark.

  The street was empty apart from a man getting into his car. He gave Amelia a curious look. She was barefoot and dressed in Sylvia’s hand-me-down pajamas and supposed she did look odd but she hardly cared. She ran to the front door and rang the bell, keeping her finger on the buzzer until her father, of all people, yanked the door open. He had obviously been roused from sleep—his face looked as rumpled as his pajamas, his mad-professor hair sticking out at all angles from his head as he stared fiercely at her as if he had no idea who she was. When he recognized her as one of his own he was even more puzzled.

  “Olivia,” she said, and this time her voice came out as a whisper.

  In the afternoon, a bolt of lightning cracked the flat skies above Cambridge, signaling the end of the heat wave. By that time, the tent in the back garden had become the center of a circle that had grown wider and wider as the day progressed, pulling more and more people inside it—first the Lands themselves, roaming the streets, scrambling through undergrowth and hedges, yelling Olivia’s name until they were hoarse. By then the police had joined the search and neighbors were checking gardens and sheds and cellars. The circle rippled outward to include the police divers fishing the river and the complete strangers who volunteered to comb meadow and fen. Police helicopters flew low over outlying villages and countryside as far as the county borders, truck drivers were alerted to keep an eye out on the motorway, and the army was brought in to search the fens, but none of them—from Amelia screaming herself sick in the back garden to the Territorial Army recruits on their hands and knees in the rain on Midsummer Common—could find a single trace of Olivia, not a hair or a flake of skin, not a pink rabbit slipper nor a blue mouse.

  Look for Kate Atkinson’s novel

  Life After Life.

  Following is an excerpt from the novel’s opening pages.

  BE YE MEN OF VALOR

  November 1930

  A fug of tobacco smoke and damp clammy air hit her as she entered the café. She had come in from the rain and drops of water still trembled like delicate dew on the fur coats of some of the women inside. A regiment of white-aproned waiters rushed around at tempo, serving the needs of the Münchner at leisure—coffee, cake and gossip.

  He was at a table at the far end of the room, surrounded by the usual cohorts and toadies. There was a wo
man she had never seen before—a permed, platinum blonde with heavy makeup—an actress by the look of her. The blonde lit a cigarette, making a phallic performance out of it. Everyone knew that he preferred his women demure and wholesome, Bavarian preferably. All those dirndls and kneesocks, God help us.

  The table was laden. Bienenstich, Gugelhupf, Käsekuchen. He was eating a slice of Kirschtorte. He loved his cakes. No wonder he looked so pasty, she was surprised he wasn’t diabetic. The softly repellent body (she imagined pastry) beneath the clothes, never exposed to public view. Not a manly man. He smiled when he caught sight of her and half rose, saying, “Guten Tag, gnädiges Fräulein,” indicating the chair next to him. The bootlicker who was currently occupying it jumped up and moved away.

  “Unsere Englische Freundin,” he said to the blonde, who blew cigarette smoke out slowly and examined her without any interest before eventually saying, “Guten Tag.” A Berliner.

  She placed her handbag, heavy with its cargo, on the floor next to her chair and ordered Schokolade. He insisted that she try the Pflaumen Streusel.

  “Es regnet,” she said by way of conversation. “It’s raining.”