Not the End of the World

by Kate Atkinson

  May 1910

  “A telegram,” Hugh said, coming unexpectedly into the nursery and ruffling Sylvie out of the pleasant doze she had fallen into while feeding Ursula. She quickly covered herself up and said, “A telegram? Is someone dead?” for Hugh’s expression hinted at catastrophe.

  “From Wiesbaden.”

  “Ah,” Sylvie said. “Izzie has had her baby, then.”

  “If only the bounder hadn’t been married,” Hugh said. “He could have made an honest woman of my sister.”

  “An honest woman?” Sylvie mused. “Is there such a thing?” (Did she say that out loud?) “And anyway, she’s so very young to be married.”

  Hugh frowned. It made him seem more handsome. “Only two years younger than you when you married me,” he said.

  “Yet so much older somehow,” Sylvie murmured. “Is all well? Is the baby well?”

  It had turned out that Izzie was already noticeably enceinte by the time Hugh caught up with her and dragged her onto the boat train back from Paris. Adelaide, her mother, said she would have preferred it if Izzie had been kidnapped by white slave traders rather than throwing herself into the arms of debauchery with such enthusiasm. Sylvie found the idea of the white slave trade rather attractive—imagined herself being carried off by a desert sheikh on an Arabian steed and then lying on a cushioned divan, dressed in silks and veils, eating sweetmeats and sipping on sherbets to the bubbling sound of rills and fountains. (She expected it wasn’t really like that.) A harem of women seemed like an eminently good idea to Sylvie—sharing the burden of a wife’s duties and so on.

  Adelaide, heroically Victorian in her attitudes, had barred the door, literally, at the sight of her youngest daughter’s burgeoning belly and dispatched her back across the Channel to wait out her shame abroad. The baby would be adopted as swiftly as possible. “A respectable German couple, unable to have their own child,” Adelaide said. Sylvie tried to imagine giving away a child. (“And will we never hear of it again?” she puzzled. “I certainly hope not,” Adelaide said.) Izzie was now to be packed off to a finishing school in Switzerland, even though it seemed she was already finished, in more ways than one.

  “A boy,” Hugh said, waving the telegram like a flag. “Bouncing, et cetera.”

  Ursula’s own first spring had unfurled. Lying in her pram beneath the beech tree, she had watched the patterns that the light made flickering through the tender green leaves as the breeze delicately swayed the branches. The branches were arms and the leaves were like hands. The tree danced for her. Rock-a-bye baby, Sylvie crooned to her, in the treetop.

  I had a little nut tree, Pamela sang lispingly, and nothing would it bear, but a silver nutmeg and a golden pear.

  A tiny hare dangled from the hood of the carriage, twirling around, the sun glinting off its silver skin. The hare sat upright in a little basket and had once adorned the top of the infant Sylvie’s rattle, the rattle itself, like Sylvie’s childhood, long since gone.

  Bare branches, buds, leaves—the world as she knew it came and went before Ursula’s eyes. She observed the turn of seasons for the first time. She was born with winter already in her bones, but then came the sharp promise of spring, the fattening of the buds, the indolent heat of summer, the mold and mushroom of autumn. From within the limited frame of the pram hood she saw it all. To say nothing of the somewhat random embellishments the seasons brought with them—sun, clouds, birds, a stray cricket ball arcing silently overhead, a rainbow once or twice, rain more often than she would have liked. (There was sometimes a tardiness to rescuing her from the elements.)

  Once there had even been the stars and a rising moon—astonishing and terrifying in equal measure—when she had been forgotten one autumn evening. Bridget was castigated. The pram was outside, whatever the weather, for Sylvie had inherited a fixation with fresh air from her own mother, Lottie, who when younger had spent some time in a Swiss sanatorium, spending her days wrapped in a rug, sitting on an outdoor terrace, gazing passively at snowy Alpine peaks.

  The beech shed its leaves, papery bronze drifts filling the sky above her head. One boisterously windy November day a threatening figure appeared, peering into the baby carriage. Maurice, making faces at Ursula and chanting, “Goo, goo, goo,” before prodding the blankets with a stick. “Stupid baby,” he said before proceeding to bury her beneath a soft pile of leaves. She started to fall asleep again beneath her new leafy cover but then a hand suddenly swatted Maurice’s head and he yelled, “Ow!” and disappeared. The silver hare pirouetted round and round and a big pair of hands plucked her from the pram and Hugh said, “Here she is,” as if she had been lost.

  “Like a hedgehog in hibernation,” he said to Sylvie.

  “Poor old thing,” she laughed.

  Winter came again. She recognized it from the first time around.

  June 1914

  Ursula entered her fifth summer without further mishap. Her mother was relieved that the baby, despite (or perhaps because of) her daunting start in life, grew, thanks to Sylvie’s robust regime (or perhaps in spite of it) into a steady-seeming sort of child. Ursula didn’t think too much, the way Pamela sometimes did, nor did she think too little, as was Maurice’s wont.

  A little soldier, Sylvie thought as she watched Ursula trooping along the beach in the wake of Maurice and Pamela. How small they all looked—they were small, she knew that—but sometimes Sylvie was taken by surprise by the breadth of her feelings for her children. The smallest, newest, of them all—Edward—was confined to a wicker Moses basket next to her on the sand and had not yet learned to cry havoc.

  They had taken a house in Cornwall for a month. Hugh stayed for the first week and Bridget for the duration. Bridget and Sylvie managed the cooking between them (rather badly) as Sylvie gave Mrs. Glover the month off so that she could go and stay in Salford with one of her sisters who had lost a son to diphtheria. Sylvie sighed with relief as she stood on the platform and watched Mrs. Glover’s broad back disappearing inside the railway carriage. “You had no need to see her off,” Hugh said.

  “For the pleasure of seeing her go,” Sylvie said.

  There was hot sun and boisterous sea breezes and a hard unfamiliar bed in which Sylvie lay undisturbed all night long. They bought meat pies and fried potatoes and apple turnovers and ate them sitting on a rug on the sand with their backs against the rocks. The rental of a beach hut took care of the always tricky problem of how to feed a baby in public. Sometimes Bridget and Sylvie took off their boots and daringly dabbled their toes in the water, other times they sat on the sand beneath enormous sunshades and read their books. Sylvie was reading Conrad, while Bridget had a copy of Jane Eyre that Sylvie had given her as she had not thought to bring one of her usual thrilling gothic romances. Bridget proved to be an animated reader, frequently gasping in horror or stirred to disgust and, at the end, delight. It made The Secret Agent seem quite dry by comparison.

  She was also an inland creature and spent a lot of time fretting about whether the tide was coming in or going out, seemingly incapable of understanding its predictability. “It changes a little every day,” Sylvie explained patiently.

  “But what on earth for?” a baffled Bridget asked.

  “Well…” Sylvie had absolutely no idea. “Why not?” she concluded crisply.

  The children were returning from fishing with their nets in the rock pools at the far end of the beach. Pamela and Ursula stopped halfway along and began to paddle at the water’s edge but Maurice picked up the pace, sprinting toward Sylvie before flinging himself down in a flurry of sand. He was holding a small crab by its claw and Bridget screeched in alarm at the sight of it.

  “Any meat pies left?” he asked.

  “Manners, Maurice,” Sylvie admonished. He was going to boarding school after the summer. She was rather relieved.

  Come on, let’s go and jump over the waves,” Pamela said. Pamela was bossy but in a nice way and Ursula was nearly always happy to fall in with her plans and even if she
wasn’t she still went along with them.

  A hoop bowled past them along the sand, as if blown by the wind, and Ursula wanted to run after it and reunite it with its owner, but Pamela said, “No, come on, let’s paddle,” and so they put their nets down on the sand and waded into the surf. It was a mystery that no matter how hot they were in the sun the water was always freezing. They yelped and squealed as usual before holding hands and waiting for the waves to come. When they did they were disappointingly small, no more than a ripple with a lacy frill. So they waded out further.

  The waves weren’t waves at all now, just the surge and tug of a swell that lifted them and then moved on past them. Ursula gripped hard on to Pamela’s hand whenever the swell approached. The water was already up to her waist. Pamela pushed further out into the water, a figurehead on a prow, plowing through the buffeting waves. The water was up to Ursula’s armpits now and she started to cry and pull on Pamela’s hand, trying to stop her from going any further. Pamela glanced back at her and said, “Careful, you’ll make us both fall over,” and so didn’t see the huge wave cresting behind her. Within a heartbeat, it had crashed over both of them, tossing them around as lightly as though they were leaves.

  Ursula felt herself being pulled under, deeper and deeper, as if she were miles out to sea, not within sight of the shore. Her little legs bicycled beneath her, trying to find purchase on the sand. If she could just stand up and fight the waves, but there was no longer any sand to stand on and she began to choke on water, thrashing around in panic. Someone would come, surely? Bridget or Sylvie, and save her. Or Pamela—where was she?

  No one came. And there was only water. Water and more water. Her helpless little heart was beating wildly, a bird trapped in her chest. A thousand bees buzzed in the curled pearl of her ear. No breath. A drowning child, a bird dropped from the sky.

  Darkness fell.

  To learn more about Kate Atkinson, please visit facebook.com/KateAtkinsonBooks.

  About the Author

  KATE ATKINSON’s first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, won the Whitbread (now Costa) Book of the Year Award. She has been a critically acclaimed, bestselling author ever since, with more than one million copies of her books in print in the United States. She is the author of a collection of short stories, Not the End of the World, and of the novels Human Croquet, Emotionally Weird, Case Histories, One Good Turn, When Will There Be Good News?, and Started Early, Took My Dog. Case Histories, which introduced her readers to Jackson Brodie, a former police inspector turned private investigator, was made into a television series starring Jason Isaacs. Kate Atkinson lives in Edinburgh.

  facebook.com/KateAtkinsonBooks

  Books by Kate Atkinson

  Life After Life

  Started Early, Took My Dog

  When Will There Be Good News?

  One Good Turn

  Case Histories

  Not the End of the World

  Emotionally Weird

  Human Croquet

  Behind the Scenes at the Museum

  Praise for Kate Atkinson’s

  NOT THE END OF THE WORLD

  “A marvelously loopy story collection…. Clearly a practitioner of writing as bewitchment, Atkinson casts a dazzling spell with her mostly befuddled figures, whose loves and loathing surface in equal measure and surprising ways.”

  —Lisa Shea, Elle

  “Wild inventiveness… exceptionally entertaining.”

  —Booklist

  “Not the End of the World effortlessly conjures a peculiar world peopled with celebrities, nannies, nerdy academic men, publishers, scriptwriters, hormonal teens, and their single parents. Each story is connected to the others, and the plots build upon each other with an almost novel-like progression…. Atkinson’s descriptions are unfailingly witty and perceptive…. The book’s varied themes are buoyed by such innate humor and light, freed from bounds of reality or convention…. They follow each other in a dazzling circle…. By the end, Atkinson manages to turn everything that has come before on its head, leaving the reader with the impression that these surprising tales delivered with confident and pointed prose have the power to offer up a new set of delights to challenge and inspire, if only one were to turn the book over and start again.”

  —Christine Thomas, San Francisco Chronicle

  “Atkinson sets a tone that prevails throughout most of these postmodern fairy tales. The fantastic or merely improbable obtrudes in seemingly ordinary lives, but rather than creating any kind of dissonance, it helps invest the everyday with drama and poignance…. Atkinson displays a flair for combining brutal emotional realism and fantasy in most of these stories, which run the gamut of social and emotional realities (or surrealities)…. She makes use of sly humor occasionally to relieve emotional intensity…. Not the End of the World draws upon a variety of sources, making for literate fun.”

  —Kevin O’Kelly, Boston Globe

  “This is a tantalizing collection, full of twists and transformations and tweaking of the mundane. Some of these evanescent stories don’t bear up to rigorous analysis, but all are worth your attention. Pleasureland, indeed.”

  —Carole Goldberg, Hartford Courant

  “Those who already know Kate Atkinson’s brilliant novels won’t be surprised to find that her richly peopled stories are shot through with the same exhilarating disregard for decorum, the same scintillating wit and wisdom. Not the End of the World is an exuberant, vivid, and hugely readable collection.”

  —Margot Livesey, author of Eva Moves the Furniture

  “A sharp and wholly original collection.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Whimsical… original…. Atkinson’s clever, funny prose makes a believer of the biggest skeptic. Her offbeat stories merge myth and human experience to provide a great escape from the duller world of everyday life.”

  —Jillian Dunham, Chicago Tribune

  ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

  Frontispiece: The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Death, Famine, Pestilence and War, from the Apocalypse or The Revelations of St. John the Divine, pub. 1948 (woodcut) by Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), Private Collection / © Bridgeman Art Library, I: The Chimera of Arezzo, woodcut; II: engraving from Le Ballet Comique de la Reyne by Balthasar Beaujoyeulx, Paris, 1582; III: Atalanta from De Vernieuwde Guldne Winckel der kunstleibende Niederlanders by Joost van den Vondel, 1622; IV: Troilus, sixteenth-century woodcut by the Master of the Standing Warrior; V: Assembly of the Gods, woodcut from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Leipzig, 1582; VI: Diana, engraving by Antonio Belema after Parmigianino; VII: woodcut from Albumasar’s Flores Astrologie, 1488; VIII: woodcut from Historium Animalium by Conrad Gesner, 1551-58, © Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia/CORBIS; IX: In fidem uxoriam from Emblemata by Andrea Alciatus, 1550; X: Rape of Proserpina by Cherubino Alberti; XI: Hymen from Le Imagini, con la spositione de i dei gli antichi by Vincenzo Cartari, 1580; XII: Poliphilus and Polia among the nymphs at the Fountain of Venus from Poliphili Hyperotomachia by Francesco Colonna, 1499.

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  Contents

  Welcome

  Dedication

  I Charlene and Trudi Go Shopping

  II Tunnel of Fish

  III Transparent Fiction

  IV Dissonance

  V Sheer Big Waste of Love

  VI Unseen Translation

  VII Evil Doppelgängers

  VIII The Cat Lover

  IX The Bodies Vest

  X Temporal Anomaly

  XI Wedding Favors

  XII Pleasureland

  Acknowledgments

  Reading Group Guide

  A Conversation with Kate Atkinson

  Questions and Topics for discussion

  Kate Atkinson’
s Top Ten Reads (and Then Some)

  Preview of Case Histories

  Preview of Life After Life

  About the Author

  Also by Kate Atkinson

  Praise for Kate Atkinson’s Not the End of the World

  Illustration Credits

  Newsletters

  Copyright

  Copyright

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Copyright © 2002 by Kate Atkinson

  Reading group guide copyright © 2004 by Kate Atkinson and Little, Brown and Company

  Excerpt from Case Histories © 2004 by Kate Atkinson

  Excerpt from Life After Life © 2013 by Kate Costello Ltd.

  Author photograph by Euan Myles

  Cover design by Yoori Kim

  Cover © 2004 Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

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