Life After Life

by Kate Atkinson

  ‘That’s a bit odd, don’t you think?’ Pamela said. ‘No,’ Ursula said. ‘It’s like a surprise gift. My wedding present from him.’

  When Derek finally carried her awkwardly over the Wealdstone threshold (a red-tiled porch that neither Sylvie nor William Morris would have approved of) Ursula couldn’t help but feel a twinge of disappointment. The house proved to be more sparsely old-fashioned than the one in her imagination and there was a drabness about it that she supposed came from its not having had a woman’s hand in the décor, so she was surprised when Derek said, ‘Mother helped me.’ But then there was, of course, a similar kind of occlusion in Barnet where a certain dinginess adhered to the dowager Mrs Oliphant.

  Sylvie had passed her honeymoon in Deauville, Pamela spent hers on a walking holiday in Switzerland, but Ursula began her own marriage with a rather wet week in Worthing.

  She married one man (‘a pleasant enough chap’) and woke up with another, one as tightly wound as Sylvie’s little carriage clock.

  He changed almost immediately, as if the honeymoon itself was a transition, an anticipated rite of passage for him from solicitous suitor to disenchanted spouse. Ursula blamed the weather, which was wretched. The landlady of the boarding house where they were staying expected them to vacate the premises between breakfast and dinner at six and so they spent long days sheltering in cafés or in the art gallery and museum or fighting the wind on the pier. Evenings were spent playing partner whist with other (less dispirited) guests before retiring to their chilly bedroom. Derek was a poor card player, in more ways than one, and they lost nearly every hand. He seemed almost to wilfully misread her attempts to indicate her hand to him.

  ‘Why did you lead trumps?’ she asked him later – genuinely curious – as they decorously removed their clothes in the bedroom. ‘You think that nonsense is important?’ he said with a look of such deep contempt that she thought it might be best to avoid games of any kind with Derek in the future.

  On the first night, blood, or the lack of it, passed unnoticed, Ursula was relieved to find. ‘I think you should know that I am not in-experienced,’ Derek said rather pompously as they climbed into bed together for the first time. ‘I believe it is the duty of a husband to know something of the world. How else can he protect the purity of his wife?’ It sounded like a specious argument to Ursula but she was hardly in a position to argue.

  Derek rose early each morning and did a relentless series of press-ups – as if he were in an army barracks rather than on honeymoon. ‘Mens sana in corpora sana,’ he said. Best not to correct him, she thought. He was proud of his Latin, as well as his smattering of ancient Greek. His mother had scrimped and saved to make sure he had a good education, ‘nothing had been handed on a plate, unlike some’. Ursula had been rather good at Latin, Greek too, but she thought it best not to crow. That was another Ursula, of course. A different Ursula, unmarked by Belgravia.

  Derek’s method of having conjugal relations was very similar to his method of exercise, even down to the same expression of pain and effort on his face. Ursula could have been part of the mattress for all he seemed to care. But what did she have to measure it against? Howie? She wished now that she had questioned Hilda about what went on in her ‘pleasure palace’ in Ealing. She thought of Izzie’s exuberant flirting and the warm affection between Pamela and Harold. It all seemed to indicate diversion if not downright happiness. ‘What’s life worth if you can’t have some fun?’ Izzie used to say. Ursula sensed there was going to be a shortage of fun in Wealdstone.

  As humdrum as her job had been, it was as nothing compared to the drudge work of keeping house, day in, day out. Everything had to be continually washed, scrubbed, dusted, polished and swept, not to mention the ironing, the folding, the hanging, the straightening. The adjustments. Derek was a man of right angles and straight lines. Towels, tea-towels, curtains, rugs all needed constant alignment and realignment. (As did Ursula, apparently.) But this was her job, this was the arrangement and realignment of marriage itself, wasn’t it? Although Ursula couldn’t get over the feeling that she was on some kind of permanent probation.

  It was easier to succumb to Derek’s unquestioning belief in domestic order rather than to fight it. (‘A place for everything and everything in its place.’) Crockery had to be scoured clean of stains, cutlery had to be polished and straightened in drawers – knives adjusted like soldiers on parade, spoons spooning each other neatly. A housewife has to be the most observant worshipper at the altar of the Lares and Penates, he said. It should be ‘hearth’, not ‘altar’, she thought, the amount of time she spent sweeping out grates and rattling clinker out of the boiler.

  Derek was particular about tidiness. He couldn’t think, he said, if things were out of place or askew. ‘Tidy house, tidy mind,’ he said. He was, Ursula was learning, rather fond of aphorisms. He certainly couldn’t work on ‘From Plantagenets to Tudors’ in the kind of muddle that Ursula seemed to create simply by entering a room. They needed the income from this textbook – his first – which William Collins was to publish and to this end he commandeered the poky dining room (table, sideboard and all) at the back of the house as his ‘study’ and Ursula was banished from Derek’s company most evenings so that he could write. Two should live as cheaply as one, he said, and yet here they were, barely able to pay their bills because of her lack of domestic economy, so she could at least give him some peace to try to earn an extra crust. And no, thank you, he didn’t want her help in typing up his manuscript.

  Ursula’s old household routines now seemed appallingly slovenly, even to her own eyes. In Bayswater her bed often went unmade and her pots unwashed. Bread and butter made a good breakfast and there was nothing wrong, as far as she could see, with a boiled egg for tea. Married life was more exacting. Breakfasts had to be cooked and on the table at just the right time in the morning. Derek couldn’t be late for school and regarded his breakfast, a litany of porridge, eggs and toast, as a solemn (and solitary) communion. The eggs were cooked in rotation throughout the week, scrambled, fried, boiled, poached, and on Fridays the excitement of a kipper. At weekends Derek liked bacon, sausage and black pudding with his eggs. The eggs came not from a shop but a smallholding three miles away, to which Ursula had to trek on foot every week because Derek had sold their bikes when they moved to Wealdstone ‘to save money’.

  Tea was a different kind of nightmare as she had to think of new things to cook all the time. Life was an endless round of chops and steaks and pies and stews and roasts, not to mention the pudding that was expected every day and in great variety. I’m a slave to recipe books! she wrote with faux-cheerfulness to Sylvie, although cheerful was far from how she felt every day, poring over their demanding pages. She gained a new respect for Mrs Glover. Of course, Mrs Glover benefited from a large kitchen, a substantial budget and a full batterie de cuisine, whereas the Wealdstone kitchen was fitted out in a rather paltry fashion and Ursula’s housekeeping allowance never seemed to stretch throughout the week so that she was continually chastised for overspending.

  She had never bothered much about money in Bayswater, if she fell short she ate less and walked instead of taking the Tube. If she really needed topping up there had always been Hugh or Izzie to fall back on, but she could hardly go running to them for money now that she had a husband. Derek would have been mortified at this slur on his manhood.

  After several months under the constraint of unending chores Ursula thought she might go mad if she couldn’t find some kind of pastime to alleviate the long days. There was a tennis club that she passed en route to the shops every day. All she could see of it was the tall netting that rose behind a wooden fence and a green door in a white pebble-dash wall facing the street, but she could hear the familiar inviting summer sound of thock and twang and one day she found herself knocking on the green door and asking if she could join.

  ‘I’ve joined the local tennis club,’ she said to Derek when he came home that evening.

  �
��You didn’t ask me,’ Derek said.

  ‘I didn’t think you played tennis.’

  ‘I don’t,’ he said. ‘I meant you didn’t ask me if you could join.’

  ‘I didn’t know I had to ask.’ Something passed over his face, the same cloud she had briefly seen on their wedding day when Sylvie had corrected his Shakespeare. This time it took longer to pass and seemed to change him in some indefinable way, as though part of him had shrivelled inside.

  ‘Well, can I?’ she said, thinking it would be better to be meek and keep the peace. Would Pammy have asked such a question of Harold? Would Harold have ever expected such a question? Ursula wasn’t sure. She realized she knew nothing about marriage. And, of course, Sylvie and Hugh’s alliance remained an ongoing enigma.

  She wondered what argument Derek could possibly have against her playing tennis. He seemed to be having the same struggle and eventually said begrudgingly, ‘I suppose so. As long as you still have time to do everything in the house.’ Halfway through their tea – stewed lamb chops and mashed potatoes – he got up abruptly from the table, picked up his plate and threw it across the room and then walked out of the house without saying a word. He didn’t come back until Ursula was getting ready for bed. He still wore the same thrawn expression on his face as when he had left and gave her a brief ‘good night’ that almost choked him as they climbed into bed.

  In the middle of the night she was woken by him clambering on top of her and hitching himself wordlessly inside her. Wisteria came to mind.

  The thrawn face (‘that look’ was how she thought of it) now made regular appearances and Ursula surprised herself with how far she would go to appease it. But it was hopeless, once he was in this mood she got on his nerves, no matter what she did or said, in fact her attempts to placate him seemed to make the situation worse, if anything.

  A visit was arranged to Mrs Oliphant in Barnet, the first since the wedding. They had popped in briefly – tea and a stale scone – to announce their engagement, but hadn’t been back since.

  This time round Mrs Oliphant fed them a limp ham salad and some small conversation. She had several odd jobs ‘saved up’ for Derek and he disappeared, tools in hand, leaving his womenfolk to clear up. When the washing-up was done, Ursula said, ‘Shall I make a cup of tea?’ and Mrs Oliphant said, ‘If you like,’ without any great encouragement.

  They sat awkwardly in the parlour, sipping their tea. There was a framed photograph hanging on the wall, a studio portrait of Mrs Oliphant and her new husband on their wedding day, looking strait-laced in turn-of-the-century wedding garb. ‘Very nice,’ Ursula said. ‘Do you have any photographs of Derek when he was small? Or of his sister?’ she added because it didn’t seem right to exclude the girl from family history merely on account of her being dead.

  ‘Sister?’ Mrs Oliphant said, frowning. ‘What sister?’

  ‘His sister who died,’ Ursula said.

  ‘Died?’ Mrs Oliphant looked startled.

  ‘Your daughter,’ Ursula said. ‘She fell in the fire,’ she added, feeling foolish, it was hardly a detail you were likely to forget. She wondered if perhaps Mrs Oliphant was a little simple. Mrs Oliphant herself looked confused, as if she were trying to recollect this forgotten child. ‘I only ever had Derek,’ she concluded firmly.

  ‘Well, anyway,’ Ursula said, as if this were a trivial subject to be lightly tossed away, ‘you must come and visit us in Wealdstone. Now that we’re settled. We’re very grateful, you know, for the money that Mr Oliphant left.’

  ‘Left? He left money?’

  ‘Some shares, I think, in the will,’ Ursula said. Perhaps Mrs Oliphant hadn’t been involved in the probate.

  ‘Will? He left nothing but debts when he went. He’s not dead,’ she added as if it were Ursula who was the simple one. ‘He’s living in Margate.’

  What other lies and half-truths were there, Ursula wondered? Did Derek really nearly drown when he was younger?

  ‘Drown?’

  ‘Fall out of a rowing boat and swim to shore?’

  ‘Whatever gave you that idea?’

  ‘Now then,’ Derek said, appearing in the doorway and making them both jump, ‘what are you two gossiping about?’

  ‘You’ve lost weight,’ Pamela said.

  ‘Yes, I suppose I have. I’ve been playing tennis.’ How normal that made her life sound. She doggedly attended the tennis club, it was the only relief she had from the claustrophobia of life in Masons Avenue, though she had to face a constant inquisition on the subject. Every evening when he came home Derek asked if she had played tennis today, even though she only played two afternoons a week. She was always interrogated about her partner, a dentist’s wife called Phyllis. Derek seemed to despise Phyllis, even though he had never met her.

  Pamela had travelled all the way from Finchley. ‘Obviously it was the only way I was ever going to see you. You must like married life. Or Wealdstone,’ she laughed. ‘Mother said that you put her off.’ Ursula had been putting everyone off since the wedding, rebuffing Hugh’s offers to ‘pop in’ for a cup of tea and Sylvie’s hints that perhaps they should be invited to Sunday lunch. Jimmy was away at school and Teddy was in his first year at Oxford but he wrote lovely long letters to her, and Maurice, of course, had no inclination to visit anyone in his family.

  ‘I’m sure she’s not too bothered about visiting. Wealdstone and so on. Not her cup of tea at all.’

  They both laughed. Ursula had almost forgotten what it felt like to laugh. She felt tears start to her eyes and had to turn away and busy herself with the tea things. ‘It’s so nice to see you, Pammy.’

  ‘Well, you know you’re welcome in Finchley whenever you please. You should get a telephone, and then we could talk all the time.’ Derek thought a telephone was an expensive luxury but Ursula suspected that he simply didn’t want her speaking to anyone. She could hardly voice this suspicion (and to whom – Phyllis? The milkman?) as people would think she was off her head. Ursula had been looking forward to Pamela’s visit the way people looked forward to holidays. On Monday she had said to Derek, ‘Pamela’s coming on Wednesday afternoon,’ and he had said, ‘Oh?’ He seemed indifferent and she was relieved that the thrawn face did not appear.

  As soon as they were finished with them Ursula quickly cleared the tea things away, washed and dried them and put them back in their places.

  ‘Golly,’ Pamela said, ‘when did you become such a neat little Hausfrau?’

  ‘Tidy house, tidy mind,’ Ursula said.

  ‘Tidiness is overrated,’ Pamela said. ‘Is anything the matter? You seem awfully down.’

  ‘Time of the month,’ Ursula said.

  ‘Oh, rotten luck. I’m going to be free of that problem for a few months. Guess what?’

  ‘You’re having a baby? Oh, that’s wonderful news!’

  ‘Yes. Isn’t it? Mother will be a grandmother again.’ (Maurice had already made a start on the next generation of Todds.) ‘Will she like that, do you suppose?’

  ‘Who knows? She’s rather unpredictable these days.’

  ‘Did you have a nice visit from your sister?’ Derek asked when he came home that night.

  ‘Lovely. She’s having a baby.’

  ‘Oh?’

  The next morning her poached eggs were not ‘up to scratch’. Even Ursula had to admit that the egg she presented for Derek’s breakfast was a sad sight, a sickly jellyfish deposited on toast to die. A sly smile appeared on his face, an expression that seemed to indicate a certain triumph in finding fault. A new look. Worse than the old.

  ‘Do you expect me to eat that?’ he asked.

  Several answers to that question passed through Ursula’s mind but she rejected them all as provocative. Instead she said, ‘I can do you another one.’

  ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I have to work all hours at a job I despise, just to keep you. You don’t have to worry your silly little noggin about anything, do you? You do nothing all day – oh, no, forgive me,’ he said
sarcastically, ‘I was forgetting you play tennis – and you can’t even manage to cook me an egg.’

  Ursula hadn’t realized he despised his job. He complained a great deal about the behaviour of the Lower Third and talked incessantly about the headmaster’s lack of appreciation of his hard work, but she hadn’t thought that he hated teaching. He looked close to tears and she felt suddenly and unexpectedly sorry for him and said, ‘I’ll poach another.’

  ‘Don’t bother.’ She anticipated the egg would be thrown at the wall, Derek was given to tossing food around since she had joined the tennis club, but instead he delivered a massive open-handed slap to the side of her head that sent her reeling against the cooker and then to the floor where she remained, kneeling as though she were at prayer. The pain, more than the act, had taken her by surprise.

  Derek walked across the kitchen and stood over her with the plate containing the offending egg. For a moment she thought he was going to bring it crashing down on her but instead he slid the egg off the plate and on to the top of her head. Then he stalked out of the kitchen and she heard the front door slam a minute later. The egg slid off her hair, down her face and on to the floor, where it burst open in a quiet splash of yellow. She struggled to her feet and fetched a cloth.

  That morning seemed to open up something in him. She broke rules she didn’t know existed – too much coal on the fire, too much toilet paper used, a light accidentally left on. Receipts and bills were all scrutinized by him, every penny had to be accounted for and she never had any spare money.

  He proved himself capable of the most enormous rants over the pettiest of things, once started he seemed unable to stop. He was angry all the time. She made him angry all the time. Every evening now he demanded an exacting account of her day. How many books did she change in the library, what did the butcher say to her, did anyone call at the house? She gave up tennis. It was easier.

  He didn’t hit her again but violence seemed to simmer constantly beneath his surface, a dormant volcano that Ursula had unwontedly brought back to life. She was wrong-footed by him all the time so that she never seemed to have a moment to clear the befuddlement in her brain. Her very existence seemed to be irksome to him. Was life to be lived as a continuous punishment? (Why not, didn’t she deserve that?)