Life After Life

by Kate Atkinson

  ‘Home’, it had struck her on the torturous drive back to London, wasn’t Egerton Gardens, wasn’t even Fox Corner. Home was an idea, and like Arcadia it was lost in the past.

  She had already ticketed the day in her memory as ‘Hugh’s sixtieth birthday’, one more in a roll-call of family occasions. Later, when she understood that it was the last time they would all be together, she wished she had paid more attention.

  She was woken in the morning by Crighton bringing her a tray of tea and toast. She had the Senior Service to thank for his domesticity rather than Wargrave.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, struggling to sit up, still worn out from yesterday.

  ‘Bad news, I’m afraid,’ he said, opening the curtains.

  She thought of Teddy and Jimmy, although she knew that for this morning at least they were safely tucked up in their beds in Fox Corner, sharing their boyhood room, once Maurice’s.

  ‘What bad news?’ she asked.

  ‘Norway has fallen.’

  ‘Poor Norway,’ she said and sipped the hot tea.

  November 1940

  PAMELA HAD SENT a parcel of baby clothes that Gerald had grown out of, and Ursula thought of Mrs Appleyard. She might not have thought of Mrs Appleyard as she hadn’t kept up with the residents of Argyll Road since she left for Egerton Gardens, something she had rather regretted as she had been fond of the Misses Nesbit and often wondered how they were faring under the relentless bombardment. But then she had had a chance encounter with Renee Miller a few weeks ago.

  Ursula had been ‘on the town’, as he put it, with Jimmy, who had a couple of days’ furlough in the capital. They had been stranded in the Charing Cross Hotel thanks to a UXB – sometimes she thought unexploded bombs were more of a nuisance than exploded ones – and had taken refuge in the first-floor coffee lounge.

  ‘There’s a rather tarty girl, all lipstick and teeth, over there who seems to know you,’ Jimmy said.

  ‘Ye gods, Renee Miller,’ Ursula said when she spotted Renee waving eagerly at her. ‘And who on earth is that man with her? He looks like a gangster.’

  Renee was effusive, as though she had been best pals with Ursula in some former life (‘She’s a lively girl,’ Jimmy laughed after they’d escaped), and insisted that they join her and ‘Nicky’ for a drink. Nicky himself seemed less than enthusiastic about the idea but nonetheless shook hands and signalled to the waiter.

  Renee filled Ursula in on ‘the doings’ in Argyll Road, although little seemed to have changed since she left a year ago for Egerton Gardens, except that the army now had Mr Appleyard and his wife had a baby. ‘A boy,’ Renee said. ‘Ugly little thing.’ Jimmy guffawed and said, ‘I like a girl who knows when a spade’s a spade.’ Nicky was rather put out by Jimmy’s personable presence, especially as by the time she had downed another watery gin Renee had begun to flirt (almost professionally it seemed) with him.

  Ursula overheard someone say that the unexploded bomb had been dealt with and when Renee said, ‘Get us another round in, Nicky,’ and Nicky began to glower Ursula thought it might be politic to move on. Nicky refused to let them pay, as if it were a matter of principle. Ursula wasn’t sure she wanted to be beholden to someone of his calibre. Renee hugged and kissed her and said, ‘Come and see the old dears, they’d love it,’ and Ursula promised that she would.

  ‘Good God, I thought she was going to eat me,’ Jimmy said as they manoeuvred around rubble on Henrietta Street.

  She made good on her promise to Renee, prompted by the parcel of Gerald’s old clothes. She reached Argyll Road not long after six, getting away from work early for once. She had not, after all, donned a uniform of any kind yet, as there seemed hardly enough time to eat and breathe between work and the bombs. ‘Your job is war work,’ Crighton pointed out, ‘I would have thought that you would have enough on your plate. How is the Ministry of Some Obscurity these days?’

  ‘Oh, you know. Busy.’ There was so much information to be logged. Each individual incident – what type of bomb, the damage done, how many killed or injured (the tally was mounting horribly) – streamed across their desks.

  Occasionally, she would open a buff folder and find what she thought of as the ‘raw material’ – ARP typed reports or even the handwritten reports they were based on – and wonder what it was like to be in the heat of battle, for that’s what the Blitz was, wasn’t it? Sometimes she saw bomb-damage maps, once one that had been drawn by Ralph. He had signed it in faint, almost indecipherable pencil on the back. They were friends, she had met him at her German class, although he had made it clear that he would like them to mean more to each other. ‘Your other man,’ Crighton called him, amused.

  ‘How kind,’ Mrs Appleyard said when Ursula appeared on her doorstep with the parcel of clothes. ‘Please come in.’

  Ursula crossed the threshold reluctantly. The previous smell of boiled cabbage now mingled with the more unappetizing smells that could accompany an infant. Sadly, Renee’s judgement on Mrs Appleyard’s baby’s pulchritude, or lack of it, turned out to be true – he was an ‘ugly little thing’.

  ‘Emil,’ Mrs Appleyard said, handing him over to Ursula to hold. She could feel the dampness of him through his rubber knickers. She almost handed him straight back. ‘Emil?’ she said to him, making a face and grinning at him with forced jollity. He stared back at her, rather truculently, his paternity not in doubt.

  Mrs Appleyard offered tea and Ursula excused herself and scurried up the stairs to the Nesbits’ eyrie.

  They were their usual benign selves. It must be quite nice to live with one’s sister, Ursula thought. She wouldn’t mind living out her days with Pamela.

  Ruth grasped one of her fingers with her own twig-like ones. ‘You’re married! How wonderful.’ Oh darn, Ursula thought, she had forgotten to take off the wedding ring. She demurred, ‘Well …’ and then, seeing the complexity, finally, modestly, ‘Yes, I suppose so.’ They both offered triumphant congratulations, as if she had achieved something spectacular.

  ‘What a shame you have no engagement ring,’ Lavinia said.

  Ursula had forgotten their penchant for costume jewellery and wished she had brought them something. She had a little box of old diamanté buckles and clips that Izzie had given her that she knew they would have appreciated.

  Lavinia was wearing an enamel brooch shaped like a black cat. A little rhinestone winked for an eye. Ruth sported a weighty carbuncle of topaz pinned to her sparrow chest. It looked like it might topple her insubstantial frame.

  ‘We’re like magpies,’ Ruth laughed. ‘We love all the shiny little things.’

  They had the kettle on and were happily fussing over what to feed her – toast with Marmite or toast with jam – when the siren began its infernal warble. Ursula looked out of the window. No sign of any raiders yet although a searchlight was already sweeping the black sky. A beautiful new moon had stamped a crescent of light out of the blackness.

  ‘Come along, dear, down to the Millers’ cellar,’ Lavinia said, surprisingly chipper. ‘Every night an adventure,’ Ruth added, as they gathered up a great amount of stuff – shawls and cups, books and darning. ‘Torch, torch, don’t forget the torch!’ Lavinia said gaily.

  As they reached the ground floor a bomb thudded down a couple of streets away. ‘Oh, no!’ Lavinia said. ‘I forgot my knitting.’

  ‘We’ll go back, dear,’ Ruth said and Ursula said, ‘No, you must take shelter.’

  ‘I’m knitting leggings for Mrs Appleyard’s baby,’ Lavinia said, as if that were a good enough reason to risk her life.

  ‘Don’t worry about us, dear,’ Ruth said, ‘we’ll be back before you know we’ve gone.’

  ‘For heaven’s sake, if you must have it then I’ll go,’ Ursula said but they were already creaking their old bones up the stairs and Mr Miller was bustling her down to the cellar.

  ‘Renee, Dolly, everyone – look who’s come to join her old pals!’ he announced to the occupants as if Ursula were a music hall
turn.

  She had forgotten how many Millers there were, and how starchy Miss Hartnell could be and how downright odd Mr Bentley was. And as for Renee, she seemed to have quite forgotten the ardour of their previous encounter, saying only, ‘Oh, lawd, another body using up the air in this hellhole.’ Renee was – reluctantly – dandling a fractious Emil. She was right, it was a hellhole. In Egerton Gardens they had a rather salubrious basement that they retired to, although Ursula (and Crighton too if he was there) often took her chances and stayed in her own bed.

  Ursula remembered the wedding ring and thought how confused Hugh and Sylvie would be if they saw it on her body if she were to die in a raid. Would Crighton come to her funeral and explain? She was prevented from slipping it off by Renee suddenly thrusting Emil into her arms just before a massive explosion rocked the building.

  ‘Crikey, old Fritz is really trying to put the wind up us tonight,’ Mr Miller said cheerfully.

  Her name was Susie, apparently. She had no idea, she really couldn’t remember anything. A man kept calling her out of the darkness. ‘Come on, Susie, don’t go to sleep now,’ and ‘How about we have a nice cuppa when we get out of here, eh, Susie?’ She was choking on ash and dust. She sensed something inside her was torn beyond repair. Cracked. She was a golden bowl. ‘Quite Jamesian, really,’ she heard Teddy say. (Had he said that?) She was a great tree (how odd). She was very cold. The man was holding her hand, squeezing it, ‘Come on, Susie, stay awake now.’ But she couldn’t, the soft dark was beckoning to her with the promise of sleep, endless sleep, and the snow began to fall gently until she was entirely shrouded and everything was dark.

  A Lovely Day Tomorrow

  September 1940

  SHE MISSED CRIGHTON, more than she had let on to either him or Pamela. He had taken a room at the Savoy on the night before war was declared and she had got dressed up in her good royal-blue satin only for him to announce that they should call an end to things (‘to say our adieux’). ‘It’s going to get awfully bloody,’ he said, but whether he meant the war or them she wasn’t sure.

  Despite or perhaps because of their adieux, they went to bed together and he spent a lot of time telling her how much he would miss ‘this body’, the ‘lineaments of your flesh’, ‘this pretty face’, and so on, until she got rather fed up and said, ‘Well, it is you that wants out of this, not me.’

  She wondered if he made love to Moira in the same way – detachment and passion in equal measure – but it was one of those questions you couldn’t ask in case he were to tell the truth. What did it matter, Moira was getting him back. Soiled goods perhaps but hers nonetheless.

  The next morning they breakfasted in the room and then listened to Chamberlain’s speech. There was a wireless in the suite. Not long after, a siren sounded but strangely neither of them panicked. It all seemed very unreal. ‘I expect it’s a test,’ Crighton said. Ursula thought that from now on everything would probably be a test.

  They left the hotel and walked along the Embankment to Westminster Bridge, where air-raid wardens were blowing their whistles and shouting that the scare was over. Others were riding along on bicycles with All-Clear signs attached to them, and Crighton said, ‘Good God, I fear for us if this is the best we can muster in a raid.’ Sandbags were being stacked along the bridge, being stacked everywhere and Ursula thought it was just as well there was so much sand in the world. She tried to remember the lines from ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’. If seven maids with seven mops – but they had reached Whitehall by now and Crighton broke into her thoughts by taking both her hands in his and saying, ‘I must go now, darling,’ and for a moment he sounded like a rather cheap and sentimental movie star. She decided she would live out the war as a nun. Much easier.

  She had watched him walk along Whitehall and suddenly felt horribly alone. She might, after all, go back to Finchley.

  November 1940

  ON THE OTHER side of the wall she could hear Emil complaining and Mrs Appleyard’s soothing remonstrance. She began to sing a lullaby in her own language, the mother tongue, Ursula thought. It was an extraordinarily sad song and Ursula vowed that if she ever had a child (difficult when you had decided to live as a nun) she would sing to it nothing but jolly jigs and ditties.

  She felt alone. She would have liked a warm body for comfort, a dog would be better than being on her own on nights like this. A living, breathing presence.

  She moved the blackout aside. No sign of bombers yet, just the long finger of a solitary searchlight poking into the blackness. A new moon hung in the sky. Pale for weariness, according to Shelley but Queen and huntress, chaste and fair for Ben Jonson. To Ursula it betrayed an indifference that made her suddenly shiver.

  There was always a second before the siren started when she was aware of a sound as yet unheard. It was like an echo, or rather the opposite of an echo. An echo came afterwards, but was there a word for what came before?

  She heard the whine of a plane overhead and the bang-bang-bang-bang-bang of the first bombs dropping and she was about to replace the blackout and make a run for the cellar when she noticed a dog cowering in a doorway opposite – almost as if she’d wished it into existence. Even from where she was, she could sense its terror. She hesitated for a second and then thought, oh, damn, and raced down the stairs.

  She passed the Nesbit sisters. ‘Ooh, bad luck, Miss Todd,’ Ruth giggled. ‘Crossing on the stairs, you know.’

  Ursula was going down, the sisters were coming up. ‘You’re going the wrong way,’ she said, rather pointlessly.

  ‘I forgot my knitting,’ Lavinia said. She was wearing an enamel brooch shaped like a black cat. A little rhinestone winked for an eye. ‘She’s knitting leggings for Mrs Appleyard’s baby,’ Ruth said. ‘It’s so cold in her flat.’

  It was incredibly noisy on the street. She could hear incendiaries clattering down on a roof nearby, sounding like a giant coal scuttle being emptied. The sky was alight. A chandelier flare fell, as graceful as fireworks, illuminating everything below.

  A stream of bombers was roaring overhead as she dashed across the street to the dog. It was a nondescript terrier, whimpering and shaking all over. Just as she grabbed hold of it she heard a terrific swish and knew she was for it, that they were both for it. A colossal growling noise was followed by the loudest bang she’d heard so far in the Blitz. This is it, she thought, this is how I die.

  She took a blow to the forehead, a brick or something, but didn’t lose consciousness. A blast of air, like a hurricane, knocked her off her feet. There was a horrendous pain in her ears and all she could hear was a high-pitched whistling, singing noise and she knew that her eardrums must have gone. Debris was showering down on her, cutting her and digging into her. The blast seemed to come in successive waves and she could feel a grumbling, grinding vibration in the ground beneath her.

  From a distance an explosion seemed to be over almost immediately but when you were in the middle of it it seemed to go on for ever, to have a character that changed and developed as it went along so that you had no idea how it was going to end up, how you were going to end up. She was half sitting, half lying on the ground and tried to hang on to something but she couldn’t let go of the dog (this thought uppermost in her mind for some reason) and she found herself being blown slowly along the ground.

  The pressure began to decrease a little but the dirt and dust were still raining down and the blast had life in it yet. Then something else hit her on the head and everything went dark.

  She was woken by the dog licking her face. It was very hard to understand what had happened but after a while she realized that the doorway where she had grabbed the dog didn’t exist any more. The door had been blown inwards, the pair of them with it, and now they were lying among debris in the passage of a house. The staircase of the house behind them, choked with broken bricks and splintered wood, now led nowhere as the upper floors had gone.

  Still stunned, she struggled to a sitting position. Her head felt
thick and stupid but nothing seemed to be broken and she couldn’t find any bleeding, although she supposed she must be covered in cuts and bruises. The dog too, although very quiet, seemed to be uninjured. ‘Your name must be Lucky,’ she said to it but her voice hardly came out at all, there was so much choking dust in the air. Cautiously, she got to her feet and walked down the passage to the street.

  Her house had also gone, everywhere she looked there were great heaps of smoking rubble and skeletal walls. The pared fingernail of the moon was bright enough, even through the veil of dust, to cast light on the horror. If she hadn’t run to save the dog she would be cinders in the Millers’ cellar now. Was everyone dead? The Nesbits, Mrs Appleyard and Emil? Mr Bentley? All the Millers?

  She stumbled into the street where two firemen were unreeling a hose. While they were attaching it to the hydrant one of them spotted her and shouted, ‘Are you all right, miss?’ It was funny but he looked exactly like Fred Smith. And then the other fireman yelled, ‘Watch out, the wall’s coming down!’

  It was. Slowly, incredibly slowly, as if in a dream, the whole wall tilted on an invisible axis and without a single brick detaching itself it inclined towards them, as if taking a graceful bow, and fell in one piece, bringing the darkness down with it.

  August 1926

  ALS ER DAS Zimmer verlassen hatte wusst, was sie aus dieser Erscheinung machen solle …

  Bees buzzed their summer afternoon lullaby and Ursula, in the shade of the apple trees, drowsily abandoned Die Marquise von O. Through half-open eyes she watched a small rabbit a few yards away nibbling contentedly on grass. He was either unaware of her or very bold. Maurice would have shot it by now. He was home after graduation, waiting to start his training in the law, and had spent the entire vacation being thoroughly and noisily bored. (‘He could always get a summer job,’ Hugh said. ‘It’s not unheard of for vigorous young men to work.’)