Life After Life

by Kate Atkinson

  A buttery, unseasonal sun was trying hard to nudge its way through the thick velvet curtains. Why dost thou thus, / Through windows, and through curtains, call on us? she thought. If she could go back in time and take a lover from history it would be Donne. Not Keats, the knowledge of his untimely death would colour everything quite wretchedly. That was the problem with time travel, of course (apart from the impossibility) – one would always be a Cassandra, spreading doom with one’s foreknowledge of events. It was quite wearyingly relentless but the only way that one could go was forward.

  She could hear a bird singing outside the window, even though it was November now. The birds were probably as confounded as people were by the Blitz. What did all the explosions do to them? Kill a great many, she supposed, their poor hearts simply giving out with shock or the little lungs bursting with the pressure waves. They must drop from the sky like weightless stones.

  ‘You look thoughtful,’ Fred Smith said. He was lying, one arm behind his head, smoking a cigarette.

  ‘And you look strangely at home,’ she said.

  ‘I am,’ he grinned and leaned forward to wrap his arms around her waist and kiss the back of her neck. They were both filthy, as if they had toiled all night in a coal mine. She recalled how sooty they had been when she had journeyed on the footplate that night. The last time she had seen Hugh alive.

  There was no hot water in Melbury Road, no water at all, nor electricity, everything turned off for the duration. In the dark, they had crawled under the dustsheet on Izzie’s bare mattress and fallen into a sleep that mimicked death. Some hours later they had both woken up at the same time and made love. It was the kind of love (lust, to be honest about it) that survivors of disasters must practise – or people who are anticipating disaster – free of all restraint, savage at times and yet strangely tender and affectionate. A strain of melancholy ran through it. Like Herr Zimmerman’s Bach sonata it had unsettled her soul, disjointed her brain and body. She tried to recall another line from Marvell, was it in ‘A Dialogue Between the Soul and Body’, something about bolts of bones and fetters and manacles but it wouldn’t come. It seemed harsh when there was so much soft skin and flesh in this abandoned (in all ways) bed.

  ‘I was thinking of Donne,’ she said. ‘You know – Busy old foole, unruly Sun.’ No, she supposed, he probably didn’t know.

  ‘Oh?’ he said, indifferently. Worse than indifferent really.

  She was taken off guard by the sudden memory of the grey ghosts in the cellar and of kneeling on the baby. Then for a second she was somewhere else, not a cellar in Argyll Road, not in Izzie’s bedroom in Holland Park but some strange limbo. Falling, falling—

  ‘Cigarette?’ Fred Smith offered. He lit another one from the stub of his first and handed it to her. She took it and said, ‘I don’t really smoke.’

  ‘I don’t really pick up strange women and fuck them in posh houses.’

  ‘How Lawrentian. And I’m not strange, we’ve known each other since we were children, more or less.’

  ‘Not like this.’

  ‘I should hope not.’ She was beginning to dislike him already. ‘I have no idea what time it is,’ she said. ‘But I can offer you some very good wine for breakfast. It’s all there is, I’m afraid.’

  He looked at his wristwatch and said, ‘We’ve missed breakfast. It’s three o’clock in the afternoon.’

  The dog nudged itself through the door, its paws pitter-pattering on the bare wooden boards. It jumped on the bed and gazed intently at Ursula. ‘Poor thing,’ she said, ‘it must be starving.’

  ‘Fred Smith? What was he like? Do tell!’

  ‘Disappointing.’

  ‘How? In bed?’

  ‘Gosh, no, not that at all. I’ve never … like that, you know. I think I thought it would be romantic. No, that’s the wrong word, a silly word. “Soulful” perhaps.’

  ‘Transcendent?’ Millie offered.

  ‘Yes, that’s it. I was looking for transcendence.’

  ‘I imagine it finds you, rather than the other way round. It’s a tall order for poor old Fred.’

  ‘I had an idea of him,’ Ursula said, ‘but the idea wasn’t him. Perhaps I wanted to fall in love.’

  ‘And instead you had jolly good sex. Poor you!’

  ‘You’re right, unfair of me to expect. Oh, God, I think I was an awful snob with him. I was quoting Donne. Am I a snob, do you think?’

  ‘Awful. You do reek, you know,’ Millie said cheerfully. ‘Cigarettes, sex, bombs, God knows what else. Shall I run you a bath?’

  ‘Oh, yes, please, that would be lovely.’

  ‘And while you’re at it,’ Millie said, ‘you can take that ruddy dog in the bath with you. He smells to high heaven. But he is kinda cute,’ she said, imitating an American accent (rather badly).

  Ursula sighed and stretched. ‘You know I really, really have had enough of being bombed.’

  ‘The war’s not going away any time soon, I’m afraid,’ Millie said.

  May 1941

  MILLIE WAS RIGHT. The war went on and on. Into that dreadfully cold winter, and then there was the awful raid on the City at the end of the year. Ralph had helped to save St Paul’s from the fire. All those lovely Wren churches, Ursula thought. They had been built because of the last Great Fire, now they were gone.

  The rest of the time they did the things that everyone of their kind did. They went to the cinema, they went dancing, they went to the lunchtime concerts in the National Gallery. They ate and drank and made love. Not ‘fucking’. That wasn’t Ralph’s style at all. ‘Very Lawrentian,’ she had said coolly to Fred Smith – she supposed he had no idea what she was talking about – but the crude word had jarred her horribly. She was used to hearing it at incidents, it was a vital constituent of the heavy rescue squad’s vocabulary, but not in the context of herself. She tried saying the word to her bathroom mirror but it felt shameful.

  ‘Where on earth did you get it?’ he asked.

  Ursula had never seen him so dumbfounded. Crighton weighed the gold cigarette case in his hand. ‘I thought I’d lost it for ever.’

  ‘Do you really want to know?’

  ‘Yes, of course I do,’ Crighton said. ‘Why the mystery?’

  ‘Does the name Renee Miller mean anything to you?’

  He frowned, thinking, and then shook his head. ‘Afraid not. Should it?’

  ‘You probably paid her for sex. Or bought her a nice dinner. Or just gave her a good time.’

  ‘Oh, that Renee Miller,’ he laughed. After a couple of beats of silence, he said, ‘No, really, the name means nothing. And anyway, I don’t think I have ever paid a woman for sex.’

  ‘You’re in the navy,’ she pointed out.

  ‘Well, not for a very, very long time then. But thank you,’ he said, ‘you know the cigarette case meant a lot to me. My father—’

  ‘Gave it to you after Jutland, I know.’

  ‘Am I boring you?’

  ‘No. Shall we go somewhere? The bolthole? Shall we fuck?’

  He burst out laughing. ‘If you want.’

  He cared less ‘for the niceties’ these days, Crighton said. These niceties seemed to include Moira and the girls and they soon resumed their furtive affair, although less furtive now. He was so different to Ralph that it hardly seemed like infidelity to her. (‘Oh, what a beguiling argument!’ Millie said.) She hardly saw Ralph now anyway and it seemed to be a mutual kind of waning.

  Teddy read the words on the Cenotaph. ‘The Glorious Dead. Do you think they are? Glorious?’ he asked.

  ‘Well, they’re certainly dead,’ Ursula said. ‘But the “glorious” bit is to make us feel better, I expect.’

  ‘I don’t suppose the dead care about anything much,’ Teddy said. ‘I think when you’re dead you’re dead. I don’t believe there’s anything beyond, do you?’

  ‘I might have done before the war,’ Ursula said, ‘before I saw a lot of dead bodies. But they just look like so much rubbish, thrown
away.’ (She thought of Hugh saying, ‘Just put me out with the dustbin.’) ‘It doesn’t seem as though their souls have flown.’

  ‘I shall probably die for England,’ Teddy said. ‘And there’s a chance you might too. Is it a good enough cause?’

  ‘I think so. Daddy said he would rather we were alive and cowards than dead and heroes. I don’t think he meant it, it wasn’t his style to shirk responsibility. What is it that it says on the war memorial in the village? For your tomorrow we gave our today. That’s what your lot are doing, giving up everything, it doesn’t seem right somehow.’

  Ursula thought that she would rather die for Fox Corner than ‘England’. For meadow and copse and the stream that ran through the bluebell wood. Well, that was England, wasn’t it? The blessed plot.

  ‘I am a patriot,’ she said. ‘I surprise myself with it although I don’t know why. What does it say on Edith Cavell’s statue, the one by St Martin’s church?’

  ‘Patriotism is not enough,’ Teddy supplied.

  ‘Do you think that really?’ she said. ‘Personally, I think it’s more than enough.’ She laughed and they linked arms as they walked down Whitehall. There was quite a lot of bomb damage. Ursula pointed out the Cabinet War Rooms to Teddy. ‘I know a girl who works in there,’ she said. ‘Sleeps in a cupboard, more or less. I don’t like bunkers and cellars and basements.’

  ‘I worry about you a lot,’ Teddy said.

  ‘I worry about you,’ she said. ‘And none of that worrying has done either of us any good.’ She sounded like Miss Woolf.

  Teddy (‘Pilot Officer Todd’) had survived his time in an OTU in Lincolnshire, flying Whitleys, and in a week or so was due to join a Heavy Conversion Unit in Yorkshire and learn how to fly the new Halifaxes and start his first tour of duty proper.

  Only half of all bomber crews survived their first tour of duty, the girl in the Air Ministry said.

  (‘Aren’t the odds the same every time they go up?’ Ursula said. ‘Isn’t that how odds work?’

  ‘Not in the case of bomber crews,’ the girl from the Air Ministry said.)

  Teddy was walking her back to the office after lunch, she had taken a long hour. Things were not quite as hectic as they had been.

  They had planned on somewhere swanky but ended up in a British Restaurant and dined on roast beef and plum pie and custard. The plums were tinned, of course. They enjoyed all of it though.

  ‘All those names,’ Teddy said, gazing at the Cenotaph. ‘All those lives. And now again. I think there is something wrong with the human race. It undermines everything one would like to believe in, don’t you think?’

  ‘No point in thinking,’ she said briskly, ‘you just have to get on with life.’ (She really was turning into Miss Woolf.) ‘We only have one after all, we should try and do our best. We can never get it right, but we must try.’ (The transformation was complete.)

  ‘What if we had a chance to do it again and again,’ Teddy said, ‘until we finally did get it right? Wouldn’t that be wonderful?’

  ‘I think it would be exhausting. I would quote Nietzsche to you but you would probably thump me.’

  ‘Probably,’ he said amiably. ‘He’s a Nazi, isn’t he?’

  ‘Not exactly. Do you still write poetry, Teddy?’

  ‘Can’t find the words any more. Everything I try feels like sublimation. Making pretty images out of war. I can’t find the heart of it.’

  ‘The dark, beating, bloody heart?’

  ‘Maybe you should write,’ he laughed.

  She wasn’t going out on patrol while Teddy was here, Miss Woolf had taken her off the roster. The raids were more sporadic now. There had been bad raids in March and April and they seemed all the worse for their having had a bit of a breather from the bombs. ‘It’s funny,’ Miss Woolf said, ‘one’s nerves are wired so tightly when it’s relentless that it’s almost easier to deal with.’

  There had been a decided lull at Ursula’s post. ‘I think Hitler’s more interested in the Balkans,’ Miss Woolf said.

  ‘He’s going to turn on Russia,’ Crighton told her with some authority. Millie was on another ENSA tour and they had the Kensington flat to themselves.

  ‘But that would be madness.’

  ‘Well, the man is insane, what do you expect?’ He sighed and said, ‘Let’s not talk about the war.’ They were drinking Admiralty whisky and playing cribbage, like an old married couple.

  Teddy walked her as far as Exhibition Road and her office and said, ‘I imagined your “War Room” would be a rather grand affair – porticos and pillars – not a bunker.’

  ‘Maurice has the porticos.’

  As soon as she was inside she was pounced upon by Ivy Jones, one of the teleprinter operators just coming on duty, who said, ‘You’re a dark horse, Miss Todd, keeping that gorgeous man a secret,’ and Ursula thought, this is what comes of being too friendly with staff. ‘Must dash,’ she said, ‘I’m a slave to the Daily Situation Report.’

  Her own ‘girls’, Miss Fawcett and her ilk, filed and collated and sent the buff folders to her so she could formulate summaries, daily, weekly, hourly sometimes. Daily logs, damage logs, situation reports, it was never-ending. Then it all had to be typed up and put into more buff folders and be signed off by her before the folders went on their journey to someone else, someone like Maurice.

  ‘We’re just cogs in a machine really, aren’t we?’ Miss Fawcett said to her and Ursula said, ‘But remember, without the cog there is no machine.’

  Teddy took her out for a drink. It was a warm evening and the trees were full of blossom so that for a moment it felt as if the war was over.

  He didn’t want to talk about flying, didn’t want to talk about the war, didn’t even want to talk about Nancy. Where was she? Doing something she couldn’t talk about, apparently. It seemed nobody wanted to talk about anything any more.

  ‘Well, let’s talk about Dad,’ he said, and so they did and it felt as if Hugh had finally been given the wake he deserved.

  Teddy caught the train to Fox Corner next morning, he was staying there for a few nights, and Ursula said, ‘Will you take another evacuee with you?’ and handed over Lucky. He was in the flat all day while she was at work but she often took him to the post if she was on duty and everyone treated him as a kind of mascot. Even Mr Bullock, who did not seem like a dog-lover, would come in with scraps and bones for him. There were times when the dog seemed to eat better than she did. Nonetheless, London in wartime was no place for a dog, she told Teddy. ‘All the noise, it must be terribly alarming.’

  ‘I like this dog,’ he said, rubbing the dog’s head. ‘He’s a very straightforward kind of dog.’

  She went to Marylebone to see them off. Teddy tucked the little dog under one arm and gave her a salute, sweet and ironic at the same time, and boarded the train. She felt almost as sad to see the dog go as she did Teddy.

  They had been too optimistic. There was a terrible raid in May.

  Their flat in Phillimore Gardens was hit. Neither Ursula nor Millie was there, thank goodness, but the roof and the upper storey were destroyed. Ursula simply moved back in and camped there for a while. The weather wasn’t bad and in some peculiar way she quite enjoyed it. There was still water, although no electricity, and someone at work lent her an old tent so she slept under canvas. The last time she had done that was in Bavaria when she had accompanied the Brenner girls on their BDM summer expedition to the mountains and she had shared a tent with Klara, the eldest. They had grown very fond of each other but she hadn’t heard from Klara since war was declared.

  Crighton was sanguine about her al fresco arrangement, ‘like sleeping on deck under the stars in the Indian Ocean’. She felt a pang of envy, she hadn’t even been to Paris. The Munich–Bologna–Nancy axis had defined the edges of the unknown world for her. She and her friend Hilary – the girl who slept in a cupboard in the War Rooms – had planned a holiday cycling through France but war had put paid to it. Everyone was stuck on the
little sceptred isle. If you thought about it too much you could start to feel quite claustrophobic.

  When Millie returned from her ENSA tour she declared that Ursula had gone quite mad and insisted they find somewhere else and so they moved to a shabby place in Lexham Gardens that she knew she would never learn to like. (‘You and I could live together if you wanted,’ Crighton said. ‘A little flat in Knightsbridge?’ She demurred.)

  That wasn’t the worst, of course. Their post received a direct hit in the same raid and both Herr Zimmerman and Mr Simms were killed.

  At Herr Zimmerman’s funeral a string quartet, all refugees, played Beethoven. Unlike Miss Woolf, Ursula thought that it would take more than the great composer’s works to heal their wounds. ‘I saw them play at the Wigmore Hall before the war,’ Miss Woolf whispered. ‘They’re very good.’

  After the funeral Ursula went in search of Fred Smith at his fire station and they rented a room in a nasty little hotel near Paddington. Later, after the sex, which had the same compelling quality as before, they were rocked to sleep by the sound of trains coming and going and she thought, he must miss that sound.

  When they woke he said, ‘I’m sorry I was a complete arse last time we were together.’ He went and found them two mugs of tea – she supposed he had charmed someone in the hotel, it didn’t seem like the kind of place to have a kitchen, let alone room service. He did have a natural charm, the same way that Teddy did, it came from a kind of straightness in their character. Jimmy’s charm was different, more dishonest perhaps.

  They sat up in bed and drank their tea and smoked cigarettes. She was thinking of Donne’s poem, ‘The Relic’, one of her favourites – the bracelet of bright hair about the bone – but refrained from quoting, considering how badly it had gone down last time. How funny though it would be if the hotel were hit and no one understood who they were or what they were doing here together, conjoined in a bed that had become their grave. She had grown very morbid since Argyll Road. It had affected her in a different way to other incidents. What would she like on her headstone, she wondered idly? ‘Ursula Beresford Todd, stalwart to the last’.