Life After Life

by Kate Atkinson

  The scent of the lilies, lovely when they had first gone in water, was beginning to make her feel slightly sick. The room was stuffy. She should open a window. She stood up in order to carry her plate through to the kitchen and was immediately struck by a blinding pain in her right temple. She had to sit down again and wait for it to pass. She had been getting these pains for weeks now. An acute pain and then a thick, buzzy head. Or sometimes just a straightforward horrible pounding ache. She thought it might be high blood pressure but, after a battery of tests, the hospital’s verdict was neuralgia, ‘probably’. She was given strong painkillers and told that she was bound to feel better once she had retired. ‘You’ll have time to relax, take it easy,’ the doctor said in the special tone of voice reserved for the elderly.

  The pain passed and she stood up, gingerly.

  What would she do with her time? She wondered about moving to the country, a little cottage, partaking in village life, perhaps somewhere in the vicinity of Pamela. She imagined St Mary Mead, or Miss Read’s Fairacre. Perhaps she could write a novel? It would certainly fill in the time. And a dog, time to get another dog. Pamela kept Golden Retrievers, a succession of them, one replacing another and quite indistinguishable to Ursula’s eye.

  She washed up her meagre pots. Thought she might have an early night, make some Ovaltine and take her book to bed with her. She was reading Greene’s The Comedians. Perhaps she did need to rest more but lately she had become rather afraid of sleep. She was having such vivid dreams that sometimes she found it hard to accept that they weren’t real. Several times recently she had believed that something outlandish had really happened to her when it quite obviously, logically, had not. And falling. She was always falling in her dreams, down staircases and off cliffs, it was a most unpleasant sensation. Was this the first sign of dementia? The beginning of the end. The end of the beginning.

  From her bedroom window she could see a fat moon rising. Keats’s Queen-Moon, she thought. Tender is the night. The pain in her head came back. She ran a glass of water from the tap and swallowed a couple of painkillers.

  ‘But if Hitler had been killed, before he became Chancellor, it would have stopped all this conflict between the Arabs and the Israelis, wouldn’t it?’ The Six-Day War, as they had called it, had ended, the Israelis decisively victorious. ‘I mean, I do understand why the Jews wanted to create an independent state and defend it vigorously,’ Ursula continued, ‘and I always felt sympathy for the Zionist cause, even before the war, but, on the other hand, I can also understand why the Arab states are so aggrieved. But if Hitler had been unable to implement the Holocaust—’

  ‘Because he was dead?’

  ‘Yes, because he was dead. Then support for a Jewish homeland would have been weak at best …’

  ‘History is all about “what ifs”,’ Nigel said. Pamela’s first-born, her favourite nephew, was a history tutor at Brasenose, Hugh’s old college. She was treating him to lunch in Fortnum’s.

  ‘It is nice to have an intelligent conversation with someone,’ she said. ‘I’ve been on holiday in the south of France with my friend Millie Shawcross, have you met her? No? Not that she’s called that any more, she’s been through several husbands, each one wealthier than the last.’

  Millie, the war bride, had hotfooted it back from America just as soon as she could, her new family were ‘cowpokes’, she reported. She had gone back to ‘treading the boards’ and had several disastrous relationships before she struck gold in the form of the scion of an oil family in tax exile.

  ‘She lives in Monaco. It’s incredibly small, I had no idea. She’s really quite stupid these days. I’m wittering, aren’t I?’

  ‘Not at all. Shall I pour you some water?’

  ‘People who live on their own do tend to witter. We live without restraint, verbal at any rate.’

  Nigel smiled. He wore serious spectacles and had Harold’s lovely smile. When he took his spectacles off to clean them on his napkin he looked very young.

  ‘You look so young,’ Ursula said. ‘You are young, of course. Am I sounding like a dotty old aunt?’

  ‘God, no,’ he said. ‘You’re just about the smartest person I know.’

  She buttered a bread roll, feeling rather chuffed at this compliment. ‘I heard someone say once that hindsight was a wonderful thing, that without it there would be no history.’

  ‘They’re probably right.’

  ‘But think how different things would be,’ Ursula persisted. ‘The Iron Curtain would probably not have fallen and Russia wouldn’t have been able to gobble up Eastern Europe.’

  ‘Gobble?’

  ‘Well, it was just pure greed. And the Americans might not have recovered from the Depression so quickly without a war economy and consequently not exerted so much influence on the post-war world—’

  ‘An awful lot of people would still be alive.’

  ‘Well, yes, obviously. And the whole cultural face of Europe would be different because of the Jews. And think of all those displaced people, shuffling from one country to another. And Britain would still have an empire, or at least we wouldn’t have lost it so precipitately – I’m not saying being an imperial power is a good thing, of course. And we wouldn’t have bankrupted ourselves and had such an awful time recovering, financially and psychologically. And no Common Market—’

  ‘Which won’t let us in anyway.’

  ‘Think how strong Europe would be! But perhaps Goering or Himmler would have stepped in. And everything would have happened in just the same way.’

  ‘Perhaps. But the Nazis were a marginal party almost up until they took power. They were all fanatical psychopaths, but none of them had Hitler’s charisma.’

  ‘Oh, I know,’ Ursula said. ‘He was extraordinarily charismatic. People talk about charisma as if it were a good thing, but really it’s a kind of glamour – in the old sense of the word, casting a spell, you know? I think it was the eyes, he had the most compelling eyes. If you looked in them you felt you were putting yourself in danger of believing—’

  ‘You met him?’ Nigel asked, astonished.

  ‘Well,’ Ursula said. ‘Not exactly. Would you like dessert, dear?’

  July and hot as Hades as she walked back from Fortnum’s, along Piccadilly. Even the colours seemed hot. Everything was bright these days – bright young things. There were girls in her office whose skirts were like pelmets. Young people these days had so much enthusiasm for themselves, as if they had invented the future. This was the generation the war had been fought for and now they bandied the word ‘peace’ around glibly as though it were an advertising slogan. They had not experienced a war (‘And that’s a good thing,’ she heard Sylvie say, ‘no matter how unsatisfactory they turn out’). They had been handed, in Churchill’s phrase, the title deeds of freedom. What they did with them was their affair now, she supposed. (What an old fuddy-duddy she sounded, she had become the person she always thought she would never be.)

  She thought she might walk through the parks and crossed the road, into Green Park. She always walked in the parks on Sundays but now she was retired every day was a Sunday, she supposed. She walked on, past the Palace, and entered Hyde Park, bought an ice-cream from a kiosk next to the Serpentine and decided she might hire a deckchair. She was awfully tired, lunch seemed to have taken it out of her.

  She must have dozed off – all that food. The boats were out on the water, people pedalling, laughing and joking. Oh, drat, she thought, she could feel a headache coming and she didn’t have any painkillers in her bag. Perhaps she could hail a cab on Carriage Drive, she would never be able to walk home in this heat, not in pain. But then the pain grew less rather than more severe, which was not the usual progression of her headaches. She closed her eyes again, the sun was still hot and bright. She felt wonderfully indolent.

  It was odd to sleep surrounded by people. It should have made her feel vulnerable but instead there was a kind of comfort. What was Tennessee Williams’s line – the ki
ndness of strangers? Millie’s swansong on the stage, the last gasp of the dying swan, was to play Blanche DuBois in a 1955 production in Bath.

  She allowed the hum and buzz of the park to lullaby her. Life wasn’t about becoming, was it? It was about being. Dr Kellet would have approved this thought. And everything was ephemeral, yet everything was eternal, she thought sleepily. A dog barked somewhere. A child cried. The child was hers, she could feel the delicate weight of the child in her arms. It was a lovely feeling. She was dreaming. She was in a meadow – flax and larkspur, buttercups, corn poppies, red campion and ox-eye daisies – and unseasonable snowdrops. The oddities of the dream world, she thought, and caught the sound of Sylvie’s little carriage clock chiming midnight. Someone was singing, a child, a reedy little voice keeping the tune, I had a little nut-tree and nothing would it bear. Muskatnuss, she thought – the German for nutmeg. She had been trying to remember that word for ages and now suddenly here it was.

  Now she was in a garden. She could hear the delicate chink of cups on saucers, the creak and clatter of a lawn-mower, and could smell the peppery-sweet perfume of pinks. A man lifted her up and tossed her in the air and sugar cubes scattered across a lawn. There was another world but it was this one. She allowed herself a little chuckle even though her opinion was that people who laughed to themselves in public were likely to be mad.

  Despite the summer heat, snow began to fall, which was the kind of thing that happened in dreams, after all. The snow began to cover her face, it was lovely and cool in this weather. And then she was falling, falling into the darkness, black and deep—

  But here was the snow again – white and welcoming, the light like a sharp sword piercing through the heavy curtains, and she was being lifted up, cradled in soft arms.

  ‘I shall call her Ursula,’ Sylvie said. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I like it,’ Hugh said. His face loomed into vision. His trim moustache and sideburns, his kind green eyes. ‘Welcome, little bear,’ he said.

  The End of the Beginning

  ‘WELCOME, LITTLE BEAR.’ Her father. She had his eyes.

  Hugh had paced, as was tradition, along the Voysey runner in the upper hallway, barred from the inner sanctum itself. He was unsure of the details of the doings behind the door, only too grateful that he was not expected to be familiar with the mechanics of childbirth. Sylvie’s screams suggested torture if not outright butchery. Women were extraordinarily brave, Hugh thought. He smoked a series of cigarettes to stave off any unmanly squeamishness.

  Dr Fellowes’s dispassionate bass notes afforded some comfort to him, counterpointed unfortunately by a kind of hysterical Celtic babble from the scullery maid. Where was Mrs Glover? A cook could sometimes be a great help at times like these. The cook in his childhood Hampstead home had been unflappable in a crisis.

  A considerable commotion could be heard at one point, indicating great victory or great defeat in the battle taking place on the other side of the bedroom door. Hugh refrained from entering unless invited, which he wasn’t. Eventually, Dr Fellowes flung open the door of the birth chamber and announced, ‘You have a bonny, bouncing baby girl. She nearly died,’ he added as an afterthought.

  Thank goodness, Hugh thought, that he had managed to get back to Fox Corner before the snow closed the roads. He had dragged his sister back with him on the Channel crossing, a cat after a long night on the tiles. He was sporting a rather painful bite mark on his hand and was left wondering from where his sister had acquired her strain of savagery. Not from Nanny Mills and the Hampstead nursery.

  Izzie was still wearing her counterfeit wedding ring, a legacy of her shameful week in a Parisian hotel with her lover, although Hugh doubted that the French, an immoral lot, cared about such niceties. She had left for the continent in short skirts and a little straw boater (his mother had given him a detailed description, as if Izzie were a criminal) but she returned in a gown by Worth (as she frequently told him, as if it would impress him). It was also clear that the scoundrel had been taking advantage of her for some time before their flight as the gown, Worth or not, was straining at the seams.

  He had eventually flushed his fugitive sister out from Hôtel d’Alsace in St Germain, a degenerate endroit, in Hugh’s estimation, the scene of Oscar Wilde’s demise, which said everything you needed to know about the place.

  An unseemly tussle had taken place not only with Izzie but also with the bounder from whose arms Hugh wrestled her before hauling her, kicking and screaming, into the handsome two-door Renault taxi that he had paid to wait outside the hotel. Hugh thought it would be rather fine to own a motor car. Could he afford one on his salary? Could he learn to drive one? How difficult could it be?

  They had eaten some rather decent, pink French lamb on the boat and Izzie had demanded champagne, which he allowed her as he was far too worn out with the whole elopement business to bother with yet another fight. It was tempting to toss her over the rails, into the dark-grey waters of the Channel.

  He had telegraphed his mother, Adelaide, from Calais, informing her of Izzie’s misfortune as he thought it might be best if she were prepared before setting eyes on her youngest daughter, whose condition was plain for all the world to see.

  Their fellow diners on the boat presumed they were a married couple and many pretty compliments on her impending motherhood were passed Izzie’s way. Hugh supposed it was better to let them think this, appalling though it was, rather than for these complete strangers to discover the truth. Thus he found himself taking part in an absurd charade for the duration of the crossing, in the course of which he was forced to deny the existence of his real wife and children and pretend that Izzie was his child bride. He became, to all intents and purposes, the very villain who had seduced a girl barely out of the nursery (forgetting, perhaps, that his own wife was only seventeen when he proposed to her).

  Izzie, of course, threw herself into this mockery with glee, taking her revenge on Hugh by making him as uncomfortable as possible, addressing him as mon cher mari and other extremely irritating blandishments.

  ‘What a lovely young wife you have,’ a man, a Belgian, chortled while Hugh was taking the air on deck and indulging in a post-prandial cigarette. ‘Hardly out of the cradle herself and soon to be a mother. It’s the best way – getting them young – then you can mould them to how you want them.’

  ‘Your English is remarkable, sir,’ Hugh said, throwing the stub of his cigarette into the sea and walking away. A lesser man would have resorted to fisticuffs. He might, if pressed, fight for the honour of his country, but he would be damned if he would fight for the besmirched honour of his feckless sister. (Although it would be undeniably pleasant to mould a woman to one’s exact requirements, like his bespoke suits from his tailor in Jermyn Street.)

  It had been difficult to find the right wording for the telegram to his mother and he had finally settled on I SHALL BE IN HAMPSTEAD BY MIDDAY STOP ISOBEL IS WITH ME STOP SHE IS WITH CHILD STOP. It was a rather bald message and he should perhaps have spent the extra money on some mitigating adverbs. ‘Unfortunately’ might have been one. The telegram (unfortunately) had the opposite to the desired effect and when they disembarked in Dover a reply was waiting for him. DO NOT BRING HER TO MY HOUSE UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES STOP, the final STOP carrying a leaden weight of certainty which was not to be challenged. Which did rather leave Hugh at a loss as to what exactly he should do with Izzie. She was, despite appearances, still only a child herself, only sixteen, he could hardly abandon her on the streets. Anxious to return to Fox Corner as soon as possible, he found himself carting her along with him.

  When they finally arrived, as iced as snowmen, it was an excitable Bridget who opened the door to him at midnight and said, ‘Oh, no, I was hoping you were going to be the doctor, so I was.’ His third child, it seemed, was on its way. Her way, he thought fondly, looking down at the tiny crumpled features. Hugh rather liked babies.

  ‘But what are we to do with her?’ Sylvie fretted. ‘She
’s not giving birth under my roof.’

  ‘Our roof.’

  ‘She’ll have to give it away.’

  ‘The child is part of our family,’ Hugh said. ‘The same blood runs in its veins as in my children.’

  ‘Our children.’

  ‘We’ll say the child is adopted,’ Hugh said. ‘An orphaned relative. People won’t question, why should they?’

  In the end the baby was born beneath the roof of Fox Corner, a boy, and once Sylvie saw him she was unable to discard him so easily. ‘He’s a delightful little thing really,’ she said. Sylvie found all babies delightful.

  Izzie had not been allowed beyond the garden for the remainder of her pregnancy. She was being kept a prisoner, she said, ‘like the Count of Monte Cristo’. She handed the baby over as soon as he was born and showed no more interest in him, as if the whole affair – the pregnancy, the confinement – had been a provoking task that they had coerced her into undertaking and now she had fulfilled her part of the bargain and was free to go. After a fortnight of lying around in bed being waited upon by a disgruntled Bridget she was put on a train back to Hampstead, from whence she was packed off to a finishing school in Lausanne.

  Hugh was right, no one questioned the sudden appearance of this surplus child. Mrs Glover and Bridget were sworn to secrecy, an oath that was sweetened, unknown to Sylvie, with cash. Hugh knew the value of money, he wasn’t a banker for nothing. Dr Fellowes could, one hoped, be relied upon for his professional discretion.

  ‘Roland,’ Sylvie said. ‘I’ve always rather liked that name. The Song of Roland – he was a French knight.’

  ‘Died in battle, I expect?’ Hugh said.

  ‘Most knights do, don’t they?’

  The silver hare spun and shone and shimmered before her eyes. The leaves on the beech danced, the garden budded, blossomed, fruited, without any help from her at all. Rock-a-bye baby, Sylvie sang. Down will fall baby, cradle and all. Ursula was not put off by this threat and continued on her small but dauntless journey, alongside her companion, Roland.