Life After Life (11 page)

She took Ursula back into bed with her and the baby rooted around for her nipple. Sylvie believed in wet-nursing her own children. The idea of glass bottles and rubber teats seemed unnatural somehow but that didn’t mean that she didn’t feel like a cow being milked. The baby was slow and floundering, confounded by the new. How long before breakfast, Sylvie wondered?

Armistice

11 November 1918

DEAR BRIDGET, I have locked and bolted the doors. There is a gang of thieves
– should the ‘i’ come before the ‘e’? Ursula chewed the end of her pencil until it splintered. Undecided, she crossed out ‘thieves’ and wrote ‘robbers’ instead.
There is a gang of robbers in the village. Please can you stay with Clarence’s mother
? For good measure she added
and also I have a headache so don’t knock
. She signed it
Mrs Todd
. Ursula waited until there was no one in the kitchen and then went outside and pinned the note to the back door.

‘What are you doing?’ Mrs Glover asked as she came back inside. Ursula jumped, Mrs Glover could move as quietly as a cat.

‘Nothing,’ Ursula said. ‘Looking to see if Bridget was coming yet.’

‘Heavens,’ Mrs Glover said, ‘she’ll be back on the last train, not for hours yet. Now shift yourself, it’s long past your bedtime. It’s Liberty Hall here.’

Ursula didn’t know what Liberty Hall meant but it sounded like rather a good place to live.

Next morning there was no Bridget in the house. Nor, more puzzlingly, was there any sign of Pamela. Ursula felt overwhelmed by a relief as inexplicable as the panic that had led her to write the note the previous night.

‘There was a silly note on the door last night, a prank,’ Sylvie said. ‘Bridget was locked out. You know, it looks just like your handwriting, Ursula, I don’t suppose you can explain that?’

‘No, I can’t,’ Ursula said stoutly.

‘I sent Pamela to Mrs Dodds to fetch Bridget home,’ Sylvie said.

‘You sent
Pamela
?’ Ursula echoed in horror.

‘Yes, Pamela.’

‘Pamela is with
Bridget
?’

‘Yes,’ Sylvie said. ‘Bridget. What is the matter with you?’

Ursula ran out of the house. She could hear Sylvie shouting after her but she didn’t stop. She had never run so fast in all of her eight years, not even when Maurice was chasing her to give her a Chinese burn. She ran up the lane in the direction of Mrs Dodds’s cottage, splashing through the mud so that by the time Pamela and Bridget were in sight ahead of her she was filthy from head to toe.

‘What
is
the matter?’ Pamela asked anxiously. ‘Is it Daddy?’ Bridget made the sign of the cross. Ursula threw her arms round Pamela and collapsed in tears.

‘Whatever is it?
Tell
me,’ Pamela said, caught up now in the dread.

‘I don’t know,’ Ursula sobbed. ‘I just felt so worried about you.’

‘What a goose,’ Pamela said affectionately, hugging her.

‘I have a bit of a headache,’ Bridget said. ‘Let’s get back to the house.’

Darkness soon fell again.

Snow

11 February 1910

‘A MIRACLE, SAYS the Fellowes feller,’ Bridget said to Mrs Glover as they toasted the new baby’s arrival over their morning teapot. As far as Mrs Glover was concerned miracles belonged inside the pages of the Bible, not amid the carnage of birth. ‘Maybe she’ll stop at three,’ she said.

‘Now why would she be going and doing that when she has such lovely healthy babies and there’s enough money in the house for anything they want?’

Mrs Glover, ignoring the argument, heaved herself up from the table and said, ‘Well, I must get on with Mrs Todd’s breakfast.’ She took a bowl of kidneys soaking in milk from the pantry and commenced removing the fatty white membrane, like a caul. Bridget glanced at the milk, white marbled with red, and felt uncharacteristically squeamish.

Dr Fellowes had already breakfasted – on bacon, black pudding, fried bread and eggs – and left. Men from the village had arrived and tried to dig his car out and when that had failed someone ran for George and he had come to the rescue, riding on the back of one of his big Shires. St George slipped briefly into Mrs Glover’s mind and hastily slipped out again as being too fanciful. With not inconsiderable difficulty, Dr Fellowes was hoisted up behind Mrs Glover’s son and the pair had ridden off, ploughing snow, not earth.

A farmer had been trampled by a bull, but was alive still. Mrs Glover’s own father, a dairyman, had been killed by a cow. Mrs Glover, young but doughty and not yet acquainted with Mr Glover, had come across her father lying dead in the milking shed. She could still see the blood on the straw and the surprised look on the face of the cow, her father’s favourite, Maisie.

Bridget warmed her hands on the teapot and Mrs Glover said, ‘Well, I’d better to see to my kidneys. Find me a flower for Mrs Todd’s breakfast tray.’

‘A flower?’ Bridget puzzled, looking through the window at the snow. ‘In this weather?’

Armistice

11 November 1918

‘OH, CLARENCE,’ SYLVIE said, opening the back door. ‘Bridget’s had a bit of an accident, I’m afraid. She tripped and fell over the step. Just a sprained ankle, I think, but I doubt that she’ll be able to go up to London for the celebrations.’

Bridget was sipping a brandy, sitting in Mrs Glover’s chair, a big high-backed Windsor, by the stove. Her ankle was propped up on a stool, and she was enjoying the drama of her tale.

‘I was just coming in the kitchen door, so I was. I’d been hanging out washing although I don’t know why I bothered because it started to rain again, when I felt hands shoving me in the back. And then there I was, sprawled all over the ground, in agony. Small hands,’ she added. ‘Like the hands of a little ghost child.’

‘Oh, really,’ Sylvie said. ‘There are no ghosts in this house, children or otherwise. Did you see anything, Ursula? You were in the garden, weren’t you?’

‘Oh, the silly girl just tripped,’ Mrs Glover said. ‘You know how clumsy she is. Well, anyway,’ she said with some satisfaction, ‘that’s put paid to your London high jinks.’

‘Not so,’ Bridget said stoutly. ‘I’m not missing this day for anything. Come on, Clarence. Give me your arm. I can
hobble
.’

Darkness, and so on.

Snow

11 February 1910

‘“URSULA”, BEFORE YOU ask,’ Mrs Glover said, dumping spoonfuls of porridge into bowls in front of Maurice and Pamela, who were sitting at the big wooden table in the kitchen.

‘Ursula,’ Bridget said appreciatively. ‘That’s a good name. Did she like the snowdrop?’

Armistice

11 November 1918

EVERYTHING FAMILIAR SOMEHOW. ‘It’s called
déjà vu
,’ Sylvie said. ‘It’s a trick of the mind. The mind is a fathomless mystery.’ Ursula was sure that she could recall lying in the baby carriage beneath the tree. ‘No,’ Sylvie said, ‘no one can remember being so small,’ yet Ursula remembered the leaves, like great green hands, waving in the breeze and the silver hare that hung from the carriage hood, turning and twisting in front of her face. Sylvie sighed. ‘You do have a very vivid imagination, Ursula.’ Ursula didn’t know whether this was a compliment or not but it was certainly true that she often felt confused between what was real and what was not. And the terrible fear – fearful terror – that she carried around inside her. The dark landscape within. ‘Don’t dwell on such things,’ Sylvie said sharply when Ursula tried to explain. ‘Think sunny thoughts.’

And sometimes, too, she knew what someone was about to say before they said it or what mundane incident was about to occur – if a dish was about to be dropped or an apple thrown through a glasshouse, as if these things had happened many times before. Words and phrases echoed themselves, strangers seemed like old acquaintances.

‘Everyone feels peculiar from time to time,’ Sylvie said. ‘Remember, dear – sunny thoughts.’

Bridget lent a more willing ear, declaring that Ursula ‘had the second sight’. There were doorways between this world and the next, she said, but only certain people could pass through them. Ursula didn’t think that she wanted to be one of those people.

Last Christmas morning, Sylvie had handed Ursula a box, nicely wrapped and ribboned, the contents quite invisible, and said, ‘Happy Christmas, dear,’ and Ursula said, ‘Oh, good, a dining set for the dolls’ house,’ and was immediately in trouble for having sneaked a preview of the presents.

‘But I never,’ she insisted obstinately to Bridget later in the kitchen, where Bridget was trying to affix little white-paper crowns on the footless legs of the Christmas goose. (The goose made Ursula think of a man in the village, a boy really, who had had both his feet blown off at Cambrai.) ‘I didn’t look, I just
knew
.’

‘Ah, I know,’ Bridget said. ‘For sure, you have the sixth sense.’

Mrs Glover, wrestling with the plum pudding, snorted her disapproval. She was of the opinion that five senses were too many, let alone adding on another one.

They were shut out in the garden for the morning. ‘So much for victory celebrations,’ Pamela said as they sheltered from the drizzle beneath the beech tree. Only Trixie was having a good time. She loved the garden, mainly because of the number of rabbits which, despite the best attentions of the foxes, continued to enjoy all the benefits of the vegetable garden. George Glover had given two babies to Ursula and Pamela before the war. Ursula convinced Pamela that they had to keep them indoors and they hid them in their bedroom cupboard and fed them with an eye-dropper they found in the medicine cabinet until they hopped out one day and frightened Bridget out of her wits.