Life After Life (23 page)

Sylvie used to love me, Ursula thought. And now she didn’t. ‘Intact,’ Ursula repeated again. She had never even considered this question. ‘How will he tell?’

‘The blood, of course,’ Sylvie said, rather testily.

Ursula thought of the wisteria wallpaper. The deflowering. She hadn’t known there was a connection. She thought the blood was a wound, not the breaching of the arch.

‘Well, he might not realize,’ Sylvie sighed. ‘I’m sure he won’t be the first husband to be deceived on his wedding night.’

‘Fresh warpaint?’ Hugh said easily when they returned to the table. Ted had inherited Hugh’s smile. Derek and Mrs Oliphant shared the same frown. Ursula wondered what Mr Oliphant had been like. He was seldom mentioned.

‘Vanity, thy name is woman,’ Derek said with what seemed like a forced joviality. He was not, Ursula noticed, as comfortable in social situations as she had first thought. She smiled at him, feeling a new bond. She was marrying a stranger, she realized. (‘Everyone marries a stranger,’ Hugh said.)

‘The word is “frailty”, actually,’ Sylvie said pleasantly. ‘
Frailty, thy name is woman
. Hamlet. Many people misquote it for some reason.’

A shadow passed over Derek’s face but then he laughed it off. ‘I bow to your superior learning, Mrs Todd.’

Their new house in Wealdstone had been chosen for its location, relatively near to the school where Derek taught. He had an inheritance, ‘a very small sum’ from his seldom-mentioned father’s investments. It was a ‘sound’ terrace in Masons Avenue, half-timbered in the Tudor style with leaded lights and a stained-glass panel in the front door depicting a galleon in full sail, although Wealdstone seemed a long way from any ocean. The house had all modern conveniences as well as shops close by, a doctor, a dentist and a park for children to play in, in fact everything a young wife (and mother, ‘one day very soon’, according to Derek) could want.

Ursula could see herself eating breakfast with Derek in the mornings before waving him off to work, could see herself pushing their children in prams then pushchairs then swings, bathing them in the evening and reading bedtime stories in their pretty bedroom. She and Derek would sit quietly in the lounge in the evenings listening to the wireless. He could work on the book he was writing, a school textbook – ‘From Plantagenets to Tudors’. (‘Gosh,’ Hilda said. ‘Sounds thrilling.’) Wealdstone was a long way from Belgravia. Thank goodness.

The rooms this married life was to be carried out in remained in her imagination until after their honeymoon, as Derek had bought and furnished the house without her ever having seen it.

‘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.