Life After Life (27 page)

She was. She had become a sensible sort.

At Mr Carver’s college Ursula had proved to have a surprising aptitude for typing and shorthand, although the men who interviewed her for the job in the Home Office, men she would never see again, clearly believed that her proficiency in the Classics would somehow stand her in better stead when opening and closing filing-cabinet drawers and conducting endless searches among a sea of buff-coloured folders. It wasn’t quite the ‘interesting job’ she had envisaged but it kept her attention and over the next ten years she rose slowly through the ranks, in the bridled way that women did. (‘One day a woman will be Prime Minister,’ Pamela said. ‘Maybe even in our lifetime.’) Now Ursula had her own junior clericals to chase down the buff folders for her. She supposed that was progress. Since ’36 she’d been working in the Air Raid Precautions Department.

‘
You’ve
not heard rumours then?’ Pamela said.

‘I’m a lowly squaw, I hear nothing but rumours.’

‘Maurice can’t say what he does,’ Pamela grumbled. ‘Couldn’t possibly talk about what goes on within the “hallowed walls”. He actually used that term – hallowed walls. You would think he had signed the Official Secrets Act with his blood and pledged his soul as warranty.’

‘Oh, well, we all have to do that,’ Ursula said, helping herself to cake. ‘
De rigueur
, don’t you know. Personally, I suspect Maurice just goes around
counting
things.’

‘And feeling very pleased with himself. He’s going to love the war, lots of power and no personal danger.’

‘
Lots
of things to count.’ They both laughed. It struck Ursula that they seemed very merry for people on the brink of dreadful conflict. They were in the garden of Pamela’s house in Finchley, a Saturday afternoon with the tea things set out on a spindly bamboo table. They were eating cake, almond speckled with chopped-up pieces of chocolate, an old recipe of Mrs Glover’s handed down on a piece of paper that was covered in greasy fingerprints. In places, the paper was as transparent as a dirty windowpane.

‘Make the most of it,’ Pamela said, ‘there’ll be no more cake, I expect.’ She fed a piece to Heidi, an unprepossessing mongrel rescued from Battersea. ‘Did you know that people are putting their pets down, thousands of them?’

‘That’s horrible.’

‘As if they weren’t part of the
family
,’ Pamela said, rubbing the top of Heidi’s head. ‘She’s much nicer than the boys. Better behaved too.’

‘How were your evacuees?’

‘Grubby.’ Despite her condition, Pamela had spent most of the morning organizing evacuees at Ealing Broadway while Olive, her mother-in-law, looked after the boys.

‘You would be so much more help to the war effort than someone like Maurice,’ Ursula said. ‘If it were up to me I would make you Prime Minister. You’d make a much better job of it than Chamberlain.’

‘Well, that’s true.’ Pamela put down her tea plate and took up her knitting – something pink and lacy. ‘If it’s a boy I’m just going to
pretend
it’s a girl.’

‘And aren’t
you
going to leave?’ Ursula asked. ‘You’re not going to keep the boys in London, are you? You could go and stay at Fox Corner, I don’t expect the Germans will be much bothered with bombing sleepy hollow.’

‘And stay with Mother? Lord, no. I have a friend from university, Jeanette, a vicar’s daughter, not that that’s relevant, I suppose. There’s a cottage that belonged to her grandmother, up in Yorkshire, Hutton-le-Hole, dot on the map, that kind of place. She’s going up there with her two boys and suggested I join her with my three.’ Pamela had given birth in quick succession to Nigel, Andrew and Christopher. She had taken to motherhood with gusto. ‘Heidi will love it too. It sounds utterly primitive, no electricity, no running water. Wonderful for the boys, they can run around like savages. It’s hard to be a savage in Finchley.’

‘I expect some people manage,’ Ursula said.

‘How’s “the man”?’ Pamela asked. ‘“The Man from the Admiralty”.’

‘You
can
use his name,’ Ursula said, brushing cake crumbs off her skirt. ‘The antirrhinums don’t have ears.’

‘You never know these days. Has
he
said anything?’

Ursula had been involved with Crighton – ‘the Man from the Admiralty’ – for a year now (she dated it from Munich). They had met at an inter-departmental meeting. He was fifteen years older than Ursula, rather dashing and with a vaguely wolfish air that was barely offset by his marriage to an industrious wife (Moira) and their clutch of three girls, all at a private school. ‘I shan’t leave them, no matter what,’ he told her after the first time they had made love in the rather basic quarters of his ‘emergency bolthole’.

‘But I don’t want you to,’ Ursula said, although as a declaration of his intent she thought it might have been better if he had let it precede the act rather than provide its coda.

‘The bolthole’ (she suspected that she was not the first woman to have seen the inside of it at Crighton’s invitation) was a flat provided by the Admiralty for the nights when Crighton stayed in town rather than ‘hiking’ all the way back to Moira and the girls in Wargrave. The bolthole wasn’t his exclusively and when it wasn’t available he ‘trekked out’ to Ursula’s flat in Argyll Road where they spent long evenings in her single bed (he had a sailor’s practical attitude towards confined spaces) or on her sofa, pursuing the ‘delights of the flesh’ as he put it, before he ‘slogged his way’ back to Berkshire. Any journey on land, even a couple of stops on the Tube, had an expeditionary quality for Crighton. He was a naval man at heart, Ursula supposed, and would have been happier sailing a skiff to the Home Counties rather than making his way overland. They did once take a little boat out to Monkey Island and have a picnic on the banks of the river. ‘Like a normal couple,’ he said apologetically.

‘What then, if not love?’ Pamela asked.

‘I
like
him.’

‘I like the man who delivers my groceries,’ Pamela said. ‘But I don’t share my bed with him.’

‘Well, I can assure you he means a good deal more to me than a tradesman.’ They were almost arguing. ‘And he’s not a callow youth,’ she continued for the defence. ‘He’s a proper person, he comes whole, all … ready-made. You know?’

‘Ready-made with a family,’ Pamela said, rather crotchety now. She looked quizzical and said, ‘But doesn’t your heart beat a little faster at the sight of him?’

‘Perhaps a little faster,’ Ursula conceded generously, sidestepping the argument, suspecting that she would never be able to explain the forensics of adultery to Pamela. ‘Who would have thought that out of everyone in our family, you would turn out to be the romantic?’

‘Oh, no, I think that’s Teddy,’ Pamela said. ‘I just like to believe that there are nuts and bolts that hold our society together – especially now – and that marriage is part of that.’

‘Nothing romantic about nuts and bolts.’

‘I admire you, really,’ Pamela said. ‘Being your own woman. Not following the herd and so on. I just don’t want you to be hurt.’

‘Believe me, neither do I. Pax?’

‘Pax,’ Pamela agreed readily. Laughing, she said, ‘My life would be so dull without your salacious reports from the front line. What a deal of vicarious excitement I derive from your love life – or whatever you want to call it.’

There had been nothing salacious about their outing to Monkey Island, they had sat chastely on a tartan blanket and eaten cold chicken and drunk warm red wine. ‘
The blushful Hippocrene
,’ Ursula said and Crighton laughed and said, ‘That sounds suspiciously like literature to me. I have no poetry in me. You should know that.’

‘I do.’

The thing about Crighton was that there always seemed to be more of him than he ever revealed. She had overheard someone in the office refer to him as ‘the Sphinx’ and he did indeed wear an air of reticence that hinted at unexplored depths and suppressed secrets – some childhood harm, some magnificent obsession. His cryptic self, she thought, peeling a hard-boiled egg and dipping it into a little screw of paper that contained salt. Who had packed this picnic – not Crighton, surely? Not Moira, heaven forfend.

He had grown rather remorseful over the clandestine nature of their relationship. She had brought a little excitement into what had become a rather tedious life, he said. He had been at Jutland with Jellicoe, he had ‘seen much’ and now he was ‘little better than a bureaucrat’. He was restless, he said.

‘You’re either about to declare your love for me,’ Ursula said, ‘or tell me that it’s all over.’ There was fruit – peaches nestling inside tissue paper.

‘It’s a fine balance,’ he said, with a rueful smile. ‘I am teetering.’ Ursula laughed, the word didn’t suit him.

He embarked on a tale about Moira, something to do with her life in the village and her need for committee work, and Ursula drifted off, more interested in the discovery of a Bakewell tart that had apparently been magicked from a kitchen somewhere deep in the Admiralty. (‘We’re well looked after,’ he said. Like Maurice, she thought. The privileges of men in power, unavailable to those adrift on the sea of buff.)

If Ursula’s older female colleagues had got wind of the affair, there would have been a stampede for the smelling salts, especially if they had known just who in the Admiralty it was that she was dallying with (Crighton was rather senior). Ursula was good, very good, at keeping secrets.

‘Your reputation for discretion precedes you, Miss Todd,’ Crighton had said when introduced to her.

‘Goodness,’ Ursula said, ‘that makes me sound so dull.’

‘Intriguing, rather. I suspect you would make a good spy.’

‘And how
was
Maurice? In himself?’ Ursula asked.

‘Maurice is very well “in himself”, in that he
is
himself and will never change.’

‘Invitations to Sunday lunch in Surrey never come
my
way.’

‘Count yourself lucky.’

‘In fact I hardly ever see him. You wouldn’t think we worked in the same ministry. He walks the airy corridors of power—’

‘The hallowed walls.’

‘The hallowed walls. And I scurry around in a bunker.’

‘Are you? In a bunker?’

‘Well, it’s above ground. In South Ken, you know – in front of the Geological Museum. Not Maurice, he prefers his Whitehall office to our War Room.’

When she had applied originally for a job in the Home Office, Ursula had rather presumed that Maurice would put in a good word for her but instead he had blustered on about nepotism and having to be seen to be above any suspicion of favouritism, ‘Caesar’s wife and so on,’ he said. ‘And I take it Maurice is Caesar in this conceit, rather than Caesar’s wife?’ Pamela said. ‘Oh, don’t put that idea into my head,’ Ursula laughed. ‘Maurice as a woman, imagine.’

‘Ah, but a
Roman
woman. That would suit him more. What was Coriolanus’s mother called?’

‘Volumnia.’

‘Oh, and I know what I had to tell you – Maurice invited a friend to lunch,’ Pamela said. ‘From his Oxford days, that big American chap. Do you remember?’

‘I do!’ Ursula struggled to come up with the name. ‘Oh, darn, what was he called … something American. He tried to kiss me on my sixteenth birthday.’

‘The swine!’ Pamela laughed. ‘You never said.’

‘Hardly what you want from a first kiss. More like a rugby tackle. He was a bit of a lout.’ Ursula laughed. ‘I think I hurt his pride – or perhaps more than his pride.’

‘Howie,’ Pamela said. ‘Only now he’s Howard – Howard S. Landsdowne III to give him his full title, apparently.’

‘Howie,’ Ursula mused. ‘I had quite forgotten. What’s he doing now?’

‘Something diplomatic. He’s even more secretive than Maurice. At the embassy, Kennedy’s a god to him. I think Howie rather admires old Adolf.’

‘Maurice, too, probably, if he weren’t quite so
foreign
. I saw him once at a Blackshirt meeting.’

‘Maurice? Never! Perhaps he was spying, I can imagine him as an
agent provocateur
. What were
you
doing there?’

‘Oh, you know, espionage, like Maurice. No, really just happenstance.’

‘So many startling revelations for one pot of tea. Are there more to come? Should I brew another pot?’

Ursula laughed. ‘No, I think that’s it.’

Pamela sighed. ‘It’s bloody, isn’t it?’

‘What, about Harold?’

‘Poor man, I suppose he’ll have to stay here. They can’t really call up hospital doctors, can they? They’ll need them if we’re bombed and gassed. We
will
be bombed and gassed, you do know that, don’t you?’

‘Yes, of course,’ Ursula said, as offhand as if they were talking about the weather.

‘What an awful thought.’ Pamela sighed again, abandoning her needles and stretching her arms above her head. ‘It’s such a glorious day. It’s hard to believe this is probably the last ordinary day we’ll have for a long time.’

Ursula had been due to begin her annual leave on Monday. She had planned a week of leisurely day trips – Eastbourne and Hastings or perhaps as far afield as Bath or Winchester – but with war about to be declared it seemed impossible to think of going anywhere. She felt suddenly listless at the idea of what might lie ahead. She had spent the morning on Kensington High Street, stocking up – batteries for her torch, a new hot-water bottle, candles, matches, endless amounts of black paper, as well as tins of baked beans and potatoes, vacuum-packed coffee. She had bought clothes too, a good woollen frock for eight pounds, a green velvet jacket for six, stockings and a pair of nice tan leather brogues that looked made to last. She had felt pleased with herself for resisting a yellow
crêpe de Chine
tea dress, patterned with little black swallows. ‘My winter coat’s only two years old,’ she said to Pamela, ‘it’ll see the war out, surely?’

‘Goodness, I would hope so.’

‘It’s all so horrid.’

‘I know,’ Pamela said, cutting more cake. ‘It’s vile. It makes me so
cross
. Going to war is madness. Have more cake, why don’t you? May as well, while the boys are still at Olive’s. They’ll come in and go through the place like locusts. God knows how we’ll manage with rationing.’