Life After Life (4 page)

The waves weren’t waves at all now, just the surge and tug of a swell that lifted them and then moved on past them. Ursula gripped hard on to Pamela’s hand whenever the swell approached. The water was already up to her waist. Pamela pushed further out into the water, a figurehead on a prow, ploughing through the buffeting waves. The water was up to Ursula’s armpits now and she started to cry and pull on Pamela’s hand, trying to stop her from going any further. Pamela glanced back at her and said, ‘Careful, you’ll make us both fall over,’ and so didn’t see the huge wave cresting behind her. Within a heartbeat, it had crashed over both of them, tossing them around as lightly as though they were leaves.

Ursula felt herself being pulled under, deeper and deeper, as if she were miles out to sea, not within sight of the shore. Her little legs bicycled beneath her, trying to find purchase on the sand. If she could just stand up and fight the waves, but there was no longer any sand to stand on and she began to choke on water, thrashing around in panic. Someone would come, surely? Bridget or Sylvie, and save her. Or Pamela – where was she?

No one came. And there was only water. Water and more water. Her helpless little heart was beating wildly, a bird trapped in her chest. A thousand bees buzzed in the curled pearl of her ear. No breath. A drowning child, a bird dropped from the sky.

Darkness fell.

Snow

11 February 1910

BRIDGET REMOVED THE breakfast tray and Sylvie said, ‘Oh, leave the little snowdrop. Here, put it on my bedside table.’ She kept the baby with her too. The fire was blazing now and the bright snow-light from the window seemed both cheerful and oddly portentous at the same time. The snow was drifting against the walls of the house, pressing in on them, burying them. They were cocooned. She imagined Hugh tunnelling heroically through the snow to reach home. He had been away three days now, looking for his sister, Isobel. Yesterday (how long ago that seemed now) a telegram had arrived from Paris, saying, THE QUARRY HAS GONE TO GROUND STOP AM IN PURSUIT STOP, although Hugh was not really a hunting man. She must send her own telegram. What should she say? Something cryptic. Hugh liked puzzles. WE WERE FOUR STOP YOU ARE GONE BUT WE ARE STILL FOUR STOP (Bridget and Mrs Glover did not count in Sylvie’s tally). Or something more prosaic. BABY HAS ARRIVED STOP ALL WELL STOP. Were they? All well? The baby had nearly died. She had been deprived of air. What if she wasn’t quite right? They had triumphed over death this night. Sylvie wondered when death would seek his revenge.

Sylvie finally fell asleep and dreamed that she had moved to a new house and was looking for her children, roaming the unfamiliar rooms, shouting their names, but she knew they had disappeared for ever and would never be found. She woke with a start and was relieved to see that at least the baby was still by her side in the great white snowfield of the bed. The baby. Ursula. Sylvie had had the name ready, Edward if it had turned out to be a boy. The naming of children was her preserve, Hugh seemed indifferent to what they were called although Sylvie supposed he had his limits. Scheherazade perhaps. Or Guinevere.

Ursula opened her milky eyes and seemed to fix her gaze on the weary snowdrop.
Rock-a-bye baby
, Sylvie crooned. How calm the house was. How deceptive that could be. One could lose everything in the blink of an eye, the slip of a foot. ‘One must avoid dark thoughts at all costs,’ she said to Ursula.

War

June 1914

MR WINTON – ARCHIBALD – had set up his easel on the sand and was attempting to render a seascape in watery marine smears of blue and green – Prussians and Cobalt Blues, Viridian and Terre Verte. He daubed a couple of rather vague seagulls in the sky, sky that was virtually indistinguishable from the waves below. He imagined showing the picture on his return home, saying, ‘In the style of the Impressionists, you know.’

Mr Winton, a bachelor, was by profession a senior clerk in a factory in Birmingham that manufactured pins but was a romantic by nature. He was a member of a cycling club and every Sunday tried to wheel as far away from Birmingham’s smogs as he could, and he took his annual holiday by the sea so that he could breathe hospitable air and think himself an artist for a week.

He thought he might try to put some figures in his painting, it would give it a bit of life and ‘movement’, something his night-school teacher (he took an art class) had encouraged him to introduce into his work. Those two little girls down at the sea’s edge would do. Their sunhats meant he wouldn’t need to try and capture their features, a skill he hadn’t yet quite mastered.

‘Come on, let’s go and jump the waves,’ Pamela said.

‘Oh,’ Ursula said, hanging back. Pamela took her hand and dragged her into the water. ‘Don’t be a silly.’ The closer she got to the water the more Ursula began to panic until she was swamped with fear but Pamela laughed and splashed her way into the water and she could only follow. She tried to think of something that would make Pamela want to return to the beach – a treasure map, a man with a puppy – but it was too late. A huge wave rose, curling above their heads, and came crashing over them, sending them down, down into the watery world.

Sylvie was startled to look up from her book and see a man, a stranger, walking towards her along the sand with one of her girls tucked under each arm, as if he was carrying geese or chickens. The girls were sopping wet and tearful. ‘Went out a bit too far,’ the man said. ‘But they’ll be fine.’

They treated their rescuer, a Mr Winton, a clerk (‘senior’) to tea and cakes in a hotel that overlooked the sea. ‘It’s the least I can do,’ Sylvie said. ‘You have ruined your boots.’

‘It was nothing,’ Mr Winton said modestly.

‘Oh, no, it was most definitely
something
,’ Sylvie said.

‘Glad to be back?’ Hugh beamed, greeting them on the station platform.

‘Are you glad to have us back?’ Sylvie said, somewhat combatively.

‘There’s a surprise for you at home,’ Hugh said. Sylvie didn’t like surprises, they all knew that.

‘Guess,’ Hugh said.

They guessed a new puppy which was a far cry from the Petter engine that Hugh had had installed in the cellar. They all trooped down the steep stone staircase and stared at its oily throbbing presence, its rows of glass accumulators. ‘Let there be light,’ Hugh said.

It would be a long time before any of them were able to snap a light switch without expecting to be blown up. Light was all it could manage, of course. Bridget had hoped for a vacuum cleaner to replace her Ewbank but there wasn’t enough voltage. ‘Thank goodness,’ Sylvie said.

July 1914

FROM THE OPEN French windows Sylvie watched Maurice erecting a makeshift tennis net, which mostly seemed to involve whacking everything in sight with a mallet. Small boys were a mystery to Sylvie. The satisfaction they gained from throwing sticks or stones for hours on end, the obsessive collection of inanimate objects, the brutal destruction of the fragile world around them, all seemed at odds with the men they were supposed to become.

Noisy chatter in the hallway announced the jaunty arrival of Margaret and Lily, once schoolfriends and now infrequent acquaintances, bearing gaily beribboned gifts for the new baby, Edward.

Margaret was an artist, militantly unmarried, conceivably someone’s mistress, a scandalous possibility that Sylvie hadn’t mentioned to Hugh. Lily was a Fabian, a society suffragette who risked nothing for her beliefs. Sylvie thought of women being restrained while tubes were pushed down their throats and raised a reassuring hand to her own lovely white neck. Lily’s husband, Cavendish (the name of a hotel, not a man, surely), had once cornered Sylvie at a teadance, pressing her up against a pillar with his goatish, cigar-scented body, suggesting something so outrageous that even now she felt hot with embarrassment at the thought of it.

‘Ah, the fresh air,’ Lily exclaimed when Sylvie led them out into the garden. ‘It’s so
rural
here.’ They cooed like doves – or pigeons, that lesser species – over the pram, admiring the baby almost as much as they applauded Sylvie’s svelte figure.

‘I’ll ring for tea,’ Sylvie said, already tired.

They had a dog. A big, brindled French mastiff called Bosun. ‘The name of Byron’s dog,’ Sylvie said. Ursula had no idea who the mysterious Byron was but he showed no interest in reclaiming his dog from them. Bosun had soft loose furry skin that rolled beneath Ursula’s fingers and his breath smelt of the scrag-end that Mrs Glover, to her disgust, had to stew for him. He was a good dog, Hugh said, a responsible dog, the kind that pulled people from burning buildings and rescued them from drowning.

Pamela liked to dress Bosun up in an old bonnet and shawl and pretend that he was her baby, although they had a real baby now – a boy, Edward. Everyone called him Teddy. Their mother seemed taken by surprise by the new baby. ‘I don’t know where he came from.’ Sylvie had a laugh like a hiccup. She was taking tea on the lawn with two schoolfriends ‘from her London days’ who had come to inspect the new arrival. All three of them wore lovely flimsy dresses and big straw hats and sat in the wicker chairs, drinking tea and eating Mrs Glover’s sherry cake. Ursula and Bosun sat on the grass a polite distance away, hoping for crumbs.

Maurice had put up a net and was trying, not very enthusiastically, to teach Pamela how to play tennis. Ursula was occupied in making a daisy-chain coronet for Bosun. She had stubby, clumsy fingers. Sylvie had the long, deft fingers of an artist or a pianist. She played on the piano in the drawing room (‘Chopin’). Sometimes they sang rounds after tea but Ursula never managed to sing her part at the right time. (‘What a dolt,’ Maurice said. ‘Practice makes perfect,’ Sylvie said.) When she opened the lid of the piano there was a smell that was like the insides of old suitcases. It reminded Ursula of her grandmother, Adelaide, who spent her days swathed in black, sipping Madeira.

The new arrival was tucked away in the huge baby carriage under the big beech tree. They had all been occupants of this magnificence but none of them could remember it. A little silver hare dangled from the hood and the baby was cosy beneath a coverlet ‘embroidered by nuns’, although no one ever explained who these nuns were and why they had spent their days embroidering small yellow ducks.

‘Edward,’ one of Sylvie’s friends said. ‘Teddy?’

‘Ursula and Teddy. My two little bears,’ Sylvie said and laughed her hiccup laugh. Ursula wasn’t at all sure about being a bear. She would rather be a dog. She lay down on her back and stared up at the sky. Bosun groaned mightily and stretched out beside her. Swallows were knifing recklessly through the blue. She could hear the delicate chink of cups on saucers, the creak and clatter of a lawn-mower being pushed by Old Tom in the Coles’ garden next door, and could smell the peppery-sweet perfume of the pinks in the border and the heady green of new-mown grass.

‘Ah,’ said one of Sylvie’s London friends, stretching out her legs and revealing graceful white-stockinged ankles. ‘A long, hot summer. Isn’t it delicious?’

The peace was broken by a disgusted Maurice throwing his racquet on to the grass where it bounced with a thump and a squeak. ‘I can’t teach her – she’s a girl!’ he yelled and stalked off into the shrubbery where he began to bash things with a stick, although in his head he was in the jungle with a machete. He was going to boarding school after the summer. It was the same school that Hugh had been to, and his father before
him
. (‘And so on, back to the Conquest probably,’ Sylvie said.) Hugh said it would be ‘the making’ of Maurice but he seemed quite made already to Ursula. Hugh said when he first went to the school he cried himself to sleep every night and yet he seemed more than happy to subject Maurice to the same torture. Maurice puffed out his chest and declared that
he
wouldn’t cry.

(‘And what about us?’ a worried Pamela asked. ‘Shall we have to go away to school?’

‘Not unless you’re very naughty,’ Hugh said, laughing.)

A pink-cheeked Pamela balled up her fists and, planting them on her hips, roared, ‘You’re such a pig!’ after Maurice’s indifferent, retreating back. She made ‘pig’ sound like a much worse word than it was. Pigs were quite nice.