Life After Life (48 page)

‘Soon have you out of here,’ Mr Emslie said. ‘Get you a nice cup of tea, eh? How does that sound? Lovely, eh? Fancy one myself. And here’s Miss Todd with something for the pain,’ he continued soothingly to her. Ursula passed him the tiny morphia tablet. He seemed very good at this, it was hard to imagine him in his grocer’s apron, weighing sugar and patting butter.

One wall of the cellar had been sandbagged but most of the sand had spilled out in the explosion and for an alarming hallucinatory second Ursula was on a beach somewhere, she didn’t know where, a hoop was bowling along beside her in a brisk breeze, seagulls squawking overhead, and then she was back, just as suddenly, in the cellar. Lack of sleep, she thought, it really was the devil.

‘About fucking time,’ the woman said, greedily taking the morphia tablet. ‘You’d think you lot were at a fucking tea-party.’ She was young, Ursula realized, and oddly familiar. She was clutching her handbag, a large black affair, as if it were keeping her afloat in the sea of timber. ‘Have you got a fag, either of you?’ With some difficulty, given the awkward space they were in, Mr Emslie produced a squashed packet of Players from his pocket and then, with even more difficulty, extracted a box of matches. Her fingers tapped restlessly on the leather of the bag. ‘Take your time,’ she said sarcastically.

‘Sorry,’ she said after she had drawn deeply on the cigarette. ‘Being in an
endroit
like this has an effect on the nerves, you know.’

‘Renee?’ Ursula said, astonished.

‘What’s it to you?’ she said, returning to her former churlish self.

‘We met in the cloakroom at the Charing Cross Hotel a couple of weeks ago.’

‘I think you’ve mistaken me for someone else,’ she said primly. ‘People are always doing that. I must have one of those faces.’

She took another very long drag on her cigarette and then exhaled slowly and with extraordinary pleasure. ‘You got any more of those little pills?’ she asked. ‘Good black market price for them, I bet.’ She sounded woozy, the morphia kicking in, Ursula supposed, but then the cigarette dropped from her fingers and her eyes rolled back in her head. She started to convulse. Mr Emslie grabbed hold of her hand.

Ursula, glancing at Mr Emslie, caught sight of a colour reproduction of Millais’s
Bubbles
, hanging by a piece of tape from a sandbag behind him. It was a picture she disliked, she disliked all the Pre-Raphaelites with their droopy, drugged-looking women. Hardly the time and place for art criticism, she thought. She had become almost indifferent to death. Her soft soul had crystallized. (Just as well, she thought.) She was a sword tempered in the fire. And again she was somewhere else, a little flicker in time. She was descending a staircase, wisteria was blooming, she was flying out of a window.

Mr Emslie was talking encouragingly to Renee. ‘Come on, Susie, don’t give up on us now. We’ll have you out of here in two shakes of a lamb’s tail, you’ll see. All the lads are working on it. And the girls,’ he added for Ursula’s benefit. Renee had stopped convulsing but now she started to shiver alarmingly and Mr Emslie, more urgently now, said, ‘Come on, Susie, come on, girl, stay awake, there’s a good girl.’

‘Her name
is
Renee,’ Ursula said, ‘even if she denies it.’

‘I call ’em all Susie,’ Mr Emslie said softly. ‘I had a little girl by that name. The diphtheria took her off when she was just a littl’un.’

Renee gave one last great shudder and life disappeared from her half-open eyes.

‘Gone,’ Mr Emslie said sadly. ‘Internal injuries probably.’ He wrote ‘Argyll Road’ on a label in his neat grocer’s hand and tied it to her finger. Ursula removed the handbag from Renee’s rather reluctant grasp and shook its contents out. ‘Her identity card,’ she said, holding it up for Mr Emslie to see. ‘Renee Miller’ it said, indisputably. He added her name to the label.

While Mr Emslie began the complex manoeuvre of turning round in order to make his way back out of the cellar, Ursula picked up the gold cigarette case that had fallen out with the compact and lipstick and French letters and God knows what else that formed the contents of Renee’s handbag. Not a gift but stolen property, she was sure of that. It was a difficult task for Ursula’s imagination to place Renee and Crighton in the same room as each other, let alone the same bed. War did indeed make strange bedfellows of people. He must have picked her up in a hotel somewhere, or perhaps a less salubrious
endroit
. Where had she learned her French? She probably only had a couple of words. Not from Crighton anyway, he thought English was quite enough to rule the world with.

She slipped the cigarette case and the identity card into a pocket.

The debris shifted in a heart-stopping way as they were trying to back out of the cellar (they’d given up on trying to turn round). They remained paralysed, crouched like cats, hardly daring to take a breath for what seemed an eternity. When it felt safe to move again they found that this new arrangement of wreckage had made the barricade impenetrable and they were forced to find another, tortuous exit, creeping on their hands and knees through the shattered base of the building. ‘Doing my back in, this lark is,’ Mr Emslie muttered behind her.

‘Doing my knees in,’ Ursula said. They carried on with weary doggedness. Ursula cheered herself up with the thought of buttered toast, although Phillimore Gardens was out of butter and unless Millie had gone out and queued (unlikely), there was no bread either.

The cellar seemed to be an endless maze and it slowly dawned on Ursula why there were people unaccounted for up above – they were all secretly cached down here. The residents of the house clearly used this part of the cellar as a shelter. The dead here – men, women, children, even a dog – looked as though they had been entombed where they had been sitting. They were completely cloaked in a shell of dust and looked more like sculptures, or fossils. She was reminded of Pompeii or Herculaneum. Ursula had visited both, during her ambitiously titled ‘grand tour’ of Europe. She had been lodged in Bologna where she had made friends with an American girl – Kathy, a gung-ho type – and they had taken a whistle-stop tour – Venice, Florence, Rome, Naples – before Ursula left for France and the final leg of her year abroad.

In Naples, a city that frankly terrified them, they hired a loquacious private guide and spent the longest day of their lives trudging determinedly round the dry, dusty ruins of the lost cities of the Roman Empire beneath a merciless southern sun.

‘Oh, gosh,’ Kathy said as they staggered around a deserted Herculaneum, ‘I wish no one had ever gone to the bother of digging ’em up.’ Their friendship had flared brightly for a short time and fizzled out just as quickly when Ursula went to Nancy.

‘I have spread my wings and learned how to fly,’ she wrote to Pamela after leaving Munich and her hosts, the Brenners. ‘I am quite the sophisticated woman of the world,’ although she was still little more than a fledgling. If the year had taught her one thing it was that after having endured a succession of private students, the last thing she wanted to do was teach.

Instead, on her return – with an eye to entrance into the civil service – she did an intensive shorthand and typing course in High Wycombe, run by a Mr Carver who was later arrested for exposing himself in public. (‘A meat-flasher?’ Maurice said, his lip curling in disgust, and Hugh shouted at him to leave the room and never to use such language in his house again. ‘Infantile,’ he said when Maurice had slammed his way out into the garden. ‘Is he really fit for marriage?’ Maurice had come home to announce his engagement to a girl called Edwina, the eldest daughter of a bishop. ‘Goodness,’ Sylvie said, ‘will we have to genuflect or something?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Maurice said and Hugh said, ‘How dare you speak to your mother like that.’ It was a terrifically bad-tempered visit all round.)

Mr Carver hadn’t been such a bad sort really. He had been very keen on Esperanto, which had seemed an absurd eccentricity at the time but now Ursula thought it might be a good thing to have a universal language, as Latin had once been. Oh, yes, Miss Woolf said, a common language was a wonderful idea, but utterly utopian. All good ideas were, she said sadly.

Ursula had embarked for Europe a virgin, but didn’t return one. She had Italy to thank for that. (‘Well, if one can’t take a lover in Italy where can one take one?’ Millie said.) He, Gianni, was studying for a doctorate in philology at Bologna University and was more grave and serious than Ursula had expected an Italian to be. (In Bridget’s romantic novels, Italians were always dashing but untrustworthy.) Gianni brought a studious solemnity to the occasion and made the rite of passage less embarrassing and awkward than she had feared.

‘Gosh,’ Kathy said, ‘you are bold.’ She reminded Ursula of Pamela. In some ways, not in others – not in her serene denial of Darwin, for example. Kathy, a Baptist, was saving herself for marriage but a few months after she returned to Chicago her mother wrote to Ursula to tell her that Kathy had died in a boating accident. She must have gone through her daughter’s address book and written to everyone in it, one by one. What an awful task. For Hugh, they had simply put a notice in
The Times
. Poor Kathy had saved herself for nothing.
The grave’s a fine and private place, But none I think do there embrace
.

‘Miss Todd?’

‘Sorry, Mr Emslie. It’s like being in a crypt, isn’t it? Full of the ancient dead.’

‘Yes, and I’d quite like to get out before I turn into one of them.’

As she crept gingerly forward, Ursula’s knee pressed on something soft and supple and she recoiled, banging her head on a broken rafter, sending a shower of dust down.

‘You all right?’ Mr Emslie said.

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘Are we stopped for something else?’

‘Hang on.’ She had once stood on a body, recognized the squashy, meat-like quality of it. She supposed she had to look, although God knows she didn’t want to. She shone her torch on what seemed to be a dusty mound of material, scraps of stuff – crochet and ribbons, wool – partly impacted into the earth. It could have been the contents of a sewing basket. But it wasn’t, of course. She peeled back a layer of wool and then another one as if unwrapping a badly packed parcel or a large, unwieldy cabbage. Eventually a small almost unblemished hand, a small star, revealed itself from the compacted mass. She thought she might have found Emil. Better then that his mother was dead rather than knowing about this, she thought.

‘Be careful here, Mr Emslie,’ she said over her shoulder, ‘there’s a baby, try to avoid it.’

‘All right?’ Miss Woolf asked her when they finally emerged like moles. The fire on the other side of the street was almost out now and the street was murky with the dark, the soot, the filth. ‘How many?’ Miss Woolf asked.

‘Quite a few,’ Ursula said.

‘Easy to recover?’

‘Hard to say.’ She handed over Renee’s identity card. ‘There’s a baby down there, bit of a mess, I’m afraid.’

‘There’s tea,’ Miss Woolf said. ‘Go and get yourself some.’

As she made her way, with Mr Emslie, to the mobile canteen she was amazed to spot a dog cowering in a doorway further up the street.

‘I’ll catch up with you,’ she said to Mr Emslie. ‘Get a mug for me, will you? Two sugars.’

It was a small nondescript terrier, whimpering and shaking with fear. Most of the house behind the doorway had disappeared and Ursula wondered if this had been the dog’s home, that it was hoping for some kind of safety or protection and couldn’t think of anywhere else to go. As she approached it, however, it ran off up the street. Dratted dog, she thought, chasing after it. Eventually she caught up with it, snatching it up in her arms before it had a chance to run again. It was trembling all over and she held it close, talking in soothing tones to it, rather as Mr Emslie had to Renee. She pressed her face against its fur (disgustingly dirty but then so was she). It was so small and helpless. ‘Slaughter of the Innocents,’ Miss Woolf said the other day when they heard of a school in the East End taking a direct hit. But wasn’t everyone innocent? (Or were they all guilty?) ‘That buffoon Hitler certainly isn’t,’ Hugh said, the last time they had talked, ‘it’s all down to him, this whole war.’ Was she really never going to see her father again? A sob escaped from her and the dog whined in fear or sympathy, it was hard to say. (There wasn’t a single member of the Todd family – apart from Maurice – who didn’t attribute human emotions to dogs.)

At that moment there was a tremendous noise behind them, the dog tried to bolt again and she had to hold it tightly. When she turned round she saw the gable wall of the building that had been on fire falling down, almost in one piece, the bricks rattling on to the ground in a brutish fashion, just reaching the WVS canteen.

Two of the women from the WVS were killed, as was Mr Emslie. And Tony, their messenger boy who had been scooting past on his bicycle, but not scooting fast enough unfortunately. Miss Woolf knelt down on the jagged, broken brick, oblivious to the pain, and took hold of his hand. Ursula crouched down by her side.

‘Oh, Anthony,’ Miss Woolf said, unable to say anything else. Her hair was escaping from its usual neat bun, making her look quite wild, a figure from a tragedy. Tony was unconscious – a terrible head wound, they had dragged him roughly from beneath the collapsed wall – and Ursula felt they should say something encouraging and not let him be aware of how upset they were. She remembered he was a Scout and started talking to him about the joys of the outdoors, pitching a tent in a field, hearing a running stream nearby, collecting sticks for a fire, watching the mist rise in the morning as breakfast cooked in the open. ‘What fun you’ll have again when the war is over,’ she said.

‘Your mother will be awfully glad to see you come home tonight,’ Miss Woolf said, joining the charade. She stifled a sob with her hand. Tony made no sign of having heard them and they watched as he slowly turned a deathly pale, the colour of thin milk. He had gone.

‘Oh, God,’ Miss Woolf cried. ‘I can’t bear it.’