Life After Life (49 page)

‘But bear it we must,’ Ursula said, wiping away the snot and the tears and filth from her cheeks with the back of her hand and thinking how once this exchange would have been the other way round.

‘Bloody fools,’ Fred Smith said angrily, ‘what did they go and park the bloody canteen there for? Right next to the gable end?’

‘They didn’t know,’ Ursula said.

‘Well, they should have bloody realized.’

‘Well then someone should have bloody told them,’ Ursula said, her anger flaring up suddenly. ‘Like a bloody fireman, for instance.’

It was first light by now and they heard the all-clear sound.

‘I thought I saw you earlier, and then I decided I’d imagined you,’ Ursula said, making peace. He was angry because they were dead, not because they were stupid.

She felt as though she were in a dream, drifting away from reality. ‘I’m as good as dead,’ she said, ‘I have to sleep before I go mad. I live just round the corner,’ she added. ‘Lucky it wasn’t our flat. Lucky, too, that I ran after this dog.’ One of the rescue squad had given her a piece of rope to tie round the dog’s neck and she had hitched it to a charred post sticking out of the ground. She was reminded of the arms and legs the stretcher-bearer had been harvesting earlier. ‘I suppose the circumstances dictate that’s what I should call him – Lucky, even though it’s a bit of a cliché. He saved me, you know, I would have been drinking my tea there if I hadn’t gone after him.’

‘Bloody fools,’ he said again. ‘Shall I walk you home?’

‘That would be nice,’ Ursula said but she didn’t lead him ‘round the corner’ to Phillimore Gardens, instead they walked wearily hand in hand, like children, the dog trotting beside them, along Kensington High Street, almost deserted at this time in the morning, with only a slight diversion for a gas main that was on fire.

Ursula knew where they were going, it was inevitable somehow.

In Izzie’s bedroom there was a framed picture on the wall opposite her bed. It was one of the original illustrations from the first
Adventures of Augustus
, a line drawing depicting a cheeky boy and his dog. It verged on the cartoon – the schoolboy cap, the gob-stoppered cheek of Augustus and the rather idiotic-looking Westie who bore no resemblance to the real-life Jock.

The picture was very much at odds with how Ursula remembered this room before it was mothballed – a feminine boudoir, full of ivory silks and pale satins, expensive cut-glass bottles and enamelled brushes. A lovely Aubusson carpet had been rolled up tightly and tied with thick string and left against a wall. There had been one of the lesser Impressionists on another of the walls, acquired, Ursula suspected, more for the way it matched the décor than for any great love of the artist. Ursula wondered if Augustus was there to remind Izzie of her success. The Impressionist had been packed away somewhere safe but this illustration seemed to have been forgotten about, or perhaps Izzie didn’t care so much for it any more. Whatever the reason, it had sustained a diagonal crack from one corner of the glass to the other. Ursula recalled the night that she and Ralph had been in the wine cellar, the night that Holland House was bombed, perhaps it had sustained the damage then.

Izzie had, sensibly, chosen not to stay at Fox Corner with ‘the grieving widow’ as she referred to Sylvie, as ‘we shall fight like cats and dogs’. Instead, she had decamped to Cornwall, to a house on top of a cliff (‘like Manderley, terrifically wild and romantic, no Mrs Danvers though, thank goodness’), and had started ‘churning out’ an
Adventures of Augustus
comic strip for one of the popular dailies. How much more interesting, Ursula thought, if she had allowed her Augustus to grow up, as Teddy had done.

A buttery, unseasonal sun was trying hard to nudge its way through the thick velvet curtains.
Why dost thou thus, / Through windows, and through curtains, call on us
? she thought. If she could go back in time and take a lover from history it would be Donne. Not Keats, the knowledge of his untimely death would colour everything quite wretchedly. That was the problem with time travel, of course (apart from the impossibility) – one would always be a Cassandra, spreading doom with one’s foreknowledge of events. It was quite wearyingly relentless but the only way that one could go was forward.

She could hear a bird singing outside the window, even though it was November now. The birds were probably as confounded as people were by the Blitz. What did all the explosions do to them? Kill a great many, she supposed, their poor hearts simply giving out with shock or the little lungs bursting with the pressure waves. They must drop from the sky like weightless stones.

‘You look thoughtful,’ Fred Smith said. He was lying, one arm behind his head, smoking a cigarette.

‘And you look strangely at home,’ she said.

‘I am,’ he grinned and leaned forward to wrap his arms around her waist and kiss the back of her neck. They were both filthy, as if they had toiled all night in a coal mine. She recalled how sooty they had been when she had journeyed on the footplate that night. The last time she had seen Hugh alive.

There was no hot water in Melbury Road, no water at all, nor electricity, everything turned off for the duration. In the dark, they had crawled under the dustsheet on Izzie’s bare mattress and fallen into a sleep that mimicked death. Some hours later they had both woken up at the same time and made love. It was the kind of love (lust, to be honest about it) that survivors of disasters must practise – or people who are anticipating disaster – free of all restraint, savage at times and yet strangely tender and affectionate. A strain of melancholy ran through it. Like Herr Zimmerman’s Bach sonata it had unsettled her soul, disjointed her brain and body. She tried to recall another line from Marvell, was it in ‘A Dialogue Between the Soul and Body’, something about
bolts of bones
and fetters and manacles but it wouldn’t come. It seemed harsh when there was so much soft skin and flesh in this abandoned (in all ways) bed.

‘I was thinking of Donne,’ she said. ‘You know –
Busy old foole, unruly Sun
.’ No, she supposed, he probably didn’t know.

‘Oh?’ he said, indifferently. Worse than indifferent really.

She was taken off guard by the sudden memory of the grey ghosts in the cellar and of kneeling on the baby. Then for a second she was somewhere else, not a cellar in Argyll Road, not in Izzie’s bedroom in Holland Park but some strange limbo. Falling, falling—

‘Cigarette?’ Fred Smith offered. He lit another one from the stub of his first and handed it to her. She took it and said, ‘I don’t really smoke.’

‘I don’t really pick up strange women and fuck them in posh houses.’

‘How Lawrentian. And I’m not strange, we’ve known each other since we were children, more or less.’

‘Not like this.’

‘I should hope not.’ She was beginning to dislike him already. ‘I have no idea what time it is,’ she said. ‘But I can offer you some very good wine for breakfast. It’s all there is, I’m afraid.’

He looked at his wristwatch and said, ‘We’ve missed breakfast. It’s three o’clock in the afternoon.’

The dog nudged itself through the door, its paws pitter-pattering on the bare wooden boards. It jumped on the bed and gazed intently at Ursula. ‘Poor thing,’ she said, ‘it must be starving.’

‘Fred Smith? What was he like? Do tell!’

‘Disappointing.’

‘How? In bed?’

‘Gosh, no, not that at all. I’ve never … like that, you know. I think I thought it would be romantic. No, that’s the wrong word, a silly word. “Soulful” perhaps.’

‘Transcendent?’ Millie offered.

‘Yes, that’s it. I was looking for transcendence.’

‘I imagine it finds you, rather than the other way round. It’s a tall order for poor old Fred.’

‘I had an
idea
of him,’ Ursula said, ‘but the idea wasn’t him. Perhaps I wanted to fall in love.’

‘And instead you had jolly good sex. Poor you!’

‘You’re right, unfair of me to expect. Oh, God, I think I was an awful snob with him. I was quoting Donne. Am I a snob, do you think?’

‘Awful. You do reek, you know,’ Millie said cheerfully. ‘Cigarettes, sex, bombs, God knows what else. Shall I run you a bath?’

‘Oh, yes, please, that would be lovely.’

‘And while you’re at it,’ Millie said, ‘you can take that ruddy dog in the bath with you. He smells to high heaven. But he is kinda cute,’ she said, imitating an American accent (rather badly).

Ursula sighed and stretched. ‘You know I really,
really
have had enough of being bombed.’

‘The war’s not going away any time soon, I’m afraid,’ Millie said.

May 1941

MILLIE WAS RIGHT. The war went on and on. Into that dreadfully cold winter, and then there was the awful raid on the City at the end of the year. Ralph had helped to save St Paul’s from the fire. All those lovely Wren churches, Ursula thought. They had been built because of the last Great Fire, now they were gone.

The rest of the time they did the things that everyone of their kind did. They went to the cinema, they went dancing, they went to the lunchtime concerts in the National Gallery. They ate and drank and made love. Not ‘fucking’. That wasn’t Ralph’s style at all. ‘Very Lawrentian,’ she had said coolly to Fred Smith – she supposed he had no idea what she was talking about – but the crude word had jarred her horribly. She was used to hearing it at incidents, it was a vital constituent of the heavy rescue squad’s vocabulary, but not in the context of
herself
. She tried saying the word to her bathroom mirror but it felt shameful.

‘Where on earth did you get it?’ he asked.

Ursula had never seen him so dumbfounded. Crighton weighed the gold cigarette case in his hand. ‘I thought I’d lost it for ever.’

‘Do you really want to know?’

‘Yes, of course I do,’ Crighton said. ‘Why the mystery?’

‘Does the name Renee Miller mean anything to you?’

He frowned, thinking, and then shook his head. ‘Afraid not. Should it?’

‘You probably paid her for sex. Or bought her a nice dinner. Or just gave her a good time.’

‘Oh,
that
Renee Miller,’ he laughed. After a couple of beats of silence, he said, ‘No, really, the name means nothing. And anyway, I don’t think I have ever
paid
a woman for sex.’

‘You’re in the navy,’ she pointed out.

‘Well, not for a very,
very
long time then. But thank you,’ he said, ‘you know the cigarette case meant a lot to me. My father—’

‘Gave it to you after Jutland, I know.’

‘Am I boring you?’

‘No. Shall we go somewhere? The bolthole? Shall we
fuck
?’

He burst out laughing. ‘If you want.’

He cared less ‘for the niceties’ these days, Crighton said. These niceties seemed to include Moira and the girls and they soon resumed their furtive affair, although less furtive now. He was so different to Ralph that it hardly seemed like infidelity to her. (‘Oh, what a beguiling argument!’ Millie said.) She hardly saw Ralph now anyway and it seemed to be a mutual kind of waning.

Teddy read the words on the Cenotaph. ‘
The Glorious Dead
. Do you think they are? Glorious?’ he asked.

‘Well, they’re certainly dead,’ Ursula said. ‘But the “glorious” bit is to make
us
feel better, I expect.’

‘I don’t suppose the dead care about anything much,’ Teddy said. ‘I think when you’re dead you’re dead. I don’t believe there’s anything beyond, do you?’

‘I might have done before the war,’ Ursula said, ‘before I saw a lot of dead bodies. But they just look like so much rubbish, thrown away.’ (She thought of Hugh saying, ‘Just put me out with the dustbin.’) ‘It doesn’t seem as though their souls have flown.’

‘I shall probably die for England,’ Teddy said. ‘And there’s a chance you might too. Is it a good enough cause?’

‘I think so. Daddy said he would rather we were alive and cowards than dead and heroes. I don’t think he meant it, it wasn’t his style to shirk responsibility. What is it that it says on the war memorial in the village?
For your tomorrow we gave our today
. That’s what your lot are doing, giving up everything, it doesn’t seem right somehow.’

Ursula thought that she would rather die for Fox Corner than ‘England’. For meadow and copse and the stream that ran through the bluebell wood. Well, that
was
England, wasn’t it? The blessed plot.

‘I am a patriot,’ she said. ‘I surprise myself with it although I don’t know why. What does it say on Edith Cavell’s statue, the one by St Martin’s church?’

‘
Patriotism is not enough
,’ Teddy supplied.

‘Do you think that really?’ she said. ‘Personally, I think it’s more than enough.’ She laughed and they linked arms as they walked down Whitehall. There was quite a lot of bomb damage. Ursula pointed out the Cabinet War Rooms to Teddy. ‘I know a girl who works in there,’ she said. ‘Sleeps in a cupboard, more or less. I don’t like bunkers and cellars and basements.’

‘I worry about you a lot,’ Teddy said.

‘I worry about
you
,’ she said. ‘And none of that worrying has done either of us any good.’ She sounded like Miss Woolf.

Teddy (‘Pilot Officer Todd’) had survived his time in an OTU in Lincolnshire, flying Whitleys, and in a week or so was due to join a Heavy Conversion Unit in Yorkshire and learn how to fly the new Halifaxes and start his first tour of duty proper.

Only half of all bomber crews survived their first tour of duty, the girl in the Air Ministry said.

(‘Aren’t the odds the same every time they go up?’ Ursula said. ‘Isn’t that how odds work?’

‘Not in the case of bomber crews,’ the girl from the Air Ministry said.)

Teddy was walking her back to the office after lunch, she had taken a long hour. Things were not quite as hectic as they had been.

They had planned on somewhere swanky but ended up in a British Restaurant and dined on roast beef and plum pie and custard. The plums were tinned, of course. They enjoyed all of it though.