Life After Life (5 page)

‘Pammy,’ Sylvie said mildly. ‘You sound like a fishwife.’

Ursula edged nearer to the source of cake.

‘Oh, come here,’ one of the women said to her, ‘let me look at you.’ Ursula tried to shy away but was held firmly in place by Sylvie. ‘She’s quite pretty, isn’t she?’ Sylvie’s friend said. ‘She takes after you, Sylvie.’

‘Fish have wives?’ Ursula said to her mother and Sylvie’s friends laughed, lovely bubbling laughs. ‘What a funny little thing,’ one of them said.

‘Yes, she’s a real hoot,’ Sylvie said.

‘Yes, she’s a real hoot,’ Sylvie said.

‘Children,’ Margaret said, ‘they are droll, aren’t they?’

They are so much more than that, Sylvie thought, but how do you explain the magnitude of motherhood to someone who has no children? Sylvie felt positively matronly in her present company, the friends of her brief girlhood curtailed by the relief of marriage.

Bridget came out with the tray and started to take away the tea things. In the mornings Bridget wore a striped print dress for housework but in the afternoons she changed into a black dress with white cuffs and collar and a matching white apron and little cap. She had been elevated out of the scullery. Alice had left to get married and Sylvie had engaged a girl from the village, Marjorie, a boss-eyed thirteen-year-old, to help with the rough work. (‘We couldn’t get by with just two of them?’ Hugh queried mildly. ‘Bridget and Mrs G? It’s not as if they’re running a mansion.’

‘No, we can’t,’ Sylvie said and that was the end of that.)

The little white cap was too big for Bridget and was forever slipping over her eyes, like a blindfold. On her way back across the lawn she was suddenly blinkered by the cap and tripped, a music-hall tumble that she rescued just in time and the only casualties were the silver sugar bowl and tongs that went shooting through the air, lumps of sugar scattering like blind dice across the green of the lawn. Maurice laughed extravagantly at Bridget’s misfortune, and Sylvie said, ‘Maurice, stop playing the fool.’

She watched as Bosun and Ursula picked up the jettisoned sugar lumps, Bosun with his big pink tongue, Ursula, eccentrically, with the tricky tongs. Bosun swallowed his quickly without chewing. Ursula sucked hers slowly, one by one. Sylvie suspected that Ursula was destined to be the odd one out. An only child herself, she was frequently disturbed by the complexity of sibling relationships among her own children.

‘You should come up to London,’ Margaret said suddenly. ‘Stay with me for a few days. We could have such fun.’

‘But the children,’ Sylvie said. ‘The baby. I can hardly leave them.’

‘Why not?’ Lily said. ‘Your nanny can manage for a few days, surely?’

‘But I have no nanny,’ Sylvie said. Lily cast her eyes around the garden as if she was looking for a nanny lurking in the hydrangeas. ‘Nor do I want one,’ Sylvie added. (Or did she?) Motherhood was her responsibility, her destiny. It was, lacking anything else (and what else could there be?), her life. The future of England was clutched to Sylvie’s bosom. Replacing her was not a casual undertaking, as if her absence meant little more than her presence. ‘And I am feeding the baby myself,’ she added. Both women seemed astonished. Lily unconsciously clasped a hand to her own bosom as if to protect it from assault.

‘It’s what God intended,’ Sylvie said, even though she hadn’t believed in God since the loss of Tiffin. Hugh rescued her, striding across the lawn like a man with a purpose. He laughed and said, ‘What’s going on here then?’ picking up Ursula and tossing her casually in the air, only stopping when she started to choke on a sugar lump. He smiled at Sylvie and said, ‘Your friends,’ as if she might have forgotten who they were.

‘Friday evening,’ Hugh said, depositing Ursula back on the grass, ‘the working man’s labours are over and I believe the sun is officially over the yardarm. Would you lovely ladies like to move on to something stronger than tea? Gin slings perhaps?’ Hugh had four younger sisters and felt comfortable with women. That in itself was enough to charm them. Sylvie knew his instincts were to chaperone, not to court, but she did occasionally wonder about his popularity and where it might lead. Or, indeed, have already led.

A détente was brokered between Maurice and Pamela. Sylvie asked Bridget to drag a table out on to the small but useful terrace so that the children could eat their tea outside – herring roe on toast and a pink shape that was barely set and quivered without restraint. The sight of it made Sylvie feel slightly queasy. ‘Nursery food,’ Hugh said with relish, observing his children eating.

‘Austria has declared war on Serbia,’ Hugh said conversationally and Margaret said, ‘How silly. I spent a wonderful weekend in Vienna last year. At the Imperial, do you know it?’

‘Not intimately,’ Hugh said.

Sylvie knew it but did not say so.

The evening turned into gossamer. Sylvie, drifting gently on a mist of alcohol, suddenly remembered her father’s cognac-induced demise and clapped her hands as if killing a small annoying fly and said, ‘Time for bed, children,’ and watched as Bridget pushed the heavy pram awkwardly across the grass. Sylvie sighed and Hugh helped her up from her chair, bussing her cheek once she was on her feet.

Sylvie propped open the tiny skylight window in the baby’s stuffy room. They called it the ‘nursery’ but it was no more than a box tucked into a corner of the eaves, airless in summer and freezing in winter, and thereby totally unsuitable for a tender infant. Like Hugh, Sylvie considered that children should be toughened up early, the better to take the blows in later life. (The loss of a nice house in Mayfair, a beloved pony, a faith in an omniscient deity.) She sat on the button-backed velvet nursing chair and fed Edward. ‘Teddy,’ she murmured fondly as he gulped and choked his way to sated sleep. Sylvie liked them all best as babies, when they were shiny and new, like the pink pads on a kitten’s paw. This one was special though. She kissed the floss on his head.

Words floated up in the soft air. ‘All good things must come to an end,’ she heard Hugh say as he escorted Lily and Margaret indoors to dinner. ‘I believe the poetically inclined Mrs Glover has baked a skate. But first, perhaps you would care to see my Petter engine?’ The women twittered like the silly schoolgirls they still were.

Ursula was woken by an excited shouting and clapping of hands. ‘Electricity!’ she heard one of Sylvie’s friends exclaim. ‘How wonderful!’

She shared an attic room with Pamela. They had matching small beds with a rag rug and a bedside cabinet in between. Pamela slept with her arms above her head and sometimes cried out as if pricked with a pin (a horrible trick Maurice was fond of). On one side of the bedroom wall was Mrs Glover who snored like a train and on the other side Bridget muttered her way through the night. Bosun slept outside their door, always on guard even when asleep. Sometimes he whined softly but whether in pleasure or pain they couldn’t tell. The attic floor was a crowded and unquiet sort of place.

Ursula was woken again later by the visitors taking their leave. (‘That child is an unnaturally light sleeper,’ Mrs Glover said, as if it were a flaw in her character that should be corrected.) She climbed out of bed and padded over to the window. If she stood on a chair and looked out, something they were all expressly forbidden to do, then she could see Sylvie and her friends on the lawn below, their dresses fluttering like moths in the encroaching dusk. Hugh stood at the back gate, waiting to escort them along the lane to the station.

Sometimes Bridget walked the children to the station to meet their father off the train when he came home from work. Maurice said he might be an engine driver when he was older, or he might become an Antarctic explorer like Sir Ernest Shackleton who was about to set sail on his grand expedition. Or perhaps he would simply become a banker, like his father.

Hugh worked in London, a place they visited infrequently to spend stilted afternoons in their grandmother’s drawing room in Hampstead, a quarrelsome Maurice and Pamela ‘fraying’ Sylvie’s nerves so that she was always in a bad mood on the train home.

When everyone had left, their voices fading into the distance, Sylvie walked back across the lawn towards the house, a darkening shadow now as the black bat unfolded his wings. Unseen by Sylvie, a fox trotted purposefully in her footsteps before veering off and disappearing into the shrubbery.

‘Did you hear something?’ Sylvie asked. She was propped up on pillows, reading an early Forster. ‘The baby perhaps?’

Hugh cocked his head to one side. For a moment he reminded Sylvie of Bosun.

‘No,’ he said.

The baby slept all through the night usually. He was a cherub. But not in heaven. Thankfully.

‘The best one yet,’ Hugh said.

‘Yes, I think we should keep this one.’

‘He doesn’t look like me,’ Hugh said.

‘No,’ she agreed amiably. ‘Nothing like you at all.’

Hugh laughed and, kissing her affectionately, said, ‘Good night, I’m turning out my light.’

‘I think I’ll read a little longer.’

One afternoon of heat a few days later they went to watch the harvest being brought in.

Sylvie and Bridget walked across the fields with the girls, Sylvie carrying the baby in a sling that Bridget fashioned from her shawl and tied around Sylvie’s torso. ‘Like a Hibernian peasant,’ Hugh said, amused. It was a Saturday and, freed from the gloomy confines of banking, he was lying on the wicker chaise-longue on the terrace at the back of the house, cradling
Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack
like a hymnal.

Maurice had disappeared after breakfast. He was a nine-year-old boy and free to go where he pleased with whomsoever he pleased, although he tended to keep to the exclusive company of other nine-year-old boys. Sylvie had no idea what they did but at the end of the day he would return, filthy from head to toe and with some unappetizing trophy, a jar of frogs or worms, a dead bird, the bleached skull of some small creature.

The sun had long since started on its steep climb into the sky by the time they finally set off, awkwardly encumbered with the baby, and picnic baskets, sun-bonnets and parasols. Bosun trotted along at their side like a small pony. ‘Goodness, we’re burdened like refugees,’ Sylvie said. ‘The Jews leaving Israel, perhaps.’

‘Jews?’ Bridget said, screwing up her plain features in distaste.

Teddy slept throughout the trek in his makeshift papoose while they clambered over stiles and stumbled on muddy ruts made hard by the sun. Bridget tore her dress on a nail and said she had blisters on her feet. Sylvie wondered about removing her corsets and leaving them by the wayside, imagined someone’s puzzlement when they came across them. She had a sudden memory, unexpected in the dazzling daylight in a field of cows, of Hugh unlacing her stays on honeymoon in their hotel in Deauville while sounds drifted in from the open window – gulls screeching on the wing and a man and a woman arguing in rough, rapid French. On the boat home from Cherbourg Sylvie was already carrying the tiny homunculus that would become Maurice, although she had been blissfully unaware of this fact at the time.

‘Ma’am?’ Bridget said, breaking this reverie. ‘Mrs Todd? They’re not
cows
.’

They stopped to admire George Glover’s plough horses, enormous Shires called Samson and Nelson who snorted and shook their heads when they caught sight of company. They made Ursula nervous but Sylvie fed them an apple each and they picked the fruit delicately from her palm with their big pink-velvet lips. Sylvie said they were dappled greys and much more beautiful than people and Pamela said, ‘Even children?’ and Sylvie said, ‘Yes, especially children,’ and laughed.

They found George himself helping with the harvest. When he caught sight of them he strode across the field to greet them. ‘Ma’am,’ he said to Sylvie, removing his cap and wiping the sweat off his forehead with a big red and white spotted handkerchief. Tiny pieces of chaff were stuck to his arms. Like the chaff, the hairs on his arms were golden from the sun. ‘It’s hot,’ he said unnecessarily. He looked at Sylvie from beneath the long lock of hair that always fell in his handsome blue eyes. Sylvie appeared to blush.

As well as their own lunch – bloater paste sandwiches, lemon curd sandwiches, ginger beer and seed cake – they had carried the remains of yesterday’s pork pie that Mrs Glover had sent for George, along with a little jar of her famous piccalilli. The seed cake was already stale because Bridget had forgotten to put it back in the cake tin and it was left out in the warm kitchen overnight. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if the ants had laid eggs in it,’ Mrs Glover said. When it came to eating it, Ursula had to pick out the seeds, which were legion, checking each one to make sure it wasn’t an ant egg.

The workers in the field stopped to have their lunch, bread and cheese and beer mainly. Bridget turned red and giggled as she handed over the pork pie to George. Pamela told Ursula that Maurice said Bridget had a pash on George, although it seemed to both of them that Maurice was an unlikely source of information on affairs of the heart. They ate their picnic at the edge of the stubble, George sprawled casually as he took great horse-sized bites out of the pork pie, Bridget gazing at him in admiration as if he were a Greek god, while Sylvie fussed with the baby.

Sylvie traipsed off to find a discreet spot in order to feed Teddy. Girls brought up in nice houses in Mayfair did not generally duck behind hedges to suckle infants. Like Hibernian peasants, no doubt. She thought fondly of the beach hut in Cornwall. By the time she found a suitable covert in the lee of a hedge, Teddy was bawling his head off, little pugilistic fists clenched against the injustice of the world. Just as he settled at the breast she happened to glance up and caught sight of George Glover coming out of the trees at the far end of the field. Spotting her, he stopped, staring at her like a startled deer. For a second he didn’t move but then he doffed his cap and said, ‘Still hot, ma’am.’

‘It certainly is,’ Sylvie said briskly and then watched as George Glover hastened towards the five-bar gate that broke the hedgerow in the middle of the field and leapt over it as easily as a big hunter over a hurdle.