Life After Life (51 page)

Roy Holt was from Sheffield where the air still belonged to Yorkshire but was perhaps not so good. His mother and sister had been killed in the awful raids in December 1940 and he said he wasn’t going to rest until he’d dropped a bomb directly on Hitler’s head.

‘Good for you,’ Izzie said. She had a peculiar way with young men, Ursula noticed, both maternal and flirtatious at the same time (where once she had simply been flirtatious). It was rather disturbing to watch.

As soon as she heard the news, Izzie left Cornwall post-haste for London and then commandeered a car and a fistful of petrol coupons from a ‘man she knew’ in the government, to take them both to Fox Corner, and then, onwards, to make the journey to Teddy’s airfield. (‘You’ll never manage the train,’ she said, ‘you’ll be far too upset.’) ‘Men she knew’ was generally a euphemism for ex-lovers (‘What did you do to get this?’ a surly garage owner had asked when they filled up at his pumps on the road north. ‘I slept with someone terribly important,’ Izzie said sweetly).

Ursula hadn’t seen Izzie since Hugh’s funeral, since her astonishing confession that she had a child, and Ursula thought that perhaps she should reintroduce the subject on the drive to Yorkshire (awkward to do) as Izzie had been so upset and presumably had no one else to talk to about it. But when Ursula said, ‘Do you want to talk more about your baby?’ Izzie said, ‘Oh,
that
,’ as if it was something trivial. ‘Forget I ever said anything, I was just being morbid. Shall we stop for tea somewhere, I could demolish a scone, couldn’t you?’

Yes, they had gathered at Fox Corner, and no, there was no ‘body’. By then the status of Teddy and his crew had changed from ‘missing in action’ to ‘missing, presumed dead’. There was no hope, Maurice said, they must stop thinking there was hope. ‘There’s always hope,’ Sylvie said.

‘No,’ Ursula said, ‘sometimes there really isn’t.’ She thought of the baby. Emil. What would Teddy look like? Blackened and charred and shrunk like an ancient piece of wood? Maybe there was nothing left at all, no ‘body’. Stop it, stop it, stop it. She breathed. Think of him as a little boy, playing with his planes and trains – no, actually that was worse. Much worse.

‘It’s hardly a surprise,’ Nancy said grimly. They were sitting outside on the terrace. They had drunk rather too much of Hugh’s good malt. It felt peculiar to be drinking his whisky when he himself was gone. It was kept in a cut-glass decanter on the desk in the growlery, and it was the first time she had drunk it when it had not been poured by his own hand. (‘Fancy a drop of the good stuff, little bear?’)

‘He’d flown so many missions,’ Nancy said, ‘the odds were against him.’

‘I know.’

‘He expected it,’ Nancy said. ‘Accepted it, even. They have to, all those boys do. I sound sanguine, I know,’ she continued quietly, ‘but my heart is split in two. I loved him so much.
Love
him so much. I don’t know why I use the past tense. It’s not as if love dies with the beloved. I love him
more
now because I feel so damn sorry for him. He’ll never marry, never have children, never have the wonderful life that was his birthright. Not all this,’ she said, waving a hand around to indicate Fox Corner, the middle class, England in general, ‘but because he was such a
good
man. Sound and true, like a great bell, I think.’ She laughed. ‘Silly, I know. I know you’re the one that understands. And I can’t cry, I don’t even want to cry. My tears would never do justice to this loss.’

Nancy hadn’t wanted to talk, Teddy had once said, and now she wanted to do nothing but talk. Ursula herself had barely talked but wept continually. She had hardly gone an hour without finding the tears streaming unstoppably. Her eyes were still swollen and sore. Crighton had been awfully good, cradling her and shushing her, making endless cups of tea, tea purloined from the Admiralty, she supposed. He didn’t deliver platitudes, didn’t say everything will be all right, time will heal, he’s in a better place – none of that rubbish. Miss Woolf was wonderful too. She came and sat with Crighton, never questioning who he might be, and held her hand and stroked her hair and allowed her to be an inconsolable child.

That was over now, she thought, finishing her whisky. Now there was just nothing. A vast, featureless landscape of nothing, as far as the horizon of her mind.
Despair behind, and Death before
.

‘Will you do something for me?’ Nancy asked.

‘Yes, of course. Anything.’

‘Will you find out if there’s a scrap of hope that he’s alive? Surely there’s a chance, however small, that he’s been taken captive. I thought you might know someone in the Air Ministry—’

‘Well, I know a girl …’

‘Or perhaps Maurice knows someone, someone who could be … definitive.’ She stood up suddenly, swaying slightly from the whisky, and said, ‘I have to go.’

‘We’ve met before,’ Roy Holt said to her.

‘Yes, I came up to visit last year,’ Ursula said. ‘I stayed here, at the White Hart, they have rooms, but I suppose you know that. This is “your” pub, isn’t it? The aircrew, I mean.’

‘We were all drinking in the bar, I remember,’ Roy Holt said.

‘Yes, it was a very jolly evening.’

Maurice was no use, of course, but Crighton had tried. It was always the same story. Teddy had gone down in flames, no one jumped.

‘You were the last person who saw him,’ Ursula said.

‘I don’t think about it really,’ Roy Holt said. ‘He was a good bloke, Ted, but it happens all the time. They don’t come back. They’re there at tea and they’re not there at breakfast. You mourn for a minute and then you don’t think about it. Do you know the statistics?’

‘I do actually.’

He shrugged and said, ‘Maybe after the war, I don’t know. I don’t know what you want me to tell you.’

‘We just want to know,’ Izzie said gently, ‘that he didn’t bail out. That he is dead. You were under attack, in extreme circumstances, you may not have seen the whole sorry drama play itself out.’

‘He’s dead, believe me,’ Roy Holt said. ‘The whole crew. The plane was ablaze from front to back. Most of them were probably already dead. I could see him, the planes were very close, still in formation. He turned and looked at me.’

‘Looked at you?’ Ursula said. Teddy in the last moments of his life, knowing he was going to die. What did he think about – the meadow and the copse and the stream that ran through the bluebell wood? Or the flames that were going to consume him – another martyr for England?

Izzie reached out and clutched her hand. ‘Steady,’ she said.

‘I was only bothered about getting away from them. His kite was going out of control, I didn’t want the bugger crashing into us.’ He shrugged. He looked incredibly young and incredibly old at the same time.

‘You should get on with your lives,’ he said rather roughly, and then less so added, ‘I brought the dog. I thought you might want it back.’

Lucky was asleep at Ursula’s feet, he had been deliriously happy when he saw her. Teddy hadn’t left him at Fox Corner, instead he had taken him north, to his base. ‘With a name and a reputation like his, what else could I do?’ he wrote. He sent a photograph of his crew, lounging in old armchairs, Lucky sitting proudly to attention on Teddy’s knee.

‘But he’s your lucky mascot,’ Ursula protested. ‘Isn’t that like asking for bad luck? Giving him away, I mean.’

‘We’ve had nothing but bad luck since Ted went,’ Roy Holt said morosely. ‘He was Ted’s dog,’ he added more kindly, ‘faithful unto the last, as they say. He’s pining something rotten, you should take him. The lads can’t bear to see him hanging around on the airfield, waiting for Ted to come back. It just reminds them that it’s probably going to be them next time.’

‘
I
can’t bear it,’ she said to Izzie as they drove away. It was what Miss Woolf said when Tony died, she remembered. Just how much
was
one expected to bear? The dog was sitting contentedly on her lap, sensing something of Ted about her perhaps. Or so she liked to think.

‘What else is there to do?’ Izzie said.

Well, one could kill oneself. And she might have done but how could she leave the dog behind? ‘Is that ridiculous?’ she asked Pamela.

‘No, not ridiculous,’ Pamela said. ‘The dog is all that’s left of Teddy.’

‘Sometimes I feel that he
is
Teddy.’

‘Now that
is
ridiculous.’

They were sitting on the lawn at Fox Corner, two weeks or so after VE Day. (‘Now begins the hard part,’ Pamela said.) They hadn’t celebrated. Sylvie had marked the day by taking an overdose of sleeping pills. ‘Selfish, really,’ Pamela said. ‘After all, we’re her children too.’

She had embraced the truth in her own inimitable way and lain down on Teddy’s childhood bed and swallowed a whole bottle of pills, washed down with the last of Hugh’s whisky. It was Jimmy’s room too, but he hardly seemed to count to her. Now two of Pamela’s boys slept in that room and played with Teddy’s old train set, laid out in Mrs Glover’s old attic room.

They lived at Fox Corner, the boys and Pamela and Harold. To everyone’s surprise, Bridget made good on her threat to return to Ireland. Sylvie, enigmatic to the last, left behind her own version of a delayed action bomb. When her will was read they discovered that there was some money – stocks and shares and so on, Hugh wasn’t a banker for nothing – that was to be divided equally but Pamela was to inherit Fox Corner. ‘But why me?’ Pamela puzzled. ‘I was no more of a favourite than anyone else.’

‘None of us were favourites,’ Ursula said, ‘only Teddy. I suppose if he’d lived she would have left it to him.’

‘If he’d lived she wouldn’t be dead.’

Maurice was incandescent, Jimmy was not back from the war and when he did return he didn’t seem to care too much one way or the other. Ursula wasn’t entirely indifferent to the snub (a small word for a rather large betrayal) but she thought Pamela was the perfect person to live at Fox Corner and she was glad it was in her stewardship. Pamela wanted to sell and divide the proceeds but Harold, to Ursula’s surprise, talked her out of it. (And it was difficult to talk Pamela out of things.) Harold had always disliked Maurice, for his politics as much as his person, and Ursula suspected this was his way of punishing Maurice for, well, for being Maurice. It was all rather Forsterian and it would have been easy to develop a grudge but Ursula chose not to.

The contents were to be divided among them. Jimmy wanted nothing, he already had his passage booked to New York and a job secured in an advertising agency, thanks to someone he met during the war, ‘A man I know,’ he said, an echo of Izzie. Maurice, on the other hand, having decided not to contest the will (‘even though I would be successful, of course’), sent a removal van and virtually looted the house. None of the contents of the van ever turned up in Maurice’s own house so they presumed he sold them, out of spite more than anything. Pamela cried for Sylvie’s nice rugs and ornaments, the Regency Revival dining table, some very good Queen Anne chairs, the grandfather clock in the hall, ‘Things we grew up with,’ but it seemed to appease Maurice and prevented an outbreak of total war.

Ursula took Sylvie’s little carriage clock. ‘I want nothing else,’ she said. ‘Only to be always welcome here.’

‘As you will be. You know that.’

February 1947

WONDERFUL! LIKE A Red Cross package
, she wrote and propped the old postcard of the Brighton Pavilion on the mantelpiece next to Sylvie’s clock, next to Teddy’s photograph. She would put the card in with the afternoon post tomorrow. It would take for ever to reach Fox Corner, of course.

A birthday card for her had made it through eventually. The weather had prevented the usual celebration at Fox Corner, instead Crighton had taken her to the Dorchester for dinner, by candlelight when the electricity gave out halfway through the meal.

‘Very romantic,’ he said. ‘Just like old times.’

‘I don’t remember us being particularly romantic,’ she said. Their affair had ended with the war but he had remembered her birthday, a fact which touched her more deeply than he knew. For a present he gave her a box of Milk Tray (‘It’s not much, I’m afraid’).

‘Admiralty supplies?’ she quizzed and they both laughed. When she got home she ate the whole box in one go.

Five o’clock. She took her plate over to the sink to join the other unwashed dishes. The grey ash was a blizzard in the dark sky now and she pulled the flimsy cotton curtain to try to make it disappear. It tugged hopelessly on its wire and she gave up before she brought the whole thing down. The window was old and ill-fitting and let in a piercing draught.

The electricity went and she fumbled for the candle on the mantelpiece. Could it get any worse? Ursula took the candle and the whisky bottle to bed, climbed under the covers still in her coat. She was so tired. Being hungry and cold created the most awful lethargy.

The flame on the little Radiant fire quivered alarmingly. Would it be so very bad?
To cease upon the midnight with no pain
. There were worse ways. Auschwitz, Treblinka. Teddy’s Halifax going down in flames. The only way to stop the tears was to keep drinking the whisky. Good old Pammy. The flame on the Radiant flickered and died. The pilot light too. She wondered when the gas would come back on. If the smell would wake her, if she would get up and relight it. She hadn’t expected to die like a fox frozen in its den. Pammy would see the postcard, know that she’d been appreciated. Ursula closed her eyes. She felt as though she had been awake for a hundred years and more. She really was so very, very tired.

Darkness began to fall.

She woke with a start. Was it daytime? The light was on but it was dark. She had been dreaming she was trapped in a cellar. She climbed out of the bed, she still felt quite drunk and realized it was the wireless that had woken her. The power was back on in time for the shipping forecast.

She fed the meter and the little Radiant popped back into life. She hadn’t gassed herself after all then.

June 1967

THIS MORNING THE Jordanians had opened fire on Tel Aviv, the BBC reporter said, now they were shelling Jerusalem. He was standing on a street, in Jerusalem presumably, she hadn’t really been paying attention, the noise of artillery fire in the background, too far away to be any danger to him, yet his faux-battledress attire and style of reportage – excited, yet solemn – hinted at unlikely heroics on his part.