Life After Life (6 page)

From a safe distance they watched the enormous harvester noisily eating the wheat. ‘Hypnotic, isn’t it?’ Bridget said. She had recently learned the word. Sylvie took out her pretty little gold fob watch, an article much coveted by Pamela, and said, ‘Heavens above, look at the time,’ although none of them did. ‘We must be getting back.’

Just as they were leaving, George Glover shouted, ‘Heyathere!’ and cantered towards them across the field. He was carrying something cuddled in his cap. Two baby rabbits. ‘Oh,’ Pamela said, tearful with excitement.

‘Conies,’ George Glover said. ‘All huddled up in the middle of the field. Their mother gone. Take them, why don’t you? One each.’

On the way home, Pamela carried both baby rabbits in her pinafore, holding it out proudly in front of her like Bridget with a tea-tray.

‘Look at you,’ Hugh said when they walked wearily through the garden gate. ‘Golden and kissed by the sun. You look like real countrywomen.’

‘More red than gold, I’m afraid,’ Sylvie said ruefully.

The gardener was at work. He was called Old Tom (‘Like a cat,’ Sylvie said. ‘Do you think he was once called Young Tom?’). He worked six days a week, sharing his time between them and another house nearby. These neighbours, the Coles, addressed him as ‘Mr Ridgely’. He gave no indication which he preferred. The Coles lived in a very similar house to the Todds’ and Mr Cole, like Hugh, was a banker. ‘Jewish,’ Sylvie said in the same voice she would use for ‘Catholic’ – intrigued yet unsettled by such exoticism.

‘I don’t think they practise,’ Hugh said. Practise what, Ursula wondered? Pamela had to practise her piano scales every evening before tea, a
plinking
and
plonking
that wasn’t very pleasant to listen to.

Mr Cole had been born with a quite different name, according to their eldest son, Simon, something far too complicated for English tongues. The middle son, Daniel, was friends with Maurice, for although the grown-ups weren’t friends the children were familiar with each other. Simon, ‘a swot’ (Maurice said), helped Maurice every Monday evening with his maths. Sylvie was unsure how to reward him for this disagreeable task, perplexed seemingly by his Jewishness. ‘Perhaps I might give him something that would offend them?’ she speculated. ‘If I give money they might think I’m referring to their well-known reputation for miserliness. If I give sweets they might not fit their dietary strictures.’

‘They don’t practise,’ Hugh repeated. ‘They’re not
observant
.’

‘Benjamin’s very observant,’ Pamela said. ‘He found a blackbird’s nest yesterday.’ She glared at Maurice when she said this. He had come upon them marvelling at the beautiful eggs, blue and freckled brown, and had grabbed them and cracked them open on a stone. He thought it was a great joke. Pamela threw a small (well, smallish) rock at him that hit him on the head. ‘There,’ she said. ‘How does it feel to have
your
shell broken open?’ Now he had a nasty cut and a bruise on his temple. ‘Fell,’ he said shortly when Sylvie enquired how he came by the injury. He would, by nature, have told on Pamela, but the initial sin would have come to light and Sylvie would have punished him soundly for breaking the eggs. She had caught him stealing eggs before now and had boxed his ears. Sylvie said they should ‘revere’ nature, not destroy it, but reverence was not in Maurice’s own nature, unfortunately.

‘He’s learning the violin, isn’t he – Simon?’ Sylvie said. ‘Jews are usually very musical, aren’t they? Perhaps I could give him some sheet music, something like that.’ This discussion of the perils of offending Judaism had taken place around the breakfast table. Hugh always looked vaguely startled to find his children at the same table as him. He hadn’t eaten breakfast with his parents until he was twelve years old and deemed fit to leave the nursery. He was the robust graduate of an efficient nanny, a household within a household in Hampstead. The infant Sylvie, on the other hand, had dined late, on
Canard à la presse
, perched precariously on cushions, lulled by flickering candles and twinkling silverware, while her parents’ conversation floated above her head. It was not, she now suspected, an entirely regular childhood.

Old Tom was double-digging a trench, he said, for a new asparagus bed. Hugh had long since abandoned
Wisden
and had been picking raspberries to fill a big white enamel bowl that both Pamela and Ursula recognized as the one that Maurice had until recently been keeping tadpoles in, although neither of them mentioned this fact. Pouring himself a glass of beer, Hugh said, ‘Thirsty work, this agricultural labour,’ and they all laughed. Except for Old Tom.

Mrs Glover came out to demand that Old Tom dig up some potatoes to go with her beef collops. She huffed and puffed at the sight of the rabbits, ‘Not enough even for a stew.’ Pamela screamed and had to be calmed down with a sip of Hugh’s beer.

Pamela and Ursula made a nest, in a lost corner of the garden, out of grass and cotton wool, decorated with fallen rose petals, and carefully placed the baby rabbits in it. Pamela sang them a lullaby, she could keep a tune nicely, but they had been asleep ever since George Glover had handed them over.

‘I think they might be too small,’ Sylvie said. Too small for what? Ursula wondered but Sylvie didn’t say.

They sat on the lawn and ate the raspberries with cream and sugar. Hugh looked up into the blue, blue sky and said, ‘Did you hear that thunder? There’s going to be a tremendous storm, I can feel it coming. Can’t you, Old Tom?’ he raised his voice so that Old Tom, far away in the vegetable bed, could hear. Hugh believed that, as a gardener, Old Tom must know about weather. Old Tom said nothing and carried on digging.

‘He’s deaf,’ Hugh said.

‘No, he isn’t,’ Sylvie said, making a Rose Madder by mashing raspberries, beautiful like blood, into thick cream, and she thought, unexpectedly, about George Glover. A son of the soil. His strong square hands, his beautiful dappled greys, like big rocking horses, and the way he had lolled on the grassy bank eating his lunch, posed rather like Michelangelo’s Adam in the Sistine Chapel but reaching for another slice of pork pie rather than the hand of his Creator. (When Sylvie had accompanied her father, Llewellyn, to Italy she had been astonished by the amount of male flesh available to view as art.) She imagined feeding George Glover apples from her hand and laughed.

‘What?’ Hugh said and Sylvie said, ‘What a handsome boy George Glover is.’

‘He must be adopted then,’ Hugh said.

In bed that night Sylvie abandoned Forster for less cerebral pursuits, entwining overheated limbs in the marital bed, more a panting hart than a soaring lark. She found herself thinking not of Hugh’s smooth, wiry body but of the great burnished centaureal limbs of George Glover. ‘You’re very …’ a spent Hugh said, gazing at the bedroom cornice as he searched for an appropriate word. ‘Lively,’ he concluded finally.

‘It must be all that fresh air,’ Sylvie said.

Golden and kissed by the sun, she thought as she drifted comfortably off to sleep and then Shakespeare came unwontedly to mind.
Golden lads and girls all must, / as chimney-sweepers, come to dust
, and she felt suddenly afraid.

‘There’s the storm rolling in at last,’ Hugh said. ‘Shall I turn out the light?’

Sylvie and Hugh were ejected from their Sunday-morning slumber by a wailing Pamela. She and Ursula had woken early with excitement and rushed outside to find that the rabbits had disappeared, only the fluffy pom-pom of one tiny tail remaining, white smudged with red.

‘Foxes,’ Mrs Glover said, with some satisfaction. ‘What did you expect?’

January 1915

‘DID YOU HEAR the latest news?’ Bridget asked.

Sylvie sighed and put down the letter from Hugh, its pages as brittle as dead leaves. It was only a matter of months since he had left for the Front yet she could hardly remember being married to him any more. Hugh was a captain in the Ox and Bucks. Last summer he was a banker. It seemed absurd.

His letters were cheerful and guarded (
the men are wonderful, they have such character
). He used to mention these men by name (‘Bert’, ‘Alfred’, ‘Wilfred’) but since the Battle of Ypres they had become simply ‘men’ and Sylvie wondered if Bert and Alfred and Wilfred were dead. Hugh never mentioned death or dying, it was as if they were away on a jaunt, a picnic (
An awful lot of rain this week. Mud everywhere. Hope you are enjoying better weather than we are!
).

‘To war? You are going to war?’ she had shouted at him when he enlisted and it struck her that she had never shouted at him before. Perhaps she should have.

If there was to be a war, Hugh explained to her, he didn’t want to look back and know that he had missed it, that others had stepped forward for their country’s honour and he had not. ‘It may be the only adventure I ever have,’ he said.

‘Adventure?’ she echoed in disbelief. ‘What about your children, what about your
wife
?’

‘But it’s for you that I am doing this,’ he said, looking exquisitely pained, a misunderstood Theseus. Sylvie disliked him intensely in that moment. ‘To protect hearth and home,’ he persisted. ‘To defend everything we believe in.’

‘And yet I heard the word
adventure
,’ Sylvie said, turning her back on him.

Nonetheless, she had, of course, gone up to London to see him off. They had been jostled by an enormous flag-waving throng who were cheering as if a great victory had already been won. Sylvie was surprised by the rabid patriotism of the women on the platform, surely war should make pacifists of all women?

Hugh had held her close to him as if they were new sweethearts and only jumped on the train at the very last moment. He was instantly swallowed by the crush of uniformed men.
His regiment
, she thought. How odd. Like the crowd, he had seemed immensely, stupidly cheerful.

When the train began to heave itself slowly out of the station the excitable crowd roared their approval, frantically waving their flags and throwing caps and hats in the air. Sylvie could only stare blindly at the carriage windows as they passed by, first slowly and then more and more rapidly until they were no more than a blur. She could see no sign of Hugh, nor, she supposed, could he see her.

She remained on the platform after everyone else had left, staring at the spot on the horizon where the train had disappeared.

Sylvie abandoned the letter and took up her knitting needles instead.

‘
Did
you hear the news?’ Bridget persisted. She was placing the cutlery on the tea-table. Sylvie frowned at the knitting on her needles and wondered if she wanted to hear any news that had Bridget as its provenance. She cast off a stitch on the raglan sleeve of the serviceable grey jersey that she was knitting for Maurice. All the women of the household now spent an inordinate amount of time knitting – mufflers and mittens, gloves and socks and hats, vests and sweaters – to keep their men warm.

Mrs Glover sat by the kitchen stove in the evening and knitted huge gloves, big enough to fit over the hooves of George’s plough horses. They were not for Samson and Nelson, of course, but for George himself, one of the first to volunteer, Mrs Glover said proudly at every opportunity, making Sylvie quite crotchety. Even Marjorie, the scullery maid, had been taken by the knitting fad, labouring after lunch on something that looked like a dishcloth, although to call it ‘knitting’ was generous. ‘More holes than wool’ was Mrs Glover’s verdict, before boxing her ears and telling her to get back to work.

Bridget had taken to making misshapen socks – she could not turn a heel for the life of her – for her new love. She had ‘given her heart’ to a groom from Ettringham Hall called Sam Wellington. ‘Oh, for sure, he’s an old boot,’ she said and laughed her head off at her joke, several times a day, as if telling it for the first time. Bridget sent Sam Wellington sentimental postcards in which angels hovered in the air over women who wept while sitting at chenille-covered tables in domestic parlours. Sylvie had hinted to Bridget that perhaps she should send more cheerful missives to a man at war.

Bridget kept a photograph, a studio portrait, of Sam Wellington on her rather poorly appointed dressing table. It took pride of place next to the old enamelled brush and comb set that Sylvie had given her when Hugh had bought her a silver vanity set for her birthday.

A similar obligatory likeness of George adorned Mrs Glover’s bedside table. Trussed in uniform and uncomfortable before a studio backdrop that reminded Sylvie of the Amalfi coast, George Glover no longer resembled a Sistine Adam. Sylvie thought of all the enlisted men who had already undergone the same ritual, a keepsake for mothers and sweethearts, the only photograph that would ever be taken of some of them. ‘He could be killed,’ Bridget said of her beau, ‘and I might forget what he looked like.’ Sylvie had plenty of photographs of Hugh. He led a well-documented life.

All of the children, except for Pamela, were upstairs. Teddy was asleep in his cot, or perhaps he was awake in his cot, whichever state he was in, he was not complaining. Maurice and Ursula were doing Sylvie knew-not-what and was not interested in it as it meant that tranquillity reigned in the morning room, apart from the occasional suspicious thud on the ceiling and the metallic report of heavy pans in the kitchen where Mrs Glover was making her feelings about something known – the war or Marjorie’s incompetence, or both.

Ever since the fighting on the continent began they had been taking their meals in the morning room, abandoning the Regency Revival dining table as too extravagant for wartime austerity and instead espousing the little parlour table. (‘Not using the dining room isn’t going to win the war,’ Mrs Glover said.)

Sylvie gestured to Pamela who obediently followed her mother’s mute orders and trailed round the table after Bridget, turning the cutlery the right way round. Bridget couldn’t tell her right from her left or her up from her down.

Pamela’s support for the expeditionary force had taken the form of a mass production of dun-coloured mufflers of extraordinary and impractical lengths. Sylvie was pleasantly surprised by her elder daughter’s capacity for monotony. It would stand her in good stead for her life to come. Sylvie lost a stitch and muttered an oath that startled Pamela and Bridget. ‘What news?’ she asked at last, reluctantly.