Life after life

February 1947

URSULA TRAVERSED THE street cautiously. The road surface was treacherous – crimped and rucked by ridges and crevasses of ice. The pavements were even more perilous, no more than massifs of ugly, hard-packed snow, or, worse, toboggan runs ironed by the neighbourhood children who had nothing better to do than enjoy themselves because the schools were closed. Oh, God, Ursula thought, how mean-spirited I’ve become. The bloody war. The bloody peace.

By the time she had put her key in the lock of the street door she was exhausted. A shopping trip had never seemed such a challenge previously, even in the worst days of the Blitz. The skin on her face was whipped raw by the biting wind and her toes were numb with cold. The temperature hadn’t risen above zero for weeks, colder even than ’41. Ursula imagined at some future date trying to recall this glacial chill and knew she would never be able to conjure it up. It was so physical, you expected bones to shatter, skin to crackle. Yesterday she had seen two men trying to open a manhole in the road with what looked like a flamethrower. Perhaps there would be no future of thaw and warmth, perhaps this was the beginning of a new Ice Age. First fire and then ice.

It was as well, she thought, that the war had robbed her of any care for fashion. She was wearing, in order, from inner to outer – a short-sleeved vest, a long-sleeved vest, a long-sleeved pullover, a cardigan and stretched on top of it all her shabby old winter coat, bought new in Peter Robinson’s two years before the war. Not to mention, of course, the usual drab underwear, a thick tweed skirt, grey wool stockings, gloves and mittens, a scarf, a hat and her mother’s old fur-lined boots. Pity any man who was suddenly moved to ravish her. ‘Chance’d be a fine thing, eh?’ Enid Barker, one of the secretaries, said over the balm and succour of the tea-urn. Enid had auditioned for the part of plucky young London woman somewhere around 1940 and had been playing it with gusto ever since. Ursula chided herself for more unkind thoughts. Enid was a good sort. Terrifically skilled at typing tabulations, something Ursula had never quite got the hang of when she was at secretarial college. She had done a typing and shorthand course, years ago now – everything before the war seemed like ancient history (her own). She had been surprisingly adept. Mr Carver, the man who ran the secretarial college, had suggested that her shorthand was good enough for her to train as a court reporter at the Old Bailey. That would have been a quite different life, perhaps a better one. Of course, there was no way of knowing these things.

She trudged up the unlit stairs to her flat. She lived on her own now. Millie had married an American USAF officer and moved to New York State (‘Me – a war bride! Who’d a thunk it?’). A thin layer of soot and what seemed to be grease coated the walls of the stairway. It was an old building, in Soho of all places (‘needs must’ she heard her mother’s voice say). The woman who lived upstairs had a great many gentleman callers and Ursula had become accustomed to the creaking bedsprings and strange noises that came through the ceiling. She was pleasant though, always ready with a cheery greeting and never missed her turn at sweeping the stairs.

The building had been Dickensian in its dinginess to begin with and was now even more neglected and unloved. But then, the whole of London looked wretched. Grimy and grim. She remembered Miss Woolf saying that she didn’t think ‘poor old London’ would ever be clean again. (‘Everything is so awfully shabby.’) Perhaps she was right.

‘You wouldn’t think we had won the war,’ Jimmy said when he came to visit, spivvy in his American clothes, shiny and bright with promise. She readily forgave her little brother his New World élan, he had had a hard war. Hadn’t they all? ‘A long and hard war,’ Churchill had promised. How right he had been.

It was a temporary billet. She had the money for something better but the truth was she didn’t really care. It was just one room, a window above the sink, a hot-water geyser, shared toilet down the hall. Ursula still missed the old flat in Kensington that she had shared with Millie. They had been bombed out in the big raid of May ’41. Ursula had thought of Bessie Smith singing like a fox without a hole but she had actually moved back in for a few weeks, living without a roof. It was chilly but she was a good camper. She had learned with the Bund Deutscher Mädel, although it wasn’t the kind of fact that you bandied about in those dark days.

But here was a lovely surprise waiting for her. A gift from Pammy – a wooden crate filled with potatoes, leeks, onions, an enormous emerald-green Savoy cabbage (a thing of beauty) and on the top, half a dozen eggs, nestled in cotton wool inside an old trilby of Hugh’s. Lovely eggs, brown and speckled, as precious as unpolished gemstones, tiny feathers stuck here and there. From Fox Corner, with love the label attached to the crate read. It was like receiving a Red Cross parcel. How on earth had it got here? There were no trains running and Pamela was almost certainly snowed in. Even more puzzling was how her sister had managed to dig up this wintry harvest when Earth stood hard as iron.

When she opened the door she found a scrap of paper on the floor. She had to put her spectacles on to read it. It was a note from Bea Shawcross. Visited but you weren’t in. Will pop by again. Bea xxx. Ursula was sorry she had missed Bea’s visit, it would have been a nicer way to spend a Saturday afternoon than wandering in the dystopian West End. She was immensely cheered by nothing more than the sight of a cabbage. But then the cabbage – unexpectedly as was always the wont of these moments – uprooted an unwanted memory of the little parcel in the cellar at Argyll Road and she was plunged back into gloom. She was so up and down these days. Honestly, she chided herself, buck up, for heaven’s sake.

It felt even colder inside the flat. She had developed chilblains, horrid painful things. Even her ears were cold. She wished she had some earmuffs, or a balaclava, like the grey woollen ones that Teddy and Jimmy used to wear to school. There was a line in ‘The Eve of St Agnes’, what was it? Something about the stone effigies in the church in icy hoods and mails. It used to make her feel cold every time she recited it. Ursula had learned the whole poem at school, a feat of memory that was probably beyond her now, and what, after all, had been the point if she couldn’t even remember a complete line? She had a sudden longing for Sylvie’s fur coat, a neglected mink, like a large friendly animal, that now belonged to Pamela. Sylvie had chosen death on VE Day. While other women were scratching together food for tea-parties and dancing in the streets of Britain, Sylvie had lain down on the bed that had been Teddy’s when he was a child and swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills. No note, but her intention and motivation were quite clear to the family that she left behind. There had been a horrible funeral tea for her at Fox Corner. Pamela said it was the coward’s way out, but Ursula wasn’t so sure. She thought it showed a rather admirable clarity of purpose. Sylvie was another casualty of war, another statistic.

‘You know,’ Pamela said, ‘I used to argue with her because she said science had made the world a worse place, that it was all about men inventing new ways to kill people. But now I wonder if she wasn’t right.’ And that was before Hiroshima, of course.

Ursula lit the gas fire, a rather pathetic little Radiant that looked as if it dated from the turn of the century, and fed the meter. The rumour was that pennies and shillings were running out. Ursula wondered why they couldn’t melt down armaments. Guns into ploughshares, and so on.

She unpacked Pammy’s box, laying everything out on the little wooden draining board like a poor man’s still life. The vegetables were dirty but there wasn’t much hope of washing the soil off as the pipes were frozen, even in the little Ascot, although the gas pressure was so low that it could barely heat the water anyway. Water like a stone. At the bottom of the crate she found a half-bottle of whisky. Good old Pammy, ever the thoughtful one.

She scooped some water from the bucket that she’d filled from the standpipe in the street and put a pan of water on the gas ring, thinking she might boil one of the eggs, although it would take for ever as there was only the tiniest frill of blue around the burner. There were warnings to be vigilant about the gas pressure – in case the gas came back on when the pilot light had gone out.

Would it be so bad to be gassed, Ursula wondered? Gassed. She thought of Auschwitz. Treblinka. Jimmy had been a Commando and at the end of the war he had become attached, rather haphazardly according to him (although everything to do with Jimmy was always slightly haphazard), to the anti-tank regiment that liberated Bergen-Belsen. Ursula insisted that he told her what he had found there. He was reluctant and had probably withheld the worst but it was necessary to know. One must bear witness. (She heard Miss Woolf’s voice in her head, We must remember these people when we are safely in the future.)

The toll of the dead had been her business during the war, the endless stream of figures that represented the blitzed and the bombed passed across her desk to be collated and recorded. They had seemed overwhelming, but the greater figures – the six million dead, the fifty million dead, the numberless infinities of souls – were in a realm beyond comprehension.

Ursula had fetched water yesterday. They – who were ‘they’? After six years of war everyone had become accustomed to following ‘their’ orders, what an obedient lot the English were – they had set up a standpipe in the next street and Ursula had filled up a kettle and bucket from the tap. The woman ahead of her in the queue was terrifically smart in an enviable floor-length sable, silver-grey, and yet there she was, waiting patiently in the bitter cold with her buckets. She looked out of place in Soho but then who knew her story?

The women at the well. Ursula seemed to remember that Jesus had a particularly confrontational conversation with the woman at the well. A woman of Samaria – no name, of course. She had had five husbands, Ursula recalled, and was living with a man who wasn’t her husband, but the King James Bible never said what had happened to those five. Perhaps she had poisoned the well.

Ursula remembered Bridget telling them that when she was a girl in Ireland she had walked to a well every day to draw water. So much for progress. How quickly civilization could dissolve into its more ugly elements. Look at the Germans, the most cultured and well-mannered of people, and yet … Auschwitz, Treblinka, Bergen-Belsen. Given the same set of circumstances it could just as well have been the English, but that was something else you couldn’t say. Miss Woolf had believed that, she’d said—

‘I say,’ the woman in sable said, interrupting her thoughts. ‘Do you understand why my water is frozen solid and yet this isn’t?’ She had a cut-glass accent.

‘I don’t know,’ Ursula said. ‘I know nothing.’ The woman laughed and said, ‘Oh, I feel the same way, believe me,’ and Ursula thought that perhaps this was someone she would like as a friend but then a woman behind them said, ‘Get a move on, love,’ and the sable-furred woman hefted her buckets, as strapping as a Land Girl, and said, ‘Well, must be off, cheerio.’

She turned on the wireless. Transmission of the Third Programme had been suspended for the duration. The war against the weather. You were lucky if you got the Home or the Light, there were so many electricity cuts. She needed noise, the sound of a familiar life. Jimmy had given her his old gramophone before he left, hers had been lost in Kensington along, sadly, with most of her records. She had managed to rescue a couple, miraculously unbroken, and placed one on the turntable now. ‘I’d Rather Be Dead And Buried In My Grave’. Ursula laughed. ‘Cheerful or what?’ she said out loud. She listened to the scratch and hiss of the old record. Was that how she felt?

She glanced at the clock, Sylvie’s little gold carriage clock. She had brought it home after the funeral. Four o’clock only. Ye gods, how the days dragged. She caught the pips, turned off the news. What was the point?

She had spent the afternoon trawling Oxford Street and Regent Street, for something to do – really it was just to get out of her monastic cell of a bedsit. All the shops were dim and dismal. Paraffin lamps in Swan and Edgar’s, candles in Selfridge’s – the drawn, shadowy faces of people like something from a painting by Goya. There was nothing to buy, or certainly nothing that she wanted, and anything she did want, like a lovely cosy-looking pair of fur-topped bootees, was outrageously expensive (fifteen guineas!). So depressing. ‘Worse than the war,’ Miss Fawcett at work said. She was leaving to get married, they had all clubbed together for her wedding present, a rather uninspiring vase, but Ursula wanted to get her something more personal, more special, but she couldn’t think what and had hoped that the West End department stores might have just the thing. They didn’t.

She’d gone into a Lyon’s for a pale cup of tea, like lamb’s water, Bridget would have said. And a utilitarian teacake, she counted just two hard dry raisins, and a scraping of margarine, and tried to imagine she was eating something wonderful – a luscious Cremeschnitte or a slice of Dobostorte. She supposed the Germans weren’t getting much in the way of pastries at the moment.

She murmured Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte accidentally out loud (such an extraordinary name, such an extraordinary cake) and attracted the unwanted attention of a neighbouring table, a woman stoically working her way through a large iced bun. ‘Refugee, love?’ she asked, surprising Ursula with her sympathetic tone.

‘Something like that,’ Ursula said.

While she was waiting for the egg to boil – the water still only lukewarm – she rooted among her books, never unpacked after Kensington. She found the Dante that Izzie had given her, nicely tooled red leather but the pages all foxed, a copy of Donne (her favourite), The Waste Land (a rare first edition purloined from Izzie), a Collected Shakespeare, her beloved metaphysical poets and, finally, at the bottom of the box, her battered school copy of Keats, with an inscription that read To Ursula Todd, for good work. It would do for an epitaph too, she supposed. She flicked through the neglected pages until she found ‘The Eve of St Agnes’.

Ah, bitter chill it was!

The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;

The hare limp’d trembling through the frozen grass,

And silent was the flock in woolly fold.

She read out loud and the words made her shiver. She should read something warming, Keats and his bees – For Summer has o’erbrimm’d their clammy cells. Keats should have died on English soil. Asleep in an English garden on a summer’s afternoon. Like Hugh.

She ate the egg while reading a copy of yesterday’s Times, given to her by Mr Hobbs in the post room when he had finished with it, a little daily ritual they had acquired. The paper’s newly shrunk dimensions made it seem ridiculous somehow, as if the news itself was less important. Although really it was, wasn’t it?

Snow like flakes of grey, soapy ash was falling outside the window. She thought of the Coles’ relatives in Poland – rising above Auschwitz like a volcanic cloud, circling the Earth and blotting out the sun. Even now, after everything people had learned about the camps and so on, anti-Semitism was still rife. ‘Jewboy’ she’d heard someone being called yesterday, and when Miss Andrews ducked out of contributing to Miss Fawcett’s wedding present Enid Barker had made a joke of it and said, ‘What a Jew,’ as if it were the mildest of insults.

The office was a tedious, rather irritable place these days – fatigue, probably, due to the cold and the lack of good, nourishing food. And the work was tedious, an endless compilation and permutation of statistics to be filed away in the archives somewhere – to be pored over by the historians of the future, she supposed. They were still ‘clearing up and putting their house in order’, as Maurice would have it, as if the casualties of war were clutter to be put away and forgotten. Civil Defence had been stood down for over a year and a half yet she still hadn’t rid herself of the minutiae of bureaucracy. The mills of God (or the government) did indeed grind extremely small and slow.

The egg was delicious, it tasted as if it had been laid that very morning. She found an old postcard, a picture of the Brighton Pavilion (bought on a day trip with Crighton) that she’d never sent, and scrawled a thank you to Pammy – Wonderful! Like a Red Cross package – and propped it up on the mantelpiece next to Sylvie’s clock. Next to Teddy’s photo too. Teddy and his Halifax crew taken one sunlit afternoon. They were lounging in an assortment of old chairs. Forever young. The dog, Lucky, stood as proud as a little figurehead on Teddy’s knee. How cheering it would be to still have Lucky. She had Teddy’s DFC, propped up on the glass of the photo frame. Ursula had a medal too but it meant nothing to her.

She would put the postcard in with the afternoon post tomorrow. It would take an age to reach Fox Corner, she supposed.

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 off 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.

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.