Life after life

August 1926

THE PEN SHOULD be held lightly, and in such a manner as to permit of the shorthand characters being easily written. The wrist must not be allowed to rest on the notebook or desk.

The rest of the summer was wretched. She sat beneath the apple trees in the orchard and tried to read a Pitman’s shorthand instruction book. It had been decided she would do a typing and shorthand course rather than return to school. ‘I can’t go back,’ she said. ‘I just can’t.’

There was little escape from the chill that Sylvie brought with her every time she entered a room and discovered Ursula in it. Both Bridget and Mrs Glover were puzzled as to why the ‘serious illness’ that Ursula had contracted in London while staying with her aunt seemed to have made Sylvie so distant from her daughter when they might have expected the opposite. Izzie, of course, was barred for ever. Persona non grata in perpetuam. No one knew the truth of what had happened except for Pamela who had wormed the whole story out of Ursula, bit by bit.

‘But he forced himself on you,’ she fumed, ‘how can you think it was your fault?’

‘But the consequences …’ Ursula murmured.

Sylvie blamed her entirely, of course. ‘You’ve thrown away your virtue, your character, everyone’s good opinion of you.’

‘But no one knows.’

‘I know.’

‘You sound like someone in one of Bridget’s novels,’ Hugh said to Sylvie. Had Hugh read one of Bridget’s novels? It seemed unlikely. ‘In fact,’ Hugh said, ‘you sound rather like my own mother.’ (‘It seems dreadful now,’ Pamela said, ‘but this too will pass.’)

Even Millie was fooled by her lies. ‘Blood poisoning!’ she said. ‘How dramatic. Was hospital ghastly? Nancy said that Teddy told her that you nearly died. I’m sure nothing so exciting will ever happen to me.’

What a world of difference there was between dying and nearly dying. One’s whole life, in fact. Ursula felt she had no use for the life she had been saved for. ‘I’d like to see Dr Kellet again,’ she said to Sylvie.

‘He’s retired, I believe,’ Sylvie said indifferently.

Ursula still wore her hair long, mostly to please Hugh, but one day she went into Beaconsfield with Millie and had her hair chopped short. It was a penitent act that made her feel rather like a martyr or a nun. She supposed that was how she would live out the rest of her life, somewhere between the two.

Hugh seemed surprised rather than saddened. She supposed a haircut was a mild travesty compared to Belgravia. ‘Good gracious,’ he said, when she sat down at the dinner table to unappetizing veal cutlets à la Russe. (‘Looks like the dog’s dinner,’ Jimmy said, although Jimmy, a boy of magnificent appetite, would have quite happily eaten Jock’s dinner.)

‘You look like a completely different person,’ Hugh said.

‘That can only be a good thing, can’t it?’ Ursula said.

‘I liked the old Ursula,’ Teddy said.

‘Well, it seems as though you’re the only one who does,’ Ursula muttered. Sylvie made a noise that fell short of a word and Hugh said to Ursula, ‘Oh, come, I think you’re—’

But she never did find out what Hugh thought of her because the loud rapping of the front-door knocker announced a rather anxious Major Shawcross enquiring as to whether Nancy was with them. ‘Sorry to interrupt your dinner,’ he said, hovering in the doorway of the dining room.

‘She isn’t here,’ Hugh said, although Nancy’s absence was obvious.

Major Shawcross frowned at the cutlets on their plates. ‘She went to gather some leaves in the lane,’ he said. ‘For her scrapbook. You know what she’s like.’ This addressed to Teddy, Nancy’s twin soul. Nancy loved nature, forever collecting twigs and pine cones, shells and stones and bones, like the totems of an ancient religion. ‘A child of nature,’ Mrs Shawcross called her (‘As if that were a good thing,’ Sylvie said).

‘She wanted oak leaves,’ Major Shawcross said. ‘We don’t have any oaks in our garden.’

There was a short discussion about the demise of the English oak, followed by a thoughtful silence. Major Shawcross cleared his throat. ‘She’s been gone about an hour, according to Roberta. I’ve walked the length of the lane, up and back, shouting her name. I can’t think where she might be. Winnie and Millie are out searching as well.’ Major Shawcross was beginning to look rather sick. Sylvie poured a glass of water and handed it to him. ‘Sit down,’ she said. He didn’t. Of course, Ursula thought, he was thinking of Angela.

‘I expect she’ll have found something interesting,’ Hugh said, ‘a bird’s nest or a farm cat with kittens. You know what she’s like.’ They were all now quite in agreement that they knew what Nancy was like.

Major Shawcross picked up a spoon from the dining-room table and gazed at it absently. ‘She’s missed her dinner.’

‘I’ll come and help you look for her,’ Teddy said, jumping up from the table. He knew what Nancy was like too, knew she never missed her dinner.

‘Me too,’ Hugh said, giving Major Shawcross an encouraging pat on the back, the veal cutlets abandoned.

‘Shall I come?’ Ursula asked.

‘No,’ Sylvie said. ‘Nor Jimmy either. Stay here, we’ll look in the gardens.’

No ice house this time. A hospital mortuary for Nancy. Still warm and soft when they found her, pushed into an empty old cattle trough. ‘Interfered with,’ Hugh told Sylvie while Ursula lurked like a spy behind the morning-room door. ‘Two little girls in three years, it can’t be a coincidence, can it? Strangled like Angela before her.’

‘A monster is living among us,’ Sylvie said.

It was Major Shawcross who found her. ‘Thank God, it wasn’t poor old Ted this time,’ Hugh said. ‘He couldn’t have borne it.’ Teddy couldn’t bear it anyway. He barely spoke for weeks. His soul had been cut away, he said, when he did eventually speak. ‘Scars heal,’ Sylvie said. ‘Even the worst ones.’

‘Do you think that’s true?’ Ursula said, thinking about the wisteria wallpaper, the waiting room in Belgravia, and Sylvie said, ‘Well, not always,’ not even bothering to lie.

They heard Mrs Shawcross screaming all through the first night. Afterwards her face never looked right and Dr Fellowes reported that she’d had a ‘small stroke’.

‘Poor, poor woman,’ Hugh said.

‘She never knows where those girls are,’ Sylvie said. ‘She just lets them run wild. Now she’s paying the price of her carelessness.’

‘Oh, Sylvie,’ Hugh said sadly. ‘Where is your heart?’

Pamela left for Leeds. Hugh drove her there in the Bentley. Her trunk was too massive for the boot and had to be sent by train. ‘Big enough to hide a body in,’ Pamela said. She was bound for a women’s hall of residence and had already been informed that she was to share the small room with a girl called Barbara, from Macclesfield. ‘It’ll be just like being at home,’ Teddy said encouragingly, ‘except that Ursula will be someone else.’

‘Well, that rather makes it nothing like home,’ Pamela said. She clung to Ursula a little too fiercely before climbing into the car and sitting next to Hugh.

‘I can’t wait to go,’ Pamela said to Ursula in bed on her last night, ‘but I feel bad at leaving you.’

When she didn’t go back to school for the autumn term, no one questioned Ursula’s decision. Millie was too grief-stricken over Nancy’s death to care much about anything.

Ursula travelled on the train to High Wycombe every morning to attend a private secretarial college. ‘College’ was a fancy word for two rooms, a cold scullery and a colder cupboard containing a WC above a greengrocer’s on the high street. The college was run by a man called Mr Carver whose lifelong passions were Esperanto and Pitman’s shorthand, the latter more useful than the former. Ursula rather liked shorthand, it was akin to a secret code, with a whole new vocabulary – aspirates and shun hooks, compound consonants, special contractions, halving and doubling – the language of neither the dead nor the living but the strangely inert. There was something soothing about listening to Mr Carver’s monotonous intonation of word lists – iterate, iteration, reiteration, reiterated, reiterating, prince, princely, princes, princess, princesses …

The other girls on the course were all very pleasant and friendly – sanguine, practical sorts who always remembered their shorthand notebooks and rulers and never had fewer than two different-coloured inks in their bags.

At lunchtime when the weather was bad they stayed in, sharing their packed lunches and darning stockings among the banks of typewriters. They had spent their summer hiking and swimming and camping and Ursula wondered if they could tell just by looking at her how different her own summer had been. ‘Belgravia’ had become her shorthand for what had happened. (‘An abortion,’ Pamela said. ‘An illegal abortion.’ Pamela was never one to avoid a blunt vocabulary. Ursula very much wished that she would.) She envied the ordinariness of their lives. (How Izzie would scorn such an idea.) Ursula’s own chance at ordinariness seemed lost for ever.

What if she had thrown herself beneath the express train or had died after Belgravia, or, indeed, what if she were simply to open her bedroom window and throw herself out, head first? Would she really be able to come back and start again? Or was it, as everyone told her, and as she must believe, all in her head? And so what if it was – wasn’t everything in her head real too? What if there was no demonstrable reality? What if there was nothing beyond the mind? Philosophers ‘came to grips’ with this problem a long time ago, Dr Kellet had told her, rather wearily, it was one of the very first questions they addressed, so there was really no point in her fretting over it. But surely, by its very nature, everyone wrestled with this dilemma anew every time?

(‘Forget typing,’ Pamela wrote from Leeds, ‘you should read philosophy at university, you have the right kind of mind for it. Like a terrier with a terrifically tedious bone.’)

She had, eventually, gone in search of Dr Kellet and found his rooms occupied by a steel-haired, steel-spectacled woman who informed her that Dr Kellet had indeed retired and did she wish to make an appointment with herself? No, Ursula said, she didn’t. It was the first time she had been to London since Belgravia and she had a panic attack on the Bakerloo line on the way back from Harley Street and had to run out of the station at Marylebone, gasping for air. A newspaper seller said, ‘Are you all right, miss?’ and she said, yes, yes, quite all right, thank you.

Mr Carver liked touching the girls (‘my girls’) lightly on their shoulders, stroking the angora of a bolero cardigan or the lambswool of a sweater as if they were animals he was fond of.

In the morning they practised their typing skills on the big Underwoods. Sometimes Mr Carver made them practise with blindfolds on as this was, he claimed, the only way to stop them looking at the keys and slowing down their speeds. Wearing the blindfold made Ursula feel like a soldier about to be shot for desertion. On these occasions she often heard him making odd noises, muffled wheezes and grunts, but didn’t like to peek from the blindfold to see what he might be doing.

In the afternoons they did shorthand – soporific dictation exercises that encompassed every kind of business letter. Dear-Sir, I-brought your letter before-the Board-of-Directors at their-meeting yesterday, but after some discussion they-were obliged to postpone further-consideration of-the-matter until the next Directors’-meeting, which-will-be held on-the last Tuesday … The content of these letters was tedious in the extreme and was a strange contrast to the furious flow of ink across their pads as they struggled to keep up.

One afternoon, while he was dictating to them, We-fear there-is-no prospect of success for-those-who raise objection to-the appointment, Mr Carver passed behind Ursula and gently touched the nape of her neck, no longer protected by long hair. A shiver rippled right through her. She stared at the keys of her Underwood on the table in front of her. Was it something in her that attracted this kind of attention? Was she not a good person?