Life after life

June 1932

PAMELA HAD CHOSEN a white brocade for herself and yellow satin for her bridesmaids. The yellow was on the acidic side and made all of the bridesmaids look slightly liverish. There were four of them – Ursula, Winnie Shawcross (chosen over Gertie) and Harold’s two youngest sisters. Harold came from a large noisy family in the Old Kent Road that Sylvie considered to be ‘inferior’. The fact that Harold was a doctor didn’t seem to mitigate his circumstances (Sylvie was curiously averse to the medical profession). ‘I thought your own family were somewhat déclassé, weren’t they?’ Hugh said to Sylvie. He liked his new son-in-law-to-be, found him ‘refreshing’. He liked Harold’s mother, Olive, too. ‘She says what she means,’ he said to Sylvie. ‘And means what she says. Unlike some people.’

‘I thought it looked nice in the pattern book,’ Pamela said doubtfully at Ursula’s third and final fitting, in a dressmaker’s front room in Neasden, of all places. The bias-cut dress stretched tightly across Ursula’s midriff.

‘You’ve put on weight since the last fitting,’ the dressmaker said.

‘Have I?’

‘Yes,’ Pamela said. Ursula thought of the last time she had put on weight. Belgravia. It was certainly not the reason this time. She was standing on a chair, the dressmaker moving in a circle around her, a pincushion attached to her wrist. ‘You still look nice though,’ Pamela added.

‘I sit all day at my work,’ Ursula said. ‘I should walk more, I expect.’ It was so easy to be lazy. She lived on her own but no one knew. Hilda, the girl she was supposed to share the flat with – a top floor in Bayswater – had moved out, although she still paid the rent, thank goodness. Hilda was living in Ealing in a ‘regular little pleasure palace’ with a man called Ernest whose wife wouldn’t grant him a divorce, and she had to pretend to her parents that she was still in Bayswater, living the life of a single and virtuous woman. Ursula supposed it would only be a matter of time before Hilda’s parents turned up unexpectedly on the doorstep and she would have to spin a lie, or several, to explain their daughter’s absence. Hugh and Sylvie would have been horrified if they thought Ursula was living on her own in London.

‘Bayswater?’ Sylvie said doubtfully when Ursula announced she was moving out of Fox Corner. ‘Is that really necessary?’ Hugh and Sylvie had vetted the flat, and they had also vetted Hilda, who stood up well to Sylvie’s inquisition. Nonetheless Sylvie found both the flat and Hilda somewhat wanting.

‘Ernest from Ealing’, as Ursula always thought of him, was the one who paid the rent (‘a kept woman’, Hilda laughed) but Hilda herself came by every couple of weeks to pick up her post and pay the rent money over. ‘I can find someone else to share with,’ Ursula offered, although she hated the idea.

‘Let’s wait a bit,’ Hilda said, ‘see if it all works out for me. That’s the beauty about living in sin, you can always just get up and leave.’

‘So can Ernest (from Ealing).’

‘I’m twenty-one, he’s forty-two, he’s not about to leave, trust me.’

It had been a relief when Hilda had moved out. Ursula was able to lounge around all evening in her dressing gown, with her curlers in, eating oranges and chocolates and listening to the wireless. Not that Hilda would have objected to any of these things, would have enjoyed them in fact, but Sylvie had instilled decorum in the presence of others from an early age and it was hard to shake it off.

After a couple of weeks of being on her own, it struck her that she had hardly any friends and those that she did have she never seemed to care enough about to keep in touch with. Millie had become an actress, and was away almost all the time with a touring theatre company. She sent the odd postcard from places she would probably never have visited otherwise – Stafford, Gateshead, Grantham – and drew funny cartoons of herself in various roles (‘Me as Juliet, what a hoot!’). Their friendship hadn’t really survived Nancy’s death. The Shawcross family had turned inward with grief and when Millie finally started to live her life again she found Ursula had stopped living hers. Ursula often wished that she could explain Belgravia to Millie but didn’t want to risk what was left of their fragile attachment.

She worked for a big importing company and sometimes when Ursula listened to the girls in the office chatting about what they’d been doing and with whom, she found herself wondering how on earth they met all these people, these Gordons, Charlies, Dicks, Mildreds, Eileens and Veras – a gay, restless flock with whom they frequented variety palaces and cinemas, went skating, swam in lidos and baths and drove out to Epping Forest and Eastbourne. Ursula did none of these things.

Ursula craved solitude but she hated loneliness, a conundrum that she couldn’t even begin to solve. At work, they regarded her as a person apart, as if she were senior to them in every way, even though she wasn’t. Occasionally one or other of the office coterie would say to her, ‘Do you want to come out with us after work?’ It was meant kindly and felt like charity, which it probably was. She never took them up on their offers. She suspected, no, she knew, that they talked about her behind her back, nothing nasty, just curiosity really. They imagined there must be more to her. A dark horse. And still waters run deep. They would be disappointed to know that there was no more, that even clichés were more interesting than the life she lived. No depths, no darkness (in the past perhaps, but not the present). Unless you counted the drink. Which she supposed they would.

The work was a chore – endless bills of lading and customs forms and balance sheets. The goods themselves – rum, cocoa, sugar – and the exotic places they came from seemed at odds with the daily tedium of the office. She supposed she was a little cog in the big wheel of Empire. ‘Nothing wrong with being a cog,’ Maurice said, himself a big wheel now in the Home Office. ‘The world needs cogs.’ She didn’t want to be a cog, but Belgravia seemed to have put paid to anything grander.

Ursula knew how the drinking had started. Nothing dramatic, just something as small and domestic as a boeuf bourguignon she had planned for Pamela when she came to stay for the weekend a few months ago. She was still working in the lab in Glasgow and wanted to do some shopping for her wedding. Harold hadn’t moved yet either, he was due to take up his post at the Royal London in a few weeks. ‘We’ll have a nice weekend, just the two of us,’ Pamela said.

‘Hilda’s away,’ Ursula lied easily. ‘Gone to Hastings for the weekend with her mother.’ There was no reason not to tell Pamela the truth of her arrangement with Hilda, Pamela had always been the one person she could be honest with, and yet something held her back.

‘Splendid,’ Pamela said. ‘I’ll drag Hilda’s mattress through to your bedroom and it’ll be like old times.’

‘Are you looking forward to being married?’ Ursula asked as they lay in bed. It wasn’t really like old times at all.

‘Of course I am, why would I be doing it otherwise? I like the idea of marriage. There is something smooth and round and solid about it.’

‘Like a pebble?’ Ursula said.

‘A symphony. Well, more of a duet, I suppose.’

‘It’s not like you to wax poetic.’

‘I like what our parents have,’ Pamela said simply.

‘Do you?’ It was a while since Pamela had spent much time with Hugh and Sylvie. Perhaps she didn’t know what they had these days. Dissonance rather than harmony.

‘Have you met anyone?’ Pamela asked cautiously.

‘No. No one.’

‘Not yet,’ Pamela said in her most encouraging manner.

The boeuf bourguignon had, naturally, required burgundy and in her lunch hour Ursula had dropped into the wine merchant’s that she passed every day on her way to work in the City. It was an ancient place, the wood of the interior gave the impression that it had been soaked in wine over the centuries and the dark bottles with their beautiful labels seemed to hold out the promise of something that went beyond their contents. The wine merchant picked out a bottle for her, some people used inferior wine for cooking, he said, but the only use one should have for inferior wine was vinegar. He himself was acerbic and rather overwhelming. He afforded the bottle the tenderness of care due a baby, lovingly wrapping it in tissue paper and passing it to Ursula to cradle in her basket-weave shopper where her purchase remained concealed from the office during the afternoon, in case they suspected her of being a secret lush.

The burgundy was bought before the beef and that evening Ursula thought she would open the wine and try a glass, seeing as it had been lauded so highly by the wine merchant. Of course, she’d had alcohol before, she was no teetotaller, after all, but she had never drunk alone. Never uncorked an expensive bottle of burgundy and poured a glass just for herself (dressing gown, curlers, a cosy gas fire). It was like stepping into a warm bath on a cold night, the deep, mellow wine suddenly enormously comforting. This was Keats’s beaker full of the warm South, was it not? Her habitual despondency seemed to evaporate a little so she had another glass. When she stood up she felt quite swimmy and laughed at herself. ‘Tiddly,’ she said to no one and found herself wondering about getting a dog. It would be someone to talk to. A dog like Jock would greet her every day with cheerful optimism and perhaps some of that would rub off on her. Jock was gone now, a heart attack, the vet said. ‘And he had such a strong little heart,’ Teddy said, himself heartbroken. He had been replaced by a sad-eyed whippet that seemed too delicate for the rough and tumble of a dog’s life.

Ursula rinsed the glass and put the cork back in the bottle, leaving plenty for the beef tomorrow before tottering off to bed.

She fell fast asleep and didn’t wake until the alarm, which made a change from the usual restlessness. Drink, and leave the world unseen. When she woke she realized that she couldn’t possibly look after a dog.

Next day at work, the tedium of filling in ledgers all afternoon was cheered by the thought of the half-bottle sitting on her kitchen draining board. After all, she could buy another bottle for the beef.

‘That good, eh?’ the wine merchant said when she appeared again two days later.

‘No, no,’ she laughed, ‘I haven’t cooked the meal yet. It struck me that I should have something equally good to drink with it.’ She realized she couldn’t come back here, to this lovely shop, there was a limit to how many boeuf bourgignons someone was likely to cook.

For Pamela, Ursula made an abstemious cottage pie, followed by baked apples and custard. ‘I brought you a present from Scotland,’ Pamela said and produced a bottle of malt whisky.

Once the malt had been drunk she found another wine merchant, one who treated his wares with less veneration. ‘For a boeuf bourguignon,’ she said, although he showed no interest in its purpose. ‘I’ll take two, actually. I’m cooking for a lot of people.’ A couple of bottles of Guinness from the public house on the corner, ‘For my brother,’ she said, ‘he popped in unexpectedly.’ Teddy wasn’t quite eighteen, she doubted he was a drinker. A couple of days later the same. ‘Your brother round again, miss?’ the publican said. He winked at her and she flushed.

An Italian restaurant in Soho that she ‘happened to be passing’ happily sold her a couple of bottles of Chianti without question. ‘Sherry from the wood’ – she could take a jug to the Co-op at the end of the road and they would fill it up from the barrel. (‘For my mother.’) Rum from public houses a long way from the flat (‘for my father’). She was like a scientist experimenting with the various forms of alcohol, but she knew what she liked best, that first bottle of blushful Hippocrene, the blood-red wine. She plotted how to get a case delivered (‘for a family celebration’).

She had become a secret drinker. It was a private act, intimate and solitary. The very thought of a drink made her heart thud with both fear and anticipation. Unfortunately, between the restrictive licensing laws and the horror of humiliation, a young woman from Bayswater could have considerable difficulty in supplying her addiction. It was easier for the rich, Izzie had an account somewhere, Harrods probably, that simply delivered the stuff to her door.

She had dipped her toe in the waters of Lethe and the next thing she knew she was drowning, from sobriety to being a drunkard in a matter of weeks. It was both shameful and a way of annihilating shame. Every morning she woke up and thought, not tonight, I won’t take a drink tonight, and every afternoon the longing built as she imagined walking into her flat at the end of the day and being greeted by oblivion. She had read sensationalist accounts of the opium dens of Limehouse and wondered if they were true. Opium sounded better than burgundy for eclipsing the pain of existence. Izzie could probably supply her with the location of a Chinese opium den, she had ‘kicked the gong around’, she had reported blithely, but it wasn’t really the kind of thing Ursula felt she could ask. It might not lead to Nirvana (she had proved an apt pupil of Dr Kellet after all), it might lead to a new Belgravia.

Izzie was occasionally allowed back into the family fold (‘Weddings and funerals only,’ Sylvie said. ‘Not christenings’). She had been invited to Pamela’s wedding but to Sylvie’s profound relief had sent her apologies. ‘Weekend in Berlin,’ she said. She knew someone with a plane (thrilling) who was going to fly her there. Ursula visited Izzie occasionally. They had the horror of Belgravia in common, a memory that would unite them for evermore, although they never spoke of it.

In her stead there was a wedding present, a box of silver cake forks, a gift that Pamela was amused by. ‘How mundane,’ she said to Ursula. ‘She never ceases to surprise.’

‘Nearly finished,’ the Neasden dressmaker said through a mouthful of pins.

‘I suppose I am getting a bit plump,’ Ursula said, looking in the mirror at the yellow satin straining to accommodate her pot belly. ‘Perhaps I should join the Women’s League of Health and Beauty.’

Stone-cold sober, she tripped on her way home from work. It was a miserable November evening a few months after Pamela’s wedding, wet and dark, and she simply hadn’t seen the pavement slab the edge of which had been lifted slightly by a tree root. Her hands were full – books from the library and grocery shopping, all acquired hastily in a lunch hour – and her instinct was to save the groceries and the books rather than herself. The result was that her face slammed into the pavement, the full force taken by her nose.

The pain stunned her, she had never experienced anything that came close to it before. She knelt on the ground and held her arms around herself, shopping and books now abandoned to the wet pavement. She could hear herself moaning – keening – and could do nothing to stop the noise.

‘Oh, my,’ a man’s voice said, ‘how awful for you. Let me help you. You have blood all over your nice peach scarf. Is that the colour, or is it salmon?’

‘Peach,’ Ursula murmured, polite despite the pain. She had never given much thought to the mohair muffler around her neck. There seemed to be a lot of blood. She could feel her whole face swelling and could smell the blood, thick and rusty, in her nose but the pain had lessened a degree or two.

The man was rather nice-looking, not very tall but he had sandy hair and blue eyes, and clean, polished-looking skin stretched over good cheekbones. He helped her to her feet. His hand in hers was firm and dry. ‘My name’s Derek, Derek Oliphant,’ he said.

‘Elephant?’

‘Oliphant.’

Three months later they were married.

Derek’s origins were in Barnet and as unremarkable to Sylvie as Harold’s before him. That was, of course, the essence of his appeal for Ursula. He taught history at Blackwood, a minor public school for boys (‘the children of aspirant shopkeepers’, Sylvie said dismissively) and courted Ursula with concerts in the Wigmore Hall and walks on Primrose Hill. They took long bike rides that ended up in pleasant pubs in the outer suburbs, a half-pint of mild for him, a lemonade for her.

Her nose proved to be broken. (‘Oh, poor you,’ Pamela wrote. ‘And you had such a nice nose.’) Before he escorted her to a hospital, Derek had led her into a public house nearby to get cleaned up a little. ‘Let me get you a brandy,’ he said when she sat down and she said, ‘No, no, I’m fine, I’ll just have a glass of water. I’m not much of a drinker,’ even though the previous evening she had blacked out on the floor of her bedroom in Bayswater, courtesy of a bottle of gin she had stolen from Izzie’s house. She had no qualms about thieving from Izzie, Izzie had taken so much from her. Belgravia, and so on.

Ursula stopped drinking almost as suddenly as she had started. She supposed she had had a hollow inside her that had been scooped out in Belgravia. She had tried to fill it with alcohol but now it was being replenished with her feelings for Derek. What were those feelings? Mostly relief that someone wanted to look after her, someone who knew nothing of her shameful past. ‘I’m in love,’ she wrote rather deliriously to Pamela. ‘Hurrah,’ Pamela wrote back.

‘Sometimes,’ Sylvie said, ‘one can mistake gratitude for love.’

Derek’s mother still lived in Barnet but his father was dead, as was a younger sister. ‘A horrible accident,’ Derek said. ‘She fell into the fire when she was four years old.’ Sylvie had always been very particular about fireguards. Derek himself had nearly drowned when he was a boy, he said after Ursula had offered up her own incident in Cornwall. It was one of the few adventures in her life where she felt she had played an almost entirely innocent part. And Derek? A rough tide, an upturned rowing boat, an heroic swim to shore. No Mr Winton necessary. ‘I rescued myself,’ he said.

‘He’s not entirely ordinary then,’ Hilda said, offering Ursula a cigarette. She hesitated but declined, not ready to take on another addiction. She was in the middle of packing up her goods and chattels. She could hardly wait to leave Bayswater behind. Derek was in digs in Holborn but was finalizing the purchase of a house for them.

‘I’ve written to the landlord, by the way,’ Hilda said. ‘Told him we’re both moving out. Ernie’s wife’s giving him a divorce, did I say?’ She yawned. ‘He’s popped the question. Thought I might take him up on it. We’ll both be respectable married women. I can come and visit you in – where is it again?’

‘Wealdstone.’

The wedding party, in a register office, was, according to Derek’s wishes, restricted to his mother and to Hugh and Sylvie. Pamela was disconcerted not to be invited. ‘We didn’t want to wait,’ Ursula said. ‘And Derek didn’t want any fuss.’

‘And don’t you want fuss?’ Pamela asked. ‘Isn’t that the point of a wedding?’

No, she didn’t want a fuss. She was going to belong to someone, safe at last, that was all that counted. Being a bride was nothing, being a wife was everything. ‘We wanted it all to be simple,’ she said resolutely. (‘And cheap, by the looks of it,’ Izzie said. Another set of mundane silver cake forks was dispatched.)

‘He seems like a pleasant enough chap,’ Hugh said at what passed for a reception – a three-course luncheon in a restaurant close to the register office.

‘He is,’ Ursula agreed. ‘Very pleasant.’

‘Still, it’s a bit of a rum do, little bear,’ Hugh said. ‘Not like Pammy’s wedding, is it? Half of the Old Kent Road seemed to turn out for that. And poor Ted was very put out not to be invited today. As long as you’re happy, though,’ he added encouragingly, ‘that’s the main thing.’

Ursula wore a dove-grey suit for the ceremony. Sylvie had provided corsages for everyone made from hothouse roses from a florist. ‘Not my roses, sadly,’ she said to Mrs Oliphant. ‘Gloire des Mousseux, if you’re interested.’

‘Very nice, I’m sure,’ Mrs Oliphant said, in a way that didn’t sound much like a compliment.

‘Marry in haste, repent at leisure,’ Sylvie murmured to no one in particular before a restrained sherry toast to the bride and bridegroom.

‘Have you?’ Hugh asked her mildly. ‘Repented?’ Sylvie pretended not to hear. She was in a particularly discordant mood. ‘Change of life, I believe,’ an embarrassed Hugh whispered to Ursula.

‘Me too,’ she whispered back. Hugh squeezed her hand and said, ‘That’s my girl.’

‘And does Derek know you’re not intact?’ Sylvie asked when she was alone with Ursula in the Ladies’ powder room. They were sitting on little padded stools, repairing their lipstick in the mirror. Mrs Oliphant remained at the table, having no lipstick to repair.

‘Intact?’ Ursula echoed, staring at Sylvie in the mirror. What did that mean, that she was flawed? Or broken?

‘One’s maidenhood,’ Sylvie said. ‘Deflowering,’ she added impatiently when she saw Ursula’s blank expression. ‘For someone who is far from innocent you seem remarkably naïve.’

Sylvie used to love me, Ursula thought. And now she didn’t. ‘Intact,’ Ursula repeated again. She had never even considered this question. ‘How will he tell?’

‘The blood, of course,’ Sylvie said, rather testily.

Ursula thought of the wisteria wallpaper. The deflowering. She hadn’t known there was a connection. She thought the blood was a wound, not the breaching of the arch.

‘Well, he might not realize,’ Sylvie sighed. ‘I’m sure he won’t be the first husband to be deceived on his wedding night.’

‘Fresh warpaint?’ Hugh said easily when they returned to the table. Ted had inherited Hugh’s smile. Derek and Mrs Oliphant shared the same frown. Ursula wondered what Mr Oliphant had been like. He was seldom mentioned.

‘Vanity, thy name is woman,’ Derek said with what seemed like a forced joviality. He was not, Ursula noticed, as comfortable in social situations as she had first thought. She smiled at him, feeling a new bond. She was marrying a stranger, she realized. (‘Everyone marries a stranger,’ Hugh said.)

‘The word is “frailty”, actually,’ Sylvie said pleasantly. ‘Frailty, thy name is woman. Hamlet. Many people misquote it for some reason.’

A shadow passed over Derek’s face but then he laughed it off. ‘I bow to your superior learning, Mrs Todd.’

Their new house in Wealdstone had been chosen for its location, relatively near to the school where Derek taught. He had an inheritance, ‘a very small sum’ from his seldom-mentioned father’s investments. It was a ‘sound’ terrace in Masons Avenue, half-timbered in the Tudor style with leaded lights and a stained-glass panel in the front door depicting a galleon in full sail, although Wealdstone seemed a long way from any ocean. The house had all modern conveniences as well as shops close by, a doctor, a dentist and a park for children to play in, in fact everything a young wife (and mother, ‘one day very soon’, according to Derek) could want.

Ursula could see herself eating breakfast with Derek in the mornings before waving him off to work, could see herself pushing their children in prams then pushchairs then swings, bathing them in the evening and reading bedtime stories in their pretty bedroom. She and Derek would sit quietly in the lounge in the evenings listening to the wireless. He could work on the book he was writing, a school textbook – ‘From Plantagenets to Tudors’. (‘Gosh,’ Hilda said. ‘Sounds thrilling.’) Wealdstone was a long way from Belgravia. Thank goodness.

The rooms this married life was to be carried out in remained in her imagination until after their honeymoon, as Derek had bought and furnished the house without her ever having seen it.

‘That’s a bit odd, don’t you think?’ Pamela said. ‘No,’ Ursula said. ‘It’s like a surprise gift. My wedding present from him.’

When Derek finally carried her awkwardly over the Wealdstone threshold (a red-tiled porch that neither Sylvie nor William Morris would have approved of) Ursula couldn’t help but feel a twinge of disappointment. The house proved to be more sparsely old-fashioned than the one in her imagination and there was a drabness about it that she supposed came from its not having had a woman’s hand in the décor, so she was surprised when Derek said, ‘Mother helped me.’ But then there was, of course, a similar kind of occlusion in Barnet where a certain dinginess adhered to the dowager Mrs Oliphant.

Sylvie had passed her honeymoon in Deauville, Pamela spent hers on a walking holiday in Switzerland, but Ursula began her own marriage with a rather wet week in Worthing.

She married one man (‘a pleasant enough chap’) and woke up with another, one as tightly wound as Sylvie’s little carriage clock.

He changed almost immediately, as if the honeymoon itself was a transition, an anticipated rite of passage for him from solicitous suitor to disenchanted spouse. Ursula blamed the weather, which was wretched. The landlady of the boarding house where they were staying expected them to vacate the premises between breakfast and dinner at six and so they spent long days sheltering in cafés or in the art gallery and museum or fighting the wind on the pier. Evenings were spent playing partner whist with other (less dispirited) guests before retiring to their chilly bedroom. Derek was a poor card player, in more ways than one, and they lost nearly every hand. He seemed almost to wilfully misread her attempts to indicate her hand to him.

‘Why did you lead trumps?’ she asked him later – genuinely curious – as they decorously removed their clothes in the bedroom. ‘You think that nonsense is important?’ he said with a look of such deep contempt that she thought it might be best to avoid games of any kind with Derek in the future.

On the first night, blood, or the lack of it, passed unnoticed, Ursula was relieved to find. ‘I think you should know that I am not in-experienced,’ Derek said rather pompously as they climbed into bed together for the first time. ‘I believe it is the duty of a husband to know something of the world. How else can he protect the purity of his wife?’ It sounded like a specious argument to Ursula but she was hardly in a position to argue.

Derek rose early each morning and did a relentless series of press-ups – as if he were in an army barracks rather than on honeymoon. ‘Mens sana in corpora sana,’ he said. Best not to correct him, she thought. He was proud of his Latin, as well as his smattering of ancient Greek. His mother had scrimped and saved to make sure he had a good education, ‘nothing had been handed on a plate, unlike some’. Ursula had been rather good at Latin, Greek too, but she thought it best not to crow. That was another Ursula, of course. A different Ursula, unmarked by Belgravia.

Derek’s method of having conjugal relations was very similar to his method of exercise, even down to the same expression of pain and effort on his face. Ursula could have been part of the mattress for all he seemed to care. But what did she have to measure it against? Howie? She wished now that she had questioned Hilda about what went on in her ‘pleasure palace’ in Ealing. She thought of Izzie’s exuberant flirting and the warm affection between Pamela and Harold. It all seemed to indicate diversion if not downright happiness. ‘What’s life worth if you can’t have some fun?’ Izzie used to say. Ursula sensed there was going to be a shortage of fun in Wealdstone.

As humdrum as her job had been, it was as nothing compared to the drudge work of keeping house, day in, day out. Everything had to be continually washed, scrubbed, dusted, polished and swept, not to mention the ironing, the folding, the hanging, the straightening. The adjustments. Derek was a man of right angles and straight lines. Towels, tea-towels, curtains, rugs all needed constant alignment and realignment. (As did Ursula, apparently.) But this was her job, this was the arrangement and realignment of marriage itself, wasn’t it? Although Ursula couldn’t get over the feeling that she was on some kind of permanent probation.

It was easier to succumb to Derek’s unquestioning belief in domestic order rather than to fight it. (‘A place for everything and everything in its place.’) Crockery had to be scoured clean of stains, cutlery had to be polished and straightened in drawers – knives adjusted like soldiers on parade, spoons spooning each other neatly. A housewife has to be the most observant worshipper at the altar of the Lares and Penates, he said. It should be ‘hearth’, not ‘altar’, she thought, the amount of time she spent sweeping out grates and rattling clinker out of the boiler.

Derek was particular about tidiness. He couldn’t think, he said, if things were out of place or askew. ‘Tidy house, tidy mind,’ he said. He was, Ursula was learning, rather fond of aphorisms. He certainly couldn’t work on ‘From Plantagenets to Tudors’ in the kind of muddle that Ursula seemed to create simply by entering a room. They needed the income from this textbook – his first – which William Collins was to publish and to this end he commandeered the poky dining room (table, sideboard and all) at the back of the house as his ‘study’ and Ursula was banished from Derek’s company most evenings so that he could write. Two should live as cheaply as one, he said, and yet here they were, barely able to pay their bills because of her lack of domestic economy, so she could at least give him some peace to try to earn an extra crust. And no, thank you, he didn’t want her help in typing up his manuscript.

Ursula’s old household routines now seemed appallingly slovenly, even to her own eyes. In Bayswater her bed often went unmade and her pots unwashed. Bread and butter made a good breakfast and there was nothing wrong, as far as she could see, with a boiled egg for tea. Married life was more exacting. Breakfasts had to be cooked and on the table at just the right time in the morning. Derek couldn’t be late for school and regarded his breakfast, a litany of porridge, eggs and toast, as a solemn (and solitary) communion. The eggs were cooked in rotation throughout the week, scrambled, fried, boiled, poached, and on Fridays the excitement of a kipper. At weekends Derek liked bacon, sausage and black pudding with his eggs. The eggs came not from a shop but a smallholding three miles away, to which Ursula had to trek on foot every week because Derek had sold their bikes when they moved to Wealdstone ‘to save money’.

Tea was a different kind of nightmare as she had to think of new things to cook all the time. Life was an endless round of chops and steaks and pies and stews and roasts, not to mention the pudding that was expected every day and in great variety. I’m a slave to recipe books! she wrote with faux-cheerfulness to Sylvie, although cheerful was far from how she felt every day, poring over their demanding pages. She gained a new respect for Mrs Glover. Of course, Mrs Glover benefited from a large kitchen, a substantial budget and a full batterie de cuisine, whereas the Wealdstone kitchen was fitted out in a rather paltry fashion and Ursula’s housekeeping allowance never seemed to stretch throughout the week so that she was continually chastised for overspending.

She had never bothered much about money in Bayswater, if she fell short she ate less and walked instead of taking the Tube. If she really needed topping up there had always been Hugh or Izzie to fall back on, but she could hardly go running to them for money now that she had a husband. Derek would have been mortified at this slur on his manhood.

After several months under the constraint of unending chores Ursula thought she might go mad if she couldn’t find some kind of pastime to alleviate the long days. There was a tennis club that she passed en route to the shops every day. All she could see of it was the tall netting that rose behind a wooden fence and a green door in a white pebble-dash wall facing the street, but she could hear the familiar inviting summer sound of thock and twang and one day she found herself knocking on the green door and asking if she could join.

‘I’ve joined the local tennis club,’ she said to Derek when he came home that evening.

‘You didn’t ask me,’ Derek said.

‘I didn’t think you played tennis.’

‘I don’t,’ he said. ‘I meant you didn’t ask me if you could join.’

‘I didn’t know I had to ask.’ Something passed over his face, the same cloud she had briefly seen on their wedding day when Sylvie had corrected his Shakespeare. This time it took longer to pass and seemed to change him in some indefinable way, as though part of him had shrivelled inside.

‘Well, can I?’ she said, thinking it would be better to be meek and keep the peace. Would Pammy have asked such a question of Harold? Would Harold have ever expected such a question? Ursula wasn’t sure. She realized she knew nothing about marriage. And, of course, Sylvie and Hugh’s alliance remained an ongoing enigma.

She wondered what argument Derek could possibly have against her playing tennis. He seemed to be having the same struggle and eventually said begrudgingly, ‘I suppose so. As long as you still have time to do everything in the house.’ Halfway through their tea – stewed lamb chops and mashed potatoes – he got up abruptly from the table, picked up his plate and threw it across the room and then walked out of the house without saying a word. He didn’t come back until Ursula was getting ready for bed. He still wore the same thrawn expression on his face as when he had left and gave her a brief ‘good night’ that almost choked him as they climbed into bed.

In the middle of the night she was woken by him clambering on top of her and hitching himself wordlessly inside her. Wisteria came to mind.

The thrawn face (‘that look’ was how she thought of it) now made regular appearances and Ursula surprised herself with how far she would go to appease it. But it was hopeless, once he was in this mood she got on his nerves, no matter what she did or said, in fact her attempts to placate him seemed to make the situation worse, if anything.

A visit was arranged to Mrs Oliphant in Barnet, the first since the wedding. They had popped in briefly – tea and a stale scone – to announce their engagement, but hadn’t been back since.

This time round Mrs Oliphant fed them a limp ham salad and some small conversation. She had several odd jobs ‘saved up’ for Derek and he disappeared, tools in hand, leaving his womenfolk to clear up. When the washing-up was done, Ursula said, ‘Shall I make a cup of tea?’ and Mrs Oliphant said, ‘If you like,’ without any great encouragement.

They sat awkwardly in the parlour, sipping their tea. There was a framed photograph hanging on the wall, a studio portrait of Mrs Oliphant and her new husband on their wedding day, looking strait-laced in turn-of-the-century wedding garb. ‘Very nice,’ Ursula said. ‘Do you have any photographs of Derek when he was small? Or of his sister?’ she added because it didn’t seem right to exclude the girl from family history merely on account of her being dead.

‘Sister?’ Mrs Oliphant said, frowning. ‘What sister?’

‘His sister who died,’ Ursula said.

‘Died?’ Mrs Oliphant looked startled.

‘Your daughter,’ Ursula said. ‘She fell in the fire,’ she added, feeling foolish, it was hardly a detail you were likely to forget. She wondered if perhaps Mrs Oliphant was a little simple. Mrs Oliphant herself looked confused, as if she were trying to recollect this forgotten child. ‘I only ever had Derek,’ she concluded firmly.

‘Well, anyway,’ Ursula said, as if this were a trivial subject to be lightly tossed away, ‘you must come and visit us in Wealdstone. Now that we’re settled. We’re very grateful, you know, for the money that Mr Oliphant left.’

‘Left? He left money?’

‘Some shares, I think, in the will,’ Ursula said. Perhaps Mrs Oliphant hadn’t been involved in the probate.

‘Will? He left nothing but debts when he went. He’s not dead,’ she added as if it were Ursula who was the simple one. ‘He’s living in Margate.’

What other lies and half-truths were there, Ursula wondered? Did Derek really nearly drown when he was younger?

‘Drown?’

‘Fall out of a rowing boat and swim to shore?’

‘Whatever gave you that idea?’

‘Now then,’ Derek said, appearing in the doorway and making them both jump, ‘what are you two gossiping about?’

‘You’ve lost weight,’ Pamela said.

‘Yes, I suppose I have. I’ve been playing tennis.’ How normal that made her life sound. She doggedly attended the tennis club, it was the only relief she had from the claustrophobia of life in Masons Avenue, though she had to face a constant inquisition on the subject. Every evening when he came home Derek asked if she had played tennis today, even though she only played two afternoons a week. She was always interrogated about her partner, a dentist’s wife called Phyllis. Derek seemed to despise Phyllis, even though he had never met her.

Pamela had travelled all the way from Finchley. ‘Obviously it was the only way I was ever going to see you. You must like married life. Or Wealdstone,’ she laughed. ‘Mother said that you put her off.’ Ursula had been putting everyone off since the wedding, rebuffing Hugh’s offers to ‘pop in’ for a cup of tea and Sylvie’s hints that perhaps they should be invited to Sunday lunch. Jimmy was away at school and Teddy was in his first year at Oxford but he wrote lovely long letters to her, and Maurice, of course, had no inclination to visit anyone in his family.

‘I’m sure she’s not too bothered about visiting. Wealdstone and so on. Not her cup of tea at all.’

They both laughed. Ursula had almost forgotten what it felt like to laugh. She felt tears start to her eyes and had to turn away and busy herself with the tea things. ‘It’s so nice to see you, Pammy.’

‘Well, you know you’re welcome in Finchley whenever you please. You should get a telephone, and then we could talk all the time.’ Derek thought a telephone was an expensive luxury but Ursula suspected that he simply didn’t want her speaking to anyone. She could hardly voice this suspicion (and to whom – Phyllis? The milkman?) as people would think she was off her head. Ursula had been looking forward to Pamela’s visit the way people looked forward to holidays. On Monday she had said to Derek, ‘Pamela’s coming on Wednesday afternoon,’ and he had said, ‘Oh?’ He seemed indifferent and she was relieved that the thrawn face did not appear.

As soon as they were finished with them Ursula quickly cleared the tea things away, washed and dried them and put them back in their places.

‘Golly,’ Pamela said, ‘when did you become such a neat little Hausfrau?’

‘Tidy house, tidy mind,’ Ursula said.

‘Tidiness is overrated,’ Pamela said. ‘Is anything the matter? You seem awfully down.’

‘Time of the month,’ Ursula said.

‘Oh, rotten luck. I’m going to be free of that problem for a few months. Guess what?’

‘You’re having a baby? Oh, that’s wonderful news!’

‘Yes. Isn’t it? Mother will be a grandmother again.’ (Maurice had already made a start on the next generation of Todds.) ‘Will she like that, do you suppose?’

‘Who knows? She’s rather unpredictable these days.’

‘Did you have a nice visit from your sister?’ Derek asked when he came home that night.

‘Lovely. She’s having a baby.’

‘Oh?’

The next morning her poached eggs were not ‘up to scratch’. Even Ursula had to admit that the egg she presented for Derek’s breakfast was a sad sight, a sickly jellyfish deposited on toast to die. A sly smile appeared on his face, an expression that seemed to indicate a certain triumph in finding fault. A new look. Worse than the old.

‘Do you expect me to eat that?’ he asked.

Several answers to that question passed through Ursula’s mind but she rejected them all as provocative. Instead she said, ‘I can do you another one.’

‘You know,’ he said, ‘I have to work all hours at a job I despise, just to keep you. You don’t have to worry your silly little noggin about anything, do you? You do nothing all day – oh, no, forgive me,’ he said sarcastically, ‘I was forgetting you play tennis – and you can’t even manage to cook me an egg.’

Ursula hadn’t realized he despised his job. He complained a great deal about the behaviour of the Lower Third and talked incessantly about the headmaster’s lack of appreciation of his hard work, but she hadn’t thought that he hated teaching. He looked close to tears and she felt suddenly and unexpectedly sorry for him and said, ‘I’ll poach another.’

‘Don’t bother.’ She anticipated the egg would be thrown at the wall, Derek was given to tossing food around since she had joined the tennis club, but instead he delivered a massive open-handed slap to the side of her head that sent her reeling against the cooker and then to the floor where she remained, kneeling as though she were at prayer. The pain, more than the act, had taken her by surprise.

Derek walked across the kitchen and stood over her with the plate containing the offending egg. For a moment she thought he was going to bring it crashing down on her but instead he slid the egg off the plate and on to the top of her head. Then he stalked out of the kitchen and she heard the front door slam a minute later. The egg slid off her hair, down her face and on to the floor, where it burst open in a quiet splash of yellow. She struggled to her feet and fetched a cloth.

That morning seemed to open up something in him. She broke rules she didn’t know existed – too much coal on the fire, too much toilet paper used, a light accidentally left on. Receipts and bills were all scrutinized by him, every penny had to be accounted for and she never had any spare money.

He proved himself capable of the most enormous rants over the pettiest of things, once started he seemed unable to stop. He was angry all the time. She made him angry all the time. Every evening now he demanded an exacting account of her day. How many books did she change in the library, what did the butcher say to her, did anyone call at the house? She gave up tennis. It was easier.

He didn’t hit her again but violence seemed to simmer constantly beneath his surface, a dormant volcano that Ursula had unwontedly brought back to life. She was wrong-footed by him all the time so that she never seemed to have a moment to clear the befuddlement in her brain. Her very existence seemed to be irksome to him. Was life to be lived as a continuous punishment? (Why not, didn’t she deserve that?)

She began to live in a strange kind of malaise, as though her head was full of fog. She had made her bed, she supposed, and now she must lie on it. Perhaps that was another version of Dr Kellet’s amor fati. What would he say about her current predicament? More to the point, perhaps, what would he say about Derek’s peculiar character?

She was to attend sports day. It was a big event in Blackwood’s calendar and wives of masters were expected to attend. Derek had given her money for a new hat and said, ‘Make sure you look smart.’

She went to a local shop that sold apparel for women and children, called A La Mode (although it really wasn’t). It was here that she bought her stockings and undergarments. She had had no new clothes since her wedding. She didn’t care enough about her appearance to badger Derek for the money.

It was a lacklustre-looking shop in a row of other lacklustre shops – a hairdressing salon, a fishmonger, a greengrocer’s, a post office. She didn’t have the heart or the stomach (or the budget) to bother going up to town to a smart London department store (and what would Derek say about such a jaunt?). When she worked in London, before the watershed of marriage, she had spent a lot of time in Selfridge’s and Peter Robinson’s. Now those places seemed as distant as foreign countries.

The contents of the shop window were protected from the sun by a yellowy-orange screen, a kind of thick cellophane that reminded her of the wrapper on a bottle of Lucozade and made everything in the window completely undesirable.

It was not the most beautiful hat but she supposed it would do. She scrutinized her reflection unwillingly in the shop’s floor-to-ceiling tripartite mirror. In triptych she looked three times worse than she did in the bathroom mirror (the only one in the house that she couldn’t avoid). She no longer recognized herself, she thought. She had taken the wrong path, opened the wrong door, and was unable to find her way back.

Suddenly, horribly, she frightened herself by wailing, the wretched sound of utter despondency. The owner of the shop came rushing from behind the counter and said, ‘There, dear, don’t get upset. Time of the month, is it?’ She made her sit and have a cup of tea and a biscuit and Ursula couldn’t begin to express her gratitude for this simple kindness.

The school was one stop on the train and then a short walk along a quiet road. Ursula joined the stream of parents flowing through Blackwood’s gates. It was exciting – and slightly terrifying – to suddenly find herself among a crush. She had been married less than six months but had forgotten what it was like to be in a crowd.

Ursula had never been to the school before and was surprised by its commonplace red brick and its pedestrian herbaceous borders, quite unlike the ancient school that the men of the Todd family attended. Teddy and then Jimmy had followed in Maurice’s footsteps to Hugh’s old school, a lovely building of soft grey stone and as pretty as an Oxford college. (‘Savage within’, though, according to Teddy.) The grounds were particularly beautiful and even Sylvie admired the profusion of flowers in the beds. ‘Rather romantic planting,’ she said. No such romance at Derek’s school, where the emphasis was on the playing fields. The boys at Blackwood were not particularly academic, according to Derek anyway, and were kept occupied by an endless round of rugby and cricket. More healthy minds in healthy bodies. Did Derek have a healthy mind?

It was too late to ask him about his sister and his father, Krakatoa would erupt, Ursula suspected. Why would you make up something like that? Dr Kellet would know.

Trestle tables, bearing refreshments for parents and staff, were set up at one end of the athletics field. Tea and sandwiches and finger slices of dry Dundee cake. Ursula lingered by the tea-urn looking for Derek. He had told her he wouldn’t be able to talk much to her as he was needed to ‘help out’ and when she did eventually spot him at the far end of the field he was diligently carrying an armful of large hoops, the purpose of which seemed mysterious to Ursula.

Everyone gathered around the trestles seemed to know each other, particularly the masters’ wives, and it struck Ursula that there must be a great many more social events at Blackwood than Derek ever mentioned.

A couple of senior masters, gowned like bats, settled on the tea-table and she caught the name ‘Oliphant’. As inconspicuously as possible Ursula stepped a little closer to them, pretending a deep fascination with the crab paste in the sandwich on her plate.

‘Young Oliphant’s in trouble again, I hear.’

‘Really?’

‘Hit a boy, I believe.’

‘Nothing wrong with hitting boys. I hit them all the time.’

‘Bad this time though, apparently. Parents are threatening to go to the police.’

‘He’s never been able to control a class. Ruddy awful teacher, of course.’

Plates now fully loaded with cake, the two men began to wander off, Ursula drifting in their wake.

‘In debt up to his ears, you know.’

‘Perhaps he’ll make some money from his book.’

They both laughed heartily as if a great joke had been told.

‘The wife’s here today, I gather.’

‘Really? We’d better watch out. I hear she’s very unstable.’ This, too, a great joke, seemingly. A sudden shot from the starting pistol signalling the beginning of a hurdles race made Ursula jump. She let the masters amble off. She had lost her appetite for eavesdropping.

She caught sight of Derek striding towards her, hoops now replaced by an unwieldy burden of javelins. He shouted to a couple of boys for help and they trotted up obediently. As they passed Ursula, one of them sniggered, sotto voce, ‘Yes, Mr Elephant, coming, Mr Elephant.’ Derek dropped the javelins to the grass with a great clatter and said to the boys, ‘Carry them to the end of the field, come on, get a move on.’ He approached Ursula and kissed her lightly on the cheek, saying, ‘Hello, dear.’ She burst out laughing, she couldn’t help herself. It was the nicest thing he had said to her in weeks and was voiced not to her but for the benefit of the two masters’ wives who were standing nearby.

‘Is there something funny?’ he asked, studying her face a little too long for comfort. She could tell he was seething. She shook her head in answer. She was worried she might scream out loud, could feel her own volcano bubbling up, ready to explode. She supposed she was hysterical. Unstable.

‘I have to see to the Upper School’s high jump,’ Derek said, frowning at her. ‘I’ll meet you shortly.’ He walked off, still frowning, and she started to laugh again.

‘Mrs Oliphant? Is it Mrs Oliphant, it is, isn’t it?’ The two masters’ wives pounced on her, lionesses sensing wounded prey.

She also travelled home alone as Derek had to supervise evening study and would eat at the school, he said. She made herself a scrappy tea of fried herring and cold potatoes and had a sudden longing for a bottle of good red wine. In fact one bottle after another until she had drunk herself to death. She scraped the herring bones into the bin. To cease upon the midnight with no pain. Anything was better than this ludicrous life.

Derek was a joke, to the boys, to the staff. Mr Elephant. She could just imagine the unruly Lower Third driving him mad with rage. And his book, what of his book?

Ursula never bothered much with the contents of Derek’s ‘study’. She had never felt any great interest in the Plantagenets or Tudors either, for that matter. She was under strict instructions not to move any of his papers or books when dusting and polishing in the dining room (as she still liked to think of it) but she didn’t care to anyway, barely glancing at the progress of the great tome.

He had been working feverishly of late, the table was covered in a clutter of notes and scraps of paper. It was all disconnected sentences and thoughts – rather amusing if somewhat primitive belief – planta genista, the common broom gives us the name Angevin – come of the devil, and to the devil they would go. There was little sign of an actual manuscript, just corrections and re-corrections, the same paragraph written over and over with tiny changes each time, and endless trial pages, written in ruled exercise books with Blackwood’s crest and motto (A posse ad esse – ‘from possibility to reality’) on the cover. No wonder he hadn’t wanted her to type up his manuscript. She had married a Casaubon, she realized.

Derek’s whole life was a fabrication. From his very first words to her (Oh, my, how awful for you. Let me help you) he had not been genuine. What had he wanted from her? Someone weaker than himself? Or a wife, a mother of his children, someone running his house, all the trappings of the vie quotidienne but without any of its underlying chaos. She had married him in order to be safe from that chaos. He had married her, she now understood, for the same reason. They were the last two people on earth who could make anyone safe from anything.

Ursula rooted through the sideboard drawers and found a sheaf of letters, the top one with the letterhead of William Collins and Sons, Co. Ltd ‘regretfully’ rejecting his idea for a book, in an ‘already oversubscribed area of history textbooks’. There were similar letters from other educational publishers and, worse, there were unpaid bills and threatening final notices. A particularly harsh letter demanded immediate repayment of the loan taken out apparently to pay for the house. It was the kind of sour letter that she had typed up from dictation at her secretarial college, Dear Sir, It has been brought to my notice—

She heard the front door open and her heart jumped. Derek appeared in the doorway of the dining room, a Gothic intruder on stage. ‘What are you doing?’

She held up the letter from William Collins and said, ‘You’re a liar, through and through. Why did you marry me? Why did you make us both so unhappy?’ The look on his face. That look. She was asking to be killed, but wasn’t that easier than doing it herself? She didn’t care any more, there was no fight in her.

Ursula was expecting the first blow but it still took her by surprise, his fist punching hard into the middle of her face as if he wanted to obliterate it.

She slept, or perhaps she passed out, on the kitchen floor and woke some time before six. She was sick and dizzy and every inch of her was sore and aching, her whole body made of lead. She was desperate for a drink of water but didn’t dare turn the tap on for fear of waking Derek. Using first a chair, then the table, she hauled herself up to standing. She found her shoes and crept into the hallway where she took her coat and a headscarf from the peg. Derek’s wallet was in his jacket pocket and she took a ten-shilling note, more than enough for the rail fare and then a cab onward. She felt exhausted just at the thought of this taxing journey – she wasn’t even sure she could make it on foot as far as Harrow and Wealdstone station.

She slipped her coat on and pulled the headscarf over her face, avoiding the mirror in the hallstand. It would be too dreadful a sight. She left the front door slightly ajar in case the noise of it closing woke him up. She thought of Ibsen’s Nora slamming the door behind her. Nora wouldn’t have gone in for dramatic gestures if she had been trying to escape from Derek Oliphant.

It was the longest walk of her life. Her heart was beating so fast she thought it might give out. All the way she expected to hear his footsteps running up behind her and him yelling her name. At the ticket office she had to mumble ‘Euston’ through a mouthful of bloody, broken teeth. The ticket clerk glanced at her and then glanced quickly away when he saw the state she was in. Ursula supposed he had no precedent for dealing with female passengers who looked as if they had been in bare-knuckle fights.

She had to wait for the first train of the day for another ten agonizing minutes in the ladies’ waiting room but at least she was able to get a drink of water and remove some of the dried blood from her face.

In the carriage she sat with her head bowed, one hand shielding her face. The men in suits and bowlers studiously ignored her. As she waited for the train to pull away she risked a glance along the platform and was relieved beyond measure that there was still no sign of Derek. With any luck he hadn’t missed her yet and was still doing his press-ups on the bedroom floor, presuming her to be down in the kitchen preparing his breakfast. Friday, kipper day. The kipper still lay on the pantry shelf, wrapped in newspaper. He would be furious.

When she got off the train at Euston her legs almost gave way. People gave her a wide berth and she worried that the cab driver would refuse the fare, but when she showed him the money he took her. They drove in silence across London, bathed in rain overnight, and now the stones of the buildings were sparkling in the first rays of sun and the soft cloudy dawn was opalescent in pinks and blues. She had forgotten how much she liked London. Her heart rose. She had decided to live and now she wanted to very much.

The cab driver helped her out at the end of the journey. ‘You’re sure about this, miss, are you?’ he said, looking doubtfully at the large red-brick house in Melbury Road. She nodded, mutely.

It was an inevitable destination.

She rang the bell and the front door opened. Izzie’s hand flew to her mouth in horror at the sight of her face. ‘Oh, my God. What happened to you?’

‘My husband tried to kill me.’

‘You’d better come in then,’ Izzie said.

The bruises healed, very slowly. ‘Battle scars,’ Izzie said.

Izzie’s dentist fixed Ursula’s teeth and she had to wear her right arm in a sling for a while. Her nose had been broken again and her cheekbones and jaw cracked. She was flawed, no longer intact. On the other hand, she felt as if she had been scourged clean. The past no longer weighed so heavily on the present. She sent a message to Fox Corner saying that she had gone away for the summer, ‘a touring holiday of the Highlands with Derek’. She was fairly sure that Derek wouldn’t contact Fox Corner. He would be licking his wounds somewhere. Barnet, maybe. He had no idea where Izzie lived, thank goodness.

Izzie was surprisingly sympathetic. ‘Stay as long as you like,’ she said. ‘It’ll make a change from rattling around in here on my own. And God only knows, I’ve got more than enough money to keep you. Take your time,’ she added. ‘No rush. And you’re only twenty-three, for heaven’s sake.’ Ursula didn’t know which was more surprising – Izzie’s genuine hospitality or the fact that she knew how old she was. Perhaps Izzie had been changed by Belgravia too.

Ursula was in on her own one evening when Teddy turned up on the doorstep. ‘You’re hard to find,’ he said, giving her an enormous hug. Ursula’s heart bumped with pleasure. Teddy always seemed more real than other people somehow. He was brown and strong from spending the long summer vacation working on the Hall farm. He had announced recently that he wanted to be a farmer. ‘I’ll have the money back that I spent on your education,’ Sylvie said – but smiling because Teddy was her favourite.

‘I believe it was my money,’ Hugh said. (Did Hugh have a favourite? ‘You, I think,’ Pamela said.)

‘What happened to your face?’ Teddy asked her.

‘Bit of an accident, you should have seen it before,’ she laughed.

‘You’re not in the Highlands,’ Teddy said.

‘Doesn’t seem so, does it?’

‘You’ve left him then?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good.’ Teddy, like Hugh, didn’t go in for long narratives. ‘Where’s the giddy aunt then?’ he asked.

‘Out giddying. The Embassy Club, I believe.’ They drank some of Izzie’s champagne to celebrate Ursula’s freedom.

‘You’ll be disgraced in Mother’s eyes, I expect,’ Teddy said.

‘Don’t worry, I believe I already am.’

Together they made an omelette and a tomato salad and ate with their plates on their knees listening to Ambrose and his orchestra on the wireless. When they finished their food, Teddy lit a cigarette. ‘You’re so grown-up these days,’ Ursula laughed. ‘I have muscles,’ he said, demonstrating his biceps like a circus strongman. He was reading English at Oxford and said it was a relief to stop thinking and ‘be working on the land’. He was writing poetry, too, he said. About the land, not about ‘feelings’. Teddy’s heart had been fractured by Nancy’s death and once a thing was cracked, he said, it could never be repaired perfectly. ‘Quite Jamesian, isn’t it?’ he said ruefully. (Ursula thought of herself.)

A bereft Teddy carried his wounds on the inside, a scar across his heart where little Nancy Shawcross had been ripped away. ‘It’s as if,’ he said to Ursula, ‘you walk into a room and your life ends but you keep on living.’

‘I think I understand. I do,’ Ursula said.

Ursula dozed off with her head on Teddy’s shoulder. She was still tremendously tired. (‘Sleep is a great healer,’ Izzie said, bringing her breakfast on a tray every morning.)

Eventually, Teddy sighed and stretched and said, ‘I suppose I should be getting back to Fox Corner. What’s the story, did I see you? Or are you still in Brigadoon?’ He took their plates through to the kitchen. ‘I’ll clear up while you think about your answer.’

When the doorbell rang Ursula presumed it was Izzie. Now that Ursula was living in Melbury Road she had grown careless about her door keys. ‘But you’re always here, darling,’ she said when Ursula had to crawl out of bed at three in the morning to let her in.

It wasn’t Izzie, it was Derek. She was so surprised she couldn’t even speak. She had left him so firmly behind that she thought of him as someone who had ceased to exist. He didn’t belong in Holland Park, but rather in some dark place of the imagination.

He twisted her arm behind her back and frogmarched her down the hall into the drawing room. He glanced at the coffee table, a heavy wooden thing carved in the Oriental style. Seeing the empty champagne glasses still sitting on the coffee table and the big onyx ashtray containing Teddy’s cigarette stubs, he hissed, ‘Who’s been here with you?’ He was incandescent with rage. ‘Who have you been fornicating with?’

‘Fornicating?’ Ursula said, surprised by the word. So biblical. Teddy came into the room, a dishtowel casually over his shoulder. ‘What’s all this?’ he said, and then, ‘Get your hands off her.’

‘Is this him?’ Derek asked Ursula. ‘Is this the man you’re whoring around London with?’ and without waiting for an answer he smashed her head on to the coffee table and she slid to the ground. The pain in her head was terrible and grew worse rather than lessened, as if she were in a vice being tightened all the time. Derek lifted the heavy onyx ashtray high as if it were a chalice, careless of the cigarette butts that showered on to the carpet. Ursula knew her brain wasn’t working properly because she should have been cowering in terror but all she could think about was that this was rather like the incident with the poached egg and how silly life was. Teddy yelled something at Derek and Derek threw the ashtray at him instead of breaking open Ursula’s skull with it. Ursula couldn’t see whether or not the ashtray hit Teddy because Derek grabbed her by her hair, lifted her head up and cracked it back on to the coffee table. A bolt of lightning flashed in front of her eyes but the pain began to fade.

She slipped down on to the carpet, unable to move. There was so much blood in her eyes that she could barely see. The second time that her head hit the table she had felt something give way, the instinct to life perhaps. She knew from the awkward shuffling and grunting dance on the carpet around her that Derek and Teddy were fighting. At least Teddy was on his feet and not lying unconscious but she didn’t want him to fight, she wanted him to run away, out of harm’s way. She didn’t mind dying, she really didn’t, as long as Teddy was safe. She tried to say something but it came out as guttural nonsense. She was very cold and tired. She remembered feeling this way in the hospital, after Belgravia. Hugh had been there, he had held on to her hand and kept her in this life.

Ambrose was still on the wireless, Sam Browne was singing ‘The Sun Has Got His Hat On’. It was a jolly song to leave life to. Not what you expected.

The black bat was coming for her. She didn’t want to go. The blackness edged around her. Easeful death. It was so cold. It will snow tonight, she thought, even though it isn’t winter yet. It was already snowing, cold flakes dissolving on her skin like soap. Ursula put out a hand for Teddy to hold but this time nothing could stop her fall into the dark night.