Life after life

2 September 1939

‘DON’T GET UPSET, Pammy,’ Harold said. ‘Why is it so quiet, what have you done with the boys?’

‘Sold them,’ Pamela said, perking up. ‘Three for the price of two.’

‘You ought to stay the night, Ursula,’ Harold said kindly. ‘You shouldn’t be on your own tomorrow. It’ll be one of those awful days. Doctor’s orders.’

‘Thanks,’ Ursula said. ‘But I’ve already got plans.’

She tried on the yellow crêpe de Chine tea dress that she’d bought earlier that day in an eve-of-war spending spree on Kensington High Street. The crêpe de Chine had a pattern – tiny black swallows in flight. She admired it, rather admired herself, or what she could see in the dressing-table mirror as she had to stand on her bed in order to see her lower half.

Through Argyll Road’s thin walls Ursula could hear Mrs Appleyard having a row, in English, with a man – the mysterious Mr Appleyard presumably – whose comings and goings at all times of the day and night kept no noticeable timetable. Ursula had encountered him in the flesh only once, in passing on the stairs, when he had glared moodily at her and hurried on without a greeting. He was a big man, ruddy and slightly porcine. Ursula could imagine him standing behind a butcher’s counter or hauling brewery sacks, although according to the Misses Nesbit he was in fact an insurance clerk.

Mrs Appleyard, in contrast, was thin and sallow and when her husband was out of the flat Ursula could hear her singing mournfully to herself in a language that she couldn’t place. Something Eastern European by the sound of it. How useful Mr Carver’s Esperanto would be, she thought. (Only if everyone spoke it, of course.) And especially these days with so many refugees flooding into London. (‘She’s Czech,’ the Nesbits had eventually informed her. ‘We didn’t used to know where Czechoslovakia was, did we? I wish we still didn’t.’) Ursula presumed Mrs Appleyard was also some kind of refugee who, looking for safe harbour in the arms of an English gentleman, had found instead the pugnacious Mr Appleyard. Ursula thought that if she ever heard Mr Appleyard actually hitting his wife then she would have to knock on their door and somehow put a stop to it, although she had no idea how she would do that.

The dispute next door reached a crescendo and then the Appleyards’ front door slammed decisively in conclusion and all went quiet. Mr Appleyard, a great one for noisy exits and entrances, could be heard stomping down the stairs, a trail of profanity in his wake on the subject of women and foreigners, of which the oppressed Mrs Appleyard was both.

The sour aura of dissatisfaction that seeped through the walls, along with the even less appetizing smell of boiled cabbage, was really quite depressing. Ursula wanted her refugees to be soulful and romantic – fleeing for their cultural lives – rather than the abused wives of insurance clerks. Which was ridiculously unfair of her.

She stepped down from the bed and did a little twirl for the mirror. The dress suited her, she decided, she still had her figure, even at nearly thirty. Would she one day develop Sylvie’s matronly girth? It was beginning to seem unlikely now that she would ever have children of her own. She remembered holding Pamela’s babies – remembered Teddy and Jimmy, too – how overwhelming the feelings of love and terror, the desperate desire to protect. How much stronger would those feelings be if it were her own child? Perhaps too strong to bear.

Over their afternoon tea in John Lewis, Sylvie had asked, ‘Do you never get broody?’

‘Like your hens?’

‘A “career woman”,’ Sylvie said, as if the two words had no place in the same sentence. ‘A spinster,’ she added, contemplating the word. Ursula wondered why her mother was working so hard to rile her. ‘Perhaps you will never marry,’ Sylvie said, as if in conclusion, as if Ursula’s life was as good as over.

‘Would that be such a bad thing? “The unmarried daughter”,’ Ursula said, tucking into an iced fancy. ‘It was good enough for Jane Austen.’

She lifted the dress over her head and, in petticoat and stocking feet, padded through to the little scullery and filled a water glass at the tap before hunting down a cream cracker. Prison fare, she thought, good practice for what was to come. All she had had to eat since her breakfast toast was Pamela’s cake. She was hoping to be stood, at the very least, a good dinner by Crighton tonight. He had asked her to meet him at the Savoy, they rarely had such public assignations, and she wondered if there was going to be drama, or if the shadow of war was drama enough and he wanted to talk to her about it.

She knew that war was to be declared tomorrow, even though she had played rather dumb with Pammy. Crighton told her all kinds of things he shouldn’t, on the basis that they had ‘both signed the Official Secrets Act’. (She, on the other hand, told him almost nothing.) He had been teetering again lately and Ursula wasn’t at all sure which way he was going to fall, wasn’t sure which way she wanted him to fall.

He had asked her to meet him for a drink, a request conveyed on an Admiralty docket that had arrived mysteriously while she was briefly out of the office. Not for the first time Ursula wondered who brought these notes that seemed to appear on her desk as if delivered by elves. I think your department may be due an audit, it read. Crighton liked code. Ursula hoped that the navy’s encryptions weren’t as rudimentary as Crighton’s.

Miss Fawcett, one of her clerical assistants, spotted the note lying in full view and gave her a panic-stricken look. ‘Crikey,’ she said. ‘Are we? Due an audit?’

‘Someone’s idea of a joke,’ Ursula said, dismayed to find herself blushing. There was something un-Crighton-like about these salacious (if not downright filthy) but seemingly innocent messages. I believe there is a shortage of pencils. Or Are your ink levels sufficiently topped up? Ursula wished he would learn Pitman’s, or more discretion. Or, better still, stop altogether.

When she was ushered inside the Savoy by a doorman, Crighton was waiting for her in the expansive foyer and instead of escorting her up to the American Bar he shepherded her up the stairs to a suite on the second floor. The bed seemed to dominate the room, enormous and pillowy. Oh, so this is why we’re here, she thought.

The crêpe de Chine had been deemed unsuitable for the occasion and she had donned her royal-blue satin – one of her three good evening dresses – a decision she now regretted as Crighton, if form was anything to go by, would soon be divesting her of it rather than treating her to a slap-up meal.

He liked undressing her, liked looking at her. ‘Like a Renoir,’ he said, although he knew little about art. Better a Renoir than a Rubens, she thought. Or a Picasso, for that matter. He had bestowed on her the great gift of regarding herself naked with little, if any, criticism. Moira, apparently, was a floor-length flannelette and lights-out woman. Sometimes Ursula wondered if Crighton didn’t exaggerate his wife’s sturdy qualities. Once or twice it had crossed her mind to journey out to Wargrave to catch a glimpse of the wronged wife and find out if she really was a dowd. The problem, of course, with Moira in the flesh (Rubenesque, not Renoir, she imagined) would be that Ursula would find it difficult to betray a real person rather than an enigma.

(‘But she is a real person,’ Pamela puzzled. ‘It’s a specious argument.’

‘Yes, I am aware of that.’ This later, at Hugh’s sixtieth birthday, a rather querulous affair in the spring.)

The suite had a magnificent view of the river, from Waterloo Bridge to the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben, all shadowy now, in the encroaching twilight. (‘The violet hour’.) She could just make out Cleopatra’s Needle, a dark finger poking skywards. None of the usual blaze and twinkle of London lights. The blackout had already begun.

‘The bolthole wasn’t available then? We’re out in the open?’ Ursula said while Crighton opened a bottle of champagne that had been waiting for them in a sweating silver bucket. ‘Are we celebrating?’

‘Saying our adieux,’ Crighton said, joining her at the window and handing her a glass.

‘Our adieux?’ Ursula said, bemused. ‘You’ve brought me to a good hotel and are plying me with champagne in order to end it all between us?’

‘Adieu to the peace,’ Crighton said. ‘We’re saying goodbye to the world as we know it.’ He raised his glass in the direction of the window, to London, in its dusky glory. ‘To the beginning of the end,’ he said grimly. ‘I’ve left Moira,’ he added, as if it were an afterthought, a nothing. Ursula was caught by surprise.

‘And the girls?’ (Just checking, she thought.)

‘All of them. Life is too precious to be unhappy.’ Ursula wondered how many people across London were saying the same thing that night. Perhaps in less salubrious surroundings. And there would be others, of course, who would be saying the same words to cleave to what they already had, not to discard it on a whim.

Suddenly and unexpectedly panicked, Ursula said, ‘I don’t want to marry you.’ She hadn’t realized quite how strongly she felt until the words came out of her mouth.

‘I don’t want to marry you either,’ Crighton said, and, perversely, she felt disappointed.

‘I’ve taken a lease on a flat in Egerton Gardens,’ he said. ‘I thought perhaps you would come and join me.’

‘To cohabit? To live in sin in Knightsbridge?’

‘If you will.’

‘My, you are bold,’ she said. ‘What about your career?’

He made a dismissive sound. So, she, and not the war, was to be his new Jutland then.

‘Will you say yes? Ursula?’

Ursula stared through the window at the Thames. The river was almost invisible now.

‘We should have a toast,’ she said. ‘What is it they say in the navy – “Sweethearts and wives – may they never meet”?’ She chinked her glass against Crighton’s and said, ‘I’m starving, we are going to eat, aren’t we?’