Life after life

October 1940

‘MAN THAT IS born of woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up and is cut down like a flower: he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay.’

A light drizzle was falling. Ursula felt an urge to take out her handkerchief and wipe the wet coffin lid. On the other side of the open grave, Pamela and Bridget were pillars, holding up Sylvie, who seemed to be so consumed with her grief that she could barely stand. Ursula felt her own heart harden and contract with every sob that issued from her mother’s chest. Sylvie had been needlessly unkind to Hugh in the last months and now this great affliction seemed like a show. ‘You’re too harsh,’ Pamela said. ‘No one can understand what goes on in a marriage, every couple is different.’

Jimmy, shipped to North Africa the previous week, had been unable to get compassionate leave but Teddy had turned up at the last minute. Shiningly smart in uniform, he had returned from Canada with his ‘wings’ (‘Like an angel,’ Bridget said) and was stationed in Lincolnshire. He and Nancy clung to each other at the committal. Nancy was vague about her job (‘clerical really’) and Ursula thought she recognized the fudge of the Official Secrets Act at work.

The church was packed, most of the village turned out for Hugh and yet there was something odd about the funeral, as if the guest of honour hadn’t been able to come. Which he hadn’t, of course. Hugh wouldn’t have wanted a fuss. He had once said to her, ‘Oh, you can just put me out with the dustbin, I won’t mind.’

The service had been the usual sort – reminiscences and commonplaces – salted with a hefty dose of Anglican doctrine, although Ursula was surprised at how well the vicar seemed to be acquainted with Hugh. Major Shawcross read from the Beatitudes, rather movingly, and Nancy read ‘one of Mr Todd’s favourite poems’, which surprised all the women of his family who didn’t know that Hugh had any inclination towards poetry. Nancy had a nice speaking voice (better actually than Millie’s which was overly thespian). ‘Robert Louis Stevenson,’ Nancy said. ‘Perhaps appropriate for these testing times:

‘Tempest tossed and sore afflicted, sin defiled and care oppressed,

Come to me, all ye that labour; come, and I will give ye rest.

Fear no more, O doubting hearted; weep no more, O weeping eye!

Lo, the voice of your redeemer; lo, the songful morning near.

‘Here one hour you toil and combat, sin and suffer, bleed and die;

In my father’s quiet mansion soon to lay your burden by.

Bear a moment, heavy laden, weary hand and weeping eye.

Lo, the feet of your deliverer; lo, the hour of freedom here.’

(‘Tosh, really,’ Pamela whispered, ‘but oddly comforting tosh.’)

At the graveside, Izzie murmured, ‘I feel as if I’m waiting for something dreadful to happen, and then I realize it already has.’

Izzie had arrived back from California just a few days before Hugh died. She had flown, rather admirably, on a taxing Pan Am flight from New York to Lisbon and from there with BOAC to Bristol. ‘I saw two German fighter planes from the window,’ she said, ‘I swear I thought they were going to attack us.’

She had decided, she said, that as an Englishwoman it was wrong to be sitting out the war amid the orange groves. All that lotus eating wasn’t for her, she said (although Ursula would have said it was exactly her). She had hoped, like her husband the famous playwright, to be asked to write screenplays for the film industry but had received only one offer, some ‘silly’ costume drama that had been aborted before it left the page. Ursula got the impression that Izzie’s script hadn’t come up to scratch (‘too witty’). She had continued with Augustus, however – Augustus Goes to War, Augustus and the Salvage Hunt and so on. It didn’t help, Izzie said, that the famous playwright was surrounded by Hollywood starlets and that he was shallow enough to find them fascinating.

‘In truth, we simply grew bored with each other,’ she said. ‘All couples do eventually, it’s inevitable.’

Izzie was the one who had found Hugh. ‘He was in a deckchair on the lawn.’ The wicker furniture had long since rotted and been replaced by the more quotidian deckchair. Hugh had been put out by the arrival of folding wood and canvas. He would have preferred the wicker chaise-longue for a bier. Ursula’s thoughts were full of such inconsequences. Easier to deal with, she thought, than the bare fact that Hugh was dead.

‘I thought he was asleep out there,’ Sylvie said. ‘So I didn’t disturb him. A heart attack, the doctor said.’

‘He looked peaceful,’ Izzie said to Ursula. ‘As if he didn’t really mind going.’

Ursula felt that he probably minded very much but that was no comfort to either of them.

She had little conversation with her mother. Sylvie seemed always to be on the point of leaving the room. ‘I can’t settle,’ she said. She was wearing an old cardigan of Hugh’s. ‘I’m cold,’ she said. ‘I’m so cold,’ like someone in shock. Miss Woolf would have known what to do with Sylvie. Hot sweet tea probably, and some kind words but neither Ursula nor Izzie felt like offering either. Ursula sensed they were being rather vengeful but they had their own distress to nurse.

‘I’ll stay on with her for a while,’ Izzie said. Ursula thought this was a terrible idea and wondered if Izzie wasn’t just avoiding the bombs.

‘You’d better get yourself a ration book then,’ Bridget said. ‘You’re eating us out of house and home.’ Bridget had been very affected by Hugh’s death. Ursula came across her crying in the pantry and said, ‘I’m awfully sorry,’ as if the loss were Bridget’s, not hers. Bridget wiped her tears vigorously on her apron and said, ‘Must get on with the tea.’

Ursula herself stayed only two more days and spent most of the time helping Bridget to sort out Hugh’s things. (‘I can’t,’ Sylvie said, ‘I just can’t.’ ‘Neither can I,’ Izzie said. ‘Then it’s you and me,’ Bridget said to Ursula.) Hugh’s clothes were so very real it seemed absurd that the man who had worn them had disappeared. Ursula took a suit out of the wardrobe and held it against her body. If Bridget hadn’t taken it from her and said, ‘That’s a good suit, someone will be grateful for it,’ she might have crawled into the wardrobe and given up on life. Bridget’s feelings were now locked up tightly, thank goodness. There was a great deal to be said for fortitude in the face of tragedy. Certainly her father would have approved.

They parcelled Hugh’s clothes up in brown paper and string and the milkman put them on his cart and took them round to the WVS.

Izzie’s grief had left her wide open. She trailed around the house after Ursula, trying to conjure up Hugh from memories. They were all doing that, Ursula supposed, it was so impossible to grasp that he had gone for ever that they had all started trying to reconstitute him out of thin air, Izzie most of all. ‘I can’t remember the last thing he said to me,’ Izzie said. ‘Or what I said to him, for that matter.’

‘It won’t make any difference,’ Ursula said wearily. Whose bereavement was the greater after all, the daughter or the sister? But then she thought of Teddy.

Ursula tried to remember what her own last words to her father had been. A nonchalant ‘See you later,’ she concluded. The final irony. ‘We never know when it will be the last time,’ she said to Izzie, platitudinous, even to her own ears. She had seen so much of other people’s distress by now that she was numb to it. Except for that one moment when she held his suit (she thought of it – ridiculously – as her ‘wardrobe moment’) she had put Hugh’s death away in some quiet place to be taken out later and considered. Perhaps when everyone else had done talking.

‘And the thing is,’ Izzie said—

‘Please,’ Ursula said. ‘I’ve got an awful headache.’

Ursula was collecting eggs from the nest boxes when Izzie mooched into the henhouse. The chickens were clucking restlessly, they seemed to miss Sylvie’s attentions, the Mother Hen. ‘The thing is,’ Izzie said, ‘there’s something I’d like to tell you.’

‘Oh?’ Ursula said, distracted by a particularly broody hen. ‘I had a baby.’

‘What?’

‘I’m a mother,’ Izzie said, seemingly unable to resist sounding dramatic.

‘You had a baby in California?’

‘No, no,’ Izzie laughed. ‘Years ago. I was just a child myself. Sixteen. I had him in Germany, I was sent abroad in disgrace, as you can imagine. A boy.’

‘Germany? And he was adopted?’

‘Yes. Well, more like given away. Hugh saw to it all so I’m sure he found a very good family. But he made him a hostage to fortune, didn’t he? Poor Hugh, he was such a rock at the time, Mother would have nothing to do with it. But that’s the thing, he must have known the name, where they lived, etcetera.’ The hens were making a dreadful racket now and Ursula said, ‘Let’s get out of here.’

‘I always thought,’ Izzie said, taking Ursula’s arm and walking her round to the lawn, ‘that one day I would talk to Hugh about what he did with the baby and then perhaps try and find him. My son,’ she added, trying out the word as if for the first time. Tears started to roll down her face. For once, her emotions seemed from the heart. ‘And now Hugh’s gone and I’ll never be able to find the baby. He’s not a baby, of course, he’s the same age as you.’

‘Me?’ Ursula said, trying to grasp this idea.

‘Yes. But he’s the enemy. He might be up there in the sky’ – they both automatically glanced up at the blue autumn sky, empty of friend and foe alike – ‘or fighting in the forces. He might be dead, or going to die if this wretched war goes on.’ Izzie was sobbing openly now. ‘He might have been brought up as a Jew, for God’s sake. Hugh wasn’t an anti-Semite, quite the opposite, he was great friends with – your neighbour, what’s his name?’

‘Mr Cole.’

‘You do know what’s happening to the Jews in Germany, don’t you?’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ Sylvie said, materializing suddenly like a bad fairy. ‘What are you making such a fuss about?’

‘You should come back to London with me,’ Ursula said to Izzie. The Luftwaffe’s bombs would be more straightforward for her to deal with than Sylvie.