Life after life

June 1967

THIS MORNING THE Jordanians had opened fire on Tel Aviv, the BBC reporter said, now they were shelling Jerusalem. He was standing on a street, in Jerusalem presumably, she hadn’t really been paying attention, the noise of artillery fire in the background, too far away to be any danger to him, yet his faux-battledress attire and style of reportage – excited, yet solemn – hinted at unlikely heroics on his part.

Benjamin Cole was a member of the Israeli parliament now. He had fought in the Jewish Brigade at the end of the war and then joined the Stern Gang, in Palestine, to fight for a homeland. He had been such an upstanding kind of boy that it had been odd to think of him becoming a terrorist.

They had met up for a drink during the war but it was an awkward encounter. The romantic impulses of her girlhood had long since faded whereas his relative indifference to her as a member of the female sex had turned on its head. She had barely finished her (weak) gin and lemon when he suggested they ‘go somewhere’.

She was indignant. ‘Do I look like a woman of such easy virtue?’ she asked Millie afterwards.

‘Well, why not?’ Millie shrugged. ‘We could be killed by a bomb tomorrow. Carpe diem and all that.’

‘That seems to be everyone’s excuse for bad behaviour,’ Ursula grumbled. ‘If people believed in eternal damnation they might not be seizing the day quite so much.’ She had had a bad day at the office. One of the filing clerks had received the news that her boyfriend’s ship had gone down and she had had hysterics and an important piece of paper had been lost in the sea of buff which caused more anguish, if of a different order, so she had not seized the day with Benjamin Cole, despite him pressing his suit urgently on her. ‘I’ve always sensed something between us, haven’t you?’ he said.

‘Too late, I’m afraid,’ she said, gathering up her bag and coat. ‘Catch me next time round.’ She thought about Dr Kellet and his theories of reincarnation and wondered what she would like to come back as. A tree, she thought. A fine big tree, dancing in the breeze.

The BBC turned its attention to Downing Street. Someone or other had resigned. She had heard tittle-tattle in the office but couldn’t be bothered to listen.

She was eating her supper – a Welsh rarebit – off a tray on her knee. She usually ate like this in the evening. It seemed ridiculous to lay the table and put out vegetable dishes and table mats and all the other paraphernalia of dining for just one person. And then what? Eat in silence, or hunched over a book? There were people who saw TV dinners as the beginning of the end of civilization. (Did her robust defence of them indicate that perhaps she was of the same mind?) They obviously didn’t live on their own. And really the beginning of the end of civilization had happened a long time ago. Sarajevo perhaps, Stalingrad at the latest. There were some who would say the end started at the beginning, in the Garden.

And what was so wrong with watching television anyway? One couldn’t go out to the theatre or the cinema (or the pub for that matter) every night. And when one lived alone one’s only conversation inside the home was with a cat, which tended to be a one-sided affair. Dogs were different, but she hadn’t had a dog since Lucky. He had died in the summer of ’49, of old age, the vet said. Ursula had always thought of him as a young dog. They buried him at Fox Corner and Pamela bought a rose, a deep red, and planted it for his headstone. The garden at Fox Corner was a veritable graveyard for dogs. Wherever you went there would be a rose bush with a dog beneath, although only Pamela could remember who was where.

And what was the alternative to television anyway? (She wasn’t letting the argument die, even though it was with herself.) A jigsaw puzzle? Really? There was reading, of course, but one didn’t always want to come in from a trying day at work, full of messages and memos and agendas, and then tire one’s eyes out with even more words. The wireless, records, all good of course, but still solipsistic in some way. (Yes, she was protesting too much.) At least with television one didn’t have to think. Not such a bad thing.

Her supper was later than usual because she had been attending her own retirement do – not unlike attending one’s own funeral, except one could walk away afterwards. It had been a modest affair, no more than drinks at a local pub, but pleasant and she was relieved it had finished early (where others might feel badly done by). She didn’t officially retire until Friday but she thought it would be easier on the staff to get the whole thing over and done with on a weekday. They might resent giving up their Friday evening.

Beforehand, in the office, they had presented her with a carriage clock engraved To Ursula Todd, in gratitude for her many years of loyal service. Ye gods, she thought, what a tedious epitaph. It was a traditional kind of gift, and she didn’t have the heart to say that she already had one, and a much better one at that. But they also gave her a pair of (good) tickets for the Proms, for a performance of Beethoven’s Choral, which was thoughtful – she suspected the hand of Jacqueline Roberts, her secretary.

‘You’ve helped to pave the way for women in senior positions in the civil service,’ Jacqueline said quietly to her, handing her a Dubonnet, her preferred drink these days. Not that senior unfortunately, she thought. Not in charge. That was still for the Maurices of this world.

‘Well, cheers,’ she said, chinking her glass against Jacqueline’s port and lemon. She didn’t drink a great deal, the occasional Dubonnet, a nice bottle of burgundy at the weekend. Not like Izzie, still inhabiting the house in Melbury Road, wandering through its many rooms like a dipsomaniac Miss Havisham. Ursula visited her every Saturday morning with a bag of groceries, most of which seemed to get thrown out. No one read the Adventures of Augustus any more. Teddy would have been relieved and yet Ursula was sorry, as if another little part of him had been forgotten by the world.

‘You’ll probably get a gong now, you know,’ Maurice said, ‘now that you’re retired. An MBE or something.’ He had been knighted in the last round of honours. (‘God,’ Pamela said, ‘what’s the country coming to?’) He had sent each member of his family a framed photograph of himself, bowing beneath the Queen’s sword in the ballroom of the Palace. ‘Oh, the hubris of the man,’ Harold laughed.

Miss Woolf would have been the perfect companion for the Choral at the Albert Hall. The last time Ursula had seen her was there, at the Henry Wood seventy-fifth-birthday concert in ’44. She was killed a few months later in the Aldwych rocket attack. Anne, the girl from the Air Ministry, was killed in the same attack. She had been with a group of female colleagues who were sunbathing on the ministry roof, eating their packed lunches. It was a long time ago now. And it was yesterday.

Ursula was supposed to have met up with her in St James’s Park at lunchtime. The Air Ministry girl – Anne – had something to tell her, she said, and Ursula had wondered if it might be some information about Teddy. Perhaps they had found wreckage or a body. She had long since accepted that he was gone for ever, they would have heard by now if he was a POW or had managed to escape to Sweden.

At the last minute fate had intervened in the shape of Mr Bullock, who had turned up unexpectedly on her doorstep the previous evening (how did he know her address?) to ask if she would accompany him to court to vouch for his good character. He was on trial for some kind of black market fraud, which came as no surprise. She was his second choice, after Miss Woolf, but Miss Woolf had been made a District Warden and was responsible for the lives of two hundred and fifty thousand people, all of whom ranked higher in her estimation than Mr Bullock. His black market ‘escapades’ had turned her against him in the end. None of the wardens that Ursula had known from her post were still there by ’44.

She was rather alarmed to find that Mr Bullock was appearing at the Old Bailey, she had presumed it was some petty misdemeanour fit only for the magistrates’ court. She had waited, in vain, all morning to be called and just as the court got up to recess for lunch she had heard the dull thud of an explosion but hadn’t known it was the rocket wreaking carnage in the Aldwych. Mr Bullock, needless to say, was found innocent of all charges.

Crighton had gone with her to Miss Woolf’s funeral. He was a rock, but in the end he had stayed in Wargrave.

‘Their bodies are buried in peace; but their name liveth for evermore,’ the minister boomed as if the congregation was hard of hearing. ‘Ecclesiasticus 44: 14.’ Ursula didn’t think that was really true. Who would remember Emil or Renee? Or poor little Tony, Fred Smith. Miss Woolf herself. Ursula had forgotten the names of most of the dead already. And all those airmen, all those young lives lost. When Teddy died he was CO of his squadron and he was only twenty-nine. The youngest CO was twenty-two. Time had accelerated for those boys, as it had for Keats.

They sang ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’, Crighton had a rather fine baritone that she had never heard before. She felt sure that Miss Woolf would have preferred Beethoven to the rousing battle hymns of the church.

Miss Woolf had hoped that Beethoven might heal the post-war world but the howitzers pointed at Jerusalem seemed like the final defeat of her optimism. Ursula was now the same age as Miss Woolf had been at the outbreak of the last war. Ursula had thought of her as old. ‘And now we’re old,’ she said to Pamela.

‘Speak for yourself. And you’re not even sixty yet. That’s not old.’

‘Feels like it.’

Once her children were grown enough and no longer needed her constant oversight, Pamela had become one of those women who did good works. (Ursula was not critical, quite the opposite.) She became a JP and eventually a chief magistrate, was active on charity boards and last year had won a place on the local council as an independent. And there was the house to keep up (although she had ‘a woman who does’) and the enormous garden. In 1948, when the NHS was born, Harold had taken over Dr Fellowes’s old practice. The village had grown around them, more and more houses. The meadow gone, the copse too, many of the fields from Ettringham Hall’s home farm had been sold off to a developer. The Hall itself was empty and rather neglected. (There was talk of a hotel.) The little railway station had been given the death sentence by Beeching and had closed two months ago, despite an heroic campaign to keep it going, spearheaded by Pamela.

‘But it is still lovely around here,’ she said. ‘A five-minute walk and you’re in open countryside. And the wood hasn’t been touched. Yet.’

Sarah. She would take Sarah to the Proms with her. Pamela’s reward for patience – a daughter born in 1949. She was to take up a place at Cambridge after the summer – science, she was clever, an all-rounder like her mother. Ursula was enormously fond of Sarah. Being an aunt had helped to seal over the empty cavern in her heart from Teddy’s loss. She thought often these days – if only she had had a child of her own … She had had affairs over the years, albeit nothing too thrilling (the fault, the lack of ‘commitment’, mainly on her own side, of course) but she had never been pregnant, never been a mother or a wife and it was only when she realized that it was too late, that it could never be, that she understood what it was that she had lost. Pamela’s life would go on after she was dead, her descendants spreading through the world like the waters of a delta, but when Ursula died she would simply end. A stream that ran dry.

There had been flowers too, also Jacqueline’s doing, Ursula suspected. They had survived the evening in the pub, thank goodness. Lovely pink lilies that were now sitting on her sideboard, the scent perfuming the room. The living room was west-facing and soaked up the evening sun. It was still light outside, the trees in the shared gardens in their best new leaf. It was a very nice flat, near the Brompton Oratory, and she had put all of the money that Sylvie left her into the purchase of it. There was a small kitchen and bathroom, both modern, but she had eschewed the modern when it came to décor. After the war she had bought simple, tasteful antique furniture when no one wanted that kind of thing. There were fitted carpets throughout in a pale willow green and the curtains were the same fabric as the suite covers – a Morris print, one of the more subtle ones. The walls were painted in a pale-lemon emulsion that made the place seem light and airy even on rainy days. There were a few pieces of Meissen and Worcester – sweetmeat dishes and a garniture set – also picked up cheaply after the war, and she always had flowers, Jacqueline knew that.

The only crude note was sounded by a pair of Staffordshire foxes, garish orange creatures, each of which had a dead rabbit drooping in its jaws. She had picked them up in Portobello Road for next to nothing years ago. They had made her think of Fox Corner.

‘I love coming here,’ Sarah said. ‘You have such nice things and it’s always so clean and tidy, nothing like home.’

‘You can afford to be clean and tidy when you live on your own,’ Ursula said, but flattered by the compliment. She supposed she should make a will, leave her worldly goods to someone. She would like Sarah to have the flat but the memory of the debacle over Fox Corner when Sylvie died made her hesitate. Should one show such outright favouritism? Possibly not. She must divide her estate between all seven of her nieces and nephews, even the ones she didn’t like or never saw. Jimmy, of course, had never married or had children. He lived in California now. ‘He’s a homosexual, you do know that, don’t you?’ Pamela said. ‘He’s always had those proclivities.’ It was information, not censure, but there was still a mild prurience in her words and the faintest trace of smugness, as if she were better able to cope with liberal views. Ursula wondered if she knew about Gerald and his ‘proclivities’.

‘Jimmy’s just Jimmy,’ she said.

The previous week, she had come back from lunch and found a copy of The Times sitting on her desk. It had been neatly folded so that only the obituaries were on show. Crighton’s had a photograph of him in uniform, taken before she knew him. She had forgotten how handsome he was. It was quite a big piece, mentioned Jutland, of course. She learned that his wife Moira had ‘predeceased’ him, that he was a grandfather several times over and a keen golfer. He had always hated golf, she wondered when his conversion had taken place. And who on earth had left The Times on her desk? Who all these years later would have thought to tell her? She had no idea and supposed she never would now. There was a time during their affair, when he had been in the habit of leaving notes on her desk, rather smutty little billets-doux that appeared as if by magic. Perhaps the same invisible hand had delivered The Times, all these years later.

‘The Man from the Admiralty is dead,’ she said to Pamela. ‘Of course, everyone dies eventually.’

‘Well, now there’s a truism,’ Pamela laughed.

‘No, I mean, everybody one has ever known, including oneself, will be dead one day.’

‘Still a truism.’

‘Amor fati,’ Ursula said. ‘Nietzsche wrote about it all the time. I didn’t understand, I thought it was “a more fatty”. Do you remember I used to see a psychiatrist? Dr Kellet? He was a philosopher at heart.’

‘Love of fate?’

‘It means acceptance. Whatever happens to you, embrace it, the good and the bad equally. Death is just one more thing to be embraced, I suppose.’

‘Sounds like Buddhism. Did I tell you that Chris is going to India, to some kind of monastery, a retreat, he calls it. He’s found it hard to settle to anything since Oxford. He’s a “hippie” apparently.’ Ursula thought Pamela was very indulgent with her third son. She found Christopher rather creepy. She tried to think of another, more generous word but failed. He was one of those people who stared at you with a meaningful smile on their face, as if he was somehow intellectually and spiritually superior, when the fact was he was simply socially inept.

The scent of the lilies, lovely when they had first gone in water, was beginning to make her feel slightly sick. The room was stuffy. She should open a window. She stood up in order to carry her plate through to the kitchen and was immediately struck by a blinding pain in her right temple. She had to sit down again and wait for it to pass. She had been getting these pains for weeks now. An acute pain and then a thick, buzzy head. Or sometimes just a straightforward horrible pounding ache. She thought it might be high blood pressure but, after a battery of tests, the hospital’s verdict was neuralgia, ‘probably’. She was given strong painkillers and told that she was bound to feel better once she had retired. ‘You’ll have time to relax, take it easy,’ the doctor said in the special tone of voice reserved for the elderly.

The pain passed and she stood up, gingerly.

What would she do with her time? She wondered about moving to the country, a little cottage, partaking in village life, perhaps somewhere in the vicinity of Pamela. She imagined St Mary Mead, or Miss Read’s Fairacre. Perhaps she could write a novel? It would certainly fill in the time. And a dog, time to get another dog. Pamela kept Golden Retrievers, a succession of them, one replacing another and quite indistinguishable to Ursula’s eye.

She washed up her meagre pots. Thought she might have an early night, make some Ovaltine and take her book to bed with her. She was reading Greene’s The Comedians. Perhaps she did need to rest more but lately she had become rather afraid of sleep. She was having such vivid dreams that sometimes she found it hard to accept that they weren’t real. Several times recently she had believed that something outlandish had really happened to her when it quite obviously, logically, had not. And falling. She was always falling in her dreams, down staircases and off cliffs, it was a most unpleasant sensation. Was this the first sign of dementia? The beginning of the end. The end of the beginning.

From her bedroom window she could see a fat moon rising. Keats’s Queen-Moon, she thought. Tender is the night. The pain in her head came back. She ran a glass of water from the tap and swallowed a couple of painkillers.

‘But if Hitler had been killed, before he became Chancellor, it would have stopped all this conflict between the Arabs and the Israelis, wouldn’t it?’ The Six-Day War, as they had called it, had ended, the Israelis decisively victorious. ‘I mean, I do understand why the Jews wanted to create an independent state and defend it vigorously,’ Ursula continued, ‘and I always felt sympathy for the Zionist cause, even before the war, but, on the other hand, I can also understand why the Arab states are so aggrieved. But if Hitler had been unable to implement the Holocaust—’

‘Because he was dead?’

‘Yes, because he was dead. Then support for a Jewish homeland would have been weak at best …’

‘History is all about “what ifs”,’ Nigel said. Pamela’s first-born, her favourite nephew, was a history tutor at Brasenose, Hugh’s old college. She was treating him to lunch in Fortnum’s.

‘It is nice to have an intelligent conversation with someone,’ she said. ‘I’ve been on holiday in the south of France with my friend Millie Shawcross, have you met her? No? Not that she’s called that any more, she’s been through several husbands, each one wealthier than the last.’

Millie, the war bride, had hotfooted it back from America just as soon as she could, her new family were ‘cowpokes’, she reported. She had gone back to ‘treading the boards’ and had several disastrous relationships before she struck gold in the form of the scion of an oil family in tax exile.

‘She lives in Monaco. It’s incredibly small, I had no idea. She’s really quite stupid these days. I’m wittering, aren’t I?’

‘Not at all. Shall I pour you some water?’

‘People who live on their own do tend to witter. We live without restraint, verbal at any rate.’

Nigel smiled. He wore serious spectacles and had Harold’s lovely smile. When he took his spectacles off to clean them on his napkin he looked very young.

‘You look so young,’ Ursula said. ‘You are young, of course. Am I sounding like a dotty old aunt?’

‘God, no,’ he said. ‘You’re just about the smartest person I know.’

She buttered a bread roll, feeling rather chuffed at this compliment. ‘I heard someone say once that hindsight was a wonderful thing, that without it there would be no history.’

‘They’re probably right.’

‘But think how different things would be,’ Ursula persisted. ‘The Iron Curtain would probably not have fallen and Russia wouldn’t have been able to gobble up Eastern Europe.’

‘Gobble?’

‘Well, it was just pure greed. And the Americans might not have recovered from the Depression so quickly without a war economy and consequently not exerted so much influence on the post-war world—’

‘An awful lot of people would still be alive.’

‘Well, yes, obviously. And the whole cultural face of Europe would be different because of the Jews. And think of all those displaced people, shuffling from one country to another. And Britain would still have an empire, or at least we wouldn’t have lost it so precipitately – I’m not saying being an imperial power is a good thing, of course. And we wouldn’t have bankrupted ourselves and had such an awful time recovering, financially and psychologically. And no Common Market—’

‘Which won’t let us in anyway.’

‘Think how strong Europe would be! But perhaps Goering or Himmler would have stepped in. And everything would have happened in just the same way.’

‘Perhaps. But the Nazis were a marginal party almost up until they took power. They were all fanatical psychopaths, but none of them had Hitler’s charisma.’

‘Oh, I know,’ Ursula said. ‘He was extraordinarily charismatic. People talk about charisma as if it were a good thing, but really it’s a kind of glamour – in the old sense of the word, casting a spell, you know? I think it was the eyes, he had the most compelling eyes. If you looked in them you felt you were putting yourself in danger of believing—’

‘You met him?’ Nigel asked, astonished.

‘Well,’ Ursula said. ‘Not exactly. Would you like dessert, dear?’

July and hot as Hades as she walked back from Fortnum’s, along Piccadilly. Even the colours seemed hot. Everything was bright these days – bright young things. There were girls in her office whose skirts were like pelmets. Young people these days had so much enthusiasm for themselves, as if they had invented the future. This was the generation the war had been fought for and now they bandied the word ‘peace’ around glibly as though it were an advertising slogan. They had not experienced a war (‘And that’s a good thing,’ she heard Sylvie say, ‘no matter how unsatisfactory they turn out’). They had been handed, in Churchill’s phrase, the title deeds of freedom. What they did with them was their affair now, she supposed. (What an old fuddy-duddy she sounded, she had become the person she always thought she would never be.)

She thought she might walk through the parks and crossed the road, into Green Park. She always walked in the parks on Sundays but now she was retired every day was a Sunday, she supposed. She walked on, past the Palace, and entered Hyde Park, bought an ice-cream from a kiosk next to the Serpentine and decided she might hire a deckchair. She was awfully tired, lunch seemed to have taken it out of her.

She must have dozed off – all that food. The boats were out on the water, people pedalling, laughing and joking. Oh, drat, she thought, she could feel a headache coming and she didn’t have any painkillers in her bag. Perhaps she could hail a cab on Carriage Drive, she would never be able to walk home in this heat, not in pain. But then the pain grew less rather than more severe, which was not the usual progression of her headaches. She closed her eyes again, the sun was still hot and bright. She felt wonderfully indolent.

It was odd to sleep surrounded by people. It should have made her feel vulnerable but instead there was a kind of comfort. What was Tennessee Williams’s line – the kindness of strangers? Millie’s swansong on the stage, the last gasp of the dying swan, was to play Blanche DuBois in a 1955 production in Bath.

She allowed the hum and buzz of the park to lullaby her. Life wasn’t about becoming, was it? It was about being. Dr Kellet would have approved this thought. And everything was ephemeral, yet everything was eternal, she thought sleepily. A dog barked somewhere. A child cried. The child was hers, she could feel the delicate weight of the child in her arms. It was a lovely feeling. She was dreaming. She was in a meadow – flax and larkspur, buttercups, corn poppies, red campion and ox-eye daisies – and unseasonable snowdrops. The oddities of the dream world, she thought, and caught the sound of Sylvie’s little carriage clock chiming midnight. Someone was singing, a child, a reedy little voice keeping the tune, I had a little nut-tree and nothing would it bear. Muskatnuss, she thought – the German for nutmeg. She had been trying to remember that word for ages and now suddenly here it was.

Now she was in a garden. She could hear the delicate chink of cups on saucers, the creak and clatter of a lawn-mower, and could smell the peppery-sweet perfume of pinks. A man lifted her up and tossed her in the air and sugar cubes scattered across a lawn. There was another world but it was this one. She allowed herself a little chuckle even though her opinion was that people who laughed to themselves in public were likely to be mad.

Despite the summer heat, snow began to fall, which was the kind of thing that happened in dreams, after all. The snow began to cover her face, it was lovely and cool in this weather. And then she was falling, falling into the darkness, black and deep—

But here was the snow again – white and welcoming, the light like a sharp sword piercing through the heavy curtains, and she was being lifted up, cradled in soft arms.

‘I shall call her Ursula,’ Sylvie said. ‘What do you think?’

‘I like it,’ Hugh said. His face loomed into vision. His trim moustache and sideburns, his kind green eyes. ‘Welcome, little bear,’ he said.