Life after life

‘WELCOME, LITTLE BEAR.’ Her father. She had his eyes.

Hugh had paced, as was tradition, along the Voysey runner in the upper hallway, barred from the inner sanctum itself. He was unsure of the details of the doings behind the door, only too grateful that he was not expected to be familiar with the mechanics of childbirth. Sylvie’s screams suggested torture if not outright butchery. Women were extraordinarily brave, Hugh thought. He smoked a series of cigarettes to stave off any unmanly squeamishness.

Dr Fellowes’s dispassionate bass notes afforded some comfort to him, counterpointed unfortunately by a kind of hysterical Celtic babble from the scullery maid. Where was Mrs Glover? A cook could sometimes be a great help at times like these. The cook in his childhood Hampstead home had been unflappable in a crisis.

A considerable commotion could be heard at one point, indicating great victory or great defeat in the battle taking place on the other side of the bedroom door. Hugh refrained from entering unless invited, which he wasn’t. Eventually, Dr Fellowes flung open the door of the birth chamber and announced, ‘You have a bonny, bouncing baby girl. She nearly died,’ he added as an afterthought.

Thank goodness, Hugh thought, that he had managed to get back to Fox Corner before the snow closed the roads. He had dragged his sister back with him on the Channel crossing, a cat after a long night on the tiles. He was sporting a rather painful bite mark on his hand and was left wondering from where his sister had acquired her strain of savagery. Not from Nanny Mills and the Hampstead nursery.

Izzie was still wearing her counterfeit wedding ring, a legacy of her shameful week in a Parisian hotel with her lover, although Hugh doubted that the French, an immoral lot, cared about such niceties. She had left for the continent in short skirts and a little straw boater (his mother had given him a detailed description, as if Izzie were a criminal) but she returned in a gown by Worth (as she frequently told him, as if it would impress him). It was also clear that the scoundrel had been taking advantage of her for some time before their flight as the gown, Worth or not, was straining at the seams.

He had eventually flushed his fugitive sister out from Hôtel d’Alsace in St Germain, a degenerate endroit, in Hugh’s estimation, the scene of Oscar Wilde’s demise, which said everything you needed to know about the place.

An unseemly tussle had taken place not only with Izzie but also with the bounder from whose arms Hugh wrestled her before hauling her, kicking and screaming, into the handsome two-door Renault taxi that he had paid to wait outside the hotel. Hugh thought it would be rather fine to own a motor car. Could he afford one on his salary? Could he learn to drive one? How difficult could it be?

They had eaten some rather decent, pink French lamb on the boat and Izzie had demanded champagne, which he allowed her as he was far too worn out with the whole elopement business to bother with yet another fight. It was tempting to toss her over the rails, into the dark-grey waters of the Channel.

He had telegraphed his mother, Adelaide, from Calais, informing her of Izzie’s misfortune as he thought it might be best if she were prepared before setting eyes on her youngest daughter, whose condition was plain for all the world to see.

Their fellow diners on the boat presumed they were a married couple and many pretty compliments on her impending motherhood were passed Izzie’s way. Hugh supposed it was better to let them think this, appalling though it was, rather than for these complete strangers to discover the truth. Thus he found himself taking part in an absurd charade for the duration of the crossing, in the course of which he was forced to deny the existence of his real wife and children and pretend that Izzie was his child bride. He became, to all intents and purposes, the very villain who had seduced a girl barely out of the nursery (forgetting, perhaps, that his own wife was only seventeen when he proposed to her).

Izzie, of course, threw herself into this mockery with glee, taking her revenge on Hugh by making him as uncomfortable as possible, addressing him as mon cher mari and other extremely irritating blandishments.

‘What a lovely young wife you have,’ a man, a Belgian, chortled while Hugh was taking the air on deck and indulging in a post-prandial cigarette. ‘Hardly out of the cradle herself and soon to be a mother. It’s the best way – getting them young – then you can mould them to how you want them.’

‘Your English is remarkable, sir,’ Hugh said, throwing the stub of his cigarette into the sea and walking away. A lesser man would have resorted to fisticuffs. He might, if pressed, fight for the honour of his country, but he would be damned if he would fight for the besmirched honour of his feckless sister. (Although it would be undeniably pleasant to mould a woman to one’s exact requirements, like his bespoke suits from his tailor in Jermyn Street.)

It had been difficult to find the right wording for the telegram to his mother and he had finally settled on I SHALL BE IN HAMPSTEAD BY MIDDAY STOP ISOBEL IS WITH ME STOP SHE IS WITH CHILD STOP. It was a rather bald message and he should perhaps have spent the extra money on some mitigating adverbs. ‘Unfortunately’ might have been one. The telegram (unfortunately) had the opposite to the desired effect and when they disembarked in Dover a reply was waiting for him. DO NOT BRING HER TO MY HOUSE UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES STOP, the final STOP carrying a leaden weight of certainty which was not to be challenged. Which did rather leave Hugh at a loss as to what exactly he should do with Izzie. She was, despite appearances, still only a child herself, only sixteen, he could hardly abandon her on the streets. Anxious to return to Fox Corner as soon as possible, he found himself carting her along with him.

When they finally arrived, as iced as snowmen, it was an excitable Bridget who opened the door to him at midnight and said, ‘Oh, no, I was hoping you were going to be the doctor, so I was.’ His third child, it seemed, was on its way. Her way, he thought fondly, looking down at the tiny crumpled features. Hugh rather liked babies.

‘But what are we to do with her?’ Sylvie fretted. ‘She’s not giving birth under my roof.’

‘Our roof.’

‘She’ll have to give it away.’

‘The child is part of our family,’ Hugh said. ‘The same blood runs in its veins as in my children.’

‘Our children.’

‘We’ll say the child is adopted,’ Hugh said. ‘An orphaned relative. People won’t question, why should they?’

In the end the baby was born beneath the roof of Fox Corner, a boy, and once Sylvie saw him she was unable to discard him so easily. ‘He’s a delightful little thing really,’ she said. Sylvie found all babies delightful.

Izzie had not been allowed beyond the garden for the remainder of her pregnancy. She was being kept a prisoner, she said, ‘like the Count of Monte Cristo’. She handed the baby over as soon as he was born and showed no more interest in him, as if the whole affair – the pregnancy, the confinement – had been a provoking task that they had coerced her into undertaking and now she had fulfilled her part of the bargain and was free to go. After a fortnight of lying around in bed being waited upon by a disgruntled Bridget she was put on a train back to Hampstead, from whence she was packed off to a finishing school in Lausanne.

Hugh was right, no one questioned the sudden appearance of this surplus child. Mrs Glover and Bridget were sworn to secrecy, an oath that was sweetened, unknown to Sylvie, with cash. Hugh knew the value of money, he wasn’t a banker for nothing. Dr Fellowes could, one hoped, be relied upon for his professional discretion.

‘Roland,’ Sylvie said. ‘I’ve always rather liked that name. The Song of Roland – he was a French knight.’

‘Died in battle, I expect?’ Hugh said.

‘Most knights do, don’t they?’

The silver hare spun and shone and shimmered before her eyes. The leaves on the beech danced, the garden budded, blossomed, fruited, without any help from her at all. Rock-a-bye baby, Sylvie sang. Down will fall baby, cradle and all. Ursula was not put off by this threat and continued on her small but dauntless journey, alongside her companion, Roland.

He was a sweet-natured child and it took some time for Sylvie to notice that he was ‘not quite all there’, as she put it to Hugh one evening when he returned from a difficult day at the bank. He knew there was no point in sharing these fiscal problems with Sylvie, yet sometimes he liked to imagine coming home from work to a wife who was fascinated by ledgers and balance sheets, the rising price of tea, the unsteady market in wool. A wife ‘moulded’ to requirements instead of the beautiful, clever and somewhat contrary one he was wedded to.

He had secluded himself in the growlery, sitting at his desk with a large malt whisky and a small cigar, hoping to be left in peace. To no avail: Sylvie swept in and sat opposite him, like a customer in the bank looking for a loan, and said, ‘I think Izzie’s child may be a simpleton.’ Up until now he had always been Roland, now, apparently defective, he was Izzie’s once more.

Hugh dismissed her opinion but there was no denying that as time went on Roland didn’t progress the way the others did. He was slow to learn and didn’t seem to possess a child’s natural curiosity about the world. You could sit him on a hearth rug with a rag-book or a set of wooden bricks and he would still be there half an hour later gazing contentedly at the fire (well guarded against children) or Queenie the cat sitting next to him, attending to her toilette (less well guarded and much prone to malevolence). Roland could be set to any simple task, and spent much of his time willingly fetching and carrying for the girls, Bridget, even Mrs Glover was not above sending him on simple errands, a bag of sugar from the pantry, a wooden spoon from the jar. It seemed unlikely that he would be going to Hugh’s old school or entering Hugh’s old college, and Hugh grew fonder of the boy for that somehow.

‘Perhaps we should get him a dog,’ he suggested. ‘A dog always brings the best out in a boy.’ Bosun arrived, a large friendly animal with a tendency to herd and protect, and discerned immediately that he had been put in charge of something important.

At least the boy was placid, Hugh thought, unlike his dratted mother, or his own two eldest children who fought incessantly with each other. Ursula, of course, was different to all of them. She was watchful, as if she were trying to drink in the whole world through those little green eyes that were both his and hers. She was rather unnerving.

Mr Winton’s easel was set up to face the sea. He was quite pleased with what he had so far, the blues and greens and whites – and murky browns – of the Cornish seaside. Several passers-by paused in their journeys across the sands to observe the painting-in-progress. He hoped, in vain, for compliments.

A little fleet of white-sailed yachts skimmed the horizon, a race of some kind, Mr Winton presumed. He smudged some Chinese white on his own painted horizon and stood back to admire the results. Mr Winton saw yachts, others might have seen blobs of white paint. They would contrast rather well, he thought, with some figures on the seashore. The two little girls so intent on building a sandcastle would be perfect. He bit the tip of his brush as he gazed at his canvas. How to do it best, he wondered?

The sandcastle was Ursula’s suggestion. They should build, she said to Pamela, the best sandcastle ever. She had conjured up such a vivid image of this sandy citadel – moats and turrets and battlements – that Pamela could almost see the medieval ladies in their wimples waving to the knights as they clattered away on their horses over the drawbridge (a piece of driftwood was to be sought out for this purpose). They had set about this task with undivided energy although they were still at the heavy-engineering stage, digging a double moat that would eventually, when the tide turned, fill with seawater to protect those wimpled ladies from violent siege (by someone like Maurice, inevitably). Roland, their ever-obliging minion, was dispatched to scour the beach for decorative pebbles and the all-important drawbridge.

They were further along the beach from Sylvie and Bridget, who were immersed in their books while the new baby, Edward – Teddy – was sleeping on a blanket on the sand beneath the protection of a parasol. Maurice was dredging in rock pools at the far end of the beach. He had made new companions, rough local boys with whom he went swimming and scrabbling up cliffs. Boys were just boys to Maurice. He had not yet learned to evaluate them by accent and social standing.

Maurice had an indestructible quality and no one ever seemed to worry about him, least of all his mother.

Bosun, unfortunately, had been left behind with the Coles.

In time-honoured fashion, the sand from the moat was piled up in a central mound, the building material for the proposed fortress. Both girls, by now hot and sticky from their exertions, took a moment to stand back and contemplate this formless heap. Pamela felt more doubtful now about the turrets and battlements, the wimpled ladies seemed even more unlikely. The mound reminded Ursula of something, but what? Something familiar, yet nebulous and undefinable, no more than a shape in her brain. She was prone to these sensations, as if a memory was being tugged reluctantly out of its hiding place. She presumed it was the same for everyone.

Then this feeling was replaced by fear, a shadow of a thrill too, the kind that came with a thunderstorm rolling in, or a sea fog creeping towards the shore. Hazard could be anywhere, in the clouds, the waves, the little yachts on the horizon, the man painting at his easel. She set off at a purposeful trot to take her fears to Sylvie and have them soothed.

Ursula was a peculiar child, full of troublesome notions, in Sylvie’s opinion. She was forever answering Ursula’s anxious questions – What would we do if the house caught fire? Our train crashed? The river flooded? Practical advice, Sylvie had discovered, was the best way to allay these fears rather than dismissing them as unlikely (Why, dear, we would gather up our belongings and we would climb on the roof until the water receded).

Pamela, meanwhile, returned stoically to digging the moat. Mr Winton was entirely absorbed in the close brushwork necessary for Pamela’s sunhat. What a happy coincidence that those two little girls had chosen to build their sandcastle in the middle of his composition. He thought he might call it The Diggers. Or The Sand Diggers.

Sylvie was dozing over The Secret Agent and rather resented being woken. ‘What is it?’ she said. She glanced along the beach and saw Pamela digging industriously. Distant yelling and wild whooping suggested Maurice.

‘Where’s Roland?’ she asked.

‘Roland?’ Ursula said, looking around for their willing slave and failing to see him anywhere. ‘He’s looking for a drawbridge.’ Sylvie was on her feet now, anxiously scanning the beach.

‘A what?’

‘A drawbridge,’ Ursula repeated.

They concluded that he must have spotted a piece of wood in the sea and obediently waded out to collect it. He had no real understanding of danger and did not know how to swim, of course. If Bosun had been on watch on the beach he would have dog-paddled out into the waves, heedless of any peril, and snatched Roland back. In his absence, Archibald Winton, an amateur watercolourist from Birmingham, as the local paper referred to him, had attempted to rescue the child (Roland Todd, aged four, on holiday with his family). He had cast aside his paintbrush and swum out to sea and pulled the boy from the water, but, alas, to no avail. This clipping was carefully cut out and preserved for appreciation in Birmingham. In the course of three column inches Mr Winton had become both a hero and an artist. He imagined himself saying modestly, ‘Why, it was nothing,’ and – of course – it was nothing, for no one was saved.

Ursula watched as Mr Winton waded back through the waves, carrying Roland’s limp little body in his arms. Pamela and Ursula had thought the tide was going out but it was coming in, already filling the moat and lapping at the mound of sand which would soon be gone for ever. An ownerless hoop bowled past, driven by the breeze. Ursula stared out to sea while behind her on the beach a variety of strangers attempted to revive Roland. Pamela came and joined her and they held hands. The waves began to trickle in, covering their feet. If only they hadn’t been so intent on the sandcastle, Ursula thought. And it had seemed such a good idea.

‘Sorry about your boy, Mrs Todd, ma’am,’ George Glover mumbled. He touched an invisible cap on his head. Sylvie had mounted an expedition to see the harvest being brought in. They must rouse themselves from their torpid grief, she said. Following Roland’s drowning, the summer had been subdued, naturally. Roland seemed greater in his absence than he had done in his presence.

‘Your boy?’ Izzie muttered after they had left George Glover to his labours. She had arrived in time for Roland’s funeral, in stylish black mourning, and wept, ‘My boy, my boy,’ over Roland’s small coffin.

‘He was my boy,’ Sylvie said vehemently, ‘don’t you dare say he was yours,’ although she knew, guiltily, that she mourned less for Roland than she would have done for one of her own. But that was natural, surely? Everyone seemed to want ownership of him now he was gone. (Mrs Glover and Bridget, too, would have staked a small claim to him as well if anyone had listened.)

Hugh was very affected by the loss of ‘the little chap’ but knew that for the sake of his family he must carry on as usual.

Izzie had lingered on, to Sylvie’s annoyance. She was twenty years old, ‘stuck’ at home, waiting for an unknown-as-yet husband to free her from Adelaide’s ‘claws’. Roland’s name had been forbidden in Hampstead and now Adelaide declared his death a ‘blessing’. Hugh felt sorry for his sister, while Sylvie spent her time casting around the countryside for an eligible landowner with enough mutton-headed patience to withstand Izzie.

In an oppressive heat they had trudged across fields, clambered over stiles, splashed through streams. Sylvie had strapped the baby to her body with a shawl. The baby was a heavy burden, although perhaps not as heavy a burden as the picnic basket that Bridget was lugging. Bosun walked dutifully by their side, he was not a dog that ran ahead, tending more to bring up the rear. He was still puzzled by Roland’s disappearance and was keen not to lose anyone else. Izzie lagged behind, any original enthusiasm for the pastoral outing long since having waned. Bosun did his best to chivvy her along.

It was a bad-tempered trek, the picnic at the end of it not much better as it turned out that Bridget had forgotten to pack the sandwiches. ‘How on earth did you manage that?’ Sylvie said crossly and as a consequence they had to eat the pork pie that Mrs Glover had intended for George. (‘For God’s sake, don’t tell her,’ Sylvie said.) Pamela had scratched herself on a bramble bush, Ursula had tumbled into a nettle patch. Even the usually happy Teddy was overheated and fretful.

George brought two tiny baby rabbits for them to look at and said, ‘Would you like to take them home with you?’ and Sylvie snapped, ‘No thank you, George. They will either die or multiply, neither of which would be a happy outcome.’ Pamela was distraught and had to be promised a kitten. (To Pamela’s surprise, this promise was kept and a kitten duly acquired from the Hall farm. A week later it took a fit and died. A full funeral was held. ‘I am cursed,’ Pamela declared, with uncharacteristic melodrama.)

‘He’s very handsome, that ploughman, isn’t he?’ Izzie said and Sylvie said, ‘Don’t. Not under any circumstances. Don’t,’ and Izzie said, ‘I have no idea what you mean.’

The afternoon grew no cooler and eventually they had no choice but to wend their way home in the same heat that they had journeyed there in. Pamela, already miserable from the rabbits, stepped on a thorn, Ursula was whacked in the face by a branch. Teddy cried, Izzie swore, Sylvie breathed fire and Bridget said if it weren’t a mortal sin she would drown herself in the next stream.

‘Look at you,’ Hugh smiled in greeting when they staggered home. ‘All golden from the sun.’

‘Oh, please,’ Sylvie said, pushing past him. ‘I’m going to lie down upstairs.’

‘I think we’ll have thunder tonight,’ Hugh said. And they did. Ursula, a light sleeper, was woken. She slipped out of bed and pattered over to the attic window, standing on a chair so that she could see out.

Thunder rolled like gunfire in the distance. The sky, purple and swollen with portent, was suddenly split open by a fork of lightning. A fox, skulking over some small prey on the lawn, was briefly illuminated, caught as though in a photographer’s flash.

Ursula forgot to count and an explosive thunderclap, almost overhead, took her by surprise.

This was how war sounded, she thought.

Ursula cut straight to the chase. Bridget, chopping onions at the kitchen table, was already primed for tears. Ursula sat next to her and said, ‘I’ve been in the village.’

‘Oh,’ Bridget said, not in the least interested in this information.

‘I was buying sweets,’ Ursula said. ‘In the sweet shop.’

‘Really?’ Bridget said. ‘Sweets in a sweet shop? Who would have thought it.’ The shop sold many things other than sweets but none of those other things were of any interest to the children at Fox Corner.

‘Clarence was there.’

‘Clarence?’ Bridget said. She stopped the chopping at the mention of her beloved.

‘Buying sweets,’ Ursula said. ‘Mint humbugs,’ she added, for authenticity, and then, ‘You know Molly Lester?’

‘I do,’ Bridget said cautiously, ‘she works in the shop.’

‘Well, Clarence was kissing her.’

Bridget rose from her chair, knife still in hand. ‘Kissing? Why would Clarence kiss Molly Lester?’

‘That’s what Molly Lester said! She said, “Why are you kissing me, Clarence Dodds, when everyone knows you’re engaged to be married to that maid that works at Fox Corner?”’

Bridget was used to melodramas and penny dreadfuls. She waited for the revelation that she knew must follow.

Ursula supplied it. ‘And Clarence said, “Oh, you mean Bridget. She’s nothing to me. She’s a very ugly girl. I am just stringing her along.”’ Ursula, a precocious reader by now, had also read Bridget’s novels and had learned the discourse of romance.

The knife was dropped to the floor with a banshee shriek. Irish curses were thrown liberally. ‘The bugger,’ Bridget said.

‘A dastardly villain,’ Ursula agreed.

The engagement ring, the little gypsy ring (‘a trinket’), was returned by Bridget to Sylvie. Clarence’s protestations of innocence went unheeded.

‘You might go up to London with Mrs Glover,’ Sylvie said to Bridget. ‘For the Armistice celebrations, you know. I believe there are late trains running.’

Mrs Glover said she wouldn’t go near the capital on account of the influenza and Bridget said that she hoped very much that Clarence would go, preferably with Molly Lester, and that the pair of them would catch the Spanish flu and die.

Molly Lester, who had never spoken so much as a word to Clarence beyond a guiltless ‘Morning, sir, what can I get you?’, attended a small street party in the village but Clarence did indeed go up to London with a couple of pals and did indeed die.

‘But at least no one was pushed down the stairs,’ Ursula said.

‘Whatever do you mean?’ Sylvie said.

‘I don’t know,’ Ursula said. She really didn’t.

She was disturbed by herself. She dreamed of flying and falling all the time. Sometimes when she stood on a chair to look out of the bedroom window she felt the urge to clamber out and throw herself down. She would not fall to the ground with a thud and a smash like an over-ripe apple, instead she was sure she would be caught. (By what, though, she wondered?) She refrained from testing this theory, unlike Pamela’s poor little crinoline lady, who had been tossed from the very same bedroom window by a malignly bored Maurice one winter teatime.

On hearing his approach along the passageway – loudly signalled by Indian war whoops – Ursula had hastily placed her own favourite, Queen Solange, the knitting doll, beneath her pillow where she remained safe in her refuge while the unfortunate crinoline lady was defenestrated and smashed to pieces on the slates. ‘I only wanted to see what would happen,’ Maurice whined to Sylvie afterwards. ‘Well, now you know,’ she said. She was finding Pamela’s hysterical reaction to this incident more than a little trying. ‘We are in the middle of a war,’ she said to her. ‘There are worse things happening than a broken ornament.’ Not for Pamela there weren’t.

If Ursula had allowed Maurice the little knitting doll, made of unbreakable wood, then the crinoline lady would have been saved.

Bosun, soon to be dead of distemper, nosed his way into the room that night and laid a weighty paw on Pamela’s coverlet in sympathy before groaning into sleep on the rag rug between their beds.

The next day, Sylvie, reproaching herself for her heartlessness towards her children, acquired another kitten from the Hall farm. Kittens were in continual abundance on the farm, there was a kind of kitten currency in the neighbourhood, they were bartered for all kinds of emotional regret or fulfilment by parents – a doll lost, an exam passed.

Despite Bosun’s best attempts to keep a guardian eye on the kitten, they had only had it a week when Maurice stepped on it, during a vigorous game of soldiers with the Cole boys. Sylvie swiftly scooped up the little body and gave it to Bridget to take elsewhere so that its death throes could take place off-stage.

‘It was an accident!’ Maurice screamed. ‘I didn’t know the stupid thing was there!’ Sylvie slapped him on the face and he started crying. It was horrible to see him so upset, it really was an accident, and Ursula tried to comfort him which only made him furious and Pamela, of course, had moved beyond all notion of civilization and was trying to rip Maurice’s hair from his head. The Cole boys had long since scarpered back to their own house where emotional calm was the general order of the day.

Sometimes it was harder to change the past than it was the future.

‘Headaches,’ Sylvie said.

‘I’m a psychiatrist,’ Dr Kellet said to Sylvie. ‘Not a neurologist.’

‘And dreams and nightmares,’ Sylvie tempted.

There was something comforting about being in this room, Ursula thought. The oak panelling, the roaring fire, the thick carpet figured in red and blue, the leather chairs, even the outlandish tea-urn – all felt familiar.

‘Dreams?’ Dr Kellet said, duly tempted.

‘Yes,’ Sylvie said. ‘And sleepwalking.’

‘Do I?’ Ursula asked, startled.

‘And she has a kind of déjà vu all the time,’ Sylvie said, pronouncing the words with some distaste.

‘Really?’ Dr Kellet said, reaching for an elaborate meerschaum pipe and knocking the ashes out on to the fender. It was the Turk’s-head bowl, as familiar somehow as an old pet.

‘Oh,’ Ursula said. ‘I’ve been here before!’

‘You see!’ Sylvie said, triumphant.

‘Hm …’ Dr Kellet said thoughtfully. He turned to Ursula and addressed her directly. ‘Have you heard of reincarnation?’

‘Oh, yes, absolutely,’ Ursula said enthusiastically.

‘I’m sure she hasn’t,’ Sylvie said. ‘Is it Catholic doctrine? What is that?’ she asked, distracted by the outlandish tea-urn.

‘It’s a samovar, from Russia,’ Dr Kellet said, ‘although I’m not Russian, far from it, I’m from Maidstone, I visited St Petersburg before the Revolution.’ To Ursula, he said, ‘Would you like to draw me something?’ and pushed a pencil and paper towards her. ‘Would you like some tea?’ he asked Sylvie, who was still glaring at the samovar. She declined, mistrustful of any brew that didn’t come out of a china teapot.

Ursula finished her drawing and handed it over for appraisal.

‘What is it?’ Sylvie said, peering over Ursula’s shoulder. ‘Some kind of ring, or circlet? A crown?’

‘No,’ Dr Kellet said, ‘it’s a snake with its tail in its mouth.’ He nodded approvingly and said to Sylvie, ‘It’s a symbol representing the circularity of the universe. Time is a construct, in reality everything flows, no past or present, only the now.’

‘How gnomic,’ Sylvie said stiffly.

Dr Kellet steepled his hands and propped his chin on them. ‘You know,’ he said to Ursula, ‘I think we shall get on very well. Would you like a biscuit?’

There was one thing that puzzled her. The photograph of Guy, lost at Arras in his cricketing whites was missing from the side table. Without meaning to – it was a question that raised so many other questions – she said to Dr Kellet, ‘Where is the photograph of Guy?’ and Dr Kellet said, ‘Who is Guy?’

It seemed even the instability of time was not to be relied upon.

‘It’s just an Austin,’ Izzie said. ‘An open-road tourer – four doors though – but nowhere near as costly as a Bentley, goodness, it’s positively a vehicle for hoi polloi compared to your indulgence, Hugh.’ ‘On tick, no doubt,’ Hugh said. ‘Not at all, paid up in full, in cash. I have a publisher, I have money, Hugh. You don’t need to worry about me any more.’

While everyone was admiring the cherry-bright vehicle, Millie said, ‘I have to go, I have a dancing exhibition tonight. Thank you very much for a lovely tea, Mrs Todd.’

‘Come on, I’ll walk you back,’ Ursula said.

On the return home, she avoided the well-worn shortcut at the bottom of the garden and came the long way round, dodging Izzie speeding off in her car. Izzie gave a careless salute in farewell.

‘Who was that?’ Benjamin Cole asked, skidding his bicycle into a hedge to avoid being killed by the Austin. Ursula’s heart tripped and skipped and flipped at the sight of him. The very object of her affection! The reason she had taken the long way round was on the unlikely chance that she might engineer an ‘accidental’ meeting with Benjamin Cole. And here he was! What luck.

‘They lost my ball,’ Teddy said disconsolately when she returned to the dining room.

‘I know,’ Ursula said. ‘We can look for it later.’

‘I say, you’re all pink and flushed,’ he said.

‘Did something happen?’ Did anything happen, she thought? Did anything happen? Only the most handsome boy in the entire world kissed me and on my sixteenth birthday. He had walked her back, pushing his bicycle, and at some point their hands had brushed, they had blushed (it was poetry) and he said, ‘You know I do like you, Ursula,’ and then right there, at her front gate (where anyone could see), he had propped his bicycle against the wall and pulled her towards him. And then the kiss! Sweet and lingering and much nicer than she had expected although it did leave her feeling – well, yes … flushed. Benjamin too, and they stood apart from each other, slightly shocked.

‘Gosh,’ he said. ‘I’ve never kissed a girl before, I had no idea it could be so … exciting.’ He shook his head like a dog as if astonished by his own lack of vocabulary.

This, Ursula thought, would remain the best moment of her life, no matter what else happened to her. They would have kissed more, she supposed, but at that moment the rag and bone cart appeared round the corner of the lane and the rag and bone man’s almost incomprehensible siren moan of Enraagnbooooooone intruded on their budding romance.

‘No, nothing happened,’ she said to Teddy. ‘I was saying goodbye to Izzie. You missed seeing her car. You would have liked it.’

Teddy shrugged and pushed The Adventures of Augustus off the table and on to the floor. ‘What a load of rot it is,’ he said.

Ursula picked up a half-drunk glass of champagne, the rim of which was adorned with red lipstick, and poured half of it into a jelly glass that she handed to Teddy. ‘Cheers,’ she said. They chinked their glasses and drained them to the dregs.

‘Happy birthday,’ Teddy said.

What wondrous life is this I lead!

Ripe apples drop about my head;

The luscious clusters of the vine

Upon my mouth do crush their wine …

‘What is that you’re reading?’ Sylvie asked suspiciously.

‘Marvell.’

Sylvie took the book from her and scrutinized the verses. ‘It’s rather lush,’ she concluded.

‘“Lush” – how can that be a criticism?’ Ursula laughed and bit into an apple.

‘Try not to be precocious,’ Sylvie sighed. ‘It’s not a pleasant thing in a girl. What are you going to do when you go back to school after the holidays – Latin? Greek? Not English literature? I don’t see the point.’

‘You don’t see the point of English literature?’

‘I don’t see the point of studying it. Surely one just reads it?’ She sighed again. Neither of her daughters bore any resemblance to her. For a moment Sylvie was back in the past, under a bright London sky, and could smell the spring flowers newly refreshed by rain, hear the quiet comforting clink and jingle of Tiffin’s tack.

‘I might do Modern Languages. I don’t know. I’m not sure, I haven’t quite worked out a plan.’

‘A plan?’

They fell into silence. The fox sauntered into the silence, insouciant. Maurice was forever trying to shoot it. Either he was not such a good shot as he liked to think or the vixen was cleverer than he was. Ursula and Sylvie tended towards the latter view. ‘She’s so pretty,’ Sylvie said. ‘And she has such a magnificent brush.’ The fox sat down, a dog waiting for its dinner, her eyes never leaving Sylvie. ‘I haven’t got anything,’ Sylvie said, upturning her empty hands to prove this fact. Ursula bowled her apple core, gently underarm, so as not to alarm the creature and the vixen trotted off after it, picking it up awkwardly in her mouth and then turning tail and disappearing. ‘Eats anything,’ Sylvie said. ‘Like Jimmy.’

Maurice appeared, giving them both a start. He was carrying his new Purdey cocked over his arm and said eagerly, ‘Was that that damned fox?’

‘Language, Maurice,’ Sylvie reprimanded.

He was home after graduation, waiting to start his training in the law and irritatingly bored. He could work at the Hall farm, Sylvie suggested, they were always looking for seasonal workers. ‘Like a peasant in the field?’ Maurice said. ‘Is that why you’ve given me an expensive education?’ (‘Why have we given him an expensive education?’ Hugh said.)

‘Teach me to shoot, then,’ Ursula said, jumping up and brushing off her skirt. ‘Come on, I can use Daddy’s old wildfowler.’

Maurice shrugged and said, ‘May as well, but girls can’t shoot, it’s a well-known fact.’

‘Girls are absolutely useless,’ Ursula agreed. ‘They can’t do anything.’

‘Are you being sarcastic?’

‘Me?’

‘Pretty good for a novice,’ Maurice said reluctantly. They were shooting bottles off a wall, near the copse, Ursula hitting her target many more times than Maurice. ‘You’re sure you haven’t done this before?’

‘What can I say?’ she said. ‘I pick things up quickly.’

Maurice suddenly swung the barrel of his gun away from the wall and towards the edge of the copse and before Ursula could even see what he was aiming at he had pulled the trigger, blasting something out of existence.

‘Got the damned little blighter at last,’ he said triumphantly.

Ursula set off at a run but long before she reached it she could see the pile of ruddy-brown fur. The white tip of her beautiful brush gave a little flicker but Sylvie’s fox was no more.

She found Sylvie on the terrace, leafing through a magazine. ‘Maurice shot the fox,’ she said. Sylvie rested her head back on the wicker lounger and closed her eyes in resignation. ‘It was always going to happen,’ she said. She opened her eyes. They were glistening with tears. Ursula had never seen her mother cry. ‘I shall disinherit him one day,’ Sylvie said, the idea of cold revenge already drying her tears.

Pamela appeared on the terrace and raised a questioning eyebrow at Ursula, who said, ‘Maurice shot the fox.’

‘I hope you shot him,’ Pamela said. She meant it too.

‘I might go and meet Daddy off the train,’ Ursula said when Pamela had gone back inside.

She wasn’t really going to meet Hugh. Ever since her birthday she had been seeing Benjamin Cole in secret. Ben, he was now to her. In the meadow, in the wood, in the lane. (Anywhere out of doors, it seemed. ‘Good job the weather’s been nice for your canoodling,’ Millie said, with much clown-smirking and raising up and down of eyebrows.)

Ursula discovered what an excellent liar she was. (Didn’t she always know that, though?) Do you want anything from the shop? or I’m just going to pick raspberries in the lane. Would it be so dreadful if people knew? ‘Well, I think your mother would have me killed,’ Ben said. (‘A Jew?’ she imagined Sylvie saying.)

‘And my folks, too,’ he said. ‘We’re too young.’

‘Like Romeo and Juliet,’ Ursula said. ‘Star-crossed lovers and so on.’

‘Except we’re not going to die for love,’ Ben said.

‘Would it be such a bad thing to die for?’ Ursula mused.

‘Yes.’

Things had started to get very ‘hot’ between them, a lot of fumbling fingers and moaning (on his part). He didn’t think he could ‘hold back’ much longer, he said, but she wasn’t sure what he had to hold back from exactly. Didn’t love mean they shouldn’t hold back anything? She expected they would marry. Would she have to convert? Become a ‘Jewess’?

They had made their way to the meadow where they had lain down in each other’s arms. It was very romantic, Ursula thought, apart from the timothy grass that was tickling her and the ox-eye daisies that made her sneeze. Not to mention the way Ben suddenly shifted himself until he was on top of her so that she felt rather as if she were in a coffin filled with earth. He went into a kind of spasm that she thought might be a prelude to death by apoplexy and she stroked his hair as if he were an invalid and said, with concern, ‘Are you all right?’

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Didn’t mean to do that.’ (But what had he done?)

‘I should be getting back,’ Ursula said. They stood up and picked off grass and flowers from each other’s clothing before walking home.

Ursula wondered if she had missed Hugh’s train. Ben looked at his watch and said, ‘Oh, they’ll have been home for ages.’ (Hugh and Mr Cole travelled on the same London train.) They left the meadow and climbed over the stile into the dairy herd’s field that ran alongside the lane. The cows hadn’t returned from milking yet.

He gave her a hand down from the stile and they kissed again. When they broke free of each other they noticed a man making his way across the field, from the other side where it led into the copse. He was heading towards the lane – a shabby creature, a tramp perhaps – hobbling along as fast as he could. He glanced round and when he saw them he hobbled even faster. He stumbled on a tussock of grass but quickly recovered and was up again, loping towards the gate.

‘What a suspicious-looking fellow,’ Ben laughed. ‘I wonder what he’s been up to?’

‘Dinner’s on the table, you’re very late,’ Sylvie said. ‘Where have you been? Mrs Glover has made that awful veal à la Russe thing again.’

‘Maurice shot the fox?’ Teddy said, his face a picture of disappointment.

And so it went on from there, a bad-tempered argument between everyone at the dinner table just because of a dead fox, Hugh thought. They’re vermin, he felt like saying but didn’t want to fuel the furore of emotions that had been unleashed. Instead, he said, ‘Please, let’s not talk about it over dinner, it’s difficult enough trying to digest this stuff.’ But talk about it they would. He tried to ignore them, ploughing his way through the veal cutlets (had Mrs Glover ever tasted them herself, he wondered?). He was relieved that they were interrupted by a knock at the door.

‘Ah, Major Shawcross,’ Hugh said, ‘do come in.’

‘Oh, goodness, I don’t want to interrupt you at table,’ Major Shawcross said, looking awkward, ‘I just wondered if your Teddy had seen our Nancy.’

‘Nancy?’ Teddy said.

‘Yes,’ Major Shawcross said. ‘We can’t find her anywhere.’

They didn’t meet any more in the copse, or the lane or the meadow. Hugh imposed a strict curfew after Nancy’s body was found and anyway both Ursula and Ben were stricken with guilty horror. If they had come home when they were supposed to, if they had crossed that field even five minutes earlier instead of lingering, they might have saved her. But by the time they meandered ignorantly back Nancy was already dead, lying in the cattle trough in the top corner of the field. So, indeed, just like Romeo and Juliet it had ended in death. Nancy, sacrificed for their love.

‘It’s a terrible thing,’ Pamela said to her. ‘But you’re not responsible, why are you behaving as though you are?’

Because she was. She knew it now.

Something was riven, broken, a lightning fork cutting open a swollen sky.

In the October half-term she went to stay with Izzie for a few days. They were sitting in the Russian Tea Room in South Kensington. ‘A terrifically right-wing clientele here,’ Izzie said, ‘but they do the most wonderful pancake things.’ There was a samovar. (Was it the samovar that set her off, with its shades of Dr Kellet? It would seem absurd if it was.) They had finished their tea and Izzie said, ‘Just hang on a sec, I’m going to powder my nose. Ask for the bill, will you?’

Ursula was waiting patiently for her to return when suddenly the terror descended, swift as a predatory hawk. An anticipatory dread of something unknown but enormously threatening. It was coming for her, here among the polite tinkle of teaspoon on saucer. She stood up, knocking over her chair. She felt dizzy and there was a veil of fog in front of her face. Like bomb-dust, she thought, yet she had never been bombed.

She pushed through the veil, out of the Russian Tea Room on to Harrington Road. She started to run and kept on running, on to the Brompton Road and then, blindly, into Egerton Gardens.

She had been here before. She had never been here before.

There was always something just out of sight, just around a corner, something she could never chase down – something that was chasing her down. She was both the hunter and the hunted. Like the fox. She carried on and then tripped on something, falling straight on to her nose. The pain was extraordinary. Blood everywhere. She sat on the pavement and cried with the agony of it all. She hadn’t realized there was anyone on the street but then from behind her a man’s voice said, ‘Oh, my, how awful for you. Let me help you. You have blood all over your nice turquoise scarf. Is that the colour, or is it aquamarine? My name’s Derek, Derek Oliphant.’

She knew that voice. She didn’t know that voice. The past seemed to leak into the present, as if there were a fault somewhere. Or was it the future spilling into the past? Either way it was nightmarish, as if her inner dark landscape had become manifest. The inside become the outside. Time was out of joint, that was for certain.

She staggered to her feet but didn’t dare to look round. Ignoring the awful pain, she ran on and on. She was in Belgravia before she finally flagged completely. Here too, she thought. She had been here before. She had never been here before. I give in, she thought. Whatever it is, it can have me. She sank to her knees on the hard pavement and curled up in a ball. A fox without a hole.

She must have passed out because when she opened her eyes she was in a bed in a room painted white. There was a big window and outside the window she could see a horse-chestnut tree that had not yet shed its leaves. She turned her head and saw Dr Kellet.

‘You broke your nose,’ Dr Kellet said. ‘We thought you must have been attacked by someone.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I fell.’

‘A vicar found you. He took you in a taxi to St George’s Hospital.’

‘But what are you doing here?’

‘Your father got in touch with me,’ Dr Kellet said. ‘He wasn’t sure who else to contact.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Well, when you arrived at St George’s you wouldn’t stop screaming. They thought something terrible must have happened to you.’

‘This isn’t St George’s, is it?’

‘No,’ he said kindly. ‘This is a private clinic. Rest, good food and so on. They have lovely gardens. I always think a lovely garden helps, don’t you?’

‘Time isn’t circular,’ she said to Dr Kellet. ‘It’s like a … palimpsest.’

‘Oh dear,’ he said. ‘That sounds very vexing.’

‘And memories are sometimes in the future.’

‘You are an old soul,’ he said. ‘It can’t be easy. But your life is still ahead of you. It must be lived.’ He was not her doctor, he had retired, he said, he was ‘merely a visitor’.

The sanatorium made her feel as if she had a mild case of consumption. She sat on the sunny terrace during the day and read countless books and orderlies ferried food and drink to her. She wandered through the gardens, had polite conversation with doctors and psychiatrists, talked to her fellow patients (on her floor, at any rate. The truly mad were in the attic, like Mrs Rochester). There were even fresh flowers in her room and a bowl of apples. It must be costing a fortune for her to stay here, she thought.

‘This must be very expensive,’ she said to Hugh when he visited, which he did often.

‘Izzie is paying,’ he said. ‘She insisted.’

Dr Kellet lit his meerschaum thoughtfully. They were sitting on the terrace. Ursula thought she would be quite happy to spend the rest of her life here. It was so gloriously unchallenging.

‘And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge …’ Dr Kellet said.

‘… and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing,’ Ursula provided.

‘Caritas, of course, is love. But you will know that.’

‘I’m not without charity,’ Ursula said. ‘Why are we quoting Corinthians? I thought you were a Buddhist.’

‘Oh, I am nothing,’ Dr Kellet said. ‘And everything too, of course,’ he added – rather elliptically, in Ursula’s opinion.

‘The question is,’ he said, ‘do you have enough?’

‘Enough what?’ The conversation had quite got away from her now but Dr Kellet was busy with the demands of the meerschaum and didn’t answer. Tea interrupted them.

‘They do excellent chocolate cake here,’ Dr Kellet said.

‘All better, little bear?’ Hugh said as he helped her gently into the car. He had brought the Bentley to pick her up.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Absolutely.’

‘Good. Let’s get home. The house isn’t the same without you.’

She had wasted so much precious time but she had a plan now, she thought, as she lay awake in the dark, in her own bed at Fox Corner. The plan would involve snow, no doubt. The silver hare, the dancing green leaves. And so on. German, not the Classics, and afterwards a course in shorthand and typing and perhaps the study of Esperanto on the side, just in case utopia should come to pass. The membership of a local shooting club and an application for an office job somewhere, working for a while, salting money away – nothing untoward. She didn’t want to draw attention to herself, she would heed her father’s advice, although he hadn’t given it to her yet, she would keep her head below the parapet and her light under a bushel. And then, when she was ready, she would have enough to live on while she embedded herself deep in the heart of the beast, from whence she would pluck out the black tumour that was growing there, larger every day.

And then one day she would be walking down Amalienstrasse and pause outside Photo Hoffmann and gaze at the Kodaks and Leicas and Voigtländers in the windows and she would open the shop door and hear the little bell clanging to announce her arrival to the girl working behind the counter who will probably say Guten Tag, gnädiges Fräulein, or perhaps she will say Grüss Gott because this is 1930 when people can still address you with Grüss Gott and Tschüss instead of endless Heil Hitlers and absurd martial salutes.

And Ursula will hold out her old box Brownie and say, ‘I don’t seem to be able to spool the film on,’ and perky seventeen-year-old Eva Braun will say, ‘Let me have a look for you.’

Her heart swelled with the high holiness of it all. Imminence was all around. She was both warrior and shining spear. She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

When everyone was asleep and the house was quiet, Ursula got out of bed and climbed on the chair at the open window of the little attic bedroom.

It’s time, she thought. A clock struck somewhere in sympathy. She thought of Teddy and Miss Woolf, of Roland and little Angela, of Nancy and Sylvie. She thought of Dr Kellet and Pindar. Become such as you are, having learned what that is. She knew what that was now. She was Ursula Beresford Todd and she was a witness.

She opened her arms to the black bat and they flew to each other, embracing in the air like long-lost souls. This is love, Ursula thought. And the practice of it makes it perfect.