‘Go and fetch him,’ Mrs Glover said to Ursula. ‘And you can all have a glass of milk and a rock bun, although goodness knows you’ve done nothing to deserve it.’
Teddy was fond of hide-and-seek and, when he didn’t respond to his name being called, Ursula looked in his secret places, behind the drawing-room curtains, beneath the dining-room table, and when she could find no sign of him she set off up the stairs to the bedrooms.
A forceful clanging of the front-door bell echoed up the stairs in her wake. From the turn in the stairs she saw Sylvie appear in the hallway and open the door to Dr Fellowes. Ursula supposed her mother must have come down the back stairs rather than appearing by magic. Dr Fellowes and Sylvie engaged in an intense, whispered conversation, about Bridget, presumably, but Ursula couldn’t catch any of the words.
Not in Sylvie’s room (they had long ago ceased to think of it as a room that belonged to two parents). Not in Maurice’s room, so generously sized for someone who spent more than half his life living at school. Not in the guest bedroom or the second guest bedroom nor in Teddy’s own little back bedroom that was almost entirely taken up with his train set. Not in the bathroom or the linen cupboard. Nor was there any sign of Teddy under the beds or in the wardrobes or in the many cupboards, nor – his favourite trick – as still as a corpse beneath Sylvie’s big eiderdown.
‘There’s cake downstairs, Teddy,’ she offered up to the empty rooms. The promise of cake, true or not, was normally enough to flush Teddy out from cover.
Ursula trudged up the dark narrow wooden staircase that led to the attic bedrooms and as soon as she had placed her foot on the first tread she experienced a sudden pinch of fear in her insides. She had no idea where it came from, or why.
‘Teddy! Teddy, where are you?’ Ursula tried to raise her voice but the words came out in a whisper.
Not in the bedroom she shared with Pamela, not in Mrs Glover’s old room. Not in the boxroom, once a nursery and now home to chests and trunks and packing cases of old clothes and toys. Only Bridget’s room remained unexplored.
The door was ajar and Ursula had to force her feet to walk towards it. Something terrible was beyond that open door. She didn’t want to see it, but she knew she must.
‘Teddy!’ she said, overcome with relief at the sight of him. Teddy was sitting on Bridget’s bed, his birthday aeroplane on his knee. ‘I’ve been looking everywhere for you,’ Ursula said. Trixie was lying on the floor next to the bed and sprang up eagerly when she saw her.
‘I thought it might make Bridget feel better,’ Teddy said, stroking the plane. Teddy had great faith in the healing power of toy trains and aeroplanes. (He was, he assured them, going to be a pilot when he grew up.) ‘I think Bridget’s asleep but her eyes are open,’ he said.
They were. Wide open, staring sightlessly at the ceiling. There was a watery blue film across those disturbing eyes and her skin had a strange lilac hue. Cobalt Violet in Ursula’s Winsor and Newton watercolour set. She could see the tip of Bridget’s tongue sticking out of her mouth and had a momentary vision of Mrs Glover pushing the calf’s tongue into the press.
Ursula had never seen a dead body but she knew without any doubt that Bridget had now become one. ‘Get off the bed, Teddy,’ she said cautiously, as if her brother were a wild creature about to bolt. She started to tremble all over. It wasn’t just that Bridget was dead, although that was bad enough, but there was something more perilous here. The unadorned walls, the thin jacquard bedspread on the iron bedstead, the enamelled brush and comb set on the dressing table, the rag rug on the floor, all suddenly grew immensely threatening as if they were not really the objects they seemed. Ursula heard Sylvie and Dr Fellowes on the stairs. Sylvie’s tones were urgent, Dr Fellowes’s less concerned.
Sylvie came in and gasped, ‘Oh dear God,’ when she saw them in Bridget’s room. She snatched Teddy off the bed and then pulled Ursula by the arm out into the passage. Trixie, tail wagging eagerly at the excitement, bounded after them. ‘Go to your room,’ Sylvie said. ‘No, go to Teddy’s room. No, go to my room. Go now,’ she said, sounding frantic, not at all the Sylvie they were used to. Sylvie went back into Bridget’s room and closed the door decisively. They could hear only murmured exchanges between Sylvie and Dr Fellowes and eventually Ursula said, ‘Come on,’ to Teddy and took his hand. He allowed her to lead him docilely back down the stairs to Sylvie’s bedroom. ‘Did you say cake?’ he asked.
‘Teddy’s skin is the same colour as Bridget’s,’ Sylvie said. Her stomach hollowed out with terror. She knew what she was looking at. Ursula was merely pale, although her closed eyelids were dark and her skin glistened with a strange, sickly sheen.
‘Heliotrope cyanosis,’ Dr Fellowes said, taking Teddy’s pulse. ‘And see those mahogany spots on his cheeks? This is the more virulent strain, I’m afraid.’
‘Stop, please stop,’ Sylvie hissed. ‘Do not lecture me like a medical student. I am their mother.’ How she hated Dr Fellowes at that moment. Bridget was lying in her bed upstairs, still warm but as dead as the marble on a tomb. ‘The influenza,’ Dr Fellowes continued relentlessly. ‘Your maid was mixing with crowds of people yesterday in London – perfect conditions for the infection to spread. It can take them in the blink of an eye.’
‘But not this one,’ Sylvie said fiercely, clutching Teddy’s hand. ‘Not my child. Not my children,’ she amended, reaching across to stroke Ursula’s burning forehead.
Pamela hovered in the doorway and Sylvie shooed her away. Pamela started to cry but Sylvie had no time for tears. Not now, not in the face of death.
‘There must be something I can do,’ she said to Dr Fellowes.
‘You can pray.’
‘Pray?’
Sylvie did not believe in God. She considered the biblical deity to be an absurd, vengeful figure (Tiffin and so on), no more real than Zeus or the great god Pan. She went to church dutifully every Sunday, however, and avoided alarming Hugh with her heretical thoughts. Needs must, and so on. She prayed now, with desperate conviction but no faith, and she suspected it made no difference either way.
When a pale bloody kind of froth, like cuckoo-spit, bubbled from Teddy’s nostrils Sylvie made a noise like a wounded animal. Mrs Glover and Pamela were listening at the other side of the door and in a rare moment of unity they clutched each other’s hands. Sylvie snatched Teddy from the bed and held him tightly to her breast and howled with pain.
Dear God, Dr Fellowes thought, the woman grieved like a savage.
They sweated together in a tangle of Sylvie’s linen bed sheets. Teddy was spreadeagled across the pillows. Ursula wanted to hold him close but he was too hot so she held one of his ankles instead, as if she was trying to stop him running away. Ursula’s lungs felt as if they were full of custard, she imagined it thick and yellow and sweet.
Teddy was gone by nightfall. Ursula knew the moment he died, she felt it inside her. She heard just one wretched moan from Sylvie and then someone lifted Teddy out of the bed and even though he was just a little boy it was as if something weighty had gone from her side and Ursula was alone in the bed. She could hear Sylvie’s choking sobs, an awful noise, as if someone had hacked off one of her limbs.
Every breath squeezed the custard stuff in her lungs. The world was fading and she began to have a stirring sense of anticipation, as if it were Christmas or her birthday, and then the black bat night approached and enfolded her in his wings. One last breath and then no more. She held out a hand to Teddy, forgetting that he wasn’t there any more.
Darkness fell.
Snow
11 February 1910