Dr Kellet came out of his room at that moment and said, ‘Come along, Ursula, I’ll see to Billy later,’ but when Ursula finished her appointment Billy was no longer in the waiting room. ‘Poor man,’ Mrs Duckworth said sadly.
The war, Dr Kellet said to Ursula, had made many people search for meaning in new places – ‘Theosophy, Rosicrucianism, anthroposophy, spiritualism. Everyone needs to make sense of their loss.’ Dr Kellet himself had sacrificed a son, Guy, a captain in the Royal West Surreys, lost at Arras. ‘One must hold on to the idea of sacrifice, Ursula. It can be a higher calling.’ He showed her a photograph, not one taken in uniform, just a snapshot really, of a boy in cricket whites, standing proudly behind his bat. ‘Could have played for the county,’ Dr Kellet said sadly. ‘I like to think of him – of all of them – playing a never-ending game in heaven. A perfect afternoon in June, always just before they break for tea.’
It seemed a shame for all the young men never to have their tea. Bosun was in heaven, along with Sam Wellington, the old boot, and Clarence Dodds, who had died with astonishing speed of the Spanish flu the day after the Armistice. Ursula couldn’t imagine any of them playing cricket.
‘Of course, I don’t believe in God,’ Dr Kellet said. ‘But I believe in heaven. One has to,’ he added, rather bleakly. Ursula wondered how all of this was supposed to fix her.
‘From a more scientific point of view,’ he said, ‘perhaps the part of your brain responsible for memory has a little flaw, a neurological problem that leads you to think that you are repeating experiences. As if something had got stuck.’ She wasn’t really dying and being reborn, he said, she just thought she was. Ursula couldn’t see what the difference was. Was she stuck? And if so, where?
‘But we don’t want it to result in you killing the poor servants, do we?’
‘But it was such a long time ago,’ Ursula said. ‘It’s not as if I’ve tried to kill anyone since.’
‘Down in the dumps,’ Sylvie said at their first meeting with Dr Kellet, the only time she had been to the Harley Street rooms with Ursula although she had clearly already talked to him without Ursula. Ursula wondered very much what had been said about her. ‘And she’s rather forlorn all the time,’ Sylvie continued. ‘I can understand an adult feeling like that—’
‘Can you?’ Dr Kellet said, leaning forward, the meerschaum indicating interest. ‘Do you?’
‘I’m not the problem,’ Sylvie said with her most gracious smile.
I’m a problem, Ursula thought? And anyway she hadn’t been killing Bridget, she was saving her. And if she wasn’t saving her perhaps she was sacrificing her. Hadn’t Dr Kellet himself said sacrifice was a higher calling?
‘If I were you I would stick to traditional moral guidelines,’ he said. ‘Fate isn’t in your hands. That would be a very heavy burden for a little girl.’ He got up from his chair and put another shovel of coal on the fire.
‘There are some Buddhist philosophers (a branch referred to as Zen) who say that sometimes a bad thing happens to prevent a worse thing happening,’ Dr Kellet said. ‘But, of course, there are some situations where it’s impossible to imagine anything worse.’ Ursula supposed he was thinking of Guy, lost at Arras and then denied his tea and cucumber sandwiches for eternity.
‘Try this,’ Izzie said, squirting a perfume atomizer in Ursula’s direction. ‘Chanel Number 5. It’s quite the thing. She’s quite the thing. Her strange, synthetic perfumes.’ She laughed as if she had made a great joke and sprayed another invisible cloud around the bathroom. It was quite different from the flowery scents that Sylvie anointed herself with.
They had finally arrived at Izzie’s flat in Basil Street (‘rather a dull endroit but handy for Harrods’). Izzie’s bathroom was pink and black marble (‘I designed it myself, delicious, isn’t it?’) and was all sharp lines and hard corners. Ursula hated to think what would happen if you slipped and fell in here.
Everything in the flat seemed to be new and shiny. It was nothing like Fox Corner, where the slow-seeming tick of the grandfather clock in the hall counted time and the patina of years shone on the parquet floors. The Meissen figures with their missing fingers and chipped toes, the Staffordshire dogs with accidentally lopped-off ears, bore no resemblance to the Bakelite bookends and onyx ashtrays in Izzie’s rooms. In Basil Street everything looked so new it seemed to belong in a shop. Even the books were new, novels and volumes of essays and poetry by writers Ursula had never heard of. ‘One must keep up with the times,’ Izzie said.
Ursula regarded herself in the bathroom mirror. Izzie stood behind her, Mephistopheles to her Faustus, and said, ‘Goodness, you’re turning out to be quite pretty,’ before rearranging her hair into different styles. ‘You must have it cut,’ she said, ‘you should come to my coiffeur. He’s really very good. You’re in danger of looking like a milkmaid, when really I think you’re going to turn out to be deliciously wicked.’
Izzie danced around the bedroom singing I wish I could shimmy like my sister Kate. ‘Can you shimmy? Look, it’s easy.’ It wasn’t and they collapsed in laughter on the satin eiderdown of the bed. ‘Gort to ’ave fun, ’aven’t yew?’ Izzie said in an atrocious mock-Cockney accent. The bedroom was a terrible mess, clothes everywhere, satin petticoats, crêpe de Chine nightdresses, silk stockings, partnerless shoes lying abandoned on the carpet, a dusting of Coty powder over everything. ‘You can try things on if you want,’ Izzie said carelessly. ‘Although you’re rather small compared to me. Jolie et petite.’ Ursula declined, fearing enchantment. They were the kind of clothes that might turn you into someone else.
‘What shall we do?’ Izzie said, suddenly bored. ‘We could play cards? Bezique?’ She danced through to the living room and tripped her way towards a large shining chrome object that looked as if it belonged on the bridge of an ocean liner and turned out to be a cocktail cabinet. ‘A drink?’ She looked doubtfully at Ursula. ‘No, don’t tell me, you’re only thirteen.’ She sighed, lit a cigarette and looked at the clock. ‘We’re too late to catch a matinee, too early for an evening performance. London Calling! is on at the Duke of York’s, it’s supposed to be very amusing. We could go, you could get a later train home.’
Ursula fingered the keys on the Royal typewriter that sat on a desk at the window. ‘My trade,’ Izzie said. ‘Perhaps I should put you in this week’s column.’
‘Really? What would you say?’
‘I don’t know, make something up, I expect,’ she said. ‘That’s what writers do.’ She took out a record from the cabinet of the gramophone and put it on the turntable. ‘Listen to this,’ she said. ‘You’ve never heard anything like it.’
It was true, she hadn’t. It started with a piano, but nothing like the Chopin and Liszt that Sylvie played so nicely (and Pamela in such a pedestrian fashion).
‘They call it honky-tonk, I believe,’ Izzie said. A woman began to sing, raw and American. She sounded as if she had spent her life in a prison cell. ‘Ida Cox,’ Izzie said. ‘She’s a Negress. Isn’t she extraordinary?’
She was.
‘Singing about how wretched it is to be a woman,’ Izzie said, lighting up another cigarette and sucking hard. ‘If only one could find someone really filthy rich to marry. A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of. Do you know who said that? No? Well you should.’ She was suddenly irritable, a not completely domesticated animal. The phone rang and she said, ‘Saved by the bell,’ and proceeded to have a feverishly animated conversation with the unseen, unheard caller. She ended the call by saying, ‘That would be delish, darling, meet you in half an hour.’ And to Ursula, ‘I would offer you a lift but I’m going to Claridge’s and it’s simply miles from Marylebone and after that I have a party to go to in Lowndes Square so I can’t possibly see you to the station. You can Tube it to Marylebone, can’t you? You know how? The Piccadilly line to Piccadilly Circus and then change to the Bakerloo to Marylebone. Come on, I’ll walk out with you.’