‘Yes, all right, thank you,’ she said. Not having a ticket seemed such a little problem.
She watched Fred climb back into the cab of his locomotive. The stationmaster stalked along the platform, slamming the carriage doors with a finality that suggested they would never be opened again. Steam flared from the funnel and Fred Smith stuck his head out of the cab and shouted, ‘Look smart there, Miss Todd, or you’ll be left behind,’ and she stepped obediently on board.
The stationmaster’s whistle chirped, short at first and then a longer call, and the train shuffled out of the station. Ursula sat on the warm plush of the seats and contemplated the future. She supposed she could get lost among the other fallen women crying woe on the streets of London. Curl up on a park bench and freeze to death overnight, except that it was the height of summer and she was unlikely to freeze. Or wade into the Thames and drift gently on the tide, past Wapping and Rotherhithe and Greenwich and on to Tilbury and out to sea. How puzzled her family would be if her drowned body was hooked from the deep. She imagined Sylvie, frowning over her darning, But she only went for a walk, she said she was going to pick the wild raspberries in the lane. Ursula thought guiltily of the white china pudding basin she had abandoned in the hedgerow, intending to collect it on her return. It was half full of the sour little berries and her fingers were still stained red.
She spent the afternoon walking through the great parks of London, through St James’s and Green Park, past the Palace and into Hyde Park and on to Kensington Gardens. It was extraordinary how far you could go in London and barely touch a pavement or cross a road. She had no money on her, of course – a ridiculous mistake, she realized now – and couldn’t even buy a cup of tea in Kensington. There was no Fred Smith here to ‘see her all right’. She was hot and tired and dusty and felt as parched as the grass in Hyde Park.
Could you drink the water in the Serpentine? Shelley’s first wife had drowned herself here but Ursula supposed that on a day like this – crowds of people enjoying the sunshine – it would be almost impossible to avoid another Mr Winton jumping in and rescuing her.
She knew where she was going, of course. It was inevitable somehow.
‘Good God, what happened to you?’ Izzie said, throwing her front door wide dramatically as if she had been expecting someone more interesting. ‘You look a fright.’
‘I’ve been walking all afternoon,’ Ursula said. ‘I have no money,’ she added. ‘And I think I’m going to have a baby.’
‘You’d better come in then,’ Izzie said.
And now here she was, sitting on an uncomfortable chair in a large house in Belgravia in what must have once been the dining room. Now, devoid of any purpose except waiting, it was nondescript. The Dutch still life above the fireplace and the bowl of dusty-looking chrysanthemums on a Pembroke table provided no clue as to what might happen elsewhere in the house. It was hard to connect any of this to the odious rendezvous with Howie on the back stairs. Who would have thought it could be so easy to slip from one life to another. Ursula wondered what Dr Kellet would have made of her predicament.
After her unexpected arrival in Melbury Road, Izzie had put her to bed in her spare bedroom and Ursula had lain sobbing beneath the shiny satin cover, trying not to listen to Izzie’s unlikely lies on the phone in the hallway – I know! She just turned up on the doorstep, the lamb … wanted to see me … pay a visit, museums and so on, the theatre, nothing risqué … now don’t be a termagant, Hugh … It was just as well that Izzie hadn’t spoken to Sylvie, she would have been given short shrift there. The upshot was that she was to be allowed to stay for a few days for museums and so on.
Phone call finished, Izzie came into the bedroom carrying a tray.
‘Brandy,’ she said. ‘And buttered toast. All I could rustle up at short notice, I’m afraid. You are such a fool,’ she sighed. ‘There are ways, you know, things that one can do, prevention better than cure and so on.’ Ursula had no idea what Izzie was talking about.
‘And you must get rid of it,’ Izzie continued. ‘We are agreed on that, aren’t we?’ A question which produced a heartfelt ‘yes’ from Ursula.
A woman in a nurse’s uniform opened the door of the Belgravia waiting room and looked in. Her uniform was so starched it would have stood up quite well without her inside it.
‘This way,’ she said stiffly, without addressing Ursula by name. Ursula followed as meek as a lamb to the slaughter.
Izzie, efficient rather than sympathetic, had dropped her off in the car (‘Good luck’) with a promise that she would return ‘later’. Ursula had no idea what was to happen in the interim between Izzie’s ‘Good luck’ and her ‘later’ but she presumed it would be unpleasant. A foul-tasting syrup or a kidney dish full of large pills perhaps. And undoubtedly a good talking-to about her morals and her character. She hardly cared, as long as in the end the clock could be put back. How big was the baby, she wondered? Her brief research in the Shawcrosses’ encyclopaedia had given few clues. She supposed it would come out with a certain amount of difficulty and be wrapped in a shawl before being placed in a cradle and tended carefully until it was ready to be given to a nice couple who longed to have a baby as much as Ursula longed not to have one. And then she would be able to catch the train home, walk along Church Lane and retrieve the white china bowl with its harvest of raspberries, before entering Fox Corner as if nothing had happened beyond museums and so on.
It was a room like any other really. There were curtains, swagged and tasselled, at the tall windows. The curtains looked as though they were left over from the previous life of the house, as did the marble fireplace that now held a gas fire and, on the mantelpiece, a plain-faced clock with large numbers. The green linoleum underfoot and the operating table in the middle of the room were equally incongruous. The room smelt like the science laboratory at school. Ursula wondered about the brutish array of shining metal instruments that were laid out on a linen cloth on a trolley. They seemed to have more to do with butchery than babies. There was no sign of a cradle waiting anywhere. Her heart began to flutter.
A man, older than Hugh, in a long white doctor’s smock hurried into the room as if he were on his way somewhere else and ordered Ursula up on to the operating table with her feet ‘in the stirrups’.
‘Stirrups?’ Ursula repeated. Surely horses were not involved. The request was baffling until the starched nurse pushed her down and hooked her feet up. ‘I’m having an operation?’ Ursula protested. ‘But I’m not ill.’ The nurse placed a mask over her face. ‘Count from ten down to one,’ she said. ‘Why?’ Ursula tried to ask, but the word had barely formed in her brain before the room and everything in it disappeared.
The next thing she knew she was in the passenger seat of Izzie’s Austin, gazing woozily through the windscreen.
‘You’ll be right as rain in no time,’ Izzie said. ‘Don’t worry, they’ve doped you up. You’ll feel queer for a bit.’ How did Izzie know so much about this appalling process?
Back in Melbury Road, Izzie helped her into bed and she slept deeply beneath the shiny satin cover in the spare bedroom. It was dark outside when Izzie came in with a tray. ‘Oxtail soup,’ she said cheerfully. ‘I got it from a tin.’ Izzie smelt of alcohol, something sweet and cloying, and underneath her make-up and her bright demeanour she looked exhausted. Ursula supposed she must be a terrible burden to her. She struggled to sit up. The smell of the alcohol and the oxtail was too much and she vomited all over the shiny satin.