‘Oh, God,’ Izzie said, holding her hand over her mouth. ‘I’m really not cut out for this kind of thing.’
‘What happened to the baby?’ Ursula asked.
‘What?’
‘What happened to the baby?’ Ursula repeated. ‘Did they give it to someone nice?’
She woke in the night and vomited again and fell back to sleep without either cleaning it up or calling out to Izzie. When she woke in the morning she was too hot. Far too hot. Her heart was knocking in her chest and each breath was hard to come by. She tried to get out of bed but her head was swimming and her legs wouldn’t hold her. After that everything was a blur. Izzie must have called Hugh because she felt a cool hand on her clammy forehead and when she opened her eyes he was smiling reassuringly at her. He was sitting on the bed, still in his overcoat. She was sick all over it.
‘We’ll get you to a hospital,’ he said, unperturbed by the mess. ‘You’ve got a bit of an infection.’ Somewhere in the background Izzie was putting up a fierce protest. ‘I’ll be prosecuted,’ she hissed at Hugh and Hugh said, ‘Good, I hope they put you in jail and throw away the key.’ He lifted Ursula up in his arms and said, ‘Quicker to take the Bentley, I think.’ Ursula felt weightless, as if she was going to float away. The next thing she knew she was on a cavernous hospital ward and Sylvie was there, her face tight and awful. ‘How could you?’ she said. She was glad when evening came and Sylvie changed places with Hugh.
It was Hugh who was with her when the black bat came. The hand of night was held out to her and Ursula rose to meet it. She was relieved, almost glad, she could feel the shining, luminous world beyond calling, the place where all the mysteries would be revealed. The darkness enveloped her, a velvet friend. Snow was in the air, as fine as talcum, as icy as the east wind on a baby’s skin – but then Ursula fell back into the hospital bed, her hand rejected.
There was a brilliant slant of light across the pale green of the hospital counterpane. Hugh was asleep, his face slack and tired. He was sitting in an awkward position in a chair next to the bed. One trouser leg had ridden up slightly and Ursula could see a wrinkled grey lisle sock and the smooth skin of her father’s shin. He had once been like Teddy, she thought, and one day Teddy would be like him. The boy within the man, the man within the boy. It made her want to weep.
Hugh opened his eyes and when he saw her he smiled weakly and said, ‘Hello, little bear. Welcome back.’
August 1926
THE PEN SHOULD be held lightly, and in such a manner as to permit of the shorthand characters being easily written. The wrist must not be allowed to rest on the notebook or desk.
The rest of the summer was wretched. She sat beneath the apple trees in the orchard and tried to read a Pitman’s shorthand instruction book. It had been decided she would do a typing and shorthand course rather than return to school. ‘I can’t go back,’ she said. ‘I just can’t.’
There was little escape from the chill that Sylvie brought with her every time she entered a room and discovered Ursula in it. Both Bridget and Mrs Glover were puzzled as to why the ‘serious illness’ that Ursula had contracted in London while staying with her aunt seemed to have made Sylvie so distant from her daughter when they might have expected the opposite. Izzie, of course, was barred for ever. Persona non grata in perpetuam. No one knew the truth of what had happened except for Pamela who had wormed the whole story out of Ursula, bit by bit.
‘But he forced himself on you,’ she fumed, ‘how can you think it was your fault?’
‘But the consequences …’ Ursula murmured.
Sylvie blamed her entirely, of course. ‘You’ve thrown away your virtue, your character, everyone’s good opinion of you.’
‘But no one knows.’
‘I know.’
‘You sound like someone in one of Bridget’s novels,’ Hugh said to Sylvie. Had Hugh read one of Bridget’s novels? It seemed unlikely. ‘In fact,’ Hugh said, ‘you sound rather like my own mother.’ (‘It seems dreadful now,’ Pamela said, ‘but this too will pass.’)
Even Millie was fooled by her lies. ‘Blood poisoning!’ she said. ‘How dramatic. Was hospital ghastly? Nancy said that Teddy told her that you nearly died. I’m sure nothing so exciting will ever happen to me.’
What a world of difference there was between dying and nearly dying. One’s whole life, in fact. Ursula felt she had no use for the life she had been saved for. ‘I’d like to see Dr Kellet again,’ she said to Sylvie.
‘He’s retired, I believe,’ Sylvie said indifferently.
Ursula still wore her hair long, mostly to please Hugh, but one day she went into Beaconsfield with Millie and had her hair chopped short. It was a penitent act that made her feel rather like a martyr or a nun. She supposed that was how she would live out the rest of her life, somewhere between the two.
Hugh seemed surprised rather than saddened. She supposed a haircut was a mild travesty compared to Belgravia. ‘Good gracious,’ he said, when she sat down at the dinner table to unappetizing veal cutlets à la Russe. (‘Looks like the dog’s dinner,’ Jimmy said, although Jimmy, a boy of magnificent appetite, would have quite happily eaten Jock’s dinner.)
‘You look like a completely different person,’ Hugh said.
‘That can only be a good thing, can’t it?’ Ursula said.
‘I liked the old Ursula,’ Teddy said.
‘Well, it seems as though you’re the only one who does,’ Ursula muttered. Sylvie made a noise that fell short of a word and Hugh said to Ursula, ‘Oh, come, I think you’re—’
But she never did find out what Hugh thought of her because the loud rapping of the front-door knocker announced a rather anxious Major Shawcross enquiring as to whether Nancy was with them. ‘Sorry to interrupt your dinner,’ he said, hovering in the doorway of the dining room.
‘She isn’t here,’ Hugh said, although Nancy’s absence was obvious.
Major Shawcross frowned at the cutlets on their plates. ‘She went to gather some leaves in the lane,’ he said. ‘For her scrapbook. You know what she’s like.’ This addressed to Teddy, Nancy’s twin soul. Nancy loved nature, forever collecting twigs and pine cones, shells and stones and bones, like the totems of an ancient religion. ‘A child of nature,’ Mrs Shawcross called her (‘As if that were a good thing,’ Sylvie said).
‘She wanted oak leaves,’ Major Shawcross said. ‘We don’t have any oaks in our garden.’
There was a short discussion about the demise of the English oak, followed by a thoughtful silence. Major Shawcross cleared his throat. ‘She’s been gone about an hour, according to Roberta. I’ve walked the length of the lane, up and back, shouting her name. I can’t think where she might be. Winnie and Millie are out searching as well.’ Major Shawcross was beginning to look rather sick. Sylvie poured a glass of water and handed it to him. ‘Sit down,’ she said. He didn’t. Of course, Ursula thought, he was thinking of Angela.
‘I expect she’ll have found something interesting,’ Hugh said, ‘a bird’s nest or a farm cat with kittens. You know what she’s like.’ They were all now quite in agreement that they knew what Nancy was like.
Major Shawcross picked up a spoon from the dining-room table and gazed at it absently. ‘She’s missed her dinner.’
‘I’ll come and help you look for her,’ Teddy said, jumping up from the table. He knew what Nancy was like too, knew she never missed her dinner.
‘Me too,’ Hugh said, giving Major Shawcross an encouraging pat on the back, the veal cutlets abandoned.
‘Shall I come?’ Ursula asked.
‘No,’ Sylvie said. ‘Nor Jimmy either. Stay here, we’ll look in the gardens.’
No ice house this time. A hospital mortuary for Nancy. Still warm and soft when they found her, pushed into an empty old cattle trough. ‘Interfered with,’ Hugh told Sylvie while Ursula lurked like a spy behind the morning-room door. ‘Two little girls in three years, it can’t be a coincidence, can it? Strangled like Angela before her.’