‘A monster is living among us,’ Sylvie said.
It was Major Shawcross who found her. ‘Thank God, it wasn’t poor old Ted this time,’ Hugh said. ‘He couldn’t have borne it.’ Teddy couldn’t bear it anyway. He barely spoke for weeks. His soul had been cut away, he said, when he did eventually speak. ‘Scars heal,’ Sylvie said. ‘Even the worst ones.’
‘Do you think that’s true?’ Ursula said, thinking about the wisteria wallpaper, the waiting room in Belgravia, and Sylvie said, ‘Well, not always,’ not even bothering to lie.
They heard Mrs Shawcross screaming all through the first night. Afterwards her face never looked right and Dr Fellowes reported that she’d had a ‘small stroke’.
‘Poor, poor woman,’ Hugh said.
‘She never knows where those girls are,’ Sylvie said. ‘She just lets them run wild. Now she’s paying the price of her carelessness.’
‘Oh, Sylvie,’ Hugh said sadly. ‘Where is your heart?’
Pamela left for Leeds. Hugh drove her there in the Bentley. Her trunk was too massive for the boot and had to be sent by train. ‘Big enough to hide a body in,’ Pamela said. She was bound for a women’s hall of residence and had already been informed that she was to share the small room with a girl called Barbara, from Macclesfield. ‘It’ll be just like being at home,’ Teddy said encouragingly, ‘except that Ursula will be someone else.’
‘Well, that rather makes it nothing like home,’ Pamela said. She clung to Ursula a little too fiercely before climbing into the car and sitting next to Hugh.
‘I can’t wait to go,’ Pamela said to Ursula in bed on her last night, ‘but I feel bad at leaving you.’
When she didn’t go back to school for the autumn term, no one questioned Ursula’s decision. Millie was too grief-stricken over Nancy’s death to care much about anything.
Ursula travelled on the train to High Wycombe every morning to attend a private secretarial college. ‘College’ was a fancy word for two rooms, a cold scullery and a colder cupboard containing a WC above a greengrocer’s on the high street. The college was run by a man called Mr Carver whose lifelong passions were Esperanto and Pitman’s shorthand, the latter more useful than the former. Ursula rather liked shorthand, it was akin to a secret code, with a whole new vocabulary – aspirates and shun hooks, compound consonants, special contractions, halving and doubling – the language of neither the dead nor the living but the strangely inert. There was something soothing about listening to Mr Carver’s monotonous intonation of word lists – iterate, iteration, reiteration, reiterated, reiterating, prince, princely, princes, princess, princesses …
The other girls on the course were all very pleasant and friendly – sanguine, practical sorts who always remembered their shorthand notebooks and rulers and never had fewer than two different-coloured inks in their bags.
At lunchtime when the weather was bad they stayed in, sharing their packed lunches and darning stockings among the banks of typewriters. They had spent their summer hiking and swimming and camping and Ursula wondered if they could tell just by looking at her how different her own summer had been. ‘Belgravia’ had become her shorthand for what had happened. (‘An abortion,’ Pamela said. ‘An illegal abortion.’ Pamela was never one to avoid a blunt vocabulary. Ursula very much wished that she would.) She envied the ordinariness of their lives. (How Izzie would scorn such an idea.) Ursula’s own chance at ordinariness seemed lost for ever.
What if she had thrown herself beneath the express train or had died after Belgravia, or, indeed, what if she were simply to open her bedroom window and throw herself out, head first? Would she really be able to come back and start again? Or was it, as everyone told her, and as she must believe, all in her head? And so what if it was – wasn’t everything in her head real too? What if there was no demonstrable reality? What if there was nothing beyond the mind? Philosophers ‘came to grips’ with this problem a long time ago, Dr Kellet had told her, rather wearily, it was one of the very first questions they addressed, so there was really no point in her fretting over it. But surely, by its very nature, everyone wrestled with this dilemma anew every time?
(‘Forget typing,’ Pamela wrote from Leeds, ‘you should read philosophy at university, you have the right kind of mind for it. Like a terrier with a terrifically tedious bone.’)
She had, eventually, gone in search of Dr Kellet and found his rooms occupied by a steel-haired, steel-spectacled woman who informed her that Dr Kellet had indeed retired and did she wish to make an appointment with herself? No, Ursula said, she didn’t. It was the first time she had been to London since Belgravia and she had a panic attack on the Bakerloo line on the way back from Harley Street and had to run out of the station at Marylebone, gasping for air. A newspaper seller said, ‘Are you all right, miss?’ and she said, yes, yes, quite all right, thank you.
Mr Carver liked touching the girls (‘my girls’) lightly on their shoulders, stroking the angora of a bolero cardigan or the lambswool of a sweater as if they were animals he was fond of.
In the morning they practised their typing skills on the big Underwoods. Sometimes Mr Carver made them practise with blindfolds on as this was, he claimed, the only way to stop them looking at the keys and slowing down their speeds. Wearing the blindfold made Ursula feel like a soldier about to be shot for desertion. On these occasions she often heard him making odd noises, muffled wheezes and grunts, but didn’t like to peek from the blindfold to see what he might be doing.
In the afternoons they did shorthand – soporific dictation exercises that encompassed every kind of business letter. Dear-Sir, I-brought your letter before-the Board-of-Directors at their-meeting yesterday, but after some discussion they-were obliged to postpone further-consideration of-the-matter until the next Directors’-meeting, which-will-be held on-the last Tuesday … The content of these letters was tedious in the extreme and was a strange contrast to the furious flow of ink across their pads as they struggled to keep up.
One afternoon, while he was dictating to them, We-fear there-is-no prospect of success for-those-who raise objection to-the appointment, Mr Carver passed behind Ursula and gently touched the nape of her neck, no longer protected by long hair. A shiver rippled right through her. She stared at the keys of her Underwood on the table in front of her. Was it something in her that attracted this kind of attention? Was she not a good person?
June 1932
PAMELA HAD CHOSEN a white brocade for herself and yellow satin for her bridesmaids. The yellow was on the acidic side and made all of the bridesmaids look slightly liverish. There were four of them – Ursula, Winnie Shawcross (chosen over Gertie) and Harold’s two youngest sisters. Harold came from a large noisy family in the Old Kent Road that Sylvie considered to be ‘inferior’. The fact that Harold was a doctor didn’t seem to mitigate his circumstances (Sylvie was curiously averse to the medical profession). ‘I thought your own family were somewhat déclassé, weren’t they?’ Hugh said to Sylvie. He liked his new son-in-law-to-be, found him ‘refreshing’. He liked Harold’s mother, Olive, too. ‘She says what she means,’ he said to Sylvie. ‘And means what she says. Unlike some people.’
‘I thought it looked nice in the pattern book,’ Pamela said doubtfully at Ursula’s third and final fitting, in a dressmaker’s front room in Neasden, of all places. The bias-cut dress stretched tightly across Ursula’s midriff.