‘You’ve put on weight since the last fitting,’ the dressmaker said.
‘Have I?’
‘Yes,’ Pamela said. Ursula thought of the last time she had put on weight. Belgravia. It was certainly not the reason this time. She was standing on a chair, the dressmaker moving in a circle around her, a pincushion attached to her wrist. ‘You still look nice though,’ Pamela added.
‘I sit all day at my work,’ Ursula said. ‘I should walk more, I expect.’ It was so easy to be lazy. She lived on her own but no one knew. Hilda, the girl she was supposed to share the flat with – a top floor in Bayswater – had moved out, although she still paid the rent, thank goodness. Hilda was living in Ealing in a ‘regular little pleasure palace’ with a man called Ernest whose wife wouldn’t grant him a divorce, and she had to pretend to her parents that she was still in Bayswater, living the life of a single and virtuous woman. Ursula supposed it would only be a matter of time before Hilda’s parents turned up unexpectedly on the doorstep and she would have to spin a lie, or several, to explain their daughter’s absence. Hugh and Sylvie would have been horrified if they thought Ursula was living on her own in London.
‘Bayswater?’ Sylvie said doubtfully when Ursula announced she was moving out of Fox Corner. ‘Is that really necessary?’ Hugh and Sylvie had vetted the flat, and they had also vetted Hilda, who stood up well to Sylvie’s inquisition. Nonetheless Sylvie found both the flat and Hilda somewhat wanting.
‘Ernest from Ealing’, as Ursula always thought of him, was the one who paid the rent (‘a kept woman’, Hilda laughed) but Hilda herself came by every couple of weeks to pick up her post and pay the rent money over. ‘I can find someone else to share with,’ Ursula offered, although she hated the idea.
‘Let’s wait a bit,’ Hilda said, ‘see if it all works out for me. That’s the beauty about living in sin, you can always just get up and leave.’
‘So can Ernest (from Ealing).’
‘I’m twenty-one, he’s forty-two, he’s not about to leave, trust me.’
It had been a relief when Hilda had moved out. Ursula was able to lounge around all evening in her dressing gown, with her curlers in, eating oranges and chocolates and listening to the wireless. Not that Hilda would have objected to any of these things, would have enjoyed them in fact, but Sylvie had instilled decorum in the presence of others from an early age and it was hard to shake it off.
After a couple of weeks of being on her own, it struck her that she had hardly any friends and those that she did have she never seemed to care enough about to keep in touch with. Millie had become an actress, and was away almost all the time with a touring theatre company. She sent the odd postcard from places she would probably never have visited otherwise – Stafford, Gateshead, Grantham – and drew funny cartoons of herself in various roles (‘Me as Juliet, what a hoot!’). Their friendship hadn’t really survived Nancy’s death. The Shawcross family had turned inward with grief and when Millie finally started to live her life again she found Ursula had stopped living hers. Ursula often wished that she could explain Belgravia to Millie but didn’t want to risk what was left of their fragile attachment.
She worked for a big importing company and sometimes when Ursula listened to the girls in the office chatting about what they’d been doing and with whom, she found herself wondering how on earth they met all these people, these Gordons, Charlies, Dicks, Mildreds, Eileens and Veras – a gay, restless flock with whom they frequented variety palaces and cinemas, went skating, swam in lidos and baths and drove out to Epping Forest and Eastbourne. Ursula did none of these things.
Ursula craved solitude but she hated loneliness, a conundrum that she couldn’t even begin to solve. At work, they regarded her as a person apart, as if she were senior to them in every way, even though she wasn’t. Occasionally one or other of the office coterie would say to her, ‘Do you want to come out with us after work?’ It was meant kindly and felt like charity, which it probably was. She never took them up on their offers. She suspected, no, she knew, that they talked about her behind her back, nothing nasty, just curiosity really. They imagined there must be more to her. A dark horse. And still waters run deep. They would be disappointed to know that there was no more, that even clichés were more interesting than the life she lived. No depths, no darkness (in the past perhaps, but not the present). Unless you counted the drink. Which she supposed they would.
The work was a chore – endless bills of lading and customs forms and balance sheets. The goods themselves – rum, cocoa, sugar – and the exotic places they came from seemed at odds with the daily tedium of the office. She supposed she was a little cog in the big wheel of Empire. ‘Nothing wrong with being a cog,’ Maurice said, himself a big wheel now in the Home Office. ‘The world needs cogs.’ She didn’t want to be a cog, but Belgravia seemed to have put paid to anything grander.
Ursula knew how the drinking had started. Nothing dramatic, just something as small and domestic as a boeuf bourguignon she had planned for Pamela when she came to stay for the weekend a few months ago. She was still working in the lab in Glasgow and wanted to do some shopping for her wedding. Harold hadn’t moved yet either, he was due to take up his post at the Royal London in a few weeks. ‘We’ll have a nice weekend, just the two of us,’ Pamela said.
‘Hilda’s away,’ Ursula lied easily. ‘Gone to Hastings for the weekend with her mother.’ There was no reason not to tell Pamela the truth of her arrangement with Hilda, Pamela had always been the one person she could be honest with, and yet something held her back.
‘Splendid,’ Pamela said. ‘I’ll drag Hilda’s mattress through to your bedroom and it’ll be like old times.’
‘Are you looking forward to being married?’ Ursula asked as they lay in bed. It wasn’t really like old times at all.
‘Of course I am, why would I be doing it otherwise? I like the idea of marriage. There is something smooth and round and solid about it.’
‘Like a pebble?’ Ursula said.
‘A symphony. Well, more of a duet, I suppose.’
‘It’s not like you to wax poetic.’
‘I like what our parents have,’ Pamela said simply.
‘Do you?’ It was a while since Pamela had spent much time with Hugh and Sylvie. Perhaps she didn’t know what they had these days. Dissonance rather than harmony.
‘Have you met anyone?’ Pamela asked cautiously.
‘No. No one.’
‘Not yet,’ Pamela said in her most encouraging manner.
The boeuf bourguignon had, naturally, required burgundy and in her lunch hour Ursula had dropped into the wine merchant’s that she passed every day on her way to work in the City. It was an ancient place, the wood of the interior gave the impression that it had been soaked in wine over the centuries and the dark bottles with their beautiful labels seemed to hold out the promise of something that went beyond their contents. The wine merchant picked out a bottle for her, some people used inferior wine for cooking, he said, but the only use one should have for inferior wine was vinegar. He himself was acerbic and rather overwhelming. He afforded the bottle the tenderness of care due a baby, lovingly wrapping it in tissue paper and passing it to Ursula to cradle in her basket-weave shopper where her purchase remained concealed from the office during the afternoon, in case they suspected her of being a secret lush.
The burgundy was bought before the beef and that evening Ursula thought she would open the wine and try a glass, seeing as it had been lauded so highly by the wine merchant. Of course, she’d had alcohol before, she was no teetotaller, after all, but she had never drunk alone. Never uncorked an expensive bottle of burgundy and poured a glass just for herself (dressing gown, curlers, a cosy gas fire). It was like stepping into a warm bath on a cold night, the deep, mellow wine suddenly enormously comforting. This was Keats’s beaker full of the warm South, was it not? Her habitual despondency seemed to evaporate a little so she had another glass. When she stood up she felt quite swimmy and laughed at herself. ‘Tiddly,’ she said to no one and found herself wondering about getting a dog. It would be someone to talk to. A dog like Jock would greet her every day with cheerful optimism and perhaps some of that would rub off on her. Jock was gone now, a heart attack, the vet said. ‘And he had such a strong little heart,’ Teddy said, himself heartbroken. He had been replaced by a sad-eyed whippet that seemed too delicate for the rough and tumble of a dog’s life.