Ursula rinsed the glass and put the cork back in the bottle, leaving plenty for the beef tomorrow before tottering off to bed.
She fell fast asleep and didn’t wake until the alarm, which made a change from the usual restlessness. Drink, and leave the world unseen. When she woke she realized that she couldn’t possibly look after a dog.
Next day at work, the tedium of filling in ledgers all afternoon was cheered by the thought of the half-bottle sitting on her kitchen draining board. After all, she could buy another bottle for the beef.
‘That good, eh?’ the wine merchant said when she appeared again two days later.
‘No, no,’ she laughed, ‘I haven’t cooked the meal yet. It struck me that I should have something equally good to drink with it.’ She realized she couldn’t come back here, to this lovely shop, there was a limit to how many boeuf bourgignons someone was likely to cook.
For Pamela, Ursula made an abstemious cottage pie, followed by baked apples and custard. ‘I brought you a present from Scotland,’ Pamela said and produced a bottle of malt whisky.
Once the malt had been drunk she found another wine merchant, one who treated his wares with less veneration. ‘For a boeuf bourguignon,’ she said, although he showed no interest in its purpose. ‘I’ll take two, actually. I’m cooking for a lot of people.’ A couple of bottles of Guinness from the public house on the corner, ‘For my brother,’ she said, ‘he popped in unexpectedly.’ Teddy wasn’t quite eighteen, she doubted he was a drinker. A couple of days later the same. ‘Your brother round again, miss?’ the publican said. He winked at her and she flushed.
An Italian restaurant in Soho that she ‘happened to be passing’ happily sold her a couple of bottles of Chianti without question. ‘Sherry from the wood’ – she could take a jug to the Co-op at the end of the road and they would fill it up from the barrel. (‘For my mother.’) Rum from public houses a long way from the flat (‘for my father’). She was like a scientist experimenting with the various forms of alcohol, but she knew what she liked best, that first bottle of blushful Hippocrene, the blood-red wine. She plotted how to get a case delivered (‘for a family celebration’).
She had become a secret drinker. It was a private act, intimate and solitary. The very thought of a drink made her heart thud with both fear and anticipation. Unfortunately, between the restrictive licensing laws and the horror of humiliation, a young woman from Bayswater could have considerable difficulty in supplying her addiction. It was easier for the rich, Izzie had an account somewhere, Harrods probably, that simply delivered the stuff to her door.
She had dipped her toe in the waters of Lethe and the next thing she knew she was drowning, from sobriety to being a drunkard in a matter of weeks. It was both shameful and a way of annihilating shame. Every morning she woke up and thought, not tonight, I won’t take a drink tonight, and every afternoon the longing built as she imagined walking into her flat at the end of the day and being greeted by oblivion. She had read sensationalist accounts of the opium dens of Limehouse and wondered if they were true. Opium sounded better than burgundy for eclipsing the pain of existence. Izzie could probably supply her with the location of a Chinese opium den, she had ‘kicked the gong around’, she had reported blithely, but it wasn’t really the kind of thing Ursula felt she could ask. It might not lead to Nirvana (she had proved an apt pupil of Dr Kellet after all), it might lead to a new Belgravia.
Izzie was occasionally allowed back into the family fold (‘Weddings and funerals only,’ Sylvie said. ‘Not christenings’). She had been invited to Pamela’s wedding but to Sylvie’s profound relief had sent her apologies. ‘Weekend in Berlin,’ she said. She knew someone with a plane (thrilling) who was going to fly her there. Ursula visited Izzie occasionally. They had the horror of Belgravia in common, a memory that would unite them for evermore, although they never spoke of it.
In her stead there was a wedding present, a box of silver cake forks, a gift that Pamela was amused by. ‘How mundane,’ she said to Ursula. ‘She never ceases to surprise.’
‘Nearly finished,’ the Neasden dressmaker said through a mouthful of pins.
‘I suppose I am getting a bit plump,’ Ursula said, looking in the mirror at the yellow satin straining to accommodate her pot belly. ‘Perhaps I should join the Women’s League of Health and Beauty.’
Stone-cold sober, she tripped on her way home from work. It was a miserable November evening a few months after Pamela’s wedding, wet and dark, and she simply hadn’t seen the pavement slab the edge of which had been lifted slightly by a tree root. Her hands were full – books from the library and grocery shopping, all acquired hastily in a lunch hour – and her instinct was to save the groceries and the books rather than herself. The result was that her face slammed into the pavement, the full force taken by her nose.
The pain stunned her, she had never experienced anything that came close to it before. She knelt on the ground and held her arms around herself, shopping and books now abandoned to the wet pavement. She could hear herself moaning – keening – and could do nothing to stop the noise.
‘Oh, my,’ a man’s voice said, ‘how awful for you. Let me help you. You have blood all over your nice peach scarf. Is that the colour, or is it salmon?’
‘Peach,’ Ursula murmured, polite despite the pain. She had never given much thought to the mohair muffler around her neck. There seemed to be a lot of blood. She could feel her whole face swelling and could smell the blood, thick and rusty, in her nose but the pain had lessened a degree or two.
The man was rather nice-looking, not very tall but he had sandy hair and blue eyes, and clean, polished-looking skin stretched over good cheekbones. He helped her to her feet. His hand in hers was firm and dry. ‘My name’s Derek, Derek Oliphant,’ he said.
‘Elephant?’
‘Oliphant.’
Three months later they were married.
Derek’s origins were in Barnet and as unremarkable to Sylvie as Harold’s before him. That was, of course, the essence of his appeal for Ursula. He taught history at Blackwood, a minor public school for boys (‘the children of aspirant shopkeepers’, Sylvie said dismissively) and courted Ursula with concerts in the Wigmore Hall and walks on Primrose Hill. They took long bike rides that ended up in pleasant pubs in the outer suburbs, a half-pint of mild for him, a lemonade for her.
Her nose proved to be broken. (‘Oh, poor you,’ Pamela wrote. ‘And you had such a nice nose.’) Before he escorted her to a hospital, Derek had led her into a public house nearby to get cleaned up a little. ‘Let me get you a brandy,’ he said when she sat down and she said, ‘No, no, I’m fine, I’ll just have a glass of water. I’m not much of a drinker,’ even though the previous evening she had blacked out on the floor of her bedroom in Bayswater, courtesy of a bottle of gin she had stolen from Izzie’s house. She had no qualms about thieving from Izzie, Izzie had taken so much from her. Belgravia, and so on.