Ursula took Sylvie’s little carriage clock. ‘I want nothing else,’ she said. ‘Only to be always welcome here.’
‘As you will be. You know that.’
February 1947
WONDERFUL! LIKE A Red Cross package, she wrote and propped the old postcard of the Brighton Pavilion on the mantelpiece next to Sylvie’s clock, next to Teddy’s photograph. She would put the card in with the afternoon post tomorrow. It would take for ever to reach Fox Corner, of course.
A birthday card for her had made it through eventually. The weather had prevented the usual celebration at Fox Corner, instead Crighton had taken her to the Dorchester for dinner, by candlelight when the electricity gave out halfway through the meal.
‘Very romantic,’ he said. ‘Just like old times.’
‘I don’t remember us being particularly romantic,’ she said. Their affair had ended with the war but he had remembered her birthday, a fact which touched her more deeply than he knew. For a present he gave her a box of Milk Tray (‘It’s not much, I’m afraid’).
‘Admiralty supplies?’ she quizzed and they both laughed. When she got home she ate the whole box in one go.
Five o’clock. She took her plate over to the sink to join the other unwashed dishes. The grey ash was a blizzard in the dark sky now and she pulled the flimsy cotton curtain to try to make it disappear. It tugged hopelessly on its wire and she gave up before she brought the whole thing down. The window was old and ill-fitting and let in a piercing draught.
The electricity went and she fumbled for the candle on the mantelpiece. Could it get any worse? Ursula took the candle and the whisky bottle to bed, climbed under the covers still in her coat. She was so tired. Being hungry and cold created the most awful lethargy.
The flame on the little Radiant fire quivered alarmingly. Would it be so very bad? To cease upon the midnight with no pain. There were worse ways. Auschwitz, Treblinka. Teddy’s Halifax going down in flames. The only way to stop the tears was to keep drinking the whisky. Good old Pammy. The flame on the Radiant flickered and died. The pilot light too. She wondered when the gas would come back on. If the smell would wake her, if she would get up and relight it. She hadn’t expected to die like a fox frozen in its den. Pammy would see the postcard, know that she’d been appreciated. Ursula closed her eyes. She felt as though she had been awake for a hundred years and more. She really was so very, very tired.
Darkness began to fall.
She woke with a start. Was it daytime? The light was on but it was dark. She had been dreaming she was trapped in a cellar. She climbed out of the bed, she still felt quite drunk and realized it was the wireless that had woken her. The power was back on in time for the shipping forecast.
She fed the meter and the little Radiant popped back into life. She hadn’t gassed herself after all then.
June 1967
THIS MORNING THE Jordanians had opened fire on Tel Aviv, the BBC reporter said, now they were shelling Jerusalem. He was standing on a street, in Jerusalem presumably, she hadn’t really been paying attention, the noise of artillery fire in the background, too far away to be any danger to him, yet his faux-battledress attire and style of reportage – excited, yet solemn – hinted at unlikely heroics on his part.
Benjamin Cole was a member of the Israeli parliament now. He had fought in the Jewish Brigade at the end of the war and then joined the Stern Gang, in Palestine, to fight for a homeland. He had been such an upstanding kind of boy that it had been odd to think of him becoming a terrorist.
They had met up for a drink during the war but it was an awkward encounter. The romantic impulses of her girlhood had long since faded whereas his relative indifference to her as a member of the female sex had turned on its head. She had barely finished her (weak) gin and lemon when he suggested they ‘go somewhere’.
She was indignant. ‘Do I look like a woman of such easy virtue?’ she asked Millie afterwards.
‘Well, why not?’ Millie shrugged. ‘We could be killed by a bomb tomorrow. Carpe diem and all that.’
‘That seems to be everyone’s excuse for bad behaviour,’ Ursula grumbled. ‘If people believed in eternal damnation they might not be seizing the day quite so much.’ She had had a bad day at the office. One of the filing clerks had received the news that her boyfriend’s ship had gone down and she had had hysterics and an important piece of paper had been lost in the sea of buff which caused more anguish, if of a different order, so she had not seized the day with Benjamin Cole, despite him pressing his suit urgently on her. ‘I’ve always sensed something between us, haven’t you?’ he said.
‘Too late, I’m afraid,’ she said, gathering up her bag and coat. ‘Catch me next time round.’ She thought about Dr Kellet and his theories of reincarnation and wondered what she would like to come back as. A tree, she thought. A fine big tree, dancing in the breeze.
The BBC turned its attention to Downing Street. Someone or other had resigned. She had heard tittle-tattle in the office but couldn’t be bothered to listen.
She was eating her supper – a Welsh rarebit – off a tray on her knee. She usually ate like this in the evening. It seemed ridiculous to lay the table and put out vegetable dishes and table mats and all the other paraphernalia of dining for just one person. And then what? Eat in silence, or hunched over a book? There were people who saw TV dinners as the beginning of the end of civilization. (Did her robust defence of them indicate that perhaps she was of the same mind?) They obviously didn’t live on their own. And really the beginning of the end of civilization had happened a long time ago. Sarajevo perhaps, Stalingrad at the latest. There were some who would say the end started at the beginning, in the Garden.
And what was so wrong with watching television anyway? One couldn’t go out to the theatre or the cinema (or the pub for that matter) every night. And when one lived alone one’s only conversation inside the home was with a cat, which tended to be a one-sided affair. Dogs were different, but she hadn’t had a dog since Lucky. He had died in the summer of ’49, of old age, the vet said. Ursula had always thought of him as a young dog. They buried him at Fox Corner and Pamela bought a rose, a deep red, and planted it for his headstone. The garden at Fox Corner was a veritable graveyard for dogs. Wherever you went there would be a rose bush with a dog beneath, although only Pamela could remember who was where.
And what was the alternative to television anyway? (She wasn’t letting the argument die, even though it was with herself.) A jigsaw puzzle? Really? There was reading, of course, but one didn’t always want to come in from a trying day at work, full of messages and memos and agendas, and then tire one’s eyes out with even more words. The wireless, records, all good of course, but still solipsistic in some way. (Yes, she was protesting too much.) At least with television one didn’t have to think. Not such a bad thing.
Her supper was later than usual because she had been attending her own retirement do – not unlike attending one’s own funeral, except one could walk away afterwards. It had been a modest affair, no more than drinks at a local pub, but pleasant and she was relieved it had finished early (where others might feel badly done by). She didn’t officially retire until Friday but she thought it would be easier on the staff to get the whole thing over and done with on a weekday. They might resent giving up their Friday evening.