Beforehand, in the office, they had presented her with a carriage clock engraved To Ursula Todd, in gratitude for her many years of loyal service. Ye gods, she thought, what a tedious epitaph. It was a traditional kind of gift, and she didn’t have the heart to say that she already had one, and a much better one at that. But they also gave her a pair of (good) tickets for the Proms, for a performance of Beethoven’s Choral, which was thoughtful – she suspected the hand of Jacqueline Roberts, her secretary.
‘You’ve helped to pave the way for women in senior positions in the civil service,’ Jacqueline said quietly to her, handing her a Dubonnet, her preferred drink these days. Not that senior unfortunately, she thought. Not in charge. That was still for the Maurices of this world.
‘Well, cheers,’ she said, chinking her glass against Jacqueline’s port and lemon. She didn’t drink a great deal, the occasional Dubonnet, a nice bottle of burgundy at the weekend. Not like Izzie, still inhabiting the house in Melbury Road, wandering through its many rooms like a dipsomaniac Miss Havisham. Ursula visited her every Saturday morning with a bag of groceries, most of which seemed to get thrown out. No one read the Adventures of Augustus any more. Teddy would have been relieved and yet Ursula was sorry, as if another little part of him had been forgotten by the world.
‘You’ll probably get a gong now, you know,’ Maurice said, ‘now that you’re retired. An MBE or something.’ He had been knighted in the last round of honours. (‘God,’ Pamela said, ‘what’s the country coming to?’) He had sent each member of his family a framed photograph of himself, bowing beneath the Queen’s sword in the ballroom of the Palace. ‘Oh, the hubris of the man,’ Harold laughed.
Miss Woolf would have been the perfect companion for the Choral at the Albert Hall. The last time Ursula had seen her was there, at the Henry Wood seventy-fifth-birthday concert in ’44. She was killed a few months later in the Aldwych rocket attack. Anne, the girl from the Air Ministry, was killed in the same attack. She had been with a group of female colleagues who were sunbathing on the ministry roof, eating their packed lunches. It was a long time ago now. And it was yesterday.
Ursula was supposed to have met up with her in St James’s Park at lunchtime. The Air Ministry girl – Anne – had something to tell her, she said, and Ursula had wondered if it might be some information about Teddy. Perhaps they had found wreckage or a body. She had long since accepted that he was gone for ever, they would have heard by now if he was a POW or had managed to escape to Sweden.
At the last minute fate had intervened in the shape of Mr Bullock, who had turned up unexpectedly on her doorstep the previous evening (how did he know her address?) to ask if she would accompany him to court to vouch for his good character. He was on trial for some kind of black market fraud, which came as no surprise. She was his second choice, after Miss Woolf, but Miss Woolf had been made a District Warden and was responsible for the lives of two hundred and fifty thousand people, all of whom ranked higher in her estimation than Mr Bullock. His black market ‘escapades’ had turned her against him in the end. None of the wardens that Ursula had known from her post were still there by ’44.
She was rather alarmed to find that Mr Bullock was appearing at the Old Bailey, she had presumed it was some petty misdemeanour fit only for the magistrates’ court. She had waited, in vain, all morning to be called and just as the court got up to recess for lunch she had heard the dull thud of an explosion but hadn’t known it was the rocket wreaking carnage in the Aldwych. Mr Bullock, needless to say, was found innocent of all charges.
Crighton had gone with her to Miss Woolf’s funeral. He was a rock, but in the end he had stayed in Wargrave.
‘Their bodies are buried in peace; but their name liveth for evermore,’ the minister boomed as if the congregation was hard of hearing. ‘Ecclesiasticus 44: 14.’ Ursula didn’t think that was really true. Who would remember Emil or Renee? Or poor little Tony, Fred Smith. Miss Woolf herself. Ursula had forgotten the names of most of the dead already. And all those airmen, all those young lives lost. When Teddy died he was CO of his squadron and he was only twenty-nine. The youngest CO was twenty-two. Time had accelerated for those boys, as it had for Keats.
They sang ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’, Crighton had a rather fine baritone that she had never heard before. She felt sure that Miss Woolf would have preferred Beethoven to the rousing battle hymns of the church.
Miss Woolf had hoped that Beethoven might heal the post-war world but the howitzers pointed at Jerusalem seemed like the final defeat of her optimism. Ursula was now the same age as Miss Woolf had been at the outbreak of the last war. Ursula had thought of her as old. ‘And now we’re old,’ she said to Pamela.
‘Speak for yourself. And you’re not even sixty yet. That’s not old.’
‘Feels like it.’
Once her children were grown enough and no longer needed her constant oversight, Pamela had become one of those women who did good works. (Ursula was not critical, quite the opposite.) She became a JP and eventually a chief magistrate, was active on charity boards and last year had won a place on the local council as an independent. And there was the house to keep up (although she had ‘a woman who does’) and the enormous garden. In 1948, when the NHS was born, Harold had taken over Dr Fellowes’s old practice. The village had grown around them, more and more houses. The meadow gone, the copse too, many of the fields from Ettringham Hall’s home farm had been sold off to a developer. The Hall itself was empty and rather neglected. (There was talk of a hotel.) The little railway station had been given the death sentence by Beeching and had closed two months ago, despite an heroic campaign to keep it going, spearheaded by Pamela.
‘But it is still lovely around here,’ she said. ‘A five-minute walk and you’re in open countryside. And the wood hasn’t been touched. Yet.’
Sarah. She would take Sarah to the Proms with her. Pamela’s reward for patience – a daughter born in 1949. She was to take up a place at Cambridge after the summer – science, she was clever, an all-rounder like her mother. Ursula was enormously fond of Sarah. Being an aunt had helped to seal over the empty cavern in her heart from Teddy’s loss. She thought often these days – if only she had had a child of her own … She had had affairs over the years, albeit nothing too thrilling (the fault, the lack of ‘commitment’, mainly on her own side, of course) but she had never been pregnant, never been a mother or a wife and it was only when she realized that it was too late, that it could never be, that she understood what it was that she had lost. Pamela’s life would go on after she was dead, her descendants spreading through the world like the waters of a delta, but when Ursula died she would simply end. A stream that ran dry.
There had been flowers too, also Jacqueline’s doing, Ursula suspected. They had survived the evening in the pub, thank goodness. Lovely pink lilies that were now sitting on her sideboard, the scent perfuming the room. The living room was west-facing and soaked up the evening sun. It was still light outside, the trees in the shared gardens in their best new leaf. It was a very nice flat, near the Brompton Oratory, and she had put all of the money that Sylvie left her into the purchase of it. There was a small kitchen and bathroom, both modern, but she had eschewed the modern when it came to décor. After the war she had bought simple, tasteful antique furniture when no one wanted that kind of thing. There were fitted carpets throughout in a pale willow green and the curtains were the same fabric as the suite covers – a Morris print, one of the more subtle ones. The walls were painted in a pale-lemon emulsion that made the place seem light and airy even on rainy days. There were a few pieces of Meissen and Worcester – sweetmeat dishes and a garniture set – also picked up cheaply after the war, and she always had flowers, Jacqueline knew that.