Life After Life Read Free Page A

her mother went to Eastbourne for her lungs.
    ‘Full of Italians,’ Hugh said dismissively.
    ‘Quite. That’s rather the attraction,’ Sylvie said, unwinding herself from his arm.
    ‘The Gables, the Homestead?’
    ‘Do stop,’ Sylvie said.
    A fox appeared out of the shrubbery and crossed the lawn. ‘Oh, look,’ Sylvie said. ‘How tame it seems, it must have grown used to the house being unoccupied.’
    ‘Let’s hope the local hunt isn’t following on its heels,’ Hugh said. ‘It’s a scrawny beast.’
    ‘It’s a vixen. She’s a nursing mother, you can see her teats.’
    Hugh blinked at such blunt terminology falling from the lips of his recently virginal bride. (One presumed. One hoped.)
    ‘Look,’ Sylvie whispered. Two small cubs sprang out on to the grass and tumbled over each other in play. ‘Oh, they’re such handsome little creatures!’
    ‘Some might say vermin.’
    ‘Perhaps they see us as verminous,’ Sylvie said. ‘Fox Corner – that’s what we should call the house. No one else has a house with that name and shouldn’t that be the point?’
    ‘Really?’ Hugh said doubtfully. ‘It’s a little whimsical, isn’t it? It sounds like a children’s story. The House at Fox Corner .’
    ‘A little whimsy never hurt anyone.’
    ‘Strictly speaking though,’ Hugh said, ‘can a house be a corner? Isn’t it at one?’
    So this is marriage, Sylvie thought.
    Two small children peered cautiously round the door. ‘Here you are,’ Sylvie said, smiling. ‘Maurice, Pamela, come and say hello to your new sister.’
    Warily, they approached the cradle and its contents as if unsure as to what it might contain. Sylvie remembered a similar feeling when viewing her father’s body in its elaborate oak and brass coffin (charitably paid for by fellow members of the Royal Academy). Or perhaps it was Mrs Glover they were chary of.
    ‘Another girl,’ Maurice said gloomily. He was five, two years older than Pamela and the man of the family for as long as Hugh was away. ‘On business,’ Sylvie informed people although in fact he had crossed the Channel post-haste to rescue his foolish youngest sister from the clutches of the married man with whom she had eloped to Paris.
    Maurice poked a finger in the baby’s face and she woke up and squawked in alarm. Mrs Glover pinched Maurice’s ear. Sylvie winced but Maurice accepted the pain stoically. Sylvie thought that she really must have a word with Mrs Glover when she was feeling stronger.
    ‘What are you going to call her?’ Mrs Glover asked.
    ‘Ursula,’ Sylvie said. ‘I shall call her Ursula. It means little she-bear.’
    Mrs Glover nodded non-committally. The middle classes were a law unto themselves. Her own strapping son was a straightforward George. ‘Tiller of the soil, from the Greek,’ according to the vicar who christened him and George was indeed a ploughman on the nearby Ettringham Hall estate farm, as if the very naming of him had formed his destiny. Not that Mrs Glover was much given to thinking about destiny. Or Greeks, for that matter.
    ‘Well, must be getting on,’ Mrs Glover said. ‘There’ll be a nice steak pie for lunch. And an Egyptian pudding to follow.’
    Sylvie had no idea what an Egyptian pudding was. She imagined pyramids.
    ‘We all have to keep up our strength,’ Mrs Glover said.
    ‘Yes indeed,’ Sylvie said. ‘I should probably feed Ursula again for just the same reason!’ She was irritated by her own invisible exclamation mark. For reasons she couldn’t quite fathom, Sylvie often found herself impelled to adopt an overly cheerful tone with Mrs Glover, as if trying to restore some kind of natural balance of humours in the world.
    Mrs Glover couldn’t suppress a slight shudder at the sight of Sylvie’s pale, blue-veined breasts surging forth from her foamy lace peignoir. She hastily shooed the children ahead of her out of the room. ‘Porridge,’ she announced grimly to them.
    ‘God surely wanted this