Life After Life Read Free Page B

baby back,’ Bridget said when she came in later that morning with a cup of steaming beef tea.
    ‘We have been tested,’ Sylvie said, ‘and found not wanting.’
    ‘This time,’ Bridget said.

May 1910
    ‘A TELEGRAM,’ HUGH said, coming unexpectedly into the nursery and ruffling Sylvie out of the pleasant doze she had fallen into while feeding Ursula. She quickly covered herself up and said, ‘A telegram? Is someone dead?’ for Hugh’s expression hinted at catastrophe.
    ‘From Wiesbaden.’
    ‘Ah,’ Sylvie said. ‘Izzie has had her baby then.’
    ‘If only the bounder hadn’t been married,’ Hugh said. ‘He could have made an honest woman of my sister.’
    ‘An honest woman?’ Sylvie mused. ‘Is there such a thing?’ (Did she say that out loud?) ‘And anyway, she’s so very young to be married.’
    Hugh frowned. It made him seem more handsome. ‘Only two years younger than you when you married me,’ he said.
    ‘Yet so much older somehow,’ Sylvie murmured. ‘Is all well? Is the baby well?’
    It had turned out that Izzie was already noticeably enceinte by the time Hugh caught up with her and dragged her on to the boat train back from Paris. Adelaide, her mother, said she would have preferred it if Izzie had been kidnapped by white slave traders rather than throwing herself into the arms of debauchery with such enthusiasm. Sylvie found the idea of the white slave trade rather attractive – imagined herself being carried off by a desert sheikh on an Arabian steed and then lying on a cushioned divan, dressed in silks and veils, eating sweetmeats and sipping on sherbets to the bubbling sound of rills and fountains. (She expected it wasn’t really like that.) A harem of women seemed like an eminently good idea to Sylvie – sharing the burden of a wife’s duties and so on.
    Adelaide, heroically Victorian in her attitudes, had barred the door, literally, at the sight of her youngest daughter’s burgeoning belly and dispatched her back across the Channel to wait out her shame abroad. The baby would be adopted as swiftly as possible. ‘A respectable German couple, unable to have their own child,’ Adelaide said. Sylvie tried to imagine giving away a child. (‘And will we never hear of it again?’ she puzzled. ‘I certainly hope not,’ Adelaide said.) Izzie was now to be packed off to a finishing school in Switzerland, even though it seemed she was already finished, in more ways than one.
    ‘A boy,’ Hugh said, waving the telegram like a flag. ‘Bouncing, etcetera.’
    Ursula’s own first spring had unfurled. Lying in her pram beneath the beech tree, she had watched the patterns that the light made flickering through the tender green leaves as the breeze delicately swayed the branches. The branches were arms and the leaves were like hands. The tree danced for her. Rock-a-bye baby , Sylvie crooned to her, in the tree-top .
    I had a little nut tree , Pamela sang lispingly, and nothing would it bear, but a silver nutmeg and a golden pear .
    A tiny hare dangled from the hood of the carriage, twirling around, the sun glinting off its silver skin. The hare sat upright in a little basket and had once adorned the top of the infant Sylvie’s rattle, the rattle itself, like Sylvie’s childhood, long since gone.
    Bare branches, buds, leaves – the world as she knew it came and went before Ursula’s eyes. She observed the turn of seasons for the first time. She was born with winter already in her bones, but then came the sharp promise of spring, the fattening of the buds, the indolent heat of summer, the mould and mushroom of autumn. From within the limited frame of the pram hood she saw it all. To say nothing of the somewhat random embellishments the seasons brought with them – sun, clouds, birds, a stray cricket ball arcing silently overhead, a rainbow once or twice, rain more often than she would have liked. (There was sometimes a tardiness to rescuing her from the elements.)
    Once there had