STARTED EARLY, TOOK MY DOG
Kate Atkinson

‘Accept Atkinson’s vision; enjoy, admire, laugh and be moved’
The Times

A day like any other for security chief Tracy Waterhouse, until she makes a purchase she hadn’t bargained for. One moment of madness is all it takes for Tracy’s humdrum world to be turned upside down, the tedium of everyday life replaced by fear and danger at every turn.

Witnesses to Tracy’s Faustian exchange in the Merrion Centre in Leeds are Tilly, an elderly actress teetering on the brink of her own disaster, and Jackson Brodie who has returned to his home county in search of someone else’s roots. All three characters learn that the past is never history and that no good deed goes unpunished.

‘Hypnotic, compulsive reading’
Scotland on Sunday

‘Atkinson’s detective novels capture the strangeness of modern times . . . with spiky wit, emotional intelligence and consummate cleverness’
Independent

‘Hypnotic, compulsive reading’
Scotland on Sunday

‘Atkinson’s finest novel to date . . . deserves to be read for decades to come’
Mirror

Contents

Cover

About the Book

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Be Ye Men of Valour

November 1930

Snow

11 February 1910

Snow

11 February 1910

Four Seasons Fill the Measure of the Year

11 February 1910, May 1910, June 1914

Snow

11 February 1910

War

June 1914, July 1914, January 1915

Snow

11 February 1910

War

20 January 1915

Armistice

June 1918, 11 November 1918

Snow

11 February 1910

Armistice

12 November 1918

Snow

11 February 1910

Armistice

11 November 1918

Snow

11 February 1910

Armistice

11 November 1918

Snow

11 February 1910

Armistice

11 November 1918

Peace

February 1947

Snow

11 February 1910

Like a Fox in a Hole

September 1923, December 1923, 11 February 1926, May 1926, August 1926, June 1932, 11 February 1926, August 1926

A Lovely Day Tomorrow

2 September 1939, November 1940

A Lovely Day Tomorrow

2 September 1939, April 1940, November 1940

A Lovely Day Tomorrow

September 1940, November 1940, August 1926

The Land of Begin Again

August 1933, August 1939, April 1945

A Long Hard War

September 1940, October 1940, October 1940, November 1940, May 1941, November 1943, February 1947, June 1967

The End of the Beginning

Be Ye Men of Valour

December 1930

Snow

11 February 1910

The Broad Sunlit Uplands

May 1945

Snow

11 February 1910

Acknowledgements

Author Note on Life After Life

About the Author

Also by Kate Atkinson

Copyright

Life After Life

Kate Atkinson

For Elissa

Author Note on Life After Life

I was born at the end of 1951 and grew up feeling that had I just missed the Second World War, that something terrible and tremendous had occurred and I would never know it. Looking back, this strikes me as odd for as a child I was never aware of those around me talking about it. It was almost as though it had never happened, for although my family experienced the war they rarely mentioned it. It’s only recently I’ve come to realize – and understand – that once it was over and people faced the grim reality of the peace, all they wanted to do was to forget – not just the destruction wrought on us but the greater destruction that we rained down on Europe. We had reduced Germany to rubble and we were not necessarily proud of that, nor of the endless moral compromise that war necessitates. People move on, history remains.

My home town, York, was bombed, albeit in a much tamer fashion than the big industrial cities, and was a lively social hub for the crews from the many Yorkshire airfields. I had uncles serving in each of the three services and my favourite aunt sailed off to the unknown country of Canada as a war bride. My grandfather, having survived the First World War relatively intact, was killed by a stray bomb in 1941. (My other grandfather was killed in the Bentley Pit disaster of 1931. In Behind the Scenes at the Museum, Ruby voices her fear that perhaps she, too, is genetically predisposed to being blown up, a thought that crossed my mind as well.)

My own father was persuaded out of the Merchant Navy by his mother on the eve of war (one of her few acts of kindness) and returned to the mines, where he served out the next six years of the war in the same pit that his father died in. I’ve always recalled my father telling me how he came up from the coal-face in the dark dawn of December 1940, having done a double shift, and saw a great glow in the sky, ‘and that was Sheffield burning’.

And then the war was put away, consigned to history, on the personal if not the public level. Throughout my teens, twenties and thirties, it was the threat of the future – of nuclear war – that exercised me. I ‘embraced the base’, I was arrested for civil disobedience at Upper Heyford, I was reasonably convinced that the world would end with a bang not a whimper. Those fears receded, rightly or wrongly, and it was only when I came to write Behind the Scenes at the Museum and started looking at my family’s history that my fascination with the Second World War was rekindled.

We are all intrigued by ‘What if?’ scenarios, and one of the most potent and familiar is ‘What would have happened if Hitler had been prevented from coming to power?’ I’ve long harboured a desire to write something around the topic; worried, too, that it would simply turn into a cliché, as the over-familiar usually does. Originally, my idea was to write about what would have happened if Hitler had been kidnapped when he was a baby – an idea that Ursula touches on in the book – but when I explored the possibilities it seemed more of a short story than a novel. I knew that I wanted something more complex than that, something downright trickier, something multi-layered and slightly fractal (if something can be deemed slightly fractal).

The Blitz may be the dark, beating heart of the novel but it isn’t all about the war; I begin it – again and again – in 1910, the ghost of Forster always at my back. There was something hypnotic and dreamlike in returning endlessly, remorselessly, to what seems to us now (quite wrongly) to have been that prelapsarian period before the First World War – an Arcadian scene viewed through the lens of nostalgia (and Merchant Ivory films), before mechanized slaughter descended on the world. (The greatest ‘What if’ of all, of course, the staying of Princip’s gun hand at Sarajevo.)

And Ursula goes to the Berg, too, into the heart of the enemy, and lives out one of her lives in Germany. The Germans’ suffering was so much greater than ours that it seemed necessary for her own understanding (and motivation) to experience more than one way of looking at the cataclysm.

People always ask you what a book is ‘about’ and I generally make something up as I have no idea what a book is about (it’s ‘about’ itself), but if pressed, I think I would say Life After Life is about being English. (On reflection, perhaps that’s what all my books are about.) Not just the reality of being English but also what we are in our own imaginations.

During the war we were weighed in the balance and not found wanting. The more I have read about the war, the more I think that – putting aside the propaganda, and there was much and we are still subject to it – we really were at our best then and I would like to have known that. When my father watched Sheffield burning in the distance he was in his own way bearing witness. Miss Woolf, the moral centre of the Blitz chapters, tells Ursula that ‘we must all bear witness’ for ‘when we are safely in the future’. I am in that future now and I suppose this book is my bearing witness to the past.

And somewhere in that past, in the ethereal world of fiction, it is always a snowy night in February 1910 and Mrs Haddock is always settling down to her third tot of rum.

To research the background of this book I read as much as possible before beginning and then tried to forget as much as possible and simply write. As a reader I dislike historical novels where I am continually stumbling over an excess of facts; I readily understand the compulsion to include all the fascinating stuff that you’ve spent so much time reading about, but there are few things more uncomfortable for the reader than to be constantly stumbling over the pathologically recondite research of an author. (My family did question my – rather lengthy – obsession with Eva Braun.)

For me, I find it difficult to create an authentic atmosphere or narrative credibility if continually constrained. Fiction is fiction, after all. That doesn’t mean that I don’t check things afterwards (and it goes without saying that all mistakes are mine), but sometimes to find the truth at the heart of a book a certain amount of reality falls by the wayside. I am not aware, for example, of any bombs having dropped in the real Argyll Road. And I glibly attributed stained-glass galleons to the front doors of Wealdstone when in fact I have never been there. I have no idea if there were leafcutter ants in London Zoo before the war (I suspect not). And Ursula’s occupation during the war in the Intelligence Department of the Ministry of Home Security is something of a conflation and modification of aspects of that work (not hard to fudge – as time goes by it is more difficult to tell exactly what people did in a time of chaos).

I have appended a list of sources that I found helpful or inspiring and that readers may find interesting. Some of the most valuable for me were those accounts or memoirs that were published shortly after, or, in some cases, during the war. Some of these (the Sansom and the lightly fictionalized Strachey) are wonderful examples of elegant and moving prose from front-line workers in the Blitz. Ursula’s own mound is directly based on that in Strachey’s Post D, and when she is caught in a bomb blast standing on the pavement in Argyll Road, I based the description on an anonymous account (‘a Londoner’) in Front Line 1940–1, published by the government in 1942.

Stanley Rothwell’s Lambeth at War is a lively account of the life of a rescue worker, and the Mass Observation diaries of the time are compelling for their direct insight into how people from all walks of life were thinking. I would also like to pay tribute to Rosemary Horstmann’s Half a Life Story. Rosemary was a former neighbour of my mother in Edinburgh and I have drawn on her robustly innocent experience of hiking with a BDM troupe in Germany in 1939 for Ursula’s own sojourn, which takes place slightly earlier.

I have ordered these sources by the area of interest that they cover.

Written Sources

Home Front

Calder, Angus, The Myth of the Blitz (Jonathan Cape, 1991)

Camden at War (Camden History Society, 1977)

Cantwell, John D., The Second World War, a Guide to Documents in the Public Records Office (HMSO, 1972)

Carter, Ernestine (ed.), Grim Glory, Pictures of Britain under Fire (Lund Humphries, 1941)

Carter, E. J., The Diary of an ARP Warden (Waltham Abbey Historical Society)

Creaton, Heather, Sources for the History of London, 1939–45 (British Records Association, 1998)

Crockett, Olivia, Love and War in London (History Press, 2009)

Davis, Rib and Schweitzer, Pam (eds), Southwark at War (Southwark Council, 1996)

Front Line, 1940–1, The Official Story of the Civil Defence of Britain,(HMSO, 1942)

Gardiner, Juliet, The Blitz (Harper Press, 2010)

Gardiner, Juliet, Wartime Britain (Headline, 2004)

Garfield, Simon (ed.), Our Hidden Lives (Ebury Press, 2005)

Garfield, Simon (ed.), Private Battles (Ebury, 2006)

Garfield, Simon (ed.), We Are at War (Ebury, 2005)

Harris, Clive, Walking the London Blitz (Leo Cooper, 2003)

Harrisson, Tom, Living Through the Blitz (Collins, 1976)

Hylton, Stuart, Their Darkest Hour (Sutton, 2003)

Matthews, Very Reverend W. R., St Paul’s Cathedral in Wartime (Hutchinson, 1946)

O’Brien, Terence H., Civil Defence (HMSO, 1955)

Rothwell, Stanley, Lambeth at War (SE1 People’s History Project, 1981)

Sansom, William, The Blitz: Westminster at War (Faber & Faber, 1947)

Strachey, John, Post D: Some Experiences of an Air-raid Warden (Gollancz, 1941)

Sweet, Matthew, The West End Front (Faber & Faber, 2011)

Wing, Sandra Koa (ed.), Our Longest Days (Profile, 2008)

Ziegler, Philip, London at War (Pimlico, 2002)

RAF

Bishop, Patrick, Bomber Boys (Harper Perennial, 2008)

Nichol, John and Rennell, Tony, The Last Escape (Viking, 2002)

Wadsworth, Michael, Heroes of Bomber Command, Yorkshire (Countryside Books, 2007)

Within Germany

Anonymous, A Woman in Berlin (Virago, 2005)

Beevor, Antony, Berlin (Penguin, 2003)

Bielenberg, Christabel, The Past is Myself (Chatto & Windus, 1968)

Horstmann, Rosemary, Half a Life Story, 1920–1960 (Country Books, 2000)

Junge, Traudl, Downfall. Until the Final Hour (Phoenix, 2005)

Kempska, Erich, I Was Hitler’s Chauffeur (Frontline, 2010)

Knopf, Guido, Hitler’s Women (Sutton, 2003)

Lambert, Angela, The Lost Life of Eva Braun (Arrow, 2007)

Larson, Erik, In the Garden of Beasts (Doubleday, 2011)

Moorhouse, Roger, Berlin at War (Bodley Head, 2010)

Wachtel, Gretel and Strachan, Claudia, A Different Kind of Courage(Mainstream, 2009)

DVDs

Adolf and Eva (2003), Delta Visual Entertainment

Public Information Films of the British Home Front (2009), IWM

Target for Tonight (2007), IWM

The Humphrey Jennings Collection: Listen to Britain (1942), Diary for Timothy (1945), I was a Fireman (1943), Film First

The National Gallery in Wartime, National Gallery

The Nazis, A Warning from History (2004), BBC

The Second World War in Colour (1999), ITV Films

The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl (1993), Omegafilm

What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more’ … Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.’

Nietzsche, The Gay Science

Everything changes and nothing remains still.

Plato, Cratylus

‘What if we had a chance to do it again and again,

until we finally did get it right? Wouldn’t that be wonderful?’

Edward Beresford Todd

Be Ye Men of Valour

November 1930

A FUG OF tobacco smoke and damp clammy air hit her as she entered the café. She had come in from the rain and drops of water still trembled like delicate dew on the fur coats of some of the women inside. A regiment of white-aproned waiters rushed around at tempo, serving the needs of the Münchner at leisure – coffee, cake and gossip.

He was at a table at the far end of the room, surrounded by the usual cohorts and toadies. There was a woman she had never seen before – a permed, platinum blonde with heavy make-up – an actress by the look of her. The blonde lit a cigarette, making a phallic performance out of it. Everyone knew that he preferred his women demure and wholesome, Bavarian preferably. All those dirndls and knee-socks, God help us.

The table was laden. Bienenstich, Gugelhupf, Käsekuchen. He was eating a slice of Kirschtorte. He loved his cakes. No wonder he looked so pasty, she was surprised he wasn’t diabetic. The softly repellent body (she imagined pastry) beneath the clothes, never exposed to public view. Not a manly man. He smiled when he caught sight of her and half rose, saying, ‘Guten Tag, gnädiges Fräulein,’ indicating the chair next to him. The bootlicker who was currently occupying it jumped up and moved away.

‘Unsere Englische Freundin,’ he said to the blonde, who blew cigarette smoke out slowly and examined her without any interest before eventually saying, ‘Guten Tag.’ A Berliner.

She placed her handbag, heavy with its cargo, on the floor next to her chair and ordered Schokolade. He insisted that she try the Pflaumen Streusel.

‘Es regnet,’ she said by way of conversation. ‘It’s raining.’

‘Yes, it’s raining,’ he said with a heavy accent. He laughed, pleased at his attempt. Everyone else at the table laughed as well. ‘Bravo,’ someone said. ‘Sehr gutes Englisch.’ He was in a good mood, tapping the back of his index finger against his lips with an amused smile as if he was listening to a tune in his head.

The Streusel was delicious.

‘Entschuldigung,’ she murmured, reaching down into her bag and delving for a handkerchief. Lace corners, monogrammed with her initials, ‘UBT’ – a birthday present from Pammy. She dabbed politely at the Streusel flakes on her lips and then bent down again to put the handkerchief back in her bag and retrieve the weighty object nesting there. Her father’s old service revolver from the Great War, a Webley Mark V.

A move rehearsed a hundred times. One shot. Swiftness was all, yet there was a moment, a bubble suspended in time after she had drawn the gun and levelled it at his heart when everything seemed to stop.

‘Führer,’ she said, breaking the spell. ‘Für Sie.’

Around the table guns were jerked from holsters and pointed at her. One breath. One shot.

Ursula pulled the trigger.

Darkness fell.

Snow

11 February 1910

AN ICY RUSH of air, a freezing slipstream on the newly exposed skin. She is, with no warning, outside the inside and the familiar wet, tropical world has suddenly evaporated. Exposed to the elements. A prawn peeled, a nut shelled.

No breath. All the world come down to this. One breath.

Little lungs, like dragonfly wings failing to inflate in the foreign atmosphere. No wind in the strangled pipe. The buzzing of a thousand bees in the tiny curled pearl of an ear.

Panic. The drowning girl, the falling bird.

‘Dr Fellowes should have been here,’ Sylvie moaned. ‘Why isn’t he here yet? Where is he?’ Big dewdrop pearls of sweat on her skin, a horse nearing the end of a hard race. The bedroom fire stoked like a ship’s furnace. The thick brocade curtains drawn tightly against the enemy, the night. The black bat.

‘Yer man’ll be stuck in the snow, I expect, ma’am. It’s sure dreadful wild out there. The road will be closed.’

Sylvie and Bridget were alone in their ordeal. Alice, the parlour maid, was visiting her sick mother. And Hugh, of course, was chasing down Isobel, his wild goose of a sister, à Paris. Sylvie had no wish to involve Mrs Glover, snoring in her attic room like a truffling hog. Sylvie imagined she would conduct proceedings like a parade-ground sergeant-major. The baby was early. Sylvie was expecting it to be late like the others. The best-laid plans, and so on.

‘Oh, ma’am,’ Bridget cried suddenly, ‘she’s all blue, so she is.’

‘A girl?’

‘The cord’s wrapped around her neck. Oh, Mary, Mother of God. She’s been strangled, the poor wee thing.’

‘Not breathing? Let me see her. We must do something. What can we do?’

‘Oh, Mrs Todd, ma’am, she’s gone. Dead before she had a chance to live. I’m awful, awful sorry. She’ll be a little cherub in heaven now, for sure. Oh, I wish Mr Todd was here. I’m awful sorry. Shall I wake Mrs Glover?’

The little heart. A helpless little heart beating wildly. Stopped suddenly like a bird dropped from the sky. A single shot.

Darkness fell.

Snow

11 February 1910

‘FOR GOD’S SAKE, girl, stop running around like a headless chicken and fetch some hot water and towels. Do you know nothing? Were you raised in a field?’

‘Sorry, sir.’ Bridget dipped an apologetic curtsy as if Dr Fellowes were minor royalty.

‘A girl, Dr Fellowes? May I see her?’

‘Yes, Mrs Todd, a bonny, bouncing baby girl.’ Sylvie thought Dr Fellowes might be over-egging the pudding with his alliteration. He was not one for bonhomie at the best of times. The health of his patients, particularly their exits and entrances, seemed designed to annoy him.

‘She would have died from the cord around her neck. I arrived at Fox Corner in the nick of time. Literally.’ Dr Fellowes held up his surgical scissors for Sylvie’s admiration. They were small and neat and their sharp points curved upwards at the end. ‘Snip, snip,’ he said. Sylvie made a mental note, a small, vague one, given her exhaustion and the circumstances of it, to buy just such a pair of scissors, in case of similar emergency. (Unlikely, it was true.) Or a knife, a good sharp knife to be carried on one’s person at all times, like the robber-girl in The Snow Queen.

‘You were lucky I got here in time,’ Dr Fellowes said. ‘Before the snow closed the roads. I called for Mrs Haddock, the midwife, but I believe she is stuck somewhere outside Chalfont St Peter.’

‘Mrs Haddock?’ Sylvie said and frowned. Bridget laughed out loud and then quickly mumbled, ‘Sorry, sorry, sir.’ Sylvie supposed that she and Bridget were both on the edge of hysteria. Hardly surprising.

‘Bog Irish,’ Dr Fellowes muttered.

‘Bridget’s only a scullery maid, a child herself. I am very grateful to her. It all happened so quickly.’ Sylvie thought how much she wanted to be alone, how she was never alone. ‘You must stay until morning, I suppose, doctor,’ she said reluctantly.

‘Well, yes, I suppose I must,’ Dr Fellowes said, equally reluctantly.

Sylvie sighed and suggested that he help himself to a glass of brandy in the kitchen. And perhaps some ham and pickles. ‘Bridget will see to you.’ She wanted rid of him. He had delivered all three (three!) of her children and she did not like him one bit. Only a husband should see what he saw. Pawing and poking with his instruments in her most delicate and secretive places. (But would she rather have a midwife called Mrs Haddock deliver her child?) Doctors for women should all be women themselves. Little chance of that.

Dr Fellowes lingered, humming and hawing, overseeing the washing and wrapping of the new arrival by a hot-faced Bridget. Bridget was the eldest of seven so she knew how to swaddle an infant. She was fourteen years old, ten years younger than Sylvie. When Sylvie was fourteen she was still in short skirts, in love with her pony, Tiffin. Had no idea where babies came from, even on her wedding night she remained baffled. Her mother, Lottie, had hinted but had fallen shy of anatomical exactitude. Conjugal relations between man and wife seemed, mysteriously, to involve larks soaring at daybreak. Lottie was a reserved woman. Some might have said narcoleptic. Her husband, Sylvie’s father, Llewellyn Beresford, was a famous society artist but not at all Bohemian. No nudity or louche behaviour in his household. He had painted Queen Alexandra, when she was still a princess. Said she was very pleasant.

They lived in a good house in Mayfair, while Tiffin was stabled in a mews near Hyde Park. In darker moments, Sylvie was wont to cheer herself up by imagining that she was back there in the sunny past, sitting neatly in her side-saddle on Tiffin’s broad little back, trotting along Rotten Row on a clean spring morning, the blossom bright on the trees.

‘How about some hot tea and a nice bit of buttered toast, Mrs Todd?’ Bridget said.

‘That would be lovely, Bridget.’

The baby, bandaged like a Pharaonic mummy, was finally passed to Sylvie. Softly, she stroked the peachy cheek and said, ‘Hello, little one,’ and Dr Fellowes turned away so as not to be a witness to such syrupy demonstrations of affection. He would have all children brought up in a new Sparta if it were up to him.

‘Well, perhaps a little cold collation wouldn’t go amiss,’ he said. ‘Is there, by chance, any of Mrs Glover’s excellent piccalilli?’

Four Seasons Fill the Measure of the Year

11 February 1910

SYLVIE WAS WOKEN by a dazzling sliver of sunlight piercing the curtains like a shining silver sword. She lay languidly in lace and cashmere as Mrs Glover came into the room, proudly bearing a huge breakfast tray. Only an occasion of some importance seemed capable of drawing Mrs Glover this far out of her lair. A single, half-frozen snowdrop drooped in the bud vase on the tray. ‘Oh, a snowdrop!’ Sylvie said. ‘The first flower to raise its poor head above the ground. How brave it is!’

Mrs Glover, who did not believe that flowers were capable of courage, or indeed any other character trait, laudable or otherwise, was a widow who had only been with them at Fox Corner a few weeks. Before her advent there had been a woman called Mary who slouched a great deal and burnt the roasts. Mrs Glover tended, if anything, to undercook food. In the prosperous household of Sylvie’s childhood, Cook was called ‘Cook’ but Mrs Glover preferred ‘Mrs Glover’. It made her irreplaceable. Sylvie still stubbornly thought of her as Cook.

‘Thank you, Cook.’ Mrs Glover blinked slowly like a lizard. ‘Mrs Glover,’ Sylvie corrected herself.

Mrs Glover set the tray down on the bed and opened the curtains. The light was extraordinary, the black bat vanquished.

‘So bright,’ Sylvie said, shielding her eyes.

‘So much snow,’ Mrs Glover said, shaking her head in what could have been wonder or aversion. It was not always easy to tell with Mrs Glover.

‘Where is Dr Fellowes?’ Sylvie asked.

‘There was an emergency. A farmer trampled by a bull.’

‘How dreadful.’

‘Some men came from the village and tried to dig his automobile out but in the end my George came and gave him a ride.’

‘Ah,’ Sylvie said, as if suddenly understanding something that had puzzled her.

‘And they call it horsepower,’ Mrs Glover snorted, bull-like herself. ‘That’s what comes of relying on new-fangled machines.’

‘Mm,’ Sylvie said, reluctant to argue with such strongly held views. She was surprised that Dr Fellowes had left without examining either herself or the baby.

‘He looked in on you. You were asleep,’ Mrs Glover said. Sylvie sometimes wondered if Mrs Glover was a mind-reader. A perfectly horrible thought.

‘He ate his breakfast first,’ Mrs Glover said, displaying both approval and disapproval in the same breath. ‘The man has an appetite, that’s for sure.’

‘I could eat a horse,’ Sylvie laughed. She couldn’t, of course. Tiffin popped briefly into her mind. She picked up the silver cutlery, heavy like weapons, ready to tackle Mrs Glover’s devilled kidneys. ‘Lovely,’ she said (were they?) but Mrs Glover was already busy inspecting the baby in the cradle. (‘Plump as a suckling pig.’) Sylvie idly wondered if Mrs Haddock was still stuck somewhere outside Chalfont St Peter.

‘I hear the baby nearly died,’ Mrs Glover said.

‘Well …’ Sylvie said. Such a fine line between living and dying. Her own father, the society portraitist, slipped on an Isfahan rug on a first-floor landing after some fine cognac one evening. The next morning he was discovered dead at the foot of the stairs. No one had heard him fall or cry out. He had just begun a portrait of the Earl of Balfour. Never finished. Obviously.

Afterwards it turned out that he had been more profligate with his money than mother and daughter realized. A secret gambler, markers all over town. He had made no provision at all for unexpected death and soon there were creditors crawling over the nice house in Mayfair. A house of cards as it turned out. Tiffin had to go. Broke Sylvie’s heart, the grief greater than any she felt for her father.

‘I thought his only vice was women,’ her mother said, roosting temporarily on a packing case as if modelling for a pietà.

They sank into genteel and well-mannered poverty. Sylvie’s mother grew pale and uninteresting, larks soared no more for her as she faded, consumed by consumption. Seventeen-year-old Sylvie was rescued from becoming an artist’s model by a man she met at the post-office counter. Hugh. A rising star in the prosperous world of banking. The epitome of bourgeois respectability. What more could a beautiful but penniless girl hope for?

Lottie died with less fuss than was expected and Hugh and Sylvie married quietly on Sylvie’s eighteenth birthday. (‘There,’ Hugh said, ‘now you will never forget the anniversary of our marriage.’) They spent their honeymoon in France, a delightful quinzaine in Deauville, before settling in semi-rural bliss near Beaconsfield in a house that was vaguely Lutyens in style. It had everything one could ask for – a large kitchen, a drawing room with French windows on to the lawn, a pretty morning room and several bedrooms waiting to be filled with children. There was even a little room at the back of the house for Hugh to use as a study. ‘Ah, my growlery,’ he laughed.

It was surrounded at a discreet distance by similar houses. There was a meadow and a copse and a bluebell wood beyond with a stream running through it. The train station, no more than a halt, would allow Hugh to be at his banker’s desk in less than an hour.

‘Sleepy hollow,’ Hugh laughed as he gallantly carried Sylvie across the threshold. It was a relatively modest dwelling (nothing like Mayfair) but nonetheless a little beyond their means, a fiscal recklessness that surprised them both.

‘We should give the house a name,’ Hugh said. ‘The Laurels, the Pines, the Elms.’

‘But we have none of those in the garden,’ Sylvie pointed out. They were standing at the French windows of the newly purchased house, looking at a swathe of overgrown lawn. ‘We must get a gardener,’ Hugh said. The house itself was echoingly empty. They had not yet begun to fill it with the Voysey rugs and Morris fabrics and all the other aesthetic comforts of a twentieth-century house. Sylvie would have quite happily lived in Liberty’s rather than the as-yet-to-be-named marital home.

‘Greenacres, Fairview, Sunnymead?’ Hugh offered, putting his arm around his bride.

‘No.’

The previous owner of their unnamed house had sold up and gone to live in Italy. ‘Imagine,’ Sylvie said dreamily. She had been to Italy when she was younger, a grand tour with her father while 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 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 even been the stars and a rising moon – astonishing and terrifying in equal measure – when she had been forgotten one autumn evening. Bridget was castigated. The pram was outside, whatever the weather, for Sylvie had inherited a fixation with fresh air from her own mother, Lottie, who when younger had spent some time in a Swiss sanatorium, spending her days wrapped in a rug, sitting on an outdoor terrace, gazing passively at snowy Alpine peaks.

The beech shed its leaves, papery bronze drifts filling the sky above her head. One boisterously windy November day a threatening figure appeared, peering into the baby carriage. Maurice, making faces at Ursula and chanting, ‘Goo, goo, goo,’ before prodding the blankets with a stick. ‘Stupid baby,’ he said before proceeding to bury her beneath a soft pile of leaves. She started to fall asleep again beneath her new leafy cover but then a hand suddenly swatted Maurice’s head and he yelled, ‘Ow!’ and disappeared. The silver hare pirouetted round and round and a big pair of hands plucked her from the pram and Hugh said, ‘Here she is,’ as if she had been lost.

‘Like a hedgehog in hibernation,’ he said to Sylvie.

‘Poor old thing,’ she laughed.

Winter came again. She recognized it from the first time around.

June 1914

URSULA ENTERED HER fifth summer without further mishap. Her mother was relieved that the baby, despite (or perhaps because of) her daunting start in life, grew, thanks to Sylvie’s robust regime (or perhaps in spite of it) into a steady-seeming sort of child. Ursula didn’t think too much, the way Pamela sometimes did, nor did she think too little, as was Maurice’s wont.

A little soldier, Sylvie thought as she watched Ursula trooping along the beach in the wake of Maurice and Pamela. How small they all looked – they were small, she knew that – but sometimes Sylvie was taken by surprise by the breadth of her feelings for her children. The smallest, newest, of them all – Edward – was confined to a wicker Moses basket next to her on the sand and had not yet learned to cry havoc.

They had taken a house in Cornwall for a month. Hugh stayed for the first week and Bridget for the duration. Bridget and Sylvie managed the cooking between them (rather badly) as Sylvie gave Mrs Glover the month off so that she could go and stay in Salford with one of her sisters who had lost a son to diphtheria. Sylvie sighed with relief as she stood on the platform and watched Mrs Glover’s broad back disappearing inside the railway carriage. ‘You had no need to see her off,’ Hugh said.

‘For the pleasure of seeing her go,’ Sylvie said.

There was hot sun and boisterous sea breezes and a hard unfamiliar bed in which Sylvie lay undisturbed all night long. They bought meat pies and fried potatoes and apple turnovers and ate them sitting on a rug on the sand with their backs against the rocks. The rental of a beach hut took care of the always tricky problem of how to feed a baby in public. Sometimes Bridget and Sylvie took off their boots and daringly dabbled their toes in the water, other times they sat on the sand beneath enormous sunshades and read their books. Sylvie was reading Conrad, while Bridget had a copy of Jane Eyre that Sylvie had given her as she had not thought to bring one of her usual thrilling gothic romances. Bridget proved to be an animated reader, frequently gasping in horror or stirred to disgust and, at the end, delight. It made The Secret Agent seem quite dry by comparison.

She was also an inland creature and spent a lot of time fretting about whether the tide was coming in or going out, seemingly incapable of understanding its predictability. ‘It changes a little every day,’ Sylvie explained patiently.

‘But what on earth for?’ a baffled Bridget asked.

‘Well …’ Sylvie had absolutely no idea. ‘Why not?’ she concluded crisply.

The children were returning from fishing with their nets in the rock pools at the far end of the beach. Pamela and Ursula stopped halfway along and began to paddle at the water’s edge but Maurice picked up the pace, sprinting towards Sylvie before flinging himself down in a flurry of sand. He was holding a small crab by its claw and Bridget screeched in alarm at the sight of it.

‘Any meat pies left?’ he asked.