Life After Life Read Online Free PDF

Sylvie’s friends said. ‘Teddy?’
    ‘Ursula and Teddy. My two little bears,’ Sylvie said and laughed her hiccup laugh. Ursula wasn’t at all sure about being a bear. She would rather be a dog. She lay down on her back and stared up at the sky. Bosun groaned mightily and stretched out beside her. Swallows were knifing recklessly through the blue. She could hear the delicate chink of cups on saucers, the creak and clatter of a lawn-mower being pushed by Old Tom in the Coles’ garden next door, and could smell the peppery-sweet perfume of the pinks in the border and the heady green of new-mown grass.
    ‘Ah,’ said one of Sylvie’s London friends, stretching out her legs and revealing graceful white-stockinged ankles. ‘A long, hot summer. Isn’t it delicious?’
    The peace was broken by a disgusted Maurice throwing his racquet on to the grass where it bounced with a thump and a squeak. ‘I can’t teach her – she’s a girl!’ he yelled and stalked off into the shrubbery where he began to bash things with a stick, although in his head he was in the jungle with a machete. He was going to boarding school after the summer. It was the same school that Hugh had been to, and his father before him . (‘And so on, back to the Conquest probably,’ Sylvie said.) Hugh said it would be ‘the making’ of Maurice but he seemed quite made already to Ursula. Hugh said when he first went to the school he cried himself to sleep every night and yet he seemed more than happy to subject Maurice to the same torture. Maurice puffed out his chest and declared that he wouldn’t cry.
    (‘And what about us?’ a worried Pamela asked. ‘Shall we have to go away to school?’
    ‘Not unless you’re very naughty,’ Hugh said, laughing.)
    A pink-cheeked Pamela balled up her fists and, planting them on her hips, roared, ‘You’re such a pig!’ after Maurice’s indifferent, retreating back. She made ‘pig’ sound like a much worse word than it was. Pigs were quite nice.
    ‘Pammy,’ Sylvie said mildly. ‘You sound like a fishwife.’
    Ursula edged nearer to the source of cake.
    ‘Oh, come here,’ one of the women said to her, ‘let me look at you.’ Ursula tried to shy away but was held firmly in place by Sylvie. ‘She’s quite pretty, isn’t she?’ Sylvie’s friend said. ‘She takes after you, Sylvie.’
    ‘Fish have wives?’ Ursula said to her mother and Sylvie’s friends laughed, lovely bubbling laughs. ‘What a funny little thing,’ one of them said.
    ‘Yes, she’s a real hoot,’ Sylvie said.
    ‘Yes, she’s a real hoot,’ Sylvie said.
    ‘Children,’ Margaret said, ‘they are droll, aren’t they?’
    They are so much more than that, Sylvie thought, but how do you explain the magnitude of motherhood to someone who has no children? Sylvie felt positively matronly in her present company, the friends of her brief girlhood curtailed by the relief of marriage.
    Bridget came out with the tray and started to take away the tea things. In the mornings Bridget wore a striped print dress for housework but in the afternoons she changed into a black dress with white cuffs and collar and a matching white apron and little cap. She had been elevated out of the scullery. Alice had left to get married and Sylvie had engaged a girl from the village, Marjorie, a boss-eyed thirteen-year-old, to help with the rough work. (‘We couldn’t get by with just two of them?’ Hugh queried mildly. ‘Bridget and Mrs G? It’s not as if they’re running a mansion.’
    ‘No, we can’t,’ Sylvie said and that was the end of that.)
    The little white cap was too big for Bridget and was forever slipping over her eyes, like a blindfold. On her way back across the lawn she was suddenly blinkered by the cap and tripped, a music-hall tumble that she rescued just in time and the only casualties were the silver sugar bowl and tongs that went shooting through the air, lumps of sugar scattering like blind dice across the green of the