Life After Life Read Online Free

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