Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

Author:Kate Atkinson [Atkinson, Kate]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3, pdf
Tags: Mystery, Fantasy, Adult, Historical
ISBN: 9781409043799
Google: zQzG__u0vogC
Amazon: B00AQIFNGM
Barnesnoble: B00AQIFNGM
Goodreads: 17615297
Publisher: Transworld Digital
Published: 2013-03-14T08:00:00+00:00

A Lovely Day Tomorrow

2 September 1939

‘DON’T GET UPSET, Pammy,’ Harold said. ‘Why is it so quiet, what have you done with the boys?’

‘Sold them,’ Pamela said, perking up. ‘Three for the price of two.’

‘You ought to stay the night, Ursula,’ Harold said kindly. ‘You shouldn’t be on your own tomorrow. It’ll be one of those awful days. Doctor’s orders.’

‘Thanks,’ Ursula said. ‘But I’ve already got plans.’

She tried on the yellow crêpe de Chine tea dress that she’d bought earlier that day in an eve-of-war spending spree on Kensington High Street. The crêpe de Chine had a pattern – tiny black swallows in flight. She admired it, rather admired herself, or what she could see in the dressing-table mirror as she had to stand on her bed in order to see her lower half.

Through Argyll Road’s thin walls Ursula could hear Mrs Appleyard having a row, in English, with a man – the mysterious Mr Appleyard presumably – whose comings and goings at all times of the day and night kept no noticeable timetable. Ursula had encountered him in the flesh only once, in passing on the stairs, when he had glared moodily at her and hurried on without a greeting. He was a big man, ruddy and slightly porcine. Ursula could imagine him standing behind a butcher’s counter or hauling brewery sacks, although according to the Misses Nesbit he was in fact an insurance clerk.

Mrs Appleyard, in contrast, was thin and sallow and when her husband was out of the flat Ursula could hear her singing mournfully to herself in a language that she couldn’t place. Something Eastern European by the sound of it. How useful Mr Carver’s Esperanto would be, she thought. (Only if everyone spoke it, of course.) And especially these days with so many refugees flooding into London. (‘She’s Czech,’ the Nesbits had eventually informed her. ‘We didn’t used to know where Czechoslovakia was, did we? I wish we still didn’t.’) Ursula presumed Mrs Appleyard was also some kind of refugee who, looking for safe harbour in the arms of an English gentleman, had found instead the pugnacious Mr Appleyard. Ursula thought that if she ever heard Mr Appleyard actually hitting his wife then she would have to knock on their door and somehow put a stop to it, although she had no idea how she would do that.

The dispute next door reached a crescendo and then the Appleyards’ front door slammed decisively in conclusion and all went quiet. Mr Appleyard, a great one for noisy exits and entrances, could be heard stomping down the stairs, a trail of profanity in his wake on the subject of women and foreigners, of which the oppressed Mrs Appleyard was both.

The sour aura of dissatisfaction that seeped through the walls, along with the even less appetizing smell of boiled cabbage, was really quite depressing. Ursula wanted her refugees to be soulful and romantic – fleeing for their cultural lives – rather than the abused wives of insurance clerks. Which was ridiculously unfair of her.

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