Life After Life

Mrs. Glover tells Bridget the new baby’s name is Ursula.

Sylvie explains Ursula’s strange premonitions as déjà vu and tells her to have sunny thoughts. Once, Ursula gets in trouble with her parents when she knows the contents of a Christmas gift in advance. Bridget calls it the sixth sense. The baby rabbits George Glover gave the girls have multiplied, and the rabbits eat the garden vegetables despite the foxes. As Bridget gets ready to leave for the armistice celebrations, Ursula, compelled by a great sense of dread, pushes her down the stairs. The narrator says, “Practice makes perfect” (124). Teddy says he still loves Ursula even though she did something dreadful. Their father comes home from the war.

Ursula returns to her apartment in London after a shopping trip, feeling cold. She lives alone now that Millie, her roommate, has married and moved to the United States. She’s delighted to find a box of produce sent to her from Fox Corner by Pammy. She misses her mother, Sylvie, who swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills on VE day—“another casualty of war, another statistic” (132). Ursula lights her gas fire to heat water and thinks of the Jewish people killed in Auschwitz and Treblinka, which her younger brother Jimmy told her about.