Life After Life

Ursula lies on her back in a shallow pool of water. She realizes her apartment on Argyll Road has been bombed. Ursula has heard people speak of “Blitz spirit” and wonders, “really, what was the alternative?” (264). Since the end of her affair with Crighton, Ursula has been seeing a young man from her German course, Ralph. Crighton asked her if she has his cigarette case, which his father gave him after Jutland. Ursula hasn’t told him she kept it.

Ursula has seen other parts of London bombed or burned. She and Ralph discussed once how things could be different if Hitler had had a different fate—if someone had killed him as a baby, for instance. Ursula thinks she would kill Hitler if it would save Teddy, who has just joined the Royal Air Force.

Mr. Miller, part of a big family in the building, has put reproductions of English paintings in the cellar, which is their bomb shelter. Ursula detests the Bubbles by Millais. She says goodbye to Ralph as he leaves for work. Looking at the moon, she thinks how huge the war is and how hard it is to understand it.

The siren goes off, and as Ursula goes down the stairs, she passes the Nesbit sisters going up to fetch their knitting. Lavinia is wearing an enamel brooch shaped like a black cat with a rhinestone eye. A few weeks ago, Ursula saw one of Mr. Miller’s daughters, Renee, having a drink at a hotel with a man whom Jimmy, who was visiting Ursula, called a sleazy gent. Ursula is cold. She can see Bubbles and Lavinia Nesbit’s dress hanging from the staircase. Ursula realizes Lavinia’s body is still in the dress, the eye in the brooch winking at her.

A warden comes to rescue her. She mentions the neighbor Mrs. Appleyard’s baby, who has been crying. He calls her Susie and tells her she’ll get out and have a cup of tea. Ursula thinks of flying off the roof, picking raspberries, playing with Teddy, and then snow and darkness.

Ursula tries on a yellow dress she bought and listens to her neighbor, Mrs. Appleyard, fighting with Mr. Appleyard. Sylvie denounces Ursula for being a spinster. Ursula has dinner with Crighton, who has left his wife. He invites Ursula to live with him in Knightsbridge.

Maurice picks Ursula up at her apartment in Knightsbridge to drive to Fox Corner for Easter. Sylvie has taken in two young boys, evacuees. Ursula’s family teases her for being unmarried. Izzy is leaving for California with her husband, a playwright. Teddy is headed to Canada for pilot training. Mrs. Glover has retired now that George has died. Pamela arrives with her children. Ursula reflects that home, for her, is no longer Fox Corner but an idea lost in the past. Crighton reports that Norway has fallen.

Ursula takes baby clothes to Mrs. Appleyard. She thinks of Ralph, a friend she met in German class. The sirens go off, and Ursula joins the others in the cellar, including Renee Miller, whom Ursula and Jimmy saw at a hotel having a drink with a man Jimmy did not approve of. The bomb hits, and Ursula hears a man calling her Susie as everything goes dark.

Ursula misses Crighton, who ended their affair the night before war was declared.

Ursula, looking at the moon, hears the plane overhead, and sees a dog in a doorway across the street. She goes outside to rescue it. When the bomb falls, Ursula marvels at how long the explosion seems to last, with “a character that change[s] and develop[s] as it [goes] along so that you [have] no idea how it [is] going to end up, how you [are] going to end up” (320). She sees a fireman who looks like Fred Smith. Then the wall of a building falls, crushing her.

Ursula reads a novel in the sunshine and watches a small rabbit. Maurice is home and teaching Ursula how to shoot. Ursula speaks of university, which Sylvie says won’t prepare her to be a wife and mother. Ursula takes a walk and on her way home runs into Benjamin Cole, who invites her to a party. After he leaves, Ursula is accosted by a stranger, a rough-looking man. She runs away. The party is disappointing.

Ursula, waiting by the roadside with her friend Klara Brenner, watches the Chancellor of the Reich, who is calling himself the Führer, drive by to his mountainside retreat. Ursula is staying with the Brenners during her tour of Germany and goes on a walking trip with the girls. Klara’s younger sisters are in the girls’ version of the Hitler Jugend, a youth group. Ursula intends to take a teaching job when she returns to England after her travels.

Sylvie complained about her choice, and Ursula spoke to Millie about what opportunities there were for an educated woman if she didn’t want to go straight from the parental home to the marital one. On the train to Germany, a man tried to push into the lavatory after Ursula. A pair of officers took the man away. She heard later a man had fallen from the train.

Ursula enjoys the lively Brenners and meets Klara’s friend, Eva, who works in a photographer’s studio. Ursula sees that Hitler’s popularity is growing throughout the country. At a fair, Ursula dances with Jürgen, who is very handsome.

Ursula is staying at Hitler’s mountain resort, which she thinks of as the Zauberberg, the magic mountain in the novel by Thomas Mann. Eva enjoys taking pictures of Ursula’s daughter Frieda, who is five. The Berg is Hitler’s retreat, and Eva is his mistress. Ursula is surprised by how fiercely protective she feels about her child. She dislikes the Führer, finding him pretentious, though her husband, Jürgen, pays lip service to the Nazi party.

Ursula was disturbed by the military parade they attended for the Führer’s birthday and regrets that she has taken German citizenship. She thinks Hitler “was born a baby, like everyone else. And this is what he has chosen to become” (360). Ursula brought Frieda to the mountain retreat, at Eva’s invitation, to help the child recover from pneumonia. Klara married a Jewish man who was taken away to work in a factory, they were told. Trapped with Hitler’s self-aggrandizement, Ursula wishes she could go home to Fox Corner. She and Frieda leave the Berg, and the day after, Germany invades Poland.

Ursula and Frieda are living in a bombed-out cellar. The city is in ruins from the bombings by the Americans. Jürgen was killed in a raid in ‘44. Ursula had been prevented from returning to England when the war began, but she received a very battered letter from Pamela reporting that Hugh had died. Frieda is ill again, and news comes that the Soviet troops advancing from the east are destroying everything in their path, including women and children.

Ursula goes to the chemist and buys pills. She gives poison to Frieda, then herself. As the dark descends, Ursula thinks, “She had never chosen death over life before and as she was leaving she knew something had cracked and broken and the order of things had changed” (379).