Life After Life

by Kate Atkinson

Sylvie sighed and put down the letter from Hugh, its pages as brittle as dead leaves. It was only a matter of months since he had left for the Front yet she could hardly remember being married to him any more. Hugh was a captain in the Ox and Bucks. Last summer he was a banker. It seemed absurd.

Enid had auditioned for the part of plucky young London woman somewhere around 1940 and had been playing it with gusto ever since. Ursula

‘I used to argue with her because she said science had made the world a worse place, that it was all about men inventing new ways to kill people. But now I wonder if she wasn’t right.’

Shall we essay the cheese board – the Stilton’s so ripe it looks as if it’s about to walk away of its own accord – or shall we tootle off and go to mine?’ ‘I’m stuffed,’ Ursula said. ‘Me too. Tootle off it is then. Shall I pick up the bill?’ ‘I have no money. I’m thirteen,’ Ursula reminded her.

‘What did science ever do for the world, apart from make better ways of killing people?’ Sylvie said.

One day, of course, all this would be consigned to that same history, even the mountains – sand, after all, was the future of rocks.

Ursula couldn’t find a pulse. ‘Shall we move him?’ she said. She took his shoulders and Miss Woolf his ankles and Mr Palmer’s body came apart like a Christmas cracker.

… but one cannot look backwards, only forwards. What has passed has passed for ever. What is it Heraclitus says? One cannot step in the same river twice?’

‘MAN THAT IS born of woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up and is cut down like a flower: he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay.’