Life After Life Chapter 21 Summary

How It All Goes Down

Pamela is pregnant (again, she already has three boys at this point); Maurice is married (poor woman); and Ursula is working for the Home Office (and having an affair with a married man).
Everyone wonders what they'll do when the new war finally comes to England.
Ursula and Crighton, her paramour, usually spend their nights at her apartment or take little holidays to Monkey Island.
He says that Ursula's "reputation for discretion precedes [her]" (21.65), and thinks she'd make a good spy.
After talking to Pamela about Maurice and war, Ursula "wish[es] now that she'd bought the yellow crepe de Chine" (21.116). We're not sure what that is (j/k—it's fabric), but we bet it would coordinate well with foreshadowing.

Ursula is lying on her back in a pool of sewage and water and thinking about how she got there.
She's been living (but not for much longer, we fear) in an apartment across the hall from Mrs. Appleyard, a recently single mother of a young baby.
Crighton has ended things with Ursula (and later sent her a note asking for his gold cigarette case back, which she found under her bed and kept), and she's started seeing Ralph, a fellow student in her German course.
Dating during the Blitz is difficult work, and Ralph and Ursula start building their relationship as bombs fall.
He leaves her apartment one day before the bomb sirens go off and Ursula hides in the basement with the rest of the tenants: the dozens of Millers (including Renee Miller, the oldest daughter), Mrs. Appleyard, and the Misses Nesbit, elderly sisters who leave the shelter to retrieve their knitting.
Too bad they didn't knit a bomb-proof suit, since a bomb blows up their building, pretty much killing everyone.
Mrs. Appleyard, barely alive, crawls to Ursula, lying motionless at the bottom of the crater, and asks if she's seen her baby.
Ursula hasn't. But she does notice the "headless, legless body of Lavinia Nesbit" (21.238) hanging above her.
A rescue crew arrives and tries to get Ursula out of the rubble.
She can't talk, and the guy keeps calling her Susie.
"She didn't want to die as a Susie" (21.243), but she starts seeing the snow and the spinning of the silver hare ornament: "The darkness had fallen" (21.252).