We That Are Left (25 page)

P.S. I hope you like the photograph.

The photograph he chose was one he had taken on his last visit. He had asked Jim Pugh to stop on the curve in the lane
just as the castle came into view. It was not the prospect in all the paintings, the broad sweep of lawn rolled out in front of the castle like a carpet. From the lane the swollen summer trees obscured all but the tallest towers, encircled in the crook of the high north wall. Oscar had knelt in the verge, tilting the camera up so that the slanting evening sun tangled in the thickets of feathery grass. In the photograph it looked like the house was hidden deep in the forest, like an enchanted castle in a fairy story. Above the towers the mackerel sky was streaked with light.

He received a reply two days later. It ran to several pages, the first two outlining in detail Sir Aubrey's plans for extending the castle's fortifications, in particular the construction of an immense castellated wall from the south of the house almost to the stables. The new drive would require motor cars to pass through a new barbican gateway to the north and on around to the gatehouse.

The wonderful photograph you sent me has spurred my resolve. How is it that so many fail to see what you capture so delightfully, that the house is not one house but many, each angle and viewpoint and fall of light offering a fresh pleasure? This way visitors will make almost a full circle of the house before they arrive. A composition so artfully conceived must be appreciated in the round.

It was not until the final paragraph of the letter that Sir Aubrey mentioned the family.

Phyllis is presently in Luxor, Thebes as was, before beginning her studies in archaeology at London University. The news from Egypt is alarming but she assures us she is a good distance from the troubles and quite safe. I would rather she were safe here in Hampshire but it would seem that the days when a daughter heeded her father are long gone
. As
for Jessica, she has her heart set on a job in London as assistant to the editor
of a magazine which she claims will lead to great things. An archaeologist and a magazine journalist. It is hardly what one had imagined but then what is, I suppose, any more?

A fortnight later Oscar read in
The Times
of the spread of Egyptian unrest to the countryside, the bloody violence and burning of villages that had resulted in hundreds of Egyptians dead. Again he wrote to Sir Aubrey. He expressed interest in the new fortifications, in the progress of Sir Aubrey's book. He asked if Jessica was in London and if he might call on her. He enclosed another photograph, taken beneath the gatehouse arch one afternoon when he sought shelter from a thunderstorm. The ribs of the vaulted arch were reflected in the puddles and the sky was almost black. As he slid the photograph into the envelope he thought of the fair he had once gone to with his mother, where a gypsy woman in a ruffled dress had called out to passers-by to cross her hand with silver in exchange for their fortune.

The newspapers are full of Egypt
, he wrote.
I do hope Phyllis remains unaffected by the troubles.

When Sir Aubrey replied he spent several pages detailing the conversations he had had with architects, the difficulties of finding skilled stonemasons. He included several sketches made in cross section. It was not until the penultimate paragraph that he mentioned Phyllis.
The work sounds hard and hot and frightfully tedious but it is plain that it fascinates her. She is very busy.

Oscar's days by contrast were desultory. He drifted through the London streets as the spring weather gave way to gales, wild squalls that whipped rain into needles and shrieked in the chimney pots. On the Common the wind ripped the branches from the trees, their new leaves curled tight like tiny green fists. In the library Oscar read books about the Valley of the Kings, the magnificent decorated tombs of the pharaohs, filled with the treasures they would need in the afterlife, and the strange discovery just before the War of a humbler sepulchre containing
the bodies of sixty soldiers, killed in a fierce battle four thousand years before. At home, one evening, he sat alone in the parlour and pretended to tell his mother about what he had read but talking out loud only made him feel foolish and he kept forgetting what it was he meant to say. He muddled the dates and the dynasties, his tongue stumbling over the unfamiliar names. He told the empty room that it would have to read the book for itself. It was not his story to tell.

Then one windy April morning, turning the pages of the newspaper, Oscar's eye was caught by an article near the bottom of the page. Ernest Rutherford, the newly appointed Cavendish Professor of Physics at Cambridge University, was resisting attempts by the government to confiscate his supply of radium, on loan from the Vienna Academy of Sciences, as enemy property.

The jolt was like an electrical shock. He felt it in the soles of his feet, in the roots of his hair. It was forbidden to deface the newspapers in the library but he tore out the article anyway and put it in his pocket. All that day as he walked, he touched the scrap of newsprint in his pocket and the electricity surged and crackled under his skin. At home in Clapham he looked around him at the dirty windows and the piles of dirty cups and the clothes discarded on the floor and he wondered if they were his things or if the confusion had been made by someone else. He felt as though he had been asleep for a long time.

That evening he wrote to E. Willis, his college tutor at Trinity, asking if he might be permitted to matriculate not in October as planned but in two weeks, at the start of the Summer Term. He said that he knew that there were rules but that he was not sure he could wait any longer, that he had waited much too long already.

Upstairs the wind whistled in the chimney. It sounded like somebody laughing. He thought of taking the letter to Cambridge in person, of going to Liverpool Street Station and getting on a train and refusing to leave until they agreed to
let him start, but he thought they might think he had gone mad. There was something of madness in him. He hugged it to him, not wanting to let it go. When he posted the letter it made a faint clang as it fell, like a bell ringing.

It was April but that night it snowed. The house was filled with a flat white light, with a silence dense as cotton wool. In the kitchen the drawers were undisturbed, the spoons lying quietly in their stacked embrace. The piano was dumb. There was no dark head resting against the wing of the Chesterfield, no humming or laughter or patter of footsteps on the stairs. He opened the wardrobe in the hall, buried his face in the soft folds of her coat with its astrakhan collar. The coat still smelled of her, faintly, but she was not there.

Mr Willis wrote back from Cambridge. He was sorry but there was no question of a place for Oscar until the beginning of the Michaelmas Term. He enclosed a reading list, hoped Oscar would use the intervening time wisely, and looked forward to seeing him in October.

Oscar sold his mother's coat. He sold the rabbit fur stole and the peacock scarf. He sold the piano to Miss Nicholson who lived around the corner with her brother, and his mother's brass bedstead to a man with a cart. The things he could not sell he gave away. At night he lay in bed and stared at the ceiling. The little black men did not come. There was sadness in it, but there was stillness too, and peace.

When all the drawers and the cupboards were empty, and the books nearly all in boxes, he made enquiries about boarding houses in Cambridge. There were several rooms available, including an inexpensive attic in a house on Chesterton Road which offered, the landlady said, pleasant views over the town. The landlady's name was Mrs Piggott. Oscar wrote to confirm that he would take the room with immediate effect.

He took the letter to the post box at the end of the street. When he got home, he lit a fire in the back parlour and settled himself in his armchair, a cup of tea on the floor by his feet.
There was a pile of books on the fender stool. He leaned down and took one off the top. It was one of his mother's, Emily Dickinson's
Poems
. Oscar thought of the poem his mother had asked for again and again when she was ill:

Hope is the thing with feathers

That perches in the soul,

And sings the tune – without the words,

And never stops at all
.

The book had been opened so often on that page it fell open when he held it. He put the letters from Cambridge inside and, closing it, put the book on the arm of his chair. The book was small and the corners of the letters stuck out. From time to time as he sipped his tea, he touched the corners of the letters very gently with the pad of his thumb. From time to time too, he looked up over at the Chesterfield and smiled, so that she would know he was thinking about her, that he had not forgotten that she was there, even when she was gone.

The flat was in an imposing mansion block in Maida Vale, five storeys of red brick adorned at its eastern end by a pair of turrets, each topped with a pale green cupola. The turrets made Jessica think of home. The flats were very respectable, the agent said, and popular with widows as well as businessmen who had to be in London during the week. The one he showed them had three bedrooms and two rooms the agent insisted on calling receptions. He pointed out the liveried porters, the landscaped gardens, the latest plumbing and electrical amenities, including electric bells and a tradesman's lift. He stressed the advantages of an accommodation that was less than ten years old, that might conveniently be managed with only one servant.

Jessica walked with Eleanor to the end of Elgin Avenue. Mrs Leonard's street was no more than a short walk away. Perhaps in time Mrs Leonard would allow Eleanor to sit more frequently. It would be an advantage to be close by, just in case. In London too Eleanor could continue her acquaintance with Sir Oliver Lodge and his wife, perhaps with other like-minded people. When Eleanor demurred, Jessica urged her to think of the meetings she could attend, the lectures on spiritualism put on by the Society for Psychical Research. Jessica had done her own research and she did not mean to give up. The flat cost
one hundred pounds a year, with an additional forty pounds for a maid. Jessica's salary as assistant to the editor of
Woman's Friend
was twenty-five shillings a week.

Twenty-five shillings turned out to be a quite extraordinarily small amount of money. Even a room in a ghastly hostel like Phyllis's cost the best part of twenty shillings a week once breakfast and dinner were included, and heaven only knew what they would be like. Baths were threepence extra. By the time she had paid for lunches and bus fares all the money would be gone, and that was before she had bought stockings or soap or lipstick or had her laundry done. There was her dress allowance on top, of course, but it was still not nearly enough.

Her first thought had been to plead with Gerald for an increase in salary. Five pounds a week might just do it, she thought. Since that first time at the Savoy they had had lunch together on two more occasions. She told her mother she was attending job interviews, which she almost was, she supposed. When he told her about the job he presented her with a box, beautifully wrapped in ribbon. Inside was a gold wristwatch. He said that the editor at
Woman's Friend
was a stickler for timekeeping. Afterwards they walked together down to the river and in the deserted Embankment gardens she had let him kiss her. Close up his face was loose on the bone, the thin skin punctured with thousands of tiny black dots where he had shaved, and beneath the expensive spice of his cologne she could smell, very faintly, the stale mouse-nest whiff of old people. She was glad it was expected that you closed your eyes. Desire slackened a man's features, caused his eyes to hood, his mouth to soften. When it was Rudolph Valentino in the flickers, it gave you the goose bumps. Gerald just looked drunk.

She kissed him back. It was polite, like writing thank-you letters. She did not mention her pay. As things stood, it was Gerald who petitioned, who sought her favour. She did not ask for the outlandishly expensive lunches, the champagne, the presents in their beribboned boxes. If he chose to give
them she owed him nothing in return, or nothing more than a kiss or two. There was something a good deal more businesslike about the negotiation of a salary. Payment in exchange for services. He would expect more than a kiss for five pounds a week.

Jessica could not live in London alone. The flat had many advantages, Eleanor conceded, but Jessica was only nineteen, too young to live without the care of an adult. She required a chaperone, and Eleanor herself would not be there often enough to provide such care. Jessica pleaded with her but her mother was implacable. A maid-cook was in no way an adequate substitute.

Jessica stormed out of the house in a fury of rage and selfpity. She stamped down the drive and out onto the lane. She walked for a long time, her rage cooling to despondency. All her carefully laid plans had come to naught. She was stuck in Hampshire for ever. She would grow old and ugly and so desperate that she would be forced to marry the unspeakable Mervyn who would write her excruciating limericks and kiss her with his dead-fish lips. Or worse, the unspeakable Mervyn would marry one of the ghastly girls who giggled every time he went near them at parties, and Father would die, and she would be forced to become Cousin Lettice's companion or governess to the Yorkshire Melville boys, like Jane Eyre only without Mr Rochester. She thought wildly of writing to Guy Cockayne, of begging him to rescue her for Theo's sake. She had not heard from him for months, not since the end of the War, but she supposed his regiment would have a forwarding address.