We That Are Left (32 page)

After lunch Father went back to the library. The women drank coffee in the drawing room. Eleanor told Mrs Maxwell Brooke about Theo's memorial.

‘I should love to see it,' Mrs Maxwell Brooke said. ‘Wouldn't you, Marjorie?'

‘Why don't you go with Eleanor?' Jessica suggested quickly. ‘Marjorie and I will come later. We've so much to catch up on.'

As soon as they were gone, Jessica turned to Marjorie. ‘I'm so glad you came. I've been meaning to look you up in London. I'm there too, you know.'

‘Yes, your mother said. She said you were working for a magazine. It sounds frightfully glamorous. I bet you have queues of admirers?'

Jessica thought of Gerald and of Guy Cockayne who had still not answered Eleanor's letter. She wondered, not for the first time, whether the firm of solicitors had remembered to forward it on. ‘Hardly queues,' she said. ‘It's just a relief to be in London at last and not dying of boredom out here.'

‘Really? I'm always so glad to come home.'

‘Come on. You must be having the time of your life. All those balls.'

‘I suppose so.'

‘You don't sound very sure.'

‘No, I mean, of course. It's fine. It's lovely. Very busy.'

Jessica slid her a sideways glance. ‘I wondered if perhaps you might like to come to supper with me one evening. I should so like it if we could be friends.'

‘Really?'

‘But of course. Theo was very fond of you, you know.'

Marjorie stared down at the cup cradled in her bony hands. Then, abruptly, she clattered it into its saucer. ‘I still can't believe he's gone. I keep thinking—' She shook her head. ‘I'm sorry. It's just . . .'

‘I know.'

‘I thought he was wonderful. We all did. Terence was just saying the other day that of all the boys . . . well . . .' She forced a smile. ‘You remember Terence Connolly? He stayed here once or twice with his parents before the War.'

‘I remember.'

‘Mother hadn't heard from them for years. They went back to America. But when Terence enlisted Mrs Connolly wrote and asked if he could look us up while he was over here. She said we were the only English people she could think of to
ask. We saw a good deal of him before he was posted. Now he's waiting to be demobbed. The camp's only in Surrey so he comes up to London when he can.'

‘Marjorie, you dark horse. So you and Terence Connolly . . . ?'

Marjorie blushed. ‘Heavens, no. Goodness. I mean, he's awfully nice but an American, can you imagine? Mother would have sixty fits.'

After that she would not talk about the Season or parties. She asked Jessica about her work and about Phyllis and whether there was still a tennis court at Ellinghurst. When Eleanor and Mrs Maxwell Brooke came back from the memorial Mrs Maxwell Brooke told Marjorie it was time to go home.

‘Thank you, Eleanor, for a delightful afternoon,' Mrs Maxwell Brooke said, kissing her cheek. ‘Promise you'll lunch with us soon. In July, perhaps, when the Season's over and things are a little less hectic. Goodbye, Jessica, dear.' She turned to leave, Marjorie behind her. Then she turned back. ‘Just one other tiny little thing. I don't suppose you would have an address for Oscar Greenwood, would you?'

‘For Oscar?' Eleanor said, puzzled. Behind her mother Marjorie stared at her shoes.

‘It's just that I happened to hear that he's in London now and we thought it might be rather fun to catch up. The children were all so close, weren't they, growing up? I was so very sorry to hear about Sylvia, by the way. Aubrey told me. Too ghastly. It must have been a terrible blow.'

‘Thank you.'

‘Anyway, and it was only a passing fancy really, I thought, given that the poor child must be at a loose end, that he might find it entertaining to accompany Marjorie to a dance or two. I have to confess, I find it a shocking imposition, this new habit of inviting “Miss Maxwell Brooke and Partner”. One should simply refuse, I mean, one might as well ask a girl to bring her own sandwiches, only one doesn't want to be awkward, no girl wants a reputation for being difficult, and,
well, we thought young Oscar might find the whole thing rather a gas. So if you did have an address . . .'

‘Oscar's not in London,' Jessica said.

‘But I was sure I heard—'

‘He's in Cambridge. Not that he'd come, even if he was. Oscar doesn't like dancing. Or parties. Or other people much, for that matter.'

‘I think that's rather up to him, don't you, dear?' Mrs Maxwell Brooke said. ‘Well, it's not as though Cambridge is Timbuktu. It can't be more than an hour or two on the train and we'd be more than happy to cover his ticket. Might you have an address for him there, Eleanor, dear?'

‘Aubrey does, certainly. Remind me to ask him, Jessica.'

‘Or perhaps he wouldn't mind being disturbed now? While I'm here? I shouldn't want you to have to go to all the bother of telephoning.'

Eleanor hesitated. Mrs Maxwell Brooke smiled at her blandly.

‘Very well,' Eleanor said. ‘Jessica, run and ask your father for Oscar's address, would you?'

Jessica did not run. She walked quite slowly. She could hardly get over it, the sheer brass neck of Mrs Maxwell Brooke.
Marjorie was always so fond of him
. What a lot of rot. Marjorie had always been too busy mooning after Theo even to notice that Oscar existed. It was Jessica who had been made to play with him and listen to his queer nonsense, Jessica and Oscar who, to Jessica's fury, had been lumped together as ‘the little ones'. What possible right did Mrs Maxwell Brooke have now to swan in and help herself to Oscar like a film star selecting a bonbon? Well, she was in for a disappointment. Oscar loathed dances and he would never give a fig for bony Marjorie. Oscar loved Jessica. Mrs Maxwell Brooke could whistle until her lips wore out but that was the way it was. There was no changing Oscar. He was like the chemistry experiments they had done at school: understand them or not, they always came out exactly the same way.

Oscar belonged to Jessica. He always had.

Her father was sitting in a chair when she knocked on the library door. She wondered if he had been asleep. When she asked him for the address he pointed her towards a pile of letters on a table by the window. They were all from Oscar. She wondered why Oscar was writing to her father but she did not ask. She wrote down the address and walked slowly back to the Great Hall.

Mrs Maxwell Brooke held out her hand. ‘Thank you, dear,' she said.

Jessica fingered the piece of paper. ‘I had forgotten Oscar and Marjorie were such friends,' she said.

Mrs Maxwell Brooke went on smiling. ‘I've always said to Marjorie that there is no bond stronger than the bonds one forges in one's youth. Childhood friends are friends for life.'

‘Marjorie and I were just saying the same thing. So you'll invite Oscar to Marjorie's coming-out ball?'

‘If he is in town, then I'm sure—'

‘What fun. All of us together, it will be like old times.'

Mrs Maxwell Brooke's smile flickered uncertainly.

‘Marjorie tells me you've invited Terence Connolly too,' Jessica enthused. ‘Phyllis will be thrilled. It's been years since—' She broke off, a hand to her mouth. ‘Oh, heavens. You do mean to invite Phyllis and me, don't you? I just assumed . . . Please tell me I haven't put my big old foot in it? Here, this is for you.' Eyes round with innocent mortification, she held out the paper with Oscar's address on it. Mrs Maxwell Brooke took it.

‘Of course you girls are invited,' she said grimly and on her wrists her bracelets rattled like gold teeth.

The Maxwell Brooke car crunched away over the gravel.

‘Thank heavens,' Eleanor said. ‘I thought she'd never leave.'

Jessica watched her mother climb the stairs, leaning on the banister like an old woman. There was a bowl of white roses on the hall table. She drew one out and sniffed it. It smelled
very sweet. Then one by one she pulled out the petals and dropped them on the floor:
worships me, adores me, just wants me for my body
. The suit of armour watched her with its slit-eyes.

‘What are you looking at?' she asked. She laughed. Then, taking its cold hand in hers she stood on tiptoes, kissing it on its metal beak. Her laughter echoed inside the empty metal shell, making her laugh even more.

Cinderella was going to the ball.

On the last Saturday in June an aeroplane flew across the Channel from Paris to Buckingham Palace with a letter for the King. The delegates to the Peace Commission had signed the Treaty of Versailles and ended the state of war between Germany and the Allied Powers. Germany would no longer be permitted to keep a navy or an air force and a cap would be placed on her army, restricting it to no more than one hundred thousand men. Territories that had provided the country with revenue from iron, coal and steel were to be removed from her control. Meanwhile, she would be expected to foot a bill of nearly seven million pounds in reparations, to include pensions to England's war widows. It was said that when the German representatives, who were last to arrive, were ushered in to the gilded glitter of the
Galerie des Glaces
, nobody stood. The Germans sat white-faced, their eyes on the frescoed ceiling, as one by one the Allied delegates affixed their signatures to the treaty. Afterwards, they were escorted hurriedly from the room before the air echoed to the sound of a gun salute and President Wilson, together with Lloyd George and Clemenceau, stepped out onto the terrace to the tumultuous cheers of the massed crowd. It was five years to the day since the Archduke Franz Ferdinand had been assassinated in Sarajevo.

In the afternoon Oscar walked. He walked to St Ives and sat outside the village pub, a pint of beer in front of him, his hat tipped back and his face turned up to the sun. He wished he could talk to Kit. The world felt a long way away and very small, as though he was looking at it through the wrong end of a telescope.

He had thought he would be glad to have Cambridge back to himself. After the hushed intensity of the summer examinations there had followed the wild bacchanalia of May Week, a whirl of pleasure, of parties and picnics and drifts of women swooping and settling around town like colonies of gaily-coloured birds. Oscar found it difficult to work, to think. The college was giving a May Ball and, as Oscar negotiated the ranks of arched white jasmine and potted palms that blocked the entrance to the Porter's Lodge and watched from the window of the Wren Library as the workmen banged up the tents in Nevile's Court and laid the wooden floors for dancing, he felt for the first time as though he had no place there.

A van brought the books from Sir Aubrey. There were several boxes. Oscar lugged them one by one up to his attic room and made a wall of them beside the desk. When he unpacked the first box he asked Mrs Piggott to take a photograph of him sitting with them piled on his desk and sent it to Sir Aubrey with his next letter. He did not go to the library. Nor did he see Kit, though once by the river he glimpsed him leaning on the parapet of Trinity Bridge with a girl in a pale blue dress. He studied at Chesterton Road, puzzling over Henry Melville's pencilled marginalia and doggedly working his way through Mr Willis's syllabus. Mrs Piggott complained, she said she did not run the kind of house where gentlemen lounged about in their rooms all day, but at least from up there Cambridge looked almost the same as it always had, the canvas tents no more than glimpses of white between the spires and the leaded roofs. He was glad when the women took flight and the tents came down and all that remained of them were divots in the velvet lawns.

It was the last day of term when he ran into Kit in Trinity Street.

‘Where the devil have you been?' Kit said. ‘We thought you must be dead. Either that or locked into some abandoned cellar at the Cavendish with nothing but alpha particles to keep you going through the Long Vac.'

Kit was going down the next day. He was to spend a few weeks with Girouard in France and the rest of the summer at his family's estate in the Highlands.

‘You'd adore it,' he said to Oscar. ‘Shooting and Scottish dancing and a deep distrust of cleverness in all its forms.'

‘It sounds like Army training.'

Kit laughed. ‘The food's not much better, either. You'd better come to tea this afternoon. It might be the last decent meal I have for months.'

Oscar bought rock buns at the baker's on Bridge Street. By that time in the afternoon they were all that was left. The woman behind the counter put them in a brown paper bag, then held the bag by its corners and flipped it over to close it. The bag made him think of his mother. When they had bought cakes when he was little she had drawn mouse faces on brown paper bags with black noses and long black whiskers and black centres to their twisted brown paper ears. He was still thinking about his mother when he came out of the shop and walked straight into a girl walking the other way, dropping the bag on the pavement.

‘Goodness, I'm so sorry,' the girl said, ducking to pick it up, and as she handed it to him Oscar realised it was Frances, Kit's friend. He had not seen her since the day they had met outside Magdalene. ‘Oh, hello,' she said.

‘Hello.'

‘Oscar, isn't it? We met once. With Kit Ferguson.'

‘I remember.'

‘I hope your cakes aren't spoiled.'

‘Rock buns. The fall will have done them good. Softened them up a bit.'

Frances smiled awkwardly, fiddling with a button on her sleeve.

‘So, are you well?' Oscar asked to fill in the silence. ‘You look well.'

‘I'm . . . yes. It's awfully warm, isn't it? Though I suppose one shouldn't complain. Not after all that rain last month.'

‘I suppose not.'

‘And how are you? How's Kit?'