We That Are Left (37 page)

‘The ancients thought sunsets proved the existence of God,' Phyllis said. ‘Do you think anyone believes in God any more?'

‘No one I know.'

‘I wish I did sometimes. It would be a comfort, wouldn't it, to believe in something bigger? Something more than just us.'

‘You don't have to believe in God to believe in that.'

‘But what?'

‘The universe.'

‘The universe?' Phyllis made a face. ‘But that's like believing in the British Empire or the motor car. It's just . . . there.'

‘It's not like that at all. It's like God. Well, almost.'

‘How?'

‘You really want me to explain?'

‘More than anything.' The way she said it made his heart turn over.

‘All right,' he said. ‘I believe that the design of the universe determines all things to exist, that it obeys its own inexorable laws to cause effects that we understand only dimly but which underpin every aspect of every particle in every solar system in space. I don't understand how and even if I was five hundred times cleverer than I am I probably never would,
but I also understand that it doesn't matter. I don't have to know how it works to believe it, to be in awe of its mysteries, its beauty and complexity. Of the unimaginable intelligence that created it. I'm not in awe of motor cars. The rudiments of the internal combustion engine are actually pretty easy to grasp.'

‘Says you.'

Oscar grinned. ‘My mother always said we'd do better if we stopped worrying about believing in God and believed in other people.'

‘Even if you don't know how they work?'

‘Then most of all.'

The bridge was crowded with people hustling towards the railway station, girls in belted mackintoshes, blank-faced businessmen with bowler hats and rolled umbrellas. A jostle of anonymity and yet every one the central character of their own story, hoping and dreading and striving and suffering and wanting to be happy. Oscar hoped they were happy. He wanted to open his arms, to laugh out loud so that the happiness that swelled inside him might be scattered on the air and carried like spores into people's lungs, their blood. He had not known that about happiness, that it would feel like there was so much to spare. He leaned against Phyllis, entwining his fingers with hers.

‘I believe in something else as well,' he said.

‘And what's that?'

‘I believe that once in a blue moon things happen that you never dreamed of, that you never even knew enough to hope for.'

‘The hand of Fate?'

‘There's no such thing as Fate. But sometimes, just sometimes, there's sheer dumb luck.'

He meant to return to Cambridge the morning after Marjorie's dance. Instead, he stayed in London. He took a room in a cheap hotel behind Marylebone Station. The hotel was called
the Majestic. The plaster on the façade was peeling and the carpet in the narrow hallway was dark with stains. Every day he told Phyllis that he would go back to Cambridge that evening but as the sun slipped lower, angling through the chimney pots and setting the summer trees on fire, he missed one train after another until he gave up pretending and said that one more night would not hurt. By the third evening the proprietress sighed when he pushed open the door. She had copper hair and long overlapping teeth smudged with lipstick.

‘Don't tell me,' she said, hauling her ledger out from beneath the desk. ‘You missed the last train.'

When she had reentered his name in the register she gave him his key and the suitcase he had left with her during the day.

‘Room Five. Again.' She sucked on her long teeth. ‘I don't know what line of business you're in and I don't suppose I want to. Whatever it is, though, it wouldn't hurt to buy a clock.'

He stayed in London for nearly a week. He drifted through those first days as though he was in a hot air balloon, aware only of Phyllis beside him and the sudden rushes of joy like gusts of wind that tipped him sideways, giddy with exhilaration, the city beneath him as tiny and inconsequential as a toy. In the end it was Phyllis who gently suggested it was time he went back to Cambridge. London was her city, her days earthbound, moored by her work. She was taking lessons in Arabic and ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs from an Egyptologist at the British Museum. She would not miss them, she said, not even for him.

He waited for her in a dingy café near the museum, spinning out a cup of tea. The professor gave her exercises to work on between lessons. Several times that week she brought her books to the Park and studied while he sprawled next to her, waiting for her to be finished. Absorption puckered the skin between her eyebrows and pressed the pink tip of her tongue against her teeth. The urge to touch was too great for him
then, but though she smiled at him distractedly or touched her fingers to his, he knew that she did it to please him, that her attention in that moment was all for the feathers and the snakes and the indecipherable squiggles and dots of the Arabic abjad, and that it was one of the reasons that he loved her.

He loved her. He knew it quietly, with a certainty that startled him and yet was somehow no surprise at all. His love for her was a part of him and perhaps always had been, marbling the muscular tissue that moved his ribs and raised his diaphragm, diffusing every tiny alveolus in his lungs. He could feel the constriction of it, like the squeeze of a hand, whenever he took a breath. He could no more stop loving her than he could stop his own heart.

They agreed Phyllis would visit Cambridge the following Sunday. Oscar worked, partly because Phyllis had said he must be longing to get back to it but mostly to make the time pass. He attempted geology, a subject he had never studied before, but it stifled him, the stolidity of it, the leaden creep of imperceptible change.

Instead, he thought about Einstein. It seemed impossible, somehow, that a single scientist, working alone, had developed a theory of Nature that encompassed the whole history of the universe, that described the state of matter and geometry everywhere and at every moment in time. In the science journals his critics questioned Einstein's conclusions and argued against the mounting mathematisation of modern physics, the tendency to abstract and increasingly abstruse theory building without regard to the principles of common sense. While Oscar had a basic grasp of the principles of special relativity, or hoped he did, the general theory bewildered him. He wished Kit was in Cambridge. He had told Phyllis he accepted the limitations of his own intelligence but it was not quite true. He could hardly bear to think that the future might be closed off to him, that his own intellectual shortcomings would keep him from gaining even the most passing glimpse of this new
and hidden world. If Kit were here perhaps he would be able to explain it in a way that Oscar understood.

The mass of an object or system is a measure of its energy, and if a body gives off the energy E in the form of radiation, its mass diminishes by E over c
²
where c is the speed of light. The speed of light is a constant and space and time are relative. The span of a year, a yard, changes dependent upon the position and velocity of the observer. It defies reason. And yet when you are in love and waiting, you know only too well that every minute is an hour, and the sixty miles to London stretches and shrinks, the reach of a hand and, abruptly, the breadth of a boundless sea.

A year later it was Sunday. He was waiting for her on the platform when the train pulled in. She wore a wide-brimmed hat and a white dress with green stripes. He took her to the river, to the horse chestnut tree. They sat on the bank on his outspread jacket, looking down into the water. It was not awkwardness that kept them from speaking but its opposite, a deep absorbed settling that had no purpose for words. He held her hand in his, his skin alive with the silent music of her. She no longer bit her fingernails.

Later, when the tourists came, they rented a rowing boat. He told the boatman that she was his sister. She leaned against the cushions, smiling at him as he rowed them splashily upstream towards Grantchester Meadows, his shirtsleeves rolled to the elbows, and he wondered if it was possible to be happier than he was at this moment, his arms aching, his palms rubbed raw by the rough wooden oars. Silvery fish darted in the trailing weed and the banks of the river were foamy with meadowsweet.

‘We could stop,' she said.

‘We're not there yet.'

‘Then at least let me help.' Setting the boat rocking from side to side, she stood and twisted herself around to sit next to him. He slid to one side to give her room, feeling the warmth
of her hip next to his, her hand on his arm as she steadied herself. ‘One each.'

Her stroke was oiled, easy, the oar dipping into the green water like a hand.

‘My father taught me,' she said. ‘He said it was a good way of getting away from people.'

She told Oscar that her mother was going to Flanders. According to Eleanor, it had been Theo's idea. In a recent sitting he had grown agitated, repeating a single name over and over again. The name had not come through clearly. Edwin, the spirit guide said, or perhaps Eamon, she could not be sure. The next day Eleanor had received a letter from Mrs Coates. The two women had not seen each other since the terrible events in Bournemouth, though they had continued to write. Tucked inside the letter was a cutting from
The Times
. A French officer was offering private tours of the battlefields. Mrs Coates said that she had already written to him to make enquiries. Perhaps, she thought, if she could see the place where her boy had passed his last days, she might find some peace. She asked if Eleanor might want to go with her.

Eleanor cried when she got the letter. Mrs Coates' son's name was Alwyn.

‘It's not just the awful tenuousness of it,' Phyllis said and she stared out towards the bank, her oar lifted from the water. ‘How will going do anything but make it worse? It's like some terrible vision of Hell out there. And it's not safe. The ground is packed with unexploded shells; they go off all the time. People get hurt, killed even. But she won't listen. When I said she'd only get blown to bits she looked at me with this expression on her face as though there was no point in even talking about it, that I couldn't possibly understand.'

‘And your father? What does he say?'

‘He says it's her business. I don't think he cares any more what she does.'

‘I'm sure that's not true.'

‘Are you?' She pulled in her oar, letting it rest in the rowlock. ‘I saw him this week, you know. In London.'

‘How was he?'

‘I don't know. He didn't see me. He was helping a woman out of a taxi. She did this weird pirouette as she stepped out onto the pavement, like a chorus girl or something, and then he kissed her.'

‘Are you sure it was him?'

‘They were only as far away as that tree. I don't know how they didn't see me too. I just stood there, frozen to the spot, gaping at them.' She looked at Oscar. ‘It was Mrs Maxwell Brooke.'

Oscar did not say anything. He reached out and took her hand, sliding his fingers between hers. She shrugged.

‘I don't know why I care. It should be better, shouldn't it, knowing that they're just as bad as each other?' She tried to smile but her eyes were bright with tears. She blinked. ‘Sorry. So stupid.'

‘Not stupid in the least.' Leaning over he kissed her very gently on the corner of her mouth. She turned her head away, pulling her hand free of his.

‘I'm sorry,' he said. ‘I didn't mean . . .'

She wiped her eyes on her sleeve. Then, cupping his head with both hands, she kissed him so hard that he no longer knew where his mouth ended and hers began. When at last they pulled apart he was dizzy, dazzled, the glitter of the sunlit river patterning his eyes. Her eyelashes were paler at the ends than at the roots and in the grey of her eyes there were hazel flecks like freckles. She caught his hand and kissed it. ‘Ouch,' she said softly, touching her lips to the blisters.

‘Aye, there's the rub,' he said.

She laughed. ‘Rub-a-dub-dub, three fools in a tub, and who do you think they be?'

‘You and me and . . . just you and me. Two fools in a tub.'

‘I suppose we'll just have to manage without the candlesticks.'

‘We'll have meat and bread,' he said. ‘We can eat sandwiches by moonlight.'

‘With a runcible spoon like the owl and the pussycat.'

‘All right but I have to warn you, I shan't dance.'

‘Not even with me?'

‘Not even with you. You need to preserve your energy.'

‘And why is that?'

‘To row me home. You do know you're rowing me home, don't you?'

‘You . . . !'

Leaning over Phyllis seized a cushion from the bench and tried to thump him with it. He twisted away, setting the boat lurching from side to side as he snatched a cushion of his own and held it out in front of him like a shield. She pushed it away, laughing, pressing her cushion against his face and her laugh was so infectious it made him laugh too and she let her cushion fall and leaned against him, still laughing, the boat rocking beneath them as though it was laughing too.

London at the height of summer was dead. The grass in the Park was yellow and the trees drooped, heavy with dust. On Marylebone Road the buses coughed out exhaust smoke, hazing the air blue. When Jessica took off her blouse at the end of the day there was a grey line around the collar and the fabric was speckled with smuts.

Gerald had gone away. Some friends had taken a villa on the water at Lake Como. A palazzo, Gerald called it, which made Jessica think of Nanny. Nanny would have considered palazzo to be showing off. She was glad when he did not ask her to come with him—the Italian lakes were for old people and invalids, people who liked to take a little air in the afternoon in their bath chairs—and at the same time faintly perturbed. She knew he knew the girls at
Woman's Friend
were entitled to only one week's holiday each year, that Jessica would have to wait until the other girls had taken theirs. She still wondered if he was growing tired of her. She wondered, too, if the friends at Lake Como had known Christabel.