We That Are Left (49 page)

‘Look, no hands,' he said. ‘I'm flying!' Then he let go.

‘Catch me!' he screamed and suddenly he was hurtling through Jessica's head, not floating on the air like the lit sweetie papers or the scattered dust of Grandfather Melville, but falling, falling and smashing like an egg on the kitchen floor, and she had burst into noisy sobs and clutched at his legs and Theo had kicked out at her, hard enough that she let go, the scream huge in her chest, and she had thought he would fall then for certain but he had pulled himself back into the tower, his mouth tied in a knot, and said that if he had known what a baby she was he would have brought Phyllis instead. He had never taken her up to his den again.

‘Are you all right?' Oscar asked. She looked tired, her golden lustre dull and tarnished. He wondered if it was anxiety for her father or for herself that knocked her off balance and robbed her of her old imperiousness. A girl like Jessica was not made to manage alone.

‘You're cold,' he said. ‘We should go back in.'

There was a cable on the breakfast table. It was from Phyllis, from the French border. She would arrive at Ellinghurst the following afternoon.

‘You'll stay, won't you?' Jessica said, passing Oscar the telegram. Just the sight of her name like that, printed at the bottom of the flimsy sheet of paper, was enough to make his heart leap. He thought of her sprawled under the willow tree, pulling bottles of beer from the river like shiny brown fish, and in London bent over her books, the pages smouldering in the fierce heat of her focus. He thought of her on the platform at Cambridge station the last time, the way she had looked at him as though she was trying not to be disappointed in him, as though he was the one forsaking her. He thought of her walking through the front door into the Great Hall, a slight pale figure in a squashed hat, and the thought was a bruise in his chest, inside the circle of his arms. He was not sure that he could be here with her and not hold her.

‘I don't know,' he said.

‘Please.' Jessica touched his sleeve, her face turned up to his. He flinched, shifting in his chair. ‘At least until Father's well enough to see you. He was so adamant that he talk to you. Phyllis won't stay, you know. She never stays.'

Oscar did not answer. He picked up his coffee cup and in his head the film played over and over, the car drawing up under the carriage porch, Mrs Johns opening the front door, Phyllis greeting her and hurrying into the Great Hall, the brim of her hat turning towards him as he stepped forward, but though he strained to make it out, he could not see her face. However many times he ran it back there was no more film, only a clatter of black and white as the reel spun to a close.

In the early hours of the morning, the nurse heard Sir Aubrey crying out. His temperature had risen sharply and, along with a shaking chill, he was seized with sharp chest pains. The dry cough that had troubled him for several days now brought up a greenish phlegm. He struggled to breathe. For the rest of the night he drifted in and out of a fevered sleep. When morning came she summoned Dr Wilcox who confirmed pneumonia. He prescribed aspirins for the headache and steam inhalations to ease the congestion in his lungs. Visitors, even Jessica, were prohibited.

When Jessica had seen the doctor out she went back upstairs.

‘The Patient's sleeping,' the nurse said. She looked exhausted.

‘Good. Then you should too,' Jessica said, ignoring the nurse's protests. ‘I'll sit with him. If he wakes I'll ring the bell.'

When the nurse had gone she stood at the window watching the rain drift in gauzy veils across the lawn. She wondered if Oscar had gone for a walk or if he was somewhere in the house. She hoped he had thought to take an umbrella. Raindrops snaked down the window panes, fattening as they swallowed one another's tails. There was a cold draught where the window had warped. The paint was peeling from the rotting sash frames and clots of whiskery moss clogged the stone sill. Above the window the gutter dripped, streaking
the wall with green slime. Little by little the house was surrendering, letting go.

Restlessly she opened her father's wardrobe, running her hand over the lined-up jackets, the silk ties like drying fishes on their racks. She looked at the photographs in their silver frames on the chest of drawers, Theo as a baby in a bunchy sailor suit, herself and Phyllis in matching summer dresses, Uncle Henry and Aunt Violet on their wedding day. Tucked into the frames were several snapshots of Ellinghurst. Jessica did not know if there had ever been a picture of Eleanor. Until his illness this room had been her father's private domain.

In the next room her father coughed violently, fighting for breath. Hurriedly Jessica pushed open the door. The curtains were drawn and the twilit gloom was warm and stale. The nurse had propped her father up so high he was almost upright and his head lolled back against the stacked pillows, his mouth slack. When he coughed the force of the convulsion jerked his body, his startled hand jumping on the counterpane.

Jessica poured a glass of water and held it to his lips but he did not swallow. The water ran over his mouth and down his chin. He coughed again, wildly, helplessly, his eyes bulging as though he were choking. Jessica fought the surge of panic that spiked her throat.

‘I'll fetch the nurse,' she said but as she stepped away from the bed he caught her wrist. His eyes were imploring but, though his tongue moved stickily in his mouth, no sound came out.

‘What is it, Father?' she asked, trying to keep her voice steady. With her free hand she reached for one of the neatly folded handkerchiefs on the bedside table and wiped his mouth. He spat, a slick of greenish-yellow streaked with blood. Then he let his head fall back onto the pillows.

He closed his eyes, his face softening, his fingers uncurling from around her wrist. His breath slowed. Jessica watched him sleep, her hand on his, soothed by the faint whistle of air in his lungs. The room was very warm. She leaned her head
against the wing of the chair as the lassitude spread through her, softening her bones. Drowsily she closed her eyes.

She dreamed of Max. They galloped across the park, Max's sides heaving, his smoky breath wreathing his head. Theo was with them. At the bottom of the hill by the river they stopped and Max dropped his head, his lip curled as he ripped greedily at the long grass. Jessica let out the rein, her hands on the pommel of the saddle, and looked back up at the house. It was evening, summer, the sky a deep cornflower blue, and the low sun flamed gold in the windows. She raised a hand, shading her eyes from the glare.

‘Theo?' she said but Theo was not there. Max raised his head, yanking the bit. His mouth was frothed with green. The sun in the windows grew stronger, licking upwards, golden-red. Above the towers the blue sky was black. She could hear it, louder and louder, the greedy crackling, the crash of beams. Max whinnied, a high sharp shriek like a scream. The house was on fire.

She woke suddenly, her mouth dry, her heart pounding. In the bed her father gasped, a shrill string of strangled whimpers as he fought for breath. Frantically Jessica pressed the bell, then ran to the door and flung it open, shouting for the nurse. When she hurried in, tying a freshly starched apron, Jessica was holding her father's hand. His lips were blue.

‘For God's sake, do something,' she cried. The nurse pulled Sir Aubrey forward and, sliding her hands up inside his pyjama jacket, rubbed him vigorously on his back and his chest simultaneously. Sir Aubrey's eyes stretched. Then, with a violent convulsion, he coughed, splattering the blankets with vomit and phlegm.

Jessica held his hand as the nurse bundled up the dirty sheets for laundering. He lay jacketless in the half-stripped bed, his chest pale and sunken against the pillows, his bad arm slumped uselessly at his side.

‘Poor Father,' she said shakily. He stared at her in exhaustion, his mouth hanging open. His tongue was furred with
grey. ‘You're not allowed to die, do you hear me? You have to hold on. For me and Phyllis. For Ellinghurst.'

Her father's good eye fluttered. His bad one, bloodshot and raw, stared sightlessly past her shoulder. His tongue pushed at his teeth. She leaned closer.

‘What is it?'

His mouth made an O. ‘Oss.'

She frowned helplessly. ‘I can't—'

‘Osk.' The effort of speaking made the tendons stand out in his neck.

‘Oscar? Oscar's here, Father. He's here. When you're better you can see him.'

‘You,' he echoed. He stared at her, his mouth straining, but the effort to shape words was too much for him. He closed his eyes, his head falling back against the pillows. Jessica ran her thumb over the back of his hand. The skin was papery, stained with blotches of purple. When the nurse returned with a clean pyjama jacket she stepped back from the bed, watching as she dressed him and fastened the buttons. He did not open his eyes. The nurse spread clean sheets over him, smoothing them flat. In the wide bed he looked hardly bigger than a child.

‘He needs to rest,' the nurse said.

Downstairs Jessica thought about ringing for tea. Instead, she opened the front door. It had stopped raining. She stood under the carriage porch, breathing in the cold winter air. Then, crossing her arms tightly against the chill, she walked across the gravelled sweep towards the terrace. Away from the shelter of the house the wind was sharp, whipping her hair in tails across her cheeks. She tipped back her head, exhaling the stale strained taint of the sick room. Perhaps Oscar was working in his room. She wanted to tell him that her father had been asking for him. He would not leave then, surely, not until he was stronger. Perhaps he would even stay for Christmas. They could go on playing Father's foolish photograph games in rooms familiar as her own hands and telling the stories her father had told and his father before
him. Phyllis knew those stories too but they had never interested her. She scratched in the hot foreign sand for the stories of strangers, arranging bones and broken bits of bowl into lives long lost, into crumbled gods and vanished kingdoms, and sloughed off her own past like a snake shedding its skin.

It was different with Oscar. Ellinghurst was not his house or his history, and yet it had marked him, inking him under the skin like a sailor's tattoo. She saw how he stood in front of the fire in the Great Hall, his hand absently stroking the head of the stone lion carved into the chimneypiece. When she told him that as a girl she had called the lion Rex and pretended he was her pet, he smiled and said that before he was old enough to know that the marble bust in the library was Socrates he had always addressed him as Mr Albus.

‘It means white in Latin. I felt sorry for him because he was blind.'

He no longer blushed when she smiled at him. The awkwardness of adolescence had given way to something more reserved, not coldness exactly, he could never be cold, his boyish enthusiasms were too easily stirred, but something private and unreachable, as though the parts of him that might be broken had been carefully wrapped and put away. Sometimes she spoke to him and it was as though she had woken him from sleep, the way he jumped and stared at her as though she was not the person he was expecting to see at all.

She was glad, of course, that his adoration was no longer so excruciatingly blatant. The way he had gazed at her with those abject Labrador eyes of his, so apprehensive and yet so cringingly hopeful, it was no wonder those dogs were always getting themselves kicked. And yet back they wriggled with their eager smiles, tongues lolling and tails between their legs, unable to resist the lure of whatever scrap might be dropped from the table. That morning at breakfast she had touched his arm without thinking and he had frowned and pulled away. Perhaps he thought the gesture inappropriate with her father
so ill upstairs, or perhaps he was not thinking at all, she could see from his face that he was preoccupied, but the frown had stung all the same. There had been a time, she knew, when her touch would have turned him upside down.

She still remembered the summer he came to stay before he went to training camp. He had barely been able to look at her, let alone speak, and yet he had not been able to stop looking either. She had come down the stairs in her new dress and the stunned expression on his face had made her want to laugh out loud. She had been so hopeful then, the future fizzing in her like champagne, all those wonderful young men just waiting to fall in love with her, and she had kissed him not because she cared for him in the least but because at that moment she could do anything she wanted and because the temptation to knock him for six was simply too strong to resist. She had kissed him and laughed and thought how adorable she was and what an utter goose he was to love her when he knew she would never love him back, not if they both lived to be a hundred.

She had not known then that people changed. Or, if they did not change exactly, that things happened that made them see that they were not quite the people that they had thought themselves to be. They shifted inside their skins, tugging, smoothing, finding a more comfortable fit. Oscar was like that. He had made a useless boy. He lacked entirely the careless ease, the blithe gift of living in the moment that had drawn children so inexorably to boys like Theo, but boys did not go on being boys for ever. Oscar had grown up. It suited him. She was not surprised her father was fond of him. They were alike, she thought, the kind of men people dismissed as weak and passionless because they talked less than they thought, and their passions ran deep inside the rock of them and not noisily on the surface for everyone to see.

Perhaps Uncle Henry had been like that too. At dinner Oscar had told her that one of his professors at Cambridge had supervised Uncle Henry's researches in Manchester before the
War and immediately she had pictured him in the racquets court fiddling about with Uncle Henry's old beakers and flasks, adding his own burn marks to the scorches that scarred the floor. Theo had always mocked Oscar for being a swot and an egghead but it was not difficult to imagine him doing something extraordinary. That was the thing about scientists. They saw what no one else bothered to see or else they looked at something perfectly ordinary, something everyone looked at every day, and thought something no one else had ever thought. Theo had been clever at making the world bend to his will but Oscar's cleverness would change it. Because of men like Oscar things that had once seemed fantastical or insane were ordinary. Today you could fly to Paris in two hours in an aeroplane with reading lamps or talk on the telephone in New York to someone in San Francisco. And tomorrow? Tomorrow, perhaps, there would be time machines and space machines to visit distant planets and machines to work instead of people. Perhaps there would even be a machine that could save Ellinghurst from screaming schoolboys.