by Clare Clark
‘Her name is Mrs Carey.’
‘She wore a German ring because her husband was a Hun. You can’t just change that with a—a piece of paper.’
‘The law would say otherwise.’
‘So you don’t care that Oscar has German uncles, German cousins? You don’t care that it might have been one of Oscar’s family who killed Theo?’
‘For God’s sake, Jessica!’ her father shouted, banging his glass down on the table so hard that Phyllis jumped. Jessica bit the inside of her cheek to keep her steady and made herself meet her father’s glare. She could feel her heart thudding in her chest. His hands were clenched on the table and for a wild moment she wondered if he meant to hit her. There were flecks of spittle in the corner of his mouth and his neck was mottled purple and red. She could see the hairs in his nostrils moving in and out as he breathed.
Then, as if a wire had been cut, he looked away. The side of his hand caught the handle of his fork as he reached into his lap for his napkin, knocking it to the floor. Phyllis leaned down and picked it up, putting it on her own plate.
‘I’ll ring for a clean one,’ she said but Sir Aubrey shook his head.
‘I’ve had enough,’ he said and, not looking at Jessica, he wiped his mouth very carefully on his napkin. Then he folded it and put it on the table and pushed back his chair. They listened in silence as the echo of his footsteps receded down the passage.
‘Well,’ Jessica said. ‘He’s in a filthy temper.’
Phyllis did not answer. Reaching for the bell she rang it. ‘You’ve finished, haven’t you?’ she said as an afterthought, eyeing Jessica’s barely touched plate.
‘What do you care?’ Jessica pushed the plate away. The smell of congealing gravy made her feel sick. She supposed it was too much to hope for, that Phyllis would ever take her side. She scowled at her sister but Phyllis pressed her lips together and went back to her book.
‘You could talk to me,’ Jessica said. ‘It would make a nice change.’
‘Or you could read,’ Phyllis said evenly. ‘That would make a nice change too.’ When Enid came in to clear the plates she lifted her book from the table to make it easier for her to reach but she did not stop reading. Eleanor detested maids in the dining room, she said it made her feel as though she were eating in a public house, but even she had grown used to it. There were no footmen left at Ellinghurst, not since Harold and Robert had enlisted.
‘Coffee in here, miss, or in the drawing room?’ Enid asked.
‘In here is fine, thank you, Enid,’ Phyllis said. Enid put the pot in front of her and set out the cups. Jessica waited for Phyllis to pour. Then, with a noisy sigh, she reached for the pot herself and poured two cups, pushing one in front of her sister.
‘Thank you,’ Phyllis murmured absently and went on reading. Jessica drank her coffee. She thought about leaving the table but she did not have anywhere else to go. She did not want to be alone. Instead, she pleated the edge of the tablecloth and wondered why it was that Phyllis refused to take any interest in clothes and make-up. Nanny always said that Phyllis’s red hair was striking, which was the kind of word people used when they could not find anything nicer to say, but her pale pointed face cried out for a little colour and her chest was as flat as a boy’s. She had never shown the least interest in parties even though she was meant to have come out the previous summer. No one had, of course. There had been no Season in 1915, no debutantes or presentations at Court. The War had stopped all that, stopped it dead, just as it had stopped absolutely bloody everything else.
The blackness was rising in her again. Dropping the hem of the tablecloth Jessica kicked at the table leg, swinging her foot backwards and forwards like a pendulum. It hurt her toes, which helped somehow so she went on kicking. The thumps shook the table. Phyllis frowned.
‘You shouldn’t frown like that,’ Jessica said. ‘You’ll get awful wrinkles.’
‘Like this?’ Phyllis’s frown deepened. Without lifting her eyes from the page she reached for her coffee cup.
‘You’re not seriously going to drink that?’ Jessica said. ‘It’s got a skin on it.’
Phyllis glanced at the cup, grimaced and put it back down. Jessica leaned over, jabbing at the skin with her spoon. ‘For a girl who’s supposed to be clever you can be unbelievably dense.’
Phyllis gave a strangled cry and dropped her book on the table. ‘Sometimes, Jessica . . .’ She held her hands out, palms up. ‘What exactly is wrong with you?’
‘What’s wrong with me? I’m not the one who tried to drink coffee with a skin on it like a . . . like a French letter! Oh, don’t look so shocked. If you thought less about French books and more about French letters you’d probably be a lot less miserable.’
‘Is that right?’
‘You know it is.’
‘And there I was thinking I was miserable because Theo is dead. How dense can you get?’
When she slammed the door the pictures shook.
Alone at the table Jessica jammed her spoon into the sugar and twisted it, scattering brown crystals across the starched white cloth. It was usually Jessica, not Phyllis, who was the door slammer at Ellinghurst. Quite out of the blue, the lines of a poem came to her, a poem sent to their mother by Theo, who had never had any time for poetry, after Uncle Henry had been killed at Gallipoli.
War knows no power. Safe shall be my going,
Secretly armed against all death’s endeavour;
Safe though all safety’s lost; safe where men fall;
And, if these poor limbs die, safest of all.
Dropping the spoon with a clatter Jessica began to cry.
4
Oscar went to the tower. There were 385 steps in the tower, from the bottom to the top. 385 was not only a prime number and the sum of three other primes but a square pyramidal number, which meant that if you arranged one hundred balls in a 10 X 10 square and then put the other balls on top, 385 balls would be enough to make a pyramid like the ones in Egypt. Sir Aubrey had once told Oscar that the tower had been built without any scaffolding at all, just one piece on top of the other. Like an equation, Oscar had thought. He wanted to count each of the 385 steps as he climbed them and let the numbers drop one by one into his brain, like stones into a pond.
That morning the postman had brought a brown paper parcel tied with string. The parcel contained Theo’s uniform from the Front. Godmother Eleanor had laid it out on Theo’s bed, on the freshly washed sheets. The waistcoat and breeches were bloodstained, the jacket torn. Everything was stiff with mud. Oscar had not known mud could smell like that, as though mud was not earth at all but made of rotting meat. Its thick reek stopped his throat and crept like a fog under the doors and into the curtains. It was impossible to be upstairs.
Oscar had gone first to the library where everything smelled of wax polish and paper but when he opened the door his mother was in there with one hand on Sir Aubrey’s arm and Sir Aubrey was rocking backwards and forwards, just rocking without making any noise, so he had fled outside before they knew he was there.
The buttons on Theo’s uniform had tigers on them. The Royal Hampshire regiment. Everyone at school knew all the regiments in the British Army. They talked all the time about how they wished they were not too young to go to war. They said they would give the Hun a pasting and every time they said that someone would look at Oscar. They called Oscar the Boche. It did not matter that he had a picture of Theo in his uniform on the dressing table by his bed. Bash the Boche, one of them would shout, and each one would take turns to kick him or slap him or punch him in the ribs. They said he was a spy and stole the torch his mother had given him for his birthday because they said he would use it to signal to Germans in the night. At the end of term McAvoy had told everyone that Oscar’s father had been unmasked as a secret agent, that he had been taken to the Tower of London where he would be executed by firing squad.
He did not tell them that his father was already dead. They knew anyway, even if they chose
not to remember, and if there was any trouble they would have to tell his mother and he did not want that. She said that there was nothing to be afraid of but the truth was that, since the sinking of the Lusitania, she had been afraid a good deal. The days of Churchill joking about interning German wine with his dinner were long gone. Now everything remotely German was wicked and disgusting, not just Hock and Moselle but German sausage and Goethe and even Beethoven. In Clapham the greengrocer’s shop was smashed up and set on fire for having a German-sounding name, even though the owners were Hungarian and had been there for more than fifty years. His mother took off the poesy ring she always wore on the third finger of her right hand. Oscar’s father had given it to her when he proposed marriage. The gold ring was engraved with entwined ivy leaves and, inside the band, the words du allein which meant you alone in German. Her finger was narrower where the ring had been, as though the gold had rubbed it away.
When his mother told him she was changing their names she said that she understood if it made him sad or even angry. Oscar was only angry that she would not let him be Carey like her, but only a version of his German self. He did not believe her when she said that he was the most English boy you could ask for because his father had chosen to be English rather than just being born that way. Every time he looked at something and the German word for it came into his head first he felt cold inside, as if the boys at school were right and he was the enemy after all. It frightened him that he might do something German in his sleep.
He walked briskly across the lawn towards the woods, gulping the cold air, but all he could see was Godmother Eleanor’s face when she opened the parcel. Oscar’s father had come to London because his family disapproved of him, but there were plenty of brothers and sisters who had stayed. Before the war Tante Adeline had sent his mother a card every Christmas. She had five sons, all grown up, and dozens of nephews, Oscar’s cousins. He knew that statistically the possibility that it was one of them who had killed Theo Melville or the Knox brothers or his mother’s friend Mrs Winterson’s oldest son was vanishingly small, but that did not stop him from thinking about it all the time. As he pushed open the door to the tower the stink of Theo’s uniform clung greasily to his hair and skin, gagging the back of his throat.
It was a moment or two before he saw Phyllis. She was crouched up in a ball on the wooden bench that ran around the Tiled Room, her arms wrapped around her shins like a fledgling fallen out of its nest. A book was open face downwards on the bench beside her. As Oscar backed away she looked up. Her pointed nose was red.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘It’s you.’
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean . . .’
‘It’s all right.’
‘I’ll go.’
‘No. Don’t.’
Oscar hesitated. Phyllis sniffed and scrubbed at her red-rimmed eyes with the cuff of her jersey. ‘Please don’t,’ she said. ‘We don’t have to talk or anything. It might just be nice to . . . be with someone for a bit. You know?’
Oscar nodded. He thought perhaps he did know, a little. He wanted to say he was sorry about Theo but the words stuck in his throat. He thought of something his mother had said to him once, that it was not always easier to say sorry just because you knew for certain that something was your fault.
‘You’re cold,’ he said instead.
She shrugged and pulled her jersey over her hands. ‘I’m all right,’ she said. She was not wearing a coat. Oscar looked down at his own overcoat, his striped muffler. He had never had a new coat before, not new to him, but his mother had taken one look at him when he came back from school and said that he looked like a scarecrow.
‘Look at you,’ she had said, pulling him in front of the glass. ‘That coat’s so tight it looks like your arms are on back to front,’ and he had laughed, because that was exactly what it looked like, and he had kissed her on the top of her head, which made her laugh too. The coat was one of Theo’s castoffs and like all of Theo’s clothes it was beautifully made, only Oscar had grown three inches since the summer holidays. Three inches was an increase of 4.286 per cent, once you had rounded down the extra decimal points. There was another bigger coat of Theo’s in the wardrobe but they had gone to Arding & Hobbs instead and bought a new one. Oscar hesitated. He could hear the rattle of Phyllis’s teeth chattering.
‘Here.’ He pulled off his scarf and thrust it at her. ‘You can have it. Not to keep, I mean, I’ll want it back later but . . .’
To his surprise Phyllis gave a lopsided smile. ‘Thank you,’ she said. As she wrapped it round her neck Oscar thought of the matted rag of khaki in Theo’s package. In Clapham the streets echoed with marching columns of men. On the Common, next to the bit they had dug up for vegetables, a large square had been commandeered by the War Office for officer training. The soldiers’ cap badges glinted in the sun and their polished boots were spotless.
‘I’m very sorry,’ he said, looking at the floor. ‘About Theo,
I mean.’
‘I know.’
Oscar could think of nothing else to say. He buried his hands in his pockets, only his book was in one of them so he took it out and put it on the table. He thought of the last time he had seen Theo, when he had been home on leave. Godmother Eleanor had never left him alone, sitting on the arm of his chair, running her fingers over his shoulders or through his hair. At meals she sat him beside her and rested her hand on his arm. He thought of Charles II who had grown so tired of his scrofulous subjects coming to him to be healed that he had hired royal strokers to do it for him. That was the way Godmother Eleanor usually touched people too. Not Theo. The way she touched Theo it was as if he was a magnet and her fingers made of iron filings.
Phyllis picked up his book. ‘The Time Machine. Is it any good?’
‘I don’t know yet. I like the beginning.’
Phyllis opened it. She read the first page, then turned over. Oscar did not like other people touching his things but he did not say anything.
‘I like this part,’ she said. ‘Where the Time Traveller says that there’s no such thing as an instantaneous cube. That in order to exist something must have not only Length, Breadth and Thickness but Duration. It has to exist in time. I’ve never thought of it that way before. That Time could be a dimension.’
‘There’s no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it.’
Phyllis’s finger found the line. ‘Yes.’
‘Wells is right,’ Oscar said. ‘Space and time should be thought of from a four-dimensional point of view. Mathematically, I mean.’
‘Is that what they teach you at school?’
‘I wish. School stuff isn’t nearly that interesting.’
‘And I thought it was only girls who weren’t allowed to learn anything worth knowing.’
Oscar was silent. Last term his mathematics master had stopped teaching him with the rest of the class. He had given Oscar a list of books and sent him to the library. Most of the books were good. Oscar had particularly liked the one about mathematical rules that turned out not to be rules, like the angles of a triangle always adding up to exactly 180°. The mathematician who proved this was not a rule was called Riemann. Riemann had also invented a new kind of geometry and proposed a hypothesis to explain the distribution of prime numbers which Oscar’s master said was one of the most important unresolved problems in pure mathematics, but when he gave Oscar a book about Riemann to read during prep Oscar accidentally left it on his desk. Bernhard Riemann was German.
‘Eleanor says you’re a Mathematics prodigy,’ Phyllis said. ‘That you’ll win a scholarship to Oxford.’
‘Maybe. I’d like to.’
She stared at her knees. ‘You’re lucky. Eleanor wouldn’t let me go. She says that the really clever girls know not to look too clever. Men don’t marry clever girls apparently.’
Oscar looked surprised. ‘I didn’t know that.’
‘Uncle Henry tried to change her mi
nd. He said that . . . well, I suppose it doesn’t matter now.’
They were both silent. Phyllis tucked her fingers inside the cuffs of her jersey and hugged herself to keep warm. Her pointed face was milky pale and there were purple shadows under her eyes. She looked very tired and sad. Oscar tried to think of something kind to say to her.
‘Did you know it’s because of your Uncle Henry that they don’t let scientists fight any more?’ he said at last. ‘Not the really good ones, at any rate.’
‘Really?’
‘My physics master gave me a book about him. Well, more of a journal really. There was an article in it about your uncle.’
‘About it being because of him that scientists aren’t allowed to fight?’
‘No, Mr Hall told me that. The article was about Melville’s Law.’
Phyllis smiled faintly. ‘Eleanor always says Melville’s Law is that the less a Melville has to do, the more time he will spend in his study pretending to do it.’
‘Actually that’s not Melville’s Law.’
‘I know. It’s a joke.’
‘Oh,’ Oscar said. He stared at the floor. ‘Sorry.’
‘The awful thing is I don’t actually know what Melville’s Law is. The real one, I mean.’
Oscar hesitated. ‘Do you want me to tell you?’
‘Please.’
‘Melville’s Law proved a systematic mathematical relationship between the wavelengths of the X-rays produced by chemical elements and their atomic numbers.’
‘I don’t even know what that means.’
‘It means that until your uncle came along, people thought that atomic numbers were semi-arbitrary. I mean, they knew they were based approximately on atomic mass but they didn’t think they were fixed or anything. Melville’s experiments proved that an element’s atomic number correlates directly with the X-ray spectra of its atoms.’
‘Is that important?’