by Clare Clark
But then the boys were worse. She thought of Hubert Dugdale, who for months had trailed after her like a spaniel and who out of the blue in August had presented a bouquet of roses to Iris Lloyd Warner. Iris, who was fat and freckled and got out of breath just reaching for another cake. The other girls sighed and squealed and declared the whole thing impossibly romantic, but Jessica thought it was contemptible. It was not that she cared a jot for dreary Hubert Dugdale. It was the principle. The fire of passion did not burn out just because it was not stoked. It fed on itself, greedily, blazing like a house in flames, terrifying and glorious. That Hubert Dugdale could be declaring undying love to her one week and fondling fat, splotchy Iris Lloyd Warner the next made Jessica despise him even more than she had before. What kind of a sorry apology for love was that which could be dispersed with one sharp puff, like a dandelion clock?
Sometimes she forgot that Theo was dead. Sometimes she went for a whole day without remembering and she was almost happy. She hated herself then, for forgetting. Nanny said that time was the great healer but Jessica did not want to heal. She wanted to hurt, to bleed forever like St Francis of Assisi. The hurt was all she had to offer Theo in return for being alive.
She made an inventory. She went everywhere in the house she could think of, up the spiral staircase of the turret to Grandfather Melville’s old smoking room with its curved panelling and the red lamp he had used to signal to the kitchen when he needed something, and along long-closed-off corridors and into dust-sheeted bedrooms no one had slept in since before the War. She went up to the empty attic bedrooms where the servants had slept when there were still enough servants to fill them, and where now there were only iron bedsteads and rows of tin buckets, collecting the leaks from the roof. She went to the gun room with its numbered wooden shelves of boots and gaiters and to Grandfather Melville’s racquets court in the tower, its wooden panelling sagging from the walls, its cement floor scorched and stained by years of Uncle Henry’s boyish chemistry experiments. She went to the dovecote and the orangery and the gatehouse and the empty stables where a forlorn Max kicked the partition of his loosebox for something to do. She walked around the battlements and through the gardens and between the grassed-over slopes of the old moat and out over the bridge to the orchards and the woods, and for each place, she collected up all the memories of Theo she could remember and put them in her pockets, like leaves.
Some of the memories were part of family lore, stories told so often Jessica did not know if she actually remembered them at all: Theo driving the Rolls-Royce across the croquet lawn with Pritchard running behind like a madman, or flying Mr Floyd the beleaguered tutor’s darned woollen drawers from the flagpole. Some were posed, caught forever in black and white: a round-faced Theo on Max at his first Boxing Day hunt or armed with snowballs by an enormous snowman or smiling in the woods with a shotgun broken over his arm and a brace of pigeon hooked on one finger.
The best ones, though, were the ones that were just hers. She had not thought there were so many. Theo throwing Father’s top hat like a quoit over the eagle on the Great Hall newel post. Theo opening a box in the nursery and showing her the stag beetles sprawled inside, intoxicated on the dregs of cocktails abandoned on the terrace before dinner, or swinging out on the knotted rope over the lake and landing in a splash of limbs and silver, or toasting the start of the holidays with stolen champagne poured in tooth mugs, or making her roll again and again down the slope of the moat until her skirt was green and he had single-handedly repelled the Mahdi at Khartoum. Lying with her on his stomach on the lawn and plucking the petals of daisies as she strung daisy chains: worships me, adores me, just wants me for my body. Opening the door to the old scullery when he was home on leave and finding him crying, curled up in a ball on the floor.
She did not go into the scullery again. That would not be what she remembered.
Eleanor was building a memorial. She had commissioned an architect from London to design it. It was to be a cupola of marble set on Grecian pillars with a statue inside of Apollo and an inscription from Socrates around the lip of the dome: THE SOULS OF THE RIGHTEOUS ARE IMMORTAL & DIVINE. When Sir Aubrey said that labour was scarce and that if any work was to be done it should be on keeping the roof over their heads from falling in, Eleanor walked away as though she had not heard him. She told Jessica that when Mrs Waller asked Theo if he liked the sketches for the memorial, the pointer had spun like a dervish and touched YES not once but three times. Later, she said, he had spelled out DON’T CRY DEAREST, plain as printing. Everyone agreed they had never seen a message from the Other Side come through so clearly.
Eleanor had visited Mrs Waller every Thursday since February. Jessica had presumed she would tire of it, just as she had always tired of everything else, but, five months later and despite petrol supposedly being rationed, Pritchard still drove her to Bournemouth every Thursday after lunch and waited until it was time to bring her back. Perhaps, Jessica thought sourly, her mother claimed the seances as War Work. If so it was the closest she ever got. On Saturday afternoons, when Nanny finally stopped knitting and came up to the house to wrap parcels for Allied prisoners of war, Eleanor always said she had a headache and had to lie down. Other big houses had offered themselves as convalescent homes and hospitals, but Eleanor refused, even when someone from the War Ministry wrote specially to ask. She said it was unthinkable. It was one of the few things she and Sir Aubrey agreed on.
Eleanor never asked Jessica to go with her to Mrs Waller. Jessica was glad. She hated it when Eleanor talked of the Temple, as though it was somewhere holy rather than a room above a chemist’s shop. She did not want to look at the scribbled-on scraps of paper that Eleanor flourished at her, flush-cheeked and agitated as though they were something magical and not incomprehensible gobbledegook, or to hear how Mrs Waller moved her hands over the sealed envelopes containing the sitters’ questions, so that the words came up through her skin. Mrs Waller could not hear the voices of the spirits. Instead, after each question, she would begin to recite the alphabet until the table tilted, whereupon she would begin again. The letters gained in this way would then be put together into words and sentences. When the spirits were excited, Eleanor said, the table danced on its wooden legs or even rotated like a carousel. On those days the psychical energy of the spirits was so powerful that you could see it, tiny flashes of light in the dim red darkness. On one miraculous afternoon, the table had risen clean into the air, lifted from the pull of gravity by the clamour of voices from the Other Side.
On other days Mrs Waller used the planchette, a heart-shaped piece of wood fitted with a downward-facing pencil that moved at the behest of the spirits, spelling out messages on the piece of paper underneath, or practised the art of automatic writing where her right hand seemed to be owned by someone other than she, the pen in her fingers scribbling madly on whatever paper came to hand. Eleanor said that, once the process had begun, Mrs Waller’s trance was shallow enough to allow her to ask questions so that it was almost like having a conversation.
Eleanor kept the scraps of paper in a silk box on her dressing table, even the ones where the pencil marks hardly formed letters at all. She read them over and over, like love letters, until the paper was as thin as muslin. Sometimes, on Thursday afternoons, when the car was out of sight, Jessica crept into her mother’s bedroom and took out the pieces of paper. She looked at them for a long time but, though she tried, she could not see what Eleanor could see. It felt like another kind of betrayal.
7
It was not until the Easter holidays of 1917 that the Yorkshire Melvilles finally came to stay at Ellinghurst. It was a momentous occasion. Sir Aubrey insisted on Phyllis coming back from London for the weekend, even though she said that the hospital could not spare her. He said that there were still some things that were more important than the War.
Evelyn Melville was Father’s third cousin once removed or perhaps it was twice. Sir Aubrey had explained it but Jessica had not paid attent
ion. No one but Sir Aubrey had ever met him before and then only once a million years before at a family wedding when Cousin Evelyn was a boy. Now he was a middle-aged solicitor and heir to the baronetcy. He had a wife, Cousin Lettice, and four young sons, the smallest of which was no more than a grub in a blanket and too little to be left behind. The Melville baronets had always lived at Ellinghurst. When Sir Aubrey died, the house and the title would pass to Cousin Evelyn and one of the grub-children would get Jessica’s bedroom.
The Yorkshire Melvilles arrived on the afternoon train from London. Sir Aubrey sent the car to meet them at the station. For more than a year Jessica had pictured Cousin Evelyn as a devilish but seductive villain, a black-moustached, black-hearted crook who would stake the whole estate on a single hand of cards, or sometimes as a snivelling Mr Collins, gawping at the portraits and leaving greasy fingerprints on the silver. But the man who climbed out of the car was a perfectly ordinary-looking man with thinning hair and wire-rimmed spectacles. The lenses of his spectacles were the only notable thing about him, so thick that from the side they made it look as though he had four eyes in a row, two of them huge and swimmy. He told Jessica it was his poor eyesight that had kept him out of the War.
The next day, as he and Sir Aubrey walked the estate and looked at ledgers and went to meetings with land agents and accountants, Jessica went with Pritchard to meet Phyllis’s train. Anything was better than having to stay with fat Cousin Lettice. Lettice did not leave her baby with the nursemaid like normal people. She liked to hold it and bounce it up and down on her knee. Worse, she kept offering it to Jessica like a present, as though there was no greater pleasure in the world than clutching a sour-smelling sausage that, when you squeezed it, opened its mouth and leaked a disgusting stream of white sick all down its front.
‘All babies are heavenly,’ Lettice said to Jessica, making cooing fish mouths at the squalling bundle in her arms. ‘But just you wait till you have one of your own. You’ll love it so much you’ll want to eat it up.’
Jessica resisted the temptation to ask whether babies went better with mustard or mint jelly. The Lettices of the world were no fun to tease. They only looked at you in a wounded, bewildered kind of way and said something apologetic about not really liking that sort of joke that made you feel foolish and furious at the same time.
‘She’s only been here a day,’ she told Phyllis in the car as they drove back to Ellinghurst. ‘Already she’s told me that she knows in her bones that I’ve already met the man I’m going to marry, which if it’s true is frankly the most dispiriting thing anyone’s ever said to me.’
Phyllis laughed. She was very thin, almost gaunt, her pale eyes purple-lidded and smudged with exhaustion, but it was the way that she stared out of the window as they crossed the humpbacked bridge that struck Jessica most. She knew how it felt to come back from a term away at school, that fierce mix of yearning and reprieve at every indelible twist in the lane, each achingly familiar field and fencepost lining up with their pair inside her, returning her to herself piece by piece. It made her feel closer to Phyllis, to think that she felt the same way too.
‘It’s hard to believe anyone that fat has bones, let alone feels things in them, but there you are, apparently they’re infallible,’ she said. ‘The very moment she set eyes on Cousin Evelyn off they went, marrow positively writhing with certainty. I wonder if they also happened to mention that one day, if she sat very tight, she’d wake up to find herself Lady Melville.’
A flicker of something crossed Phyllis’s face. Jessica wondered if she would ask first about Eleanor or Cousin Evelyn. She had rehearsed her answers to both. Instead, Phyllis leaned forward. ‘Would you stop the car please, Pritchard? Just here would be fine.’
‘Oh God, you’re not going to be sick, are you?’ Jessica asked but Phyllis did not answer. She did not wait for Pritchard to come round. As soon as he fixed the brake she opened the door and climbed out. Jessica followed her. They were nearly home. Ahead of them the lane cut a channel through sloping green fields dotted with sheep, and the sky stretched milky-blue towards the sea. In the woods the trees were coming into leaf, latticed branches hazed with green. Phyllis held her face up towards the pale spring sun, listening to the birds, the faint throaty call of the ewes to their young.
‘If you say anything about how lovely and quiet it is after London I swear I’ll scream,’ Jessica said.
Phyllis smiled. Then, fumbling in the pockets of her coat, she took out a packet of cigarettes and a box of matches. ‘Want one?’
Jessica shook her head, staring as Phyllis put a cigarette between her lips and lit it. She did not know which part provoked her more, the smoking or the fact that Phyllis was not wearing gloves. It was just the kind of thing Phyllis would do to annoy Eleanor, unless of course she had just lost them. Phyllis had always lost things, all her life. It had driven Eleanor to distraction.
‘When did you start smoking?’ Jessica asked.
Phyllis did not answer. ‘We could always have Pritchard take us back to the station,’ she said instead, blowing out smoke. Her hands were red and rough-looking. ‘There’s a fast train to London at half past.’
‘You looked up the return trains already?’
‘It’s one of the things they drum into you during VAD training.’ She smiled wryly. ‘Always know the exits in case of emergency.’
‘Tempting though it is, I’m not sure Cousin Lettice’s bones could manage the disappointment.’
‘And Eleanor?’
Jessica hesitated. Then she shrugged. ‘You know,’ she said. The sisters exchanged a look. ‘But Mrs Moore has made plum cake.’
‘She hasn’t?’
‘This morning. Especially for you.’
Phyllis groaned. ‘Damn that woman. All right, then, it’ll have to be the six o’clock. It’s a stopping train but what choice do we have? Mrs Moore’s plum cake.’ She shook her head. ‘I dream about it, you know. All the time.’
‘You’re twenty years old and living in one of the great cities of the world, and you dream about plum cake? Tell me it’s not true.’
‘I’m twenty years old and living in a hostel in Roehampton with eighty other girls and I don’t dream about any old plum cake. I dream about Mrs Moore’s plum cake with its soft moist middle warm from the oven and bursting with fat sultanas and walnuts and bits of dried fig like perfect little pieces of heaven . . .’
Jessica put her head in her hands. ‘You break my heart, Phyllis Melville, do you know that? You break my bloody heart.’
At tea Phyllis ate two slices of plum cake and held Cousin Lettice’s grub baby. It was quiet for her, gazing up at her solemnly as she drank her tea and stared into the fire. When Lettice asked her about her work she replied as though her answers were cables, paid for by the word. The new post was in Roehampton. A convalescent hospital. Yes, Queen Mary was the patron and had visited several times. A private house, requisitioned by the War Office. Yes, specifically for officers and men who had lost limbs. Prosthetics, thousands of them. Legs, arms, sometimes both. Yes, wonderful what the doctors could do these days. One hundred new cases a week and a long waiting list. Longer all the time, yes. Of course, very brave. An inspiration, all of them.
‘You too,’ Lettice said. ‘I do admire you. It must be a terrible strain.’ She leaned forward, her face creased with sympathy, her hands lifting and fluttering in her lap like fat birds, but Phyllis only sat more upright in her chair, her jaw set and her eyes fixed on the fire. ‘There is a Home for men like that in Harrogate. You see them sometimes being led along the front, blind, half of them, their faces all smashed up. I tell the boys not to look but of course they do. They can’t help it. I mean, one feels for the poor creatures, of course one does, it’s too dreadful, but I’m not sure they should let them out like that. You know, in public. Teddy’s had nightmares.’
‘They should lock them up,’ Phyllis said. ‘Or drown them. In a sack like kittens.’
‘No, well, obviously
I’m not suggesting . . . like kittens, goodness!’ Lettice said, flustered. ‘I suppose that’s the famous hospital humour everyone talks about. Nothing so ghastly it can’t be joked about, isn’t that right?’
Phyllis opened her mouth. Then she closed it again. ‘I don’t know,’ she said wearily. ‘You’d have to ask the boys on my ward.’ Reaching out she took a cigarette from the box on the table and lit it. Lettice looked distressed.
‘Gosh, I don’t think . . . I mean, if you don’t mind?’ she said, scooping the grub from Phyllis’s lap. ‘I’m sure you understand, the risk of a burn . . .’
The baby started to cry. Phyllis looked at Lettice, her cigarette quivering between her lips. For a moment Jessica thought she might hit her. Instead she gave a strange strangled gulp of laughter. Then, sucking so hard at the cigarette that the tip crackled red, she threw it into the fire and stood up. Behind her on the table their mother had spread the plans for the memorial.
‘I wanted you to see these,’ Eleanor said to Phyllis, smoothing the paper, but Phyllis turned her head away and said she was going for a walk.
‘I’ll come with you,’ Jessica offered. Phyllis shook her head.
‘Do you mind if you don’t?’ she said. ‘I’d like to be on my own.’
There was a silence after she left. A little later Cousin Evelyn came back with Sir Aubrey. He admired the plans for the memorial. Then he sat down next to Jessica. He told her that he found Ellinghurst delightful but when she said it was just as well, given that he would soon be living there, he smiled and said that he was sure that Sir Aubrey would outlive them all.