by Clare Clark
The boys shouted for joy and bounded out of the morning room towards the kitchen, Phyllis in their wake. It was easy for Phyllis to manage without love, Jessica thought. She fell in love with things: Greek myths or the French Revolution or hieroglyphs or John Donne. She always had. When they were younger Phyllis had pinned a line from a poem on her bedroom wall, something about treading softly because you tread on my dreams, and Jessica had laughed because the only dreams Phyllis had were of lessons and books and people who were imaginary or centuries dead and what possible harm could things like that come to, even if you trod on them quite hard?
Lettice smiled, listening to the whooping, the clatter of boots across the Great Hall. The baize door banged. Then, frowning sympathetically, she put her hand on Jessica’s.
‘How is your mother?’ she asked. ‘Evie told me a little of her troubles.’
Jessica shrugged. ‘She’s all right.’
‘I wondered, has she found someone else? Another sensitive? It must be hard for her, cut off so cruelly from Theo like that.’
‘You can’t be cut off from something you were never in touch with in the first place. The woman was a fraud.’
‘Evie said. Poor Eleanor, it must have been ghastly. That’s why I wondered, not that I would ever wish to interfere, but I wondered perhaps if she might like an introduction to Sir Oliver? You remember, the scientist I told you about, my mother’s cousin. He only works with mediums who are prepared to be put through his tests, you see, so they’re all absolutely above board. Then again, his sittings are almost always in London so perhaps that would not be convenient.’
Jessica put down her cup of tea. ‘Eleanor would have to go to London?’
‘I’m afraid so. One of his ladies is in Hampstead, or is it Hampton? Is there even a difference? I’m afraid I’m quite hopeless when it comes to London. All I know is that Sir Oliver comes down from Birmingham quite regularly to sit with two sensitives, both of whom have been scientifically proven to be genuine. But perhaps London would be too much for your mother?’
Jessica looked at Cousin Lettice, her eyes gleaming. ‘Oh, no. Not at all. London would be absolutely perfect.’
Later, as Phyllis led the boys in a game of Sardines, Jessica walked across the lawn towards the woods. It was cold and she put her hands in her pockets to warm them. Above her the leafless branches of the trees drew black patterns on the darkening sky. The door to the tower stood open. She peered in. When she was little it had been the job of one of the undergardeners to clean the Tiled Room but there were not enough under-gardeners for that kind of work, not any more. The tiles were grimy, furred with sagging spiders’ webs, the floor thick with dead leaves. The varnish on the wooden benches was starting to peel. She held a piece of it up to her eye, looking through the tiny yellow lens. Scotch-tinted spectacles, she thought, and dropped it. When she scuffed the leaves with the toes of her shoes they rustled like old ladies’ skirts.
She had forgotten how many steps there were. She was out of breath when she reached the top. She leaned on the sill of one of the empty window arches, looking out. It was a long way down. In the trees below the rooks were stirring, the harsh cries cutting the air. This had been Theo’s den, the place he took boys to do whatever it was boys did when they were out of sight of grown-ups. Everyone else was strictly prohibited. Jessica could still remember the thrill she had felt when, one dark evening, bored and restless, Theo had whispered to her that he was going to the tower and that she could come if she liked, if she promised not to be a nuisance.
‘Not Phyllis,’ he had said. ‘She’ll only spoil it.’ She had nearly burst with pride and triumph. The woods had been very dark, the staircase too, the concrete walls ducking and shivering in the tiny light of Theo’s matches. When they reached the top Theo had let off the firecrackers that he had in his pockets and, though he aimed them at her feet, she had not screamed, not once, but laughed and almost meant it because she knew he was only teasing. Then he had lit toffee papers and dropped them out of the window and she had watched entranced as the scraps of flame floated down like butterflies and were swallowed by the night.
That night at dinner Cousin Evelyn expressed his surprise that Grandfather’s Tower was still standing.
‘Structurally it’s perfectly sound,’ Father said.
‘I see,’ Cousin Evelyn said, laughing. ‘So it’s only conceptually that it’s on shaky ground. Oh, come on, Aubrey, old chap. The thing’s a monstrosity.’
When Father glared at him Cousin Evelyn only laughed more. He said that Aubrey knew as well as anyone that Yorkshiremen could not help speaking their minds, it was the way they were made. There was no point in beating round the bush. The truth might be painful but at least it was clean; it was untruths that festered. Which was why, he said, he wanted to lay some plain facts on the table. He was not normally a man for mixing business with pleasure but this was a family matter. He wanted no whispering behind people’s backs.
He had done all the calculations. At current rates the value of the Ellinghurst estate put likely death duties at close to thirty per cent. As and when the estate passed on, there was no liquid capital available to meet that obligation. Even the sale of the London house, which would raise a fair sum, would provide only temporary relief. The mortgage burden on the estate was crippling, a legacy of poor investments and heavy borrowing by Sir Crawford and the ruinous agricultural depression that had followed. Land might be sold to raise the necessary funds but it would require the divesting of most of the estate. What land remained would almost certainly be insufficient to support the house, particularly one as expensive to run as Ellinghurst, and that was before one attempted to fix the roof and do all the repairs that had been ignored during the War and were now urgently in need of attention.
Alternatively, the house could be sold and the land retained intact. There were other smaller properties on the estate that might serve as well and be a great deal more practicable, and there were investors prepared to pay reasonable sums for properties that might accommodate a school or some other type of residential institution that required only limited grounds. It might even sell as a hotel. There was a market for castles, it seemed, even the Victorian imitations. Or the estate might be sold in its entirety. There were good reasons to argue against continuing as a landowner in an uncertain future when, if he liquidated his holdings, a man might clear a sizeable capital sum that could secure not only his future but those of his children.
‘Your children,’ Sir Aubrey said. His face was white.
‘Or yours. If you chose to sell now the girls could net a sizeable capital sum. Land prices are stronger than they’ve been for years. Indeed, now might be exactly the right time.’
‘And the baronetcy? You’d “liquidate” that too, I suppose, if you could.’
‘Aubrey, this is difficult, I know.’
‘Difficult? It’s intolerable.’
‘None of this has to happen in your lifetime, not if you don’t wish it. But I wanted you to understand the situation. I wanted to be clear.’
‘You’ve been very clear.’
‘Then I—’
‘You’ve been very clear indeed. You intend to destroy the Melville family.’
‘The estate is not the family, Aubrey.’
‘How can you say that? There have been Melvilles at Ellinghurst for three hundred years!’
‘Then we’ve had a good run.’
Sir Aubrey stared at Evelyn, his mouth working. Then, standing up, he threw his napkin onto his plate and stalked out of the room. Jessica and Phyllis exchanged a look. It was Phyllis who went after him. Cousin Lettice looked at her lap.
‘I’m sorry to spring this on you, Eleanor, my dear,’ Evelyn said. ‘But the facts must be faced.’
‘Must they?’
‘I’m afraid they must.’
‘This is our home,’ Eleanor said. ‘My son’s home.’
‘With the greatest respect, Eleanor, Theo would have faced exactly th
e same problems we do. The world has changed. We must change with it.’
‘And so my son’s home, his memorial, becomes—what?—a madhouse? A school for delinquents? My son died, Evelyn, while you were busy feathering your nest and fondling your fat little wife, but what does that concern you? You’re going to be rich! It was a wretched squalid War but someone has to win. That’s the way things are. The world has changed and we must change with it. Pile it high and sell it cheap. Why not? My boy is dead. There’s nothing he can do to stop you.’
‘Eleanor,’ Lettice pleaded.
‘Why should I care?’ Eleanor declared. ‘I’ve always loathed this house. It was Theo who loved it, Theo whose spirit fills every room.’
‘But spirits are free, aren’t they?’ Lettice said. ‘Your son is with you always, Eleanor, wherever you are.’ She looked helplessly at Cousin Evelyn.
‘You could always ask him,’ Jessica said. ‘If he minded, I mean.’
‘Jessica, dear, I’m not sure . . .’
Jessica ignored Lettice. ‘Don’t you see?’ she said to Eleanor. ‘If you could only talk to him the way you used to, perhaps the house wouldn’t matter so much. To either of you. Whatever happened, you’d still be together.’
Eleanor stared at her daughter. Then, one hand pressed against her mouth, she stumbled from the room.
14
Sylvia Carey’s funeral took place on a bitter Friday afternoon at the Church of the Holy Trinity on the north side of Clapham Common. Oscar’s mother had never been a church-goer but she had liked this one for the grace of its architecture and the picturesqueness of its setting, and because it had been the church of William Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect, who had done so much for the abolition of slavery. It was one of her favourite stories: how Wilberforce, presenting his Abolitionist Bill for the first time in Parliament, had insisted on laying out for the House the full horrors of slavery. He spoke for three hours. When he was finished, he said, ‘Having heard all this you may choose to look the other way but you can never again say that you did not know.’
They had walked here often on Sundays, bringing scraps of bread to feed the ducks, then circling the pond towards the stand of copper beeches behind the church. Sometimes, hopeful of more crumbs, the mallards had followed them, the gleam-green drakes in their smart white collars jostling their plump brown wives. It made Oscar and his mother laugh to turn suddenly and see them stop, their heads carefully averted, as though they were playing Grandmother’s Footsteps.
A week before he was due to be demobbed, Oscar had received a letter from Mrs Doyle. His mother had been moved to the Hostel of God, a hospice run by the Sisters of Margaret that overlooked Clapham Common. Oscar knew then that she was dying. At Christmas, when Dr Seeley had first proposed the hospice, his mother had turned him down flat. She had no intention of dying, she protested, and anyway she would rather be dead than hidden away in a convent as if cancer was something to be ashamed of. Dr Seeley had given way, startled by the vehemence of her refusal. Oscar went again to his Commanding Officer and asked if he might be released early. This time permission was not granted. It was seven days before he could return to London.
He took her home. She was very weak. Dr Seeley said she had only a few days left and that she would be more comfortable with the nuns but Oscar knew he was wrong. She lay in bed, fragments of consciousness clinging to her like cobwebs, as he sat with her, her wasted hand in his, and read her poetry and told her all the stories he could remember of their lives together and all the things that scientists were going to discover, now that the War was finally over and it no longer mattered where you came from but only what you could see. He thought she smiled. Then, one morning a little after dawn, she began to shiver. Her temperature soared and she fell into a restless twitching sleep from which he could not rouse her. At noon the twitching ceased. When Dr Seeley came he offered Oscar his commiserations and instructed him to disinfect the house to prevent the spread of infection. He said it would be best to burn everything in her bedroom that could not be boiled, just to be sure.
The funeral service was brief. Afterwards the congregation gathered on the steps of the church while the coffin was carried to the hearse. The pond was a sheet of beaten pewter and the leafless trees made cracks in the white ice of the sky. Oscar stared at his feet. His shoes were very shiny. He wondered who had polished them and how it was that he had got here.
It was Phyllis who took his elbow and steered him to the motor car. He sat between her and Sir Aubrey as they drove in silence to the graveyard. Jessica and her mother were in a second car behind them. It had been explained to him that the burial would be attended only by immediate family and his mother’s most intimate friends. The rest of the mourners would go back to the house in Clapham where refreshments had been arranged. Later he would have to face them but not now. There were more words at the graveside, a blur of white faces and black hats. People pressed his hand. He climbed back into the motor car.
‘Nearly there,’ Phyllis said.
They drove back past the church on the Common. There was a lady in a brown hat walking alone along the pavement. She raised a hand to adjust her scarf and for a moment it was her. Oscar’s heart lurched. It was only when he looked again that he saw it was not her, nor even like her. His mother was walking with the angels, wasn’t that what the vicar had said? Reunited with her husband in Heaven. Oscar had found himself wondering if that might be open to negotiation. His parents’ marriage had not been happy. Embittered by his own failures, Joachim Grunewald had resented his wife’s independence, her passionate convictions. He had wanted her at home, as thwarted and aggrieved as he was.
‘Of course Wilberforce never troubled himself with the bondage of women,’ Oscar heard his mother say quite clearly, as though she was sitting next to him in the car. ‘It was only men that he believed were born equal.’
The parlour was full and uncomfortably warm. People were smoking and drinking tea and whisky and glasses of wine. Someone had put out plates of sandwiches. Oscar saw Sir Aubrey pick up the gargoyle photograph from the mantelpiece and stare at it. Then, smiling a little, he put it back. Women he vaguely recognised kept coming up to Oscar and pressing his hand. The smell of the whisky and the wine and the pipe smoke and the half-chewed insides of people’s mouths as they talked all mixed up with the faint smell of disinfectant made him feel sick. He squeezed through the crush towards the door, nodding at the faces that loomed towards him, mumbling at him with their wet lips.
‘Excuse me,’ he said, again and again. ‘Excuse me.’
The landing at the top of the stairs was empty. He leaned against the wall, his forehead against the cold plaster. Then, twisting round, he slid down the wall into a squat and put his arms over his head. There was the click of a door.
‘Oscar?’
She still came to him, still comforted him as he was tipping into sleep. Sometimes she was Jessica in her silk dress with the string of pearls around her neck and sometimes Jessica from the tower or a slippage of the two, her clothes melting from her as he took her in his arms.
‘Oscar, are you all right?’
He looked up. Jessica frowned at him, her hands on her hips, her hair bright as butter against the black of her suit.
‘You should really come downstairs,’ she said. ‘It’s quite rude, you know, hiding away up here.’ When he did not answer she sighed. ‘I’m sorry, you know. About your mother.’
Oscar put the heels of his hands over his eyes. Lagrange’s Four-Square Theorem states that every positive integer can be written as the sum of at most four squares. Given this theorem, prove that any positive multiple of eight can be written as the sum of eight odd squares. How many times had he played this game, sitting here on the landing before his mother woke and the day was allowed to begin? He tried to arrange the numbers in his head but they only slipped and stuck like defective typewriter keys.
JUST BLOODY KISS ME, they punched out instead.
He did not
know what was wrong with him. His mother was dead and all he wanted was to kiss Jessica, to kiss her and kiss her until there was no room left inside him for anything but kissing, no feeling but the feeling of her face against his face, her mouth on his.
GO AWAY, the metal arms banged out against the inside of his skull. KISS ME. KISS ME. KISS ME.
Jessica scuffed at a worn patch in the carpet with the toe of her shoe. ‘I’m not surprised you couldn’t stand it down there. All those ghastly old people trying to look mournful while stuffing their faces with cake.’ She considered him. Then she sat down on the stairs, wrapping her arms around her knees. ‘You know in India they take their dead to the banks of a holy river and burn them with wreaths of flowers. Then they scatter the ashes on the water. People say it’s barbaric but how could it possibly be more civilised to shovel the dead into the earth like a dog burying a bone? At least the Indian way is beautiful. Romantic. You can’t do romantic with cups of tea and egg sandwiches.’
Oscar did not answer. He heard the sound of footsteps on the stairs.
‘Oscar?’ Sir Aubrey called up. Jessica leaned over the banister. ‘Jessica? Have you seen—Ah, there you are. What are you two doing hidden away up here?’
‘Oscar just needed to be on his own for a bit.’
‘Right. Of course. Still, it’d be best if you could come down, old chap. You too, Jessica. People are leaving.’
‘We’re coming,’ Jessica said. When her father was gone she turned to Oscar. ‘Are you packed? Father says you’re coming home with us tonight.’
Oscar shook his head.
‘You should. Eleanor hates to be kept hanging about.’
‘I’m not coming with you.’
‘But of course you are.’
‘I’m not. I want to stay here.’