by Clare Clark
‘Twenty-one again,’ she said. ‘One might almost consider it a miracle.’
She sauntered across the lobby towards the front door. When she walked her hips shimmered and the beads on her dress hummed quietly together, like bees. At the door she waited expectantly. It was a moment before Oscar realised she was waiting for him. He hurried across the lobby and opened the door. She smiled up at him, touching his cheek with one scarlet-nailed hand. Behind Oscar’s taxi cab a chauffeur in a peaked cap waited beside a shiny black car.
On the other side of the lobby the lift clunked noisily to a stop. Oscar turned, dropping the door behind him. The metal cage slid open.
‘Hello, Oscar,’ Jessica said.
She stood in the mouth of the lift, one hand on her hip. Her dress was a draped swathe of rose silk-satin that clung to her bosom and hips and curved upwards at the front to reveal an underskirt of pale rose chiffon. The sleeves of the dress were made from the same chiffon, pale cobwebs that clung to her bare shoulders. Her lips and cheeks glowed, flushed with pink, and in her honey-coloured hair she wore a diamond tiara. Behind her Nanny stood four-square in a dress of black bombazine.
There was no Phyllis.
‘Out,’ Nanny said to Jessica impatiently, flapping her hands. ‘Before this thing crushes us both half to death.’
Oscar tried to smile as Jessica pecked him lightly on the cheek. She wore the coquettish expression of a film star on a cigarette card.
‘Phyllis isn’t coming?’ he asked. The disappointment was like hands pressing down on his throat. It made his face feel stiff. He tugged roughly at his too-tight collar. He could not think why he had come.
‘She’s meeting us there. Why soak in delicious French bath oil when you can shiver in three inches of tepid water for threepence? I truly think Phyllis believes that if she enjoys herself even a little bit she’ll explode or turn to dust or something. I can’t imagine why she’s bothering to come at all.’ Jessica turned slowly, showing off her shimmering silk ankles, the white smoothness of her startlingly exposed back. ‘So. What do you think?’
Relief made Oscar generous. ‘You look lovely.’
She did look lovely. He could see it quite plainly, just as he could see that a painting was beautiful or a flower, but it did not touch him in the least. He stepped forward and kissed her cheek. On her chin, powdered over but still distinctly visible, there was a tiny pimple. It was red with a yellow centre, as though a tiny yellow worm was burrowing upwards from beneath the skin.
‘Lovely is as lovely does,’ Nanny said briskly. She smelled exactly as Oscar remembered her, of boiled milk and talcum powder. ‘Now, where’s this taxi of yours?’
As they drove Jessica pressed her lips together, touching her palms together in silent applause, the excitement rippling over her like water. For all her loveliness there was something childish about her, as though the dress and the face and the hair were just an elaborate dressing-up costume. When Oscar thought of how he had ached for her, the intensity of his infatuation, he felt only bafflement and a faint smudge of shame.
‘What?’ Jessica said.
‘Nothing. I didn’t say anything.’
She smirked, smoothing her dress over her hips. ‘I suppose you’ve been to heaps of these dances now, haven’t you? Now that you’re Marjorie’s beau. Don’t look so innocent. We know you’ve been escorting her to balls all summer.’
Is that what Phyllis thought? Not that it mattered what Phyllis thought. Oscar frowned, shaking his head. ‘But I haven’t been to one.’
‘Her mother didn’t ask you?’
‘She asked me. Several times. I don’t know why. I never went.’
Jessica laughed. ‘Poor Mrs Maxwell Brooke. I did warn her.’
‘I hardly even remember Marjorie.’
‘But you’re here tonight.’
Oscar shrugged awkwardly. ‘I wasn’t going to. But there was nothing much going on in Cambridge and I just thought . . . you know.’
‘I know.’
The evening sun was bright. Jessica put a hand up to shield her eyes as she looked out of the window. In the Park people strolled arm in arm beneath the trees. It was hard to believe that she and Phyllis were sisters. Everything about her was on the outside, Oscar thought, lit up loud and bright as a funfair ride. He wondered what it felt like to be her, inside her head. The spot on her chin seemed to be getting bigger.
She turned her head, catching him looking. A tiny frown puckered her brow.
‘One thing, Oscar,’ she said. ‘It’s nice to see you and everything but you have to promise not to be a bore and trail after me all evening. It’s not my job to look after you, all right?’
‘All right.’
‘All right.’ She nodded. Then she glanced at him sideways, her hand drifting up to cover her chin. ‘Don’t be upset. You have to let me be myself, that’s all.’
‘I’m not upset.’
‘Of course boys don’t like to show their feelings. Not like girls.’
‘I’m not upset, truly.’
‘Good. Well, that’s good then.’
They travelled the rest of the way in silence, Jessica gazing out of the window, her cheeks sucked in and her chin thrust out as though she were posing for a photograph, while from beneath its crust of powder her tiny pimple glared at Oscar with its sour yellow eye.
The dance was in a house in Belgravia, rented for the occasion. Oscar climbed the stairs behind Jessica and a wheezing Nanny, taking care not to tread on Jessica’s train. When they reached the ballroom a man in a red livery took their cards and announced their names as they entered. The room was beautiful, a jewel box of elaborate gilt-and-white plasterwork with a flower-strewn frescoed ceiling and gilt-framed mirrors reflecting the light of two exquisite crystal chandeliers. Everywhere there were huge gold vases filled with white flowers. At the end of the room the orchestra sat on a raised stage hung with white silk. They played softly, the music curling like smoke above the chattering guests.
A waiter offered a tray of champagne. Oscar took a glass and moved forward into the room, looking around him. He could not see Phyllis. As the band struck up a foxtrot a girl beside him in a green dress stood on her tiptoes.
‘Which one is your cousin?’ she hissed at her friend, large in lavender.
‘Over there. With the glasses.’
‘Oh. All right. You’ll introduce me, won’t you? You promise?’
The lavender girl sighed. ‘You mustn’t bother him to dance, though. He says he wishes he’d never learned, he’s such a slave to it these days. He hates it when girls push themselves on him.’
‘Jessica Melville?’ A round-faced girl in silvery lace clutched Jessica’s arm. Jessica looked at her in confusion.
‘I thought it was you! Lucinda Allingham. From school? What a nice surprise. Are you out? Only I’ve not seen you all Season.’ She smiled at Jessica and then at Oscar. ‘I don’t think we’ve met. Jessica, aren’t you going to introduce us?’
Jessica stared past Lucinda at the crowded room. ‘Oscar Greenwood, Lucinda Allingham.’
Lucinda smiled at Oscar and held out her hand. ‘How do you do? And how do you know Marjorie?’
‘I didn’t realise we were so early,’ Jessica said, craning her neck.
‘Early?’ Lucinda said. ‘Actually, I think you’re one of the last.’
Jessica frowned. ‘But I don’t understand. Where are all the men?’
Oscar had not noticed it before but now that he looked he saw that there were only a handful of men among the clusters of ballgowns that crowded the room. Several, grey-headed and bespectacled, were plainly fathers, enduring the proceedings with ill-concealed boredom as their thick-waisted wives talked avidly together. Some were boys, Oscar’s age or even younger. The few in between were spaced around the room, black-coated candles around which the girls gathered like moths. One, shorter than the girls who leaned in towards him, was bald as an egg but for a few soft hairs like a baby’s that gleamed gold i
n the light of the chandeliers. Another sat in a chair, his crutches propped against the table beside him. One leg of his trousers was pinned up over a stump. He stared into the middle distance as several girls fussed around him, fetching drinks and cushions. There were perhaps ten girls to every man.
A raw-faced youth clapped Oscar on the shoulder.
‘Not dancing, Greenwood?’ he said. It was Geoffrey Winterson. When Oscar introduced him to Jessica and Lucinda, he ignored Lucinda and asked Jessica to dance. She hesitated, then, shrugging, allowed him to lead her onto the floor.
‘So you’re at Cambridge,’ Lucinda said. ‘You must be fearfully clever,’ but before Oscar could think of a reply a gaggle of girls clustered around them.
‘Cinders, there you are! I’m sorry, are we interrupting?’
‘This is Oscar Greenwood,’ Lucinda said and she tucked her hand into the crook of Oscar’s arm. ‘He was just about to ask me to dance.’
‘Actually, I—’
And suddenly there she was. He did not notice what colour she was wearing, only the pale grey of her eyes, her soft uncertain smile.
‘Hello, Oscar.’
‘Phyllis,’ he said. ‘You came.’
It was impossible to talk to her. He tried several times to make his way through the crowd towards her but each time Marjorie’s mother headed him off, tucking her arm in his and steering him towards someone he simply had to meet. She introduced him as Marjorie’s dearest childhood friend and insisted he dance, not only with Marjorie but with several other girls who smiled bravely as he trod on their toes and whose names he forgot as soon as the music stopped. Over their shoulders he glimpsed Phyllis as she nodded and smiled politely at Marjorie’s friends and elderly relations. For a while she sat with Nanny. She did not dance. The light from the chandeliers gleamed on her shingled head. A little before eleven, she touched him on the elbow. The girls around him exchanged looks as she murmured that she had a headache and was going to go home.
‘Not yet,’ Oscar said. ‘I’ve hardly seen you.’
‘Well. You’ve been busy.’
‘At least let me see you into a taxi.’
Outside, among the sleek cars parked along the kerb, several cabs idled.
‘Cab, sir?’ a liveried footman asked. Oscar looked at Phyllis.
‘How’s the head?’
She smiled guiltily. ‘Miraculously a great deal better.’
‘It’s a beautiful night,’ he said. ‘We could walk a little. If you wanted.’
They walked together, side by side, in and out of the soft pools of lamplight that lined Elizabeth Street until the last strains of the orchestra were swallowed up into the night. She did not look at him or take his arm but all down his left side his skin was electric with the closeness of her. It was very warm. In the velvet sky the crescent moon sprawled on its back, trailing veils of cloud.
‘I’m sorry if I dragged you away,’ Phyllis said.
‘Don’t be. I mean, you didn’t. I was glad.’
‘You didn’t want to stay?’
‘Not even a bit.’
‘But you were in demand. You danced with everyone.’
‘It wasn’t really dancing.’
‘It looked like it to me.’
‘Do you know Newton’s third law? For every force or action there is a reaction of equal magnitude in the opposite direction. I didn’t dance with those girls. We simply kept one another from falling over.’
Phyllis laughed and Oscar’s heart turned over. She had always laughed like that, in gulps like sneezed hiccups. Until that moment he had not known he had forgotten.
‘When did you get back?’ he asked.
‘A week ago. Ten days.’
‘I thought your father said the excavation season ended at the end of May.’
‘I stayed on.’
‘To work?’
‘Not really. I just wanted to stay.’
There was a silence. For the first time it occurred to Oscar that perhaps Phyllis had met someone else. That she was in love or, worse, engaged to be married. Of course she was. A girl like her would have no shortage of admirers. She opened her mouth to say something else and he was seized by a sudden urgent longing not to know. Not yet.
‘So,’ he blurted, ‘what exactly were you excavating?’
‘We were looking for a tomb. The tomb of the boy-king Tut-ankh-Amen.’
‘And did you find it?’
‘No such luck. Poor Mr Carter. He’s the archaeologist leading the excavation. It was his third season in the valley, three years of digging with nothing but the foundations of a few mud huts to show for it. He was very gloomy by the end. He’s sure the tomb’s there but his patron is losing patience.’
‘This boy-king is important, then?’
‘Actually, he’s rather obscure. We know almost nothing about him.’
‘So why does he matter so much to your Mr Carter?’
‘Because we know almost nothing about him.’
Oscar smiled. He wondered if Mr Carter was the reason Phyllis had stayed in Luxor an extra month. ‘It must be disheartening,’ he said. ‘Digging for nothing.’
‘Disheartening and dusty and dull dull dull. Until suddenly it isn’t and the world stands still and you’d happily have dug ten times as long for one tenth of the joy.’
Oscar thought of Mr Rutherford and his research assistants crouched in the dark in the cellar of the Cavendish Laboratory in front of a brass chamber filled with nitrogen, counting the scintillations on a zinc sulphide screen. ‘Like physics,’ he said.
They turned the corner onto Buckingham Palace Road. Between Victoria Station and the dark-choked trees of Grosvenor Gardens there was a taxi stand with a green cabman’s shelter, its gas-lit windows fogged with steam. A cab waited at the rank. The driver leaned against the bonnet, smoking a cigarette. The smoke clung to the warm night air like cobwebs.
‘Are you tired?’ Oscar asked softly. ‘Do you want to go home?’
Phyllis shook her head. Crossing Eccleston Bridge they walked through Pimlico towards the river. The houses that lined the narrow streets were tall and dark behind their high iron railings, as secretive as books.
‘I’m sorry, though,’ Oscar said. ‘It must have been disappointing.’
‘It should have been, I suppose, but it wasn’t. Not in the least. I mean, we didn’t find the tomb, of course, but . . .’ She shook her head. ‘Never mind.’
‘Tell me.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘It does to me.’
She ducked her head. ‘I found . . . it sounds so stupid. But I found . . . life.’ She smiled at him awkwardly. He did not smile back. There was a stone in his throat. He hated Mr Carter with all his heart.
‘Life,’ he said.
‘Everyone thinks that archaeology is the study of dead things. I think that’s partly what drew me, at the beginning. That everything about it had been dead for thousands of years. There is nothing so utterly dead as an Egyptian mummy. Have you ever seen an embalmed body, unwrapped, I mean? It’s like a faggot of bones. The skin is brown, set hard. It stinks of resin. It’s the starkest, most sombre thing you ever saw. Even when it isn’t behind glass in a museum it’s impossible to imagine it breathing or laughing or eating. It was how I felt too, for a while. I felt I belonged with them, the grim, melancholy, shrivelled people whose great bequest to history was the solemn honouring of their dead.’
‘And now?’
‘Now I see I had it all wrong. All that deadness, the dogged cataloguing of bones, that’s not archaeology. They’re part of it, of course, an archaeologist needs bones, just as an accountant needs ledgers or a physicist needs . . . whatever physicists need, but the ancients were no more piles of bones than we are pieces of meat. Before they died they lived. The ancient Egyptians most of all. They were so blithe, so joyful. They danced and they feasted and they told stories and they sang songs, wonderful songs. They’ve found some of the songs during excavations but the t
ruth is they never died. You still hear them when you go into the villages, these sweet explosions of melody bubbling up like springs. And the tombs! There was one tomb I visited where the walls were inscribed all over with these extraordinary carvings, gazelles leaping as the sun came up and wild duck and butterflies and songbirds wheeling in the sky. It sounds silly, I know, but it was as if the artist had not just carved animals and birds into that stone but happiness. The sheer joy of living.’
‘It sounds wonderful.’
‘And it’s not even the past. That’s the thing. One day at the excavations, a labourer raised a millstone. It was thousands of years old. Later that afternoon a farmer came and asked if he could have it. To use. His was broken and he needed a new one. Nothing’s changed. The women still grind corn in their doorways in exactly the way they do in the tomb-paintings, and the little boys have the same shaven heads with the little tuft of hair left for decoration, and the singers at weddings still put their hands behind their ears when they sing, and the dancing girls with their kohled eyes shake the same tambourines they shake in the Pharaonic reliefs. There is an epitaph the ancients often carved in the tombs of their dead: Thou dost not come dead to thy sepulchre, thou comest living. It is almost as if they are all borne along by the present, only the present is not the tiny slice of time we allow it to be but a great rolling river, deeper and broader than we can begin to imagine. Does that sound ridiculous?’
‘Just because we can’t picture something doesn’t mean it isn’t true.’
‘I thought scientists weren’t allowed to say things like that.’
‘These days they are.’
They had reached the river. They leaned on the stone wall, gazing down at the inky water, the gleaming mud of the pebble-studded flats. The stone was rough with lichen and warm as skin. The tide was coming in. Oscar could taste the salt on the faint breeze. Above the smudge of trees along the Embankment the gas-lit clock-face of Big Ben hung in the sky like a harvest moon.
‘You sound happy,’ he said.