by Clare Clark
She let herself into the flat. Dawn was breaking and, to the east, the paling sky burned pink and gold. The pink was the colour of Guy Cockayne’s tongue. She could not stop the pictures from flickering in her head, fragments of film run too fast. She had always laughed at the men in their lipstick at Dixie’s. They seemed so absurd, like pitiful versions of the boys dressed up as girls in Theo’s school plays. She had not thought of what they did together, the disgusting things they did together. The thought of Guy and the weasel man, writhing together in a car under the plane trees—
Suddenly Nanny’s bedroom door opened and Nanny was standing there. She wore a plaid dressing gown that Jessica recognised from her childhood and an elasticated net over her hair. Her face was crumpled with sleep. She crossed her arms. ‘Exactly what time do you call this, young lady?’
Jessica took one look at Nanny’s grim expression and burst into tears.
‘Why do men have to be so . . . beastly?’ she sobbed and she let Nanny take her into her arms and rock her, just as she had when Jessica was a little girl.
A week later, on a damp grey Saturday, she went with the other girls from the office to the Peace Parade. Somewhere in the crowd were Nanny and her niece, up from Essex for the day. Nanny had looked forward to it for weeks. There would be bands and merry-go-rounds and folk dancing in the Park and, in the evening, a huge firework display. It made Jessica uneasy. She was not sure Theo would have wanted to be remembered that way. She went all the same. She was glad that the girls had asked her. She was glad too that she did not have to go home.
She had always loved Ellinghurst in July, the trees in full leaf, the borders riotous with stocks and lupins and delphiniums and shock-haired dahlias, the grey walls of the battlements billowy with blue campanula. The bees humming in the dropping roses and the sun-warmed flags of the terrace under bare feet and the mossy cool of the woods and the dappled green lake with its darting dragonflies, the bow of the old rowing boat nudging drifts of yellow irises and bulrushes like fat cigars. In July the schoolroom was locked and inside the magic circle of the castle walls time drowsed like a sun-drugged cat.
She longed for it, staring out of her slice of window at the padded white sky, but she did not go home. Instead, she walked beneath the dusty plane trees along the Grand Union Canal. Beneath the iron railings the pavement was green with goose droppings. The last time she had been to Ellinghurst was the weekend after Marjorie’s ball. The garden was extravagantly abundant, almost wild, the hedges choked with honeysuckle, the path through the woods knee-high with feathery grass. Her father said it was impossible to find men who wanted the work, that the War had made them greedy He was in a fractious mood, his voice querulous. His hands shook as he spread his toast. For the first time Jessica saw that he was an old man.
She told him she would ride while he worked but he said that there were things to discuss. He demanded to know what she had done about arrangements since they had last met. What about Marjorie Maxwell Brooke’s dance? Who had she met and what were their prospects and how soon before things were more settled? She realised, did she not, that there was not a great deal of time?
He gave up eventually and went to the library but, when she walked through the garden less than an hour later, she saw him signalling to her from the window. She pretended not to see. It was only a few minutes before he appeared on the terrace. He said he wanted to ask her opinion about a point in his book, something about the dance floor Grandfather Melville had invented for the Great Hall that was sprung and mounted on wheels to permit it to be easily moved, but when she asked why he was asking her he did not go back to the house. Instead, he sat next to her, gazing out over the sloping garden.
‘It’s all here,’ he said. ‘Don’t you see? Everything that means anything.’
All that day and the next he sought her out, in the morning room and by the lake and in the shade of the beech trees at the bottom of the lawn, until she thought she would go mad with it.
‘I’m trying, Father,’ she said and she glared at him to keep herself from crying. ‘I’m trying.’
She wanted to talk to Eleanor, to have her intercede on her behalf, but she knew it would not do any good. Her parents barely spoke to one another any more. Eleanor did not come down for breakfast. Her father ate his lunch in the library. At dinner they spoke through her, as though only she understood both of their languages. In the past when they had gone through periods of not speaking to one another their antagonism had charged the air around them like a thunderstorm, the silence crackling with static. It was not like that this time. There was no tension, no awkward atmosphere. They had simply ceased to see one another. When one of them entered a room to find the other there neither of them said anything. They did not exchange glances or sigh or tut under their breath. The one at the door simply turned around and went somewhere else. That was the thing about Ellinghurst. Even with two thirds of the rooms shut up there was always somewhere else to go.
Despite the drizzle the streets were packed. Crowds filled the pavements and spilled out over the streets, bringing the traffic to a standstill; they stood on bollards and boxes and walls and railings; they squashed onto balconies and hung from lampposts and out of open windows, throwing handfuls of biscuits and damp confetti, roaring and clapping and singing at the tops of their voices. The noise was deafening.
Jessica followed Peggy as she squirmed through the crush towards Trafalgar Square, nearly losing a shoe when someone trod on her heel. Nelson’s Column was wreathed in garlands of flowers. Packs of children sat on the backs of Landseer’s lions and on their heads, kicking their heels against the lions’ muzzles. The front of the National Gallery was festooned with Union Jack flags.
Jessica stood on tiptoes. She could just see the caps of the troops as they marched up from Whitehall where a monument had been erected as a symbol of remembrance, a huge wooden box like an upended coffin where the troops would salute the dead. Peggy said they had called it the Cenotaph, which was Greek for empty tomb. It was the kind of thing Phyllis would know. Perhaps Phyllis was here in the crowd somewhere, thinking about Theo, remembering or trying to remember. She had hardly seen Phyllis since she came back from Egypt. She never came home to Ellinghurst. She said she was too busy in London with her work, that she had years of books to catch up on if she was to be ready when her University course began in September. Jessica knew she was avoiding their father. She came to the flat one Wednesday evening when Eleanor was in London but, when Jessica tried to talk to her about it, she murmured evasively and changed the subject. All through dinner she was vague and preoccupied and as soon as it was over she left.
‘I don’t know what’s wrong with that girl,’ Eleanor said. It was not until her mother had gone to bed and she sat alone looking out over the dark castellated chimney pots of Little Venice that Jessica realised that Phyllis was happy. Her smile clung to the air in the drawing room like Alice’s Cheshire Cat.
If anything the crowds were thicker in the Mall. The wide road was lined with wooden obelisks painted white. They looked like flower trellises but perhaps they were tombs too. On and on the men came, battalion after battalion through the drifting rain, marching up towards the Palace. Fifteen thousand, Peggy said. Fifteen thousand men who did not die. Around Jessica everyone was whooping and waving flags and programmes and souvenir paper handkerchiefs printed with flowers. One squealing troop of girls had Union Jack flags wound around their heads like turbans.
‘We love you, boys!’ they shrieked as the machine men filed past, square after perfect square. ‘We love you!’
Beside Jessica a man stood with a small boy on his shoulders. The boy was wearing a forage cap so much too big for him that he had to hold it up with both hands. A Japanese officer passed on a dancing black horse, his battalion marching behind him. Over his shoulder he carried a white flag with a scarlet sun. The boy turned his head to look and she saw the badge. A crown and tiger in a wreath of laurel leaves. The Royal Hampshire Regiment.
Theo’s regiment. She thought of Guy’s sketch, the cap badge picked out in meticulous detail, then pushed the thought away.
‘Nice hat,’ she said to the little boy.
The boy eyed her and kicked the man’s chest. The man looked sideways at her, his eyes bloodshot and unfocused. He smelled of spilled beer.
‘Tigers,’ the little boy said.
‘Hampshire Tigers,’ she said and she had a sudden vivid memory of Theo in his uniform, not blithe as he had been on the day he left, his cap tipped back on his head at an angle calculated to exasperate Father, but home on leave that Christmas when he was always drunk. Scotch-tinted spectacles, he had told her, with a laugh that did not sound like his. But what was like him, by then?
‘Three and a half days,’ the man barked suddenly. He was very drunk. Jessica tried to move away from him in the crush but he swung round to glare at her, the boy swaying on his shoulders. ‘If all the dead men had marched, this fucking circus would have taken three and a half fucking days.’
There were fireworks that night, ten thousand rockets fired from Constitution Arch in Hyde Park. Peggy and Joan went to watch them. Jessica went home.
The flat was dark. Nanny was still out with her niece. Jessica closed the curtains but she could still hear the bangs. When at last she drifted into an uneasy sleep she dreamed she was back at Marjorie’s dance, in the eau-de-Nil bathroom with its marble basins and its oval looking-glasses and its lamps that were gold goddesses, holding up glass spheres of light. The pale girl in the pale green gown was curled on the watered-silk chaise as she had been then, except this time it was not a book she held in her lap but knitting, a khaki scarf that grew longer and longer, curling like a tapeworm around Jessica’s ankles. Jessica stood at the looking glass, the rim of the marble basin cool under her hands, but it was not her own reflection that she saw staring back at her but the girl on the chaise, her unblinking pale green eyes as blank as sea glass. She did not say anything. She just went on knitting, the needles clicking unnoticed in her fingers as she looked at Jessica with her rose silk dress and her honey-coloured hair and the desolation in her as loud as the roar of the sea inside an empty shell.
Every man you might have married, her glass eyes said, is already dead.
27
For the rest of Oscar’s life he never knew a place in the world as beautiful as Cambridge in the summer of 1919. It was as if the nerves in him had been magnetised, irresistibly drawing sensation to his eyes, his lungs, his brain, his skin, until the intensity of it was almost too much to bear. He walked along the familiar streets in a daze of seeing, overcome by the greenness of the lawns and the blueness of the sky and the perfect pewter gleam of the cobbles beneath his feet, struck time and again by the loveliness of things he had somehow never noticed before: the round glass panes in an overhanging upper window like bottoms of bottles, the splintery grey grain of a warped medieval lintel, the straining neck and gripping claws of a pockmarked gargoyle clinging for dear life to a narrow ledge, its mouth stretched wide and its veined wings raised and half-opened, ready for flight. He had not thought the world so full of ordinary marvels. He stopped often, the business of the day forgotten, captivated by the repeating pattern of coiled Chelsea buns on a tray in a baker’s window or a cat asleep in a puddle of sunshine, his ears translucent pink, his long whiskers as dazzling as the filaments of electrical light bulbs. On warm evenings, when the tourists had packed up their guidebooks and their picnic baskets and the tethered punts drowsed four deep in the shallows beyond Clare Bridge, he read by the river in the shade of the horse chestnut trees as the filigree light danced on the underside of the pale stone bridge and behind him, like an alchemist, the chapel of King’s College turned the evening light to gold.
Sometimes the hot weather caused thunderstorms, the air crackling with electricity. Then, as the clouds massed on the horizon, purple as bruises, and the horizon darkened to pencil shading, the obscured sun cut through the clouds in brilliant columns of light. A lifetime before, or perhaps only a few weeks, crossing Waterloo Bridge, he had tried to explain Rayleigh scattering to Phyllis, the dispersion of light by molecules in the air smaller than the wavelength of the light. He told her that it was because of Rayleigh scattering that the sky was blue and sunsets pink and orange.
‘The ancients thought sunsets proved the existence of God,’ Phyllis said. ‘Do you think anyone believes in God any more?’
‘No one I know.’
‘I wish I did sometimes. It would be a comfort, wouldn’t it, to believe in something bigger? Something more than just us.’
‘You don’t have to believe in God to believe in that.’
‘But what?’
‘The universe.’
‘The universe?’ Phyllis made a face. ‘But that’s like believing in the British Empire or the motor car. It’s just . . . there.’
‘It’s not like that at all. It’s like God. Well, almost.’
‘How?’
‘You really want me to explain?’
‘More than anything.’ The way she said it made his heart turn over.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘I believe that the design of the universe determines all things to exist, that it obeys its own inexorable laws to cause effects that we understand only dimly but which underpin every aspect of every particle in every solar system in space. I don’t understand how and even if I was five hundred times cleverer than I am I probably never would, but I also understand that it doesn’t matter. I don’t have to know how it works to believe it, to be in awe of its mysteries, its beauty and complexity. Of the unimaginable intelligence that created it. I’m not in awe of motor cars. The rudiments of the internal combustion engine are actually pretty easy to grasp.’
‘Says you.’
Oscar grinned. ‘My mother always said we’d do better if we stopped worrying about believing in God and believed in other people.’
‘Even if you don’t know how they work?’
‘Then most of all.’
The bridge was crowded with people hustling towards the railway station, girls in belted mackintoshes, blank-faced businessmen with bowler hats and rolled umbrellas. A jostle of anonymity and yet every one the central character of their own story, hoping and dreading and striving and suffering and wanting to be happy. Oscar hoped they were happy. He wanted to open his arms, to laugh out loud so that the happiness that swelled inside him might be scattered on the air and carried like spores into people’s lungs, their blood. He had not known that about happiness, that it would feel like there was so much to spare. He leaned against Phyllis, entwining his fingers with hers.
‘I believe in something else as well,’ he said.
‘And what’s that?’
‘I believe that once in a blue moon things happen that you never dreamed of, that you never even knew enough to hope for.’
‘The hand of Fate?’
‘There’s no such thing as Fate. But sometimes, just sometimes, there’s sheer dumb luck.’
He meant to return to Cambridge the morning after Marjorie’s dance. Instead, he stayed in London. He took a room in a cheap hotel behind Marylebone Station. The hotel was called the Majestic. The plaster on the façade was peeling and the carpet in the narrow hallway was dark with stains. Every day he told Phyllis that he would go back to Cambridge that evening but as the sun slipped lower, angling through the chimney pots and setting the summer trees on fire, he missed one train after another until he gave up pretending and said that one more night would not hurt. By the third evening the proprietress sighed when he pushed open the door. She had copper hair and long overlapping teeth smudged with lipstick.
‘Don’t tell me,’ she said, hauling her ledger out from beneath the desk. ‘You missed the last train.’
When she had reentered his name in the register she gave him his key and the suitcase he had left with her during the day.
‘Room Five. Again.’ She sucked on her long teeth. ‘I don’t know what line of business you�
��re in and I don’t suppose I want to. Whatever it is, though, it wouldn’t hurt to buy a clock.’
He stayed in London for nearly a week. He drifted through those first days as though he was in a hot air balloon, aware only of Phyllis beside him and the sudden rushes of joy like gusts of wind that tipped him sideways, giddy with exhilaration, the city beneath him as tiny and inconsequential as a toy. In the end it was Phyllis who gently suggested it was time he went back to Cambridge. London was her city, her days earthbound, moored by her work. She was taking lessons in Arabic and ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs from an Egyptologist at the British Museum. She would not miss them, she said, not even for him.
He waited for her in a dingy café near the museum, spinning out a cup of tea. The professor gave her exercises to work on between lessons. Several times that week she brought her books to the Park and studied while he sprawled next to her, waiting for her to be finished. Absorption puckered the skin between her eyebrows and pressed the pink tip of her tongue against her teeth. The urge to touch was too great for him then, but though she smiled at him distractedly or touched her fingers to his, he knew that she did it to please him, that her attention in that moment was all for the feathers and the snakes and the indecipherable squiggles and dots of the Arabic abjad, and that it was one of the reasons that he loved her.
He loved her. He knew it quietly, with a certainty that startled him and yet was somehow no surprise at all. His love for her was a part of him and perhaps always had been, marbling the muscular tissue that moved his ribs and raised his diaphragm, diffusing every tiny alveolus in his lungs. He could feel the constriction of it, like the squeeze of a hand, whenever he took a breath. He could no more stop loving her than he could stop his own heart.