by Clare Clark
They agreed Phyllis would visit Cambridge the following Sunday. Oscar worked, partly because Phyllis had said he must be longing to get back to it but mostly to make the time pass. He attempted geology, a subject he had never studied before, but it stifled him, the stolidity of it, the leaden creep of imperceptible change.
Instead, he thought about Einstein. It seemed impossible, somehow, that a single scientist, working alone, had developed a theory of Nature that encompassed the whole history of the universe, that described the state of matter and geometry everywhere and at every moment in time. In the science journals his critics questioned Einstein’s conclusions and argued against the mounting mathematisation of modern physics, the tendency to abstract and increasingly abstruse theory building without regard to the principles of common sense. While Oscar had a basic grasp of the principles of special relativity, or hoped he did, the general theory bewildered him. He wished Kit was in Cambridge. He had told Phyllis he accepted the limitations of his own intelligence but it was not quite true. He could hardly bear to think that the future might be closed off to him, that his own intellectual shortcomings would keep him from gaining even the most passing glimpse of this new and hidden world. If Kit were here perhaps he would be able to explain it in a way that Oscar understood.
The mass of an object or system is a measure of its energy, and if a body gives off the energy E in the form of radiation, its mass diminishes by E over c2 where c is the speed of light. The speed of light is a constant and space and time are relative. The span of a year, a yard, changes dependent upon the position and velocity of the observer. It defies reason. And yet when you are in love and waiting, you know only too well that every minute is an hour, and the sixty miles to London stretches and shrinks, the reach of a hand and, abruptly, the breadth of a boundless sea.
A year later it was Sunday. He was waiting for her on the platform when the train pulled in. She wore a wide-brimmed hat and a white dress with green stripes. He took her to the river, to the horse chestnut tree. They sat on the bank on his outspread jacket, looking down into the water. It was not awkwardness that kept them from speaking but its opposite, a deep absorbed settling that had no purpose for words. He held her hand in his, his skin alive with the silent music of her. She no longer bit her fingernails.
Later, when the tourists came, they rented a rowing boat. He told the boatman that she was his sister. She leaned against the cushions, smiling at him as he rowed them splashily upstream towards Grantchester Meadows, his shirtsleeves rolled to the elbows, and he wondered if it was possible to be happier than he was at this moment, his arms aching, his palms rubbed raw by the rough wooden oars. Silvery fish darted in the trailing weed and the banks of the river were foamy with meadowsweet.
‘We could stop,’ she said.
‘We’re not there yet.’
‘Then at least let me help.’ Setting the boat rocking from side to side, she stood and twisted herself around to sit next to him. He slid to one side to give her room, feeling the warmth of her hip next to his, her hand on his arm as she steadied herself. ‘One each.’
Her stroke was oiled, easy, the oar dipping into the green water like a hand.
‘My father taught me,’ she said. ‘He said it was a good way of getting away from people.’
She told Oscar that her mother was going to Flanders. According to Eleanor, it had been Theo’s idea. In a recent sitting he had grown agitated, repeating a single name over and over again. The name had not come through clearly. Edwin, the spirit guide said, or perhaps Eamon, she could not be sure. The next day Eleanor had received a letter from Mrs Coates. The two women had not seen each other since the terrible events in Bournemouth, though they had continued to write. Tucked inside the letter was a cutting from The Times. A French officer was offering private tours of the battlefields. Mrs Coates said that she had already written to him to make enquiries. Perhaps, she thought, if she could see the place where her boy had passed his last days, she might find some peace. She asked if Eleanor might want to go with her.
Eleanor cried when she got the letter. Mrs Coates’ son’s name was Alwyn.
‘It’s not just the awful tenuousness of it,’ Phyllis said and she stared out towards the bank, her oar lifted from the water. ‘How will going do anything but make it worse? It’s like some terrible vision of Hell out there. And it’s not safe. The ground is packed with unexploded shells; they go off all the time. People get hurt, killed even. But she won’t listen. When I said she’d only get blown to bits she looked at me with this expression on her face as though there was no point in even talking about it, that I couldn’t possibly understand.’
‘And your father? What does he say?’
‘He says it’s her business. I don’t think he cares any more what she does.’
‘I’m sure that’s not true.’
‘Are you?’ She pulled in her oar, letting it rest in the rowlock. ‘I saw him this week, you know. In London.’
‘How was he?’
‘I don’t know. He didn’t see me. He was helping a woman out of a taxi. She did this weird pirouette as she stepped out onto the pavement, like a chorus girl or something, and then he kissed her.’
‘Are you sure it was him?’
‘They were only as far away as that tree. I don’t know how they didn’t see me too. I just stood there, frozen to the spot, gaping at them.’ She looked at Oscar. ‘It was Mrs Maxwell Brooke.’
Oscar did not say anything. He reached out and took her hand, sliding his fingers between hers. She shrugged.
‘I don’t know why I care. It should be better, shouldn’t it, knowing that they’re just as bad as each other?’ She tried to smile but her eyes were bright with tears. She blinked. ‘Sorry. So stupid.’
‘Not stupid in the least.’ Leaning over he kissed her very gently on the corner of her mouth. She turned her head away, pulling her hand free of his.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean . . .’
She wiped her eyes on her sleeve. Then, cupping his head with both hands, she kissed him so hard that he no longer knew where his mouth ended and hers began. When at last they pulled apart he was dizzy, dazzled, the glitter of the sunlit river patterning his eyes. Her eyelashes were paler at the ends than at the roots and in the grey of her eyes there were hazel flecks like freckles. She caught his hand and kissed it. ‘Ouch,’ she said softly, touching her lips to the blisters.
‘Aye, there’s the rub,’ he said.
She laughed. ‘Rub-a-dub-dub, three fools in a tub, and who do you think they be?’
‘You and me and . . . just you and me. Two fools in a tub.’
‘I suppose we’ll just have to manage without the candlesticks.’
‘We’ll have meat and bread,’ he said. ‘We can eat sandwiches by moonlight.’
‘With a runcible spoon like the owl and the pussycat.’
‘All right but I have to warn you, I shan’t dance.’
‘Not even with me?’
‘Not even with you. You need to preserve your energy.’
‘And why is that?’
‘To row me home. You do know you’re rowing me home, don’t you?’
‘You . . . !’
Leaning over Phyllis seized a cushion from the bench and tried to thump him with it. He twisted away, setting the boat lurching from side to side as he snatched a cushion of his own and held it out in front of him like a shield. She pushed it away, laughing, pressing her cushion against his face and her laugh was so infectious it made him laugh too and she let her cushion fall and leaned against him, still laughing, the boat rocking beneath them as though it was laughing too.
28
London at the height of summer was dead. The grass in the Park was yellow and the trees drooped, heavy with dust. On Marylebone Road the buses coughed out exhaust smoke, hazing the air blue. When Jessica took off her blouse at the end of the day there was a grey line around the collar and the fabric was speckled with smuts.
Gerald had gone away. Some friends had taken a villa on the water at Lake Como. A palazzo, Gerald called it, which made Jessica think of Nanny. Nanny would have considered palazzo to be showing off. She was glad when he did not ask her to come with him—the Italian lakes were for old people and invalids, people who liked to take a little air in the afternoon in their bath chairs—and at the same time faintly perturbed. She knew he knew the girls at Woman’s Friend were entitled to only one week’s holiday each year, that Jessica would have to wait until the other girls had taken theirs. She still wondered if he was growing tired of her. She wondered, too, if the friends at Lake Como had known Christabel.
‘Tell me about her,’ she asked him once but he only shook his head and said that it was not something that he talked about. He did not seem angry with her for asking. That night he danced as wildly as ever but, when he kissed her goodnight, there was something hungry in his kisses that was deeper than desire. It touched her and frightened her, to sense the need in him. He was not supposed to need her nor she him, or not like that.
He told her he would be back for her birthday.
‘Twenty years old,’ he said. ‘I thought maybe a bath chair?’
At weekends she went home. There was nothing else to do. Phyllis never came. She said she was busy with her work and that she could not spare the time. She did not seem very sorry about it. For the first time Jessica wondered if Phyllis had met someone and if she had if she would marry him after all. She was not sure if the thought of Phyllis being the one to inherit Ellinghurst made her mostly glad or mostly sorry, but the thought of her in love made Jessica feel hollow inside. She told herself the man was very likely a professor or some other dusty exhibit from a museum, shrouded in tweed and ink stains and with a near-sighted squint, but it did not cheer her. Sometimes in her lunch break she walked up to the Park where Phyllis’s college was or down Gower Street towards the British Museum, hoping to catch a glimpse of her, of the two of them together. She never did. The walks left her hollower than ever, angry with herself and angrier still with Phyllis who had so callously abandoned her.
Her mother was as bad. In August Eleanor cabled to say that she had decided to remain in France another month. Without her there was no one to occupy the downstairs rooms. The new housemaid, a thick-ankled girl with a thick local accent, scurried around every morning dusting and plumping the undented cushions but the air still felt stale and disused. Jessica walked through them, fingering things, adjusting ornaments on shelves as though her touch might bring them back to life. The evenings were too warm for a fire and the huge grates were empty, neatly blacked. Even the flowers looked stagey, as though they were made of silk. The rooms reminded Jessica of Hampton Court where Nanny had taken them during holidays in London when they were small.
‘Imagine it,’ Phyllis had said wide-eyed to Jessica. ‘Henry VIII actually walked on these floors and sat in these chairs and slept in that bed.’
‘And did big jobs in that chamber pot,’ Theo added, making Jessica giggle, but it had not made it any easier to picture Henry VIII. To her the rooms with their rotting upholstery had felt as dead as the Tudors.
Her father kept erratic hours, often working through the night and retiring to bed just as Jessica came down for breakfast. He ate on trays in the library, scattering crumbs amidst his papers. He refused to let anyone in to clean. He had purchased a camera and each week he sent rolls and rolls of film to be developed in Bournemouth. The photographs were returned in brown paper packages that piled up unopened on the library floor. Her father said that they were for the book. One Saturday morning when a delivery arrived, Jessica asked if she might look. She thought it might be rather nice to have some pictures of Ellinghurst at the flat in London but when she opened one of the envelopes she frowned.
‘Like this,’ Sir Aubrey said, turning the photograph round in her hand and she saw that it was a tassel, carved in wood.
‘Do you know where that is?’ he asked and when she shook her head he insisted that she came with him, there and then, to the Great Hall where he showed her the festoons of ropes and flowers carved into the back of the two great chairs that flanked the doorway. At the base, behind the tapestry seat, was the tassel.
‘You see?’ he said, visibly distressed. ‘No one sees.’
He said he meant to photograph everything, that he owed it to the house to be meticulous. He showed her several other pictures and demanded that she identify them: a hinge with a three-pronged design from the inner door of the gatehouse, a leaf carved into the gallery balustrade, a six-petalled flower which she swore she had never seen before but which her father said was the repeating pattern in the ironwork of the vent under the billiard table. She grew accustomed to walking into a room to find him there, his lens pressed up against a cornice or the catch of a window like a child outside a toy shop.
He no longer quizzed her about London or the people she had met during the week, not since the time she lost her temper and said that she did not know how she was supposed to meet people when he and Eleanor had never made the least effort to introduce her to anyone proper.
‘I told you from the beginning you had to let me come out,’ she cried. ‘I told you but you wouldn’t listen.’
Her father had not rebuked her for raising her voice. Jessica wondered if he had even heard her. He had a way of vanishing into himself in the middle of conversations these days, his expression softening to blankness until a sharp word recalled him and he blinked at her, his neck stretching out like a tortoise waking from hibernation. Sometimes she wondered if he might be going senile.
He must have heard her, though, because after that he stopped asking. At first she was relieved, but as the weekends passed it frightened her, that he too might have given up. Then, on the last weekend of August, he told her that he had asked the Maxwell Brookes to lunch. When Jessica asked why, he said that she must be tired of the two of them rattling about in the house alone.
‘Honestly, Father,’ she protested. ‘I’d rather solitary confinement than the Maxwell Brookes. Can’t you put them off?’ But he only shrugged and said that the arrangements had already been made. The prospect of having to talk about Marjorie’s ghastly party, to dredge up something flattering to say about it, made Jessica cringe. She had done her best to push the recollections of that evening out of her head but now she found them insinuating themselves back into her head, the girl in the cloakroom, Leonard Fairbanks and his unconcealed disgust, the shock of walking in to that beautiful ballroom and seeing nothing but girls, crowds of desperate girls where the wonderful young men she had yet to meet should all have been. If Marjorie tried to talk about it, she thought, she would simply walk out and leave them to Father. It was him who had asked them, after all. It was his responsibility to entertain them both.
It was something of a relief, then, when Mrs Maxwell Brooke came alone. Marjorie, she said, settling herself like a hen on an egg, was at a weekend house party. ‘We met Lady Sarah in London during the Season. A dear girl and such a good family. I only hope Marjorie is making the most of it.’
They talked during lunch of Ellinghurst and the arrogance of English publishers. Mrs Maxwell Brooke was sympathetic. She seemed to know a good deal about it. She asked Jessica about her job, wrinkling her nose girlishly as if the subject was not only outlandish but faintly obscene and, provoked into defensiveness, Jessica declared that in her opinion all girls ought to work, at least for a bit; that everyone should know what it was like, out there in the real world.
‘Oh my,’ Mrs Maxwell Brooke said, glancing meaningfully at Sir Aubrey.
It was a beautiful day. Sir Aubrey told the maid to serve coffee on the terrace.
‘I’ll leave you ladies to it,’ he said and Mrs Maxwell Brooke nodded at him and tucked Jessica’s arm into hers. Her upholstered bosom nudged the back of Jessica’s wrist.
‘Don’t look so alarmed, dear,’ she said as she marched Jessica briskly outside. ‘Your father thought it might be a good
idea if you and I had a little chat. He’s anxious about you. Of course he is. This job of yours and the flat. Maida Vale. I mean, really. It is quite clear that your mother has been most . . . distracted.’
‘My mother has had a very difficult time.’
‘Of course she has. You all have. It’s been perfectly horrid. But one must think of the future. Of your future. There is a great deal at stake.’
Jessica frowned. ‘What are you talking about?’
The coffee was already set out on one of the tiled tables Eleanor had had brought back from Italy. Mrs Maxwell Brooke lifted the silver coffee pot and poured out two cups. ‘My dear, your father has taken me into his confidence. He is anxious and not without reason. You are a Melville and that privilege brings responsibilities. If your mother refuses to meet those responsibilities then someone else must do so on her behalf. Cream and sugar?’
‘Just cream.’
‘A girl in your position must be brought out. How else can she possibly make a suitable match? I only wish I could help Phyllis also, poor child, but your father says the damage there is already done and I’m afraid he might be right.’ She sighed theatrically, shaking her head. ‘The War may be won but we have paid a very high price for victory.’
‘So I’m to come out after all?’
‘It is a little unorthodox, I know, but something must be done. The prospect of another gruelling Season again next year, well, it is hardly something I relish, but I cannot stand by. I will not let your father down after all he has endured. Besides, it might be rather fun for you and Marjorie to attend some parties together, if she should find herself at a loose end. She could show you the ropes.’
‘So you would act as my . . . my mother?’
‘It might be rather jolly, don’t you think?’
‘And what about Eleanor?’
‘Your mother has made her bed, my dear. Now she must lie in it.’