We That Are Left

by Clare Clark

  Reluctantly Oscar followed Kit’s finger. Under the headline REVOLUTION IN SCIENCE, NEW THEORY OF THE UNIVERSE, the paper reported that a team of British astronomers had travelled to the island of Principe off the west coast of Africa to photograph the recent solar eclipse. Their results had been presented at a joint meeting of the Royal Society and the Royal Astronomical Society in London. By plotting the positions of the background stars visible near the perimeter of the darkened sun, the scientists had proved that, in the gravitational field of the sun, light bent not as the laws of Newtonian science would suggest but in precise accordance with Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

  When interviewed, the President of the Royal Society admitted to finding parts of Einstein’s theory opaque. He also acknowledged that, to support his assertions, Einstein had offered three experimentally quantifiable cases as proofs. The first, relating to the motion of the planet Mercury, had already been verified; the second, the angle of light deflection around the sun, could now be considered confirmed. Although there remained uncertainty about the third, which concerned the spectrum of light emanating from the sun compared with the light of laboratory sources, one thing was beyond doubt: the Einstein theory had now to be reckoned with. Human conceptions of the fabric of the universe would never be the same again.

  ‘Well?’ Kit demanded.

  Oscar put down the paper. He thought of those nights during the War when he had sneaked out into their tiny garden after his mother was asleep to stare up at the familiar patterns of the constellations. In Clapham on those clear nights space was constant and absolute and so, with the blackout, was the darkness. Now space was curved and light did not travel in a straight line and at night the street-lamp dazzle of London threw an orange veil over the sky, hiding the stars.

  ‘You know what this means, don’t you?’ Kit said. ‘Not only has the miraculous Mr Einstein changed physics for ever, he may just have achieved the great miracle of changing Cambridge University. They’ll have to teach us this stuff now. I’ve got to go but come for tea. We can celebrate. The King is dead, long live the King.’

  With one hand on the table, the other on the back of his chair, he levered himself to standing. When Kit was in pain the bad side of his face seemed to shrink, pulling down the corner of his eye. It looked like he was winking.

  Alone Oscar gulped the last of his tea. The trickle of undergraduates had thickened to a steady stream and the rumble of their chatter bounced and echoed beneath the vast vaulted ceiling, combining with the clatter of cutlery and the chink of cups and saucers like the tuning up of an orchestra. Oscar thought of Ishmael who set sail with Ahab in pursuit of the great whale, not like Ahab because he was in the grip of an obsessive hatred for the beast but because he was curious and he itched for the sea.

  ‘And the great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open,’ Ishmael said and Oscar felt it too, the magnificence of the future as it rose from the depths of unknowing and made a snow hill in the air.

  30

  Eleanor cabled three times from France that autumn, each time delaying her return for several weeks. Nanny’s niece had gone to take care of her daughter who had had a baby and Nanny sometimes stayed in the flat at weekends. Jessica could have stayed too, if she had wanted, but to her surprise she realised she wanted to go home. She was glad to get away from London, from Gerald. She only took a little cocaine, just enough to tip her into gaiety, but sometimes she had difficulty sleeping and on Fridays she was often short-tempered and jittery. The ache in her as the headlights of the car swept round the turn to pick out the great stone gates was as sharp as homesickness. She drank tea in front of the fire and read the books she had read as a child. Sometimes she rode Max. She was too big for him and he was getting old. She let him canter on a loose rein, pulling him up when he started to wheeze. In the cold air his breath made clouds that caught in his eyelashes.

  She took pleasure from solitude, from the safety of sameness. It perplexed her that her father, who had only ever regarded guests as an unwelcome interruption, was suddenly intent on company. Several times he wrote to Oscar in Cambridge, inviting him to stay. When Jessica asked why he said that it was a kindness, that Oscar had nowhere else to go. He said that a house like Ellinghurst did not suit being empty.

  ‘He’s your guest if he comes,’ Jessica warned him. ‘I gave up nurse-maiding Oscar Greenwood years ago.’ But Oscar never came. He had commitments to the University and too much work to do. Instead, he wrote letters which Sir Aubrey left on the hall table for Jessica to read when she came home. To her surprise he was a lively correspondent, though when he wrote about science she could hardly understand a word he said. Sometimes he enclosed newspaper cuttings or photographs he had taken.

  ‘He has Theo’s old camera,’ Sir Aubrey told her. ‘The Brownie, do you remember?’

  Jessica remembered. Knowing that the camera had been Theo’s made her look at the photographs more closely. The snaps he sent were mostly of Cambridge but occasionally he sent pictures of Ellinghurst he must have taken during the War: the bust of Socrates distorted through the mullions of the library window or the deserted stables with Max staring out disconsolately over his half-door like a lone drinker at a bar. There were never any people in Oscar’s photographs but it seemed to Jessica that there had been, that the stillness he captured had not had time properly to settle but rippled like the surface of a pond into which someone had thrown a stone.

  She did not try to explain the feeling to her father. Her father had recently purchased his own camera, a considerably more sophisticated model than Oscar’s Brownie, and she did not want to encourage him into another of his disquisitions on the art of photography. His pictures were also of Ellinghurst, taken from every conceivable angle and intended as illustrations for his book, but though they were carefully competent they had none of the simple intimacy of Oscar’s snapshots. Once Oscar sent a picture of the Tiled Room in the tower, taken through the arch of the open door, and when her father showed it to her Jessica thought of that raw afternoon when the boys from Theo’s regiment had come and Oscar had looked at her as though she was as much of a miracle as water into wine, and she had not wanted to give it back. When she asked her father if she might keep it, he hesitated only slightly before nodding. She told him she liked the idea of always having a piece of Ellinghurst in her handbag.

  Oscar was not the only person Sir Aubrey invited frequently to visit. Most Saturdays that autumn Mrs Maxwell Brooke joined them for lunch. She did not bring Marjorie. She told Jessica that there were house parties every weekend during the pheasant shooting season, that Marjorie was always dashing from one county to another. It was not true, she said, all the doom and gloom people liked to spout about the War having changed the world for ever. Little by little, and not a moment too soon, things were finally going back to the way they were before.

  ‘I wonder if you might not think of shooting here again, Aubrey?’ she said. ‘The shooting parties here were always marvellous,’ and there was a little notch between her eyebrows as though she were doing calculations in her head.

  Jessica could not help but notice how successfully Mrs Maxwell Brooke had insinuated herself into the space left empty by Eleanor. She was shrewd, of course. Although it was plain that Saturdays were not the only days she visited, there was no suggestion of impropriety. She was careful always to ask Jessica if she might speak to Mrs Johns about some trifling domestic issue or other and, when Jessica expressed surprise, she confided that both Eleanor and Aubrey had lent unfailing support in the dark times after the death of her own husband years before, that she could not think how she would have managed without them. It was a privilege, she said, to have some small opportunity to return their many kindnesses. A man like Aubrey, she said, should not have to bother himself with the everyday responsibilities of running a household.

  ‘Ellinghurst is a great blessing and a great burden,’ she said. ‘It is not right that your father should have to bear it alone.’


  ‘I’m sure Eleanor will be very grateful for all you’ve done,’ Jessica said sweetly and she took some pleasure in the flicker that crossed Mrs Maxwell Brooke’s face. She supposed Mrs Maxwell Brooke was lonely with Marjorie away all the time but there was no point in encouraging her. Soon Eleanor would be home. She wondered what Mrs Maxwell Brooke would do then, whether she would disappear or try instead to reprise the role she had played so eagerly before the War, of Eleanor’s principal admirer and acolyte.

  On 11 November, at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the country marked the first anniversary of the Armistice with a Great Silence. The hour was marked by a burst of rockets fired upwards into the sky. As the blasts echoed through the grey mist of the morning, every passenger train on the railways, every clattering goods train and shunting engine, shuddered to a halt. In every city buses and lorries and taxis stopped where they stood, their engines stilled. Beneath the pavements of London the Underground trains waited motionless in their tunnels and the ships in the Channel stayed their course. As the explosions faded and the chiming bells of clocks and churches fell silent, all sound ceased. Men pressed their hats to their stomachs and bowed their heads. Kneeling children pressed the palms of their hands together. In the offices of Woman’s Friend the girls stopped typing and put down their pencils and closed their eyes. For two long minutes everyone remembered.

  No one wanted to break the silence. It extended awkwardly, fading into a rustle of paper and clearing throats. For the rest of the day the mood in the office was sombre. Joan and Peggy hunched over their work, the frantic clatter of the typewriters another kind of silence. Later, as she put on her hat, Jessica caught sight of Miss Cooke sitting in the cubicle of her office. She was crying silently, knuckles white against her face.

  Eleanor was home. The day after the Great Silence she came to London to see Mrs Leonard. Afterwards she and Jessica had supper together at the flat. To Jessica’s surprise, she did not immediately launch into an account of the sitting, the things Theo had said to Feda. She asked Jessica about her work and listened to the answer. There was a new quietness about her, a composure Jessica did not recognise. She wondered if it was over at last, if in France Eleanor might finally have put her grief to rest.

  ‘You look well,’ Jessica said.

  Eleanor was silent, her eyes on her lap. She picked up her napkin and patted her lips with it. Then, folding it neatly, she laid it beside her plate. She was going back to France. With the help of her French guide, she had found a house close to the village of Fontaine, some miles north of Arras. The village had been badly damaged by German shells but work was being done and the inhabitants had begun to return. Beside the ruins of the village church, piled with rubble and broken pews, there was a small cemetery, a tangled plot of perhaps one hundred graves. Theo was buried there. She had visited his grave every afternoon; as the shadows lengthened she had felt the boys gathering around her, their faces pale in the gloom and their laughter like the distant wind in the trees.

  In the mornings she had walked across the devastated landscape where the fighting had been. It was there, among the shattered trees and mounds of mud that marked Theo’s last days that she had finally found peace. She was no longer separated from him by not knowing. Once she saw a woman digging wildly with her hands in the mud, scrabbling for something, anything to hold onto. Many of the boys could not be found. She knew she was lucky. There were gangs of Poles clearing the battlefields, rolling away the barbed wire, filling the trenches. The blasted tree stumps were being dug up and new saplings planted in their place. Eleanor had wished she could stop them. The wasteland of cratered mud, devoid of shape, of sense, of the dogged persistence of life, was Theo’s true memorial, the horror of loss made manifest.

  One day, she said, life would return to those ruined fields. It was hard to imagine, harder still to bear. But she meant to be there then, too, as the first tentative shoots pushed through the mud. It was Theo’s place. Every leaf, every flower and blade of grass that sprang from that earth was a part of him. She belonged there, where he was.

  The greed of her grief was gone. In its place was something calmer and more stubborn. She would leave soon, she told Jessica, as soon as things could be arranged. She asked for Jessica’s blessing, and hoped some day that she and Phyllis might come and visit her. She did not intend to return to England. Whatever became of Ellinghurst there was no longer a place for her there.

  ‘You’re leaving Father?’ Jessica said, stunned.

  ‘We have agreed to live apart. It is better that way.’

  ‘I see. Poor Father.’

  Eleanor’s jaw tightened. ‘Oh, yes, poor Aubrey. I suppose you know he wants a divorce?’

  ‘A divorce?’

  ‘Of course I’ve refused. The scandal . . .’

  ‘The scandal, of course. You’ve always worried so terribly about scandal.’

  ‘It’s quite impossible. It would break Theo’s heart.’

  ‘Theo’s?’

  ‘You know why he wants a divorce, don’t you? So he can marry that ludicrous Verity Maxwell Brooke. It seems the War was very good to Verity.’

  Jessica glared at her mother. ‘And why not, if she makes him happy?’

  ‘Happy? Oh, please. Don’t be naive.’

  ‘Remember that time in the garden with the revolting Mr Connolly? You said everyone had to have some fun now and then or they forgot they were alive. Or was that rule just for you?’

  There were two red spots in the centre of Eleanor’s cheeks. ‘You think I’m the one who began this? Your father was never faithful to me, not even at the start.’

  ‘You didn’t exactly suffer in silence.’

  ‘He broke my heart.’

  ‘My heart bleeds for you.’

  ‘God but you’re a heartless little bitch, aren’t you?’

  ‘And who do you think I got that from?’

  ‘You’re right. You’re your father’s daughter. Cold through and through.’

  She left the next morning before Eleanor was up. By the time she came home her mother was gone. She bathed and dressed and snapped at Nanny when Nanny said she looked tired and wouldn’t it be better if she did not go out for once. It was not just Eleanor. That afternoon Joan had cornered her in the ladies’ cloakroom. She hoped Jessica would forgive her presumption, she would not ask, not normally, only there was a job going at Perspective, a job that might almost make up for two wretched years of knit-and-purl at Woman’s Friend, the kind of job that hardly ever came up and then only ever went to men.

  ‘It’s the old boys’ club, you see,’ Joan said. ‘Members only. But then I thought, you know, since you and Mr Cardoza are friends . . .’

  The way she said friends had made Jessica’s insides turn over. When Joan pushed an envelope into her hand and said that she understood if it was inappropriate but if there was any way, any way at all, Jessica had muttered something about Mr Cardoza being really a friend of her mother’s, and fled. She had spent the rest of the afternoon trying not to think about who else might know.

  She did not know any more what she felt about Gerald. Since that night in the Savoy she felt both more tender towards him and more uneasy. She found herself thinking about him at work, wondering what he was doing and if he was thinking of her. Sometimes, at night, she took the diamond bracelet from the sleeve of the folded-up sweater where she had hidden it from Nanny, and put it on and tried to imagine what it would be like, to spend a lifetime with a man like Gerald. It was not so crazy an idea. Hadn’t Ludo confided that she was the first girl since Christabel that Gerald had truly cared for? He was witty and rich and generous and he adored her. Often, it was true, he drank too much or disappeared to the cloakroom with his snuff box. Then his moods grew wilder and, though he grew more wild in his affections too, his vivacity often tipped over into imperiousness and he was cruel to her, mocking her for being prissy, a debutante wet blanket. She tried to lighten her mood to match his but it
was not easy to keep up. Sometimes, she thought, there was something almost grim about his feverish pursuit of amusement. It did not seem to make him happy. In the early evenings, before he had begun seriously to drink, he as good as admitted it. He had begun, a little, to talk about the future. The previous Thursday, he had said something about the Riviera in June.

  ‘Imagine it,’ he said. ‘No more filthy foggy London. A shaded terrace overlooking the sea. Pine trees and bare feet and freshly picked figs for breakfast. Wouldn’t we be happy?’ And she had smiled at him and thought that really they might be. London was not good for him, she could see that. He had had a cold for weeks. His eyes were pouched and bloodshot, his voice hoarse, his nose streaming. He did not seem to be able to shake it off.

  That evening they went to the King Club for dinner. They drank a good deal and she tried to be gay but she knew she did not fool him. She feared he might think her dull. Instead, he took her hand and asked her what was wrong.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ she said but he only shook his head.

  ‘Not to me,’ he said, so she told him about Eleanor and her father. She thought he might laugh, or turn it into a joke. Instead, he listened gravely, watching her over the rim of his glass. It was easy to talk to someone who listened like that.

  ‘She doesn’t love him,’ Jessica said. ‘She never has. But she won’t let him go.’ And he kissed her fingers and said that it was unbearable, the damage people did to one another in the name of love.

  ‘But sometimes they save them too,’ he said, and the way he looked at her squeezed her heart into a fist. She let him kiss her outside the restaurant where anyone might see, and in the car she put her hand on his leg. He reached down to take it in his, sliding his fingers between hers, and she rested her head on his shoulder, inhaling his expensive leather and cedar wood smell.

  ‘Where are we going?’ she asked.