We That Are Left

by Clare Clark

  Contents

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  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

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  6

  7

  8

  9

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  11

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  41

  Sample Chapter from BEAUTIFUL LIES

  Buy the Book

  About the Author

  First U.S. edition 2015

  Copyright © 2015 by Clare Clark

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  First published in the United Kingdom by Harvill Secker, a Penguin Random House Company 2015

  www.hmhco.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Clark, Clare.

  We that are left / Clare Clark.—First U.S. edition.

  pages; cm

  ISBN 978-0-544-12999-3 (hardcover)—ISBN 978-0-544-13016-6 (ebook)

  1. Sisters—Fiction. 2. Upper class—Fiction. 3. World War, 1914–1918—England—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6103.L3725W4 2015

  823'.92—dc23 2014049774

  Cover design by Martha Kennedy

  Cover photograph © Richard Jenkins

  v1.1015

  Extract from The Time Machine by H. G. Wells, reprinted with permission of A. P. Watt at United Agents on behalf of The Literary Executors of the Estate of H. G. Wells.

  For Luke, Alice and Frances,

  a third each,

  because That’s Fair

  They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old:

  Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

  At the going down of the sun and in the morning

  We will remember them.

  LAURENCE BINYON, SEPTEMBER 1914.

  Prologue

  1920

  It was raining as they followed the coffin from the church. A gusty wind snatched at people’s hats. At the head of the procession the rector clamped his arms against his billowing robes and sang, ‘We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away,’ and the wind caught the words and scattered them like leaves.

  They stood together at the graveside, Phyllis and Jessica and Oscar, their heads bowed. Behind them Cousin Evelyn held an umbrella over Lettice, its apex into the wind to keep it from blowing inside out. She was expecting again. A girl this time, she was sure of it, she had confided happily to Jessica. She had never felt sicker in her life.

  Afterwards they went back to the house for tea and sandwiches. Marjorie helped Jessica with the cups while Oscar shook hands with some of the tenants, red-faced and awkward in their Sunday suits. From his frame above the fireplace Jeremiah Melville observed the proceedings grimly, his hands clasping his stick. Oscar tried not to look at him.

  On the other side of the Great Hall Mr Rawlinson murmured something to Phyllis who nodded and stared out of the window. Her black suit emphasised her pale skin, the red gleam of her hair. Rawlinson turned, catching Oscar’s eye. Oscar pretended not to see. The lawyer wished only to pay his respects, he supposed, but he would not speak to him. A more tactful man would have chosen not to come.

  It was not much of a party. When the last of the guests was gone Oscar left the women in front of the fire and went for a walk. The wind had dropped and the air was damp and chill. It smelled of wet earth and rotting leaves and, very faintly, of the sea.

  He walked down through the darkening garden and across the croquet lawn towards the tower in the woods. It still drew him, after so long. At the bottom of the spiral staircase he paused, one hand on the stone arch that led through to the Tiled Room. The floor was thick with leaves and the windows were overgrown with ivy and brambles, tendrils snaking through broken glass to entwine themselves around the rotting benches. The tiles on the walls were grey, sticky with dirt and cobwebs. He rubbed one with the side of his fist. It gleamed in the dusk like the white of an eye.

  By the time he reached the top of the tower he was out of breath. The light was paler here. The low mass of the Isle of Wight smudged the horizon, and the breeze sang in the glassless windows. Sir Aubrey had brought him up here once when he was a little boy. Sir Aubrey had not appeared to know that this room was Theo’s private fiefdom, that access was permitted only by invitation. He just made Oscar promise he would not tell Godmother Eleanor. Godmother Eleanor thought that the tower was dangerous. Sir Aubrey told Oscar that the tower had thirteen storeys and 385 steps, that it was 218 feet tall and eighteen feet square, not counting the external staircase, and rested on a foundation nine feet deep, that the concrete was two feet thick at the base of the tower and one at the top, that it had taken a team of forty workmen five years to build. Oscar had been so interested he almost forgot to be afraid about Theo finding out. Everything had been numbers in those days, for Oscar.

  The window on the west side of the tower looked down over the house. From so high a vantage point the castellated bastions and turrets of Ellinghurst looked like a child’s sandcastle, the vast ivied walls that enclosed it to the west hardly more than a curved line of pebbles in the sand. Beyond the sloping lawns the grassy moat was flooded with shadow and the house on its mound was an island, the wide vistas of the park spreading to the south, to the north the dark-clotted woods and hills of the New Forest. Beyond the barbican of the gatehouse Oscar could just make out the river, a blue-black scrawl amidst ink-blot trees.

  The farms were to go. It was a good time to sell, Rawlinson said. The agricultural subsidies introduced by the government during the War had increased the productivity of the land and the profits of farmers. There were mutterings in Westminster about repeal but, while the legislation stood, tenants were keen to buy and, with the hikes in schedule tax, it made sense to convert a reduced income into a tax-free capital gain. Oscar had stared at the ledgers that held the estate accounts, the columns of numbers jumbling in his head. If Rawlinson was right about land values the sales would raise sufficient funds to meet death duties and keep their heads above water, at least for the present.

  They had not talked about the future. It was too soon. In time, though, Oscar knew, the park would have to go. Rawlinson did not say so but Oscar knew he had already begun to put out feelers. The estate was mortgaged to the hilt and, without the income from the farms, they would struggle to meet the payments. Little by little Ellinghurst would retreat up onto its mound, its drawbridge pulled up against the marauders whose advances paid its debts and kept the roof from falling in.

  Oscar did not know if he would stay on at the University. He had insisted to Rawlinson that he be permitted to graduate but he was no longer sure why it mattered. There was no possibility of a graduate research post, not any more, so why not throw it in now and devote his energies to Ellinghurst? The loss, if there was one, was sma
ll, selfish. Science would not mourn him. Nearly five years ago Sir Aubrey’s brother Henry had been killed by a sniper at Gallipoli. Though only in his early thirties when he died, Henry Melville had already left an indelible impression on the textbooks. It was widely agreed among the scientists of Oscar’s acquaintance that, had he lived, his work would have won him the Nobel Prize.

  No one doubted that he would have gone on to do work of the utmost importance, work that in time would have marked him out as one of the very great scientists of his generation, and yet since his death that work had not been left undone. It had been done by others. The fissure opened by his loss had been stopped, the plaster smoothed over. Experimental physics was a collective enterprise, like the construction of an anthill. The particular character or contribution of each individual ant was not of consequence. What counted was the cumulative edifice. Great scientists were rare but not so rare that their work died with them. If a scientist failed to make a discovery one year, then another would make it the next. One way or another, the anthill would inexorably rise.

  Ellinghurst was not like that. After three hundred years they were the only ants left. It was chance that had saved Oscar, chance and Mr Rawlinson. He knew to be grateful. In the last six months of the War the British Army had suffered nearly half a million casualties, almost a fifth of the War’s grim reckoning. Whatever the truth, he had made his choice. There was a debt to be honoured, a duty to be discharged. The papers were signed and Sir Aubrey laid to rest. He would do what he could, as Sir Aubrey had wanted. He would not be the one to break the chain. Perhaps, in time, the house, the name, would come to feel like his own. By now he of all people should know that names meant nothing.

  It was done. Ellinghurst was theirs. Their future was set. There was no purpose in wondering what might have been, or if it was what he wanted after all.

  1

  1910

  Terence held the chair steady as Theo tied the scarf over Jessica’s eyes. He tied it very tight, so tight it pulled her hair and pushed her eyeballs down into their sockets, but Jessica did not protest. She gripped the chair’s wicker arms as Terence wheeled her out to the middle of the lane.

  ‘Cheese,’ Theo said and she forced a grin. His camera clicked. She could feel the wind tugging at the loose ends of the scarf, the tumble of apprehension in her stomach. The lane was steep here, steep enough that the red-faced lady bicyclists who panted doggedly all the way up the gentle slope through the village had to get off their machines and push. It made their mother laugh to see them. Sometimes when they were motoring, Eleanor would tell Pritchard to drive right up behind them and sound the horn. Phyllis hated it when she did that but the sight of the bicycles wobbling into the verge only made Eleanor laugh harder. She told Phyllis and Jessica that she was performing a Public Service, that the red-faced ladies should be glad of the excitement.

  The red-faced ladies pushed their bicycles downhill too. Father said it was because otherwise their bicycles might run away with them and Eleanor laughed and said it was the only thing that ever would, which made Father’s lips go thin. Jessica could see the hill in her mind’s eye: the bumpy grey lane dropping away like a laundry chute between the high banks of the hedgerows until at the bottom by the gate to Stream Farm it curved sharply right over the river. Theo said that the bath chair would go in a straight line when the road turned so that the worst that could happen was that the chair would tip over when it went into the thick grass beside the Stream Farm field and that was fine because grass was a soft landing. Jessica knew that was not the worst thing that could happen but there was no point in thinking about that. Nanny said it was thinking too much about bad things that made them happen in the first place.

  ‘Ready?’ Theo said and Jessica nodded and pushed the ends of her fingers hard into the basketwork of the chair to make herself feel braver. It was stupid to be afraid. Theo said that fear was the reason so many people lived small unhappy lives. Jessica was small for her age, Eleanor was always saying so, but she had no intention of ever being unhappy.

  ‘You know what, Theo?’ Terence Connolly said in his stretched-out American drawl. ‘You’ve made your point.’

  ‘Rules is rules. We said whoever drew the red match, right, Jess?’

  Jessica nodded, biting hard on the inside of her lip. She wished Terence Connolly would just shut up so she could get the whole thing over with.

  ‘So the kid’s got guts,’ Terence said. ‘You don’t have to make her spill them all over the roadside.’

  ‘You’re not being a pansy, are you, Connolly?’ Theo said and he jerked the chair, letting it go and catching it again just as it began to roll. Jessica’s stomach turned over. Behind her Marjorie giggled. It was all Jessica could do not to climb out and sock her. Marjorie Maxwell Brooks was always at Ellinghurst, because her mother wanted more than anything to be friends with Eleanor and traipsed around after her saying how much she had enjoyed the So-and-sos and where did she get her marvellous eye for colour. Marjorie had adenoids, which meant she breathed through her mouth and her words came out full of ‘d’s as though she had a permanent cold in the head.

  She also had the biggest stupidest pash on Theo that Jessica had ever seen. She could not say a word to him without tittering or going red. Last Christmas, Theo dropped his handkerchief and Jessica saw Marjorie pick it up and press it to her face even though Theo had just blown his nose on it. Jessica had never seen anything more disgusting in her whole life. Marjorie was supposed to be Phyllis’s friend because they were the same age but Marjorie just trailed behind Theo like Mary’s little lamb and all Phyllis ever wanted to do was read books. When Phyllis died, Jessica thought, she would not want to be buried or even burned up to ashes like Grandfather Melville but squashed flat like a pressed flower inside a huge fat book and afterwards, when someone tried to read it, they would have to peer through the mush of her brain and scrape her dried brown guts from the gaps between the lines.

  ‘You wouldn’t have done it, would you, Marjorie?’ Terence asked.

  ‘Not for all the tea in China,’ Marjorie said, still giggling.

  ‘But I don’t like tea,’ Jessica said loftily and Theo laughed.

  ‘That’s my girl,’ he said, squeezing her shoulder, and the rush of pride burned her throat almost like crying.

  ‘Go,’ she commanded, and with an almighty push she was flying, hurtling downhill with the wind whipping at the scarf and the bumps in the rough surface of the lane clattering her bones like she was a skeleton, and as her eyes filled with tears her chest tore open with a great white scream that was terror or triumph, she did not know which, and the darkness turned bright with flashing silver stars and she thought that this was what it must be like to be a bird, a bird or a motor racing car, and then quite suddenly there was an almighty jolt and the chair stopped dead and she was thrown, like a bird, through the air and for a moment time stopped and she wondered what came next and how badly it would hurt, before she landed with a thump that knocked the breath out of her in a thick patch of nettles.

  Nanny tutted as she rubbed calamine lotion on the nettle stings. She said that idle hands were the devil’s playthings and that the stream was no place for a girl who should have been drawing or practising the piano. Then she tied up Jessica’s hair again, smoothing the strands with her gnarled red hands. Jessica did not mention the bath chair. She had no intention of getting Theo into trouble. Not that he ever was in trouble, not properly. When Nanny told him off he only pulled silly faces and tickled her in the place on her side that made her go squirmy and said that he knew she was only pretending to be cross.

  As for their parents, Theo could have burned the house down and Eleanor would have laughed and told him how pretty the flames were. It made Father furious when Eleanor stuck up for Theo but when Father shouted at him it only ended up in an argument and Theo always won. He had a way of smiling at Father when he was angry that made Father squeeze his hands into fists and walk out of the room.

&nbs
p; When finally Nanny stopped fussing over her and let her leave the nursery Jessica ran downstairs and out into the garden but she could not see the others anywhere. Her skin was sore and horribly itchy, and the palms of her hands burned. She licked the hard white bumps, trying to soothe them. They tasted of calamine. She grimaced, wiping her tongue on her sleeve.

  It had grown cool, fat clouds clotting the sky. Around the terrace, the roses shivered, their pale heads pressed close together, and the horse chestnuts waved their flat green hands up and down. Someone, Terence maybe, had left a cricket sweater on the wrought-iron bench by the oak tree. Jessica hoped it would rain and the sweater would get spoiled. She did not like Terence Connolly one bit. His mouth was too red and when he talked his voice was loud and American. He was the most awful boaster too. When Father had asked him if he played tennis he had gone on and on about the stupid tournaments he had won until she had wanted to scream. It baffled her that Theo had insisted on inviting him to stay for another whole week by himself instead of leaving the next day for London with his parents. She supposed it must be the Brownie camera that had turned his head. Before they had arrived with their piles of stupid American presents no one had wanted any of the Connollys at Ellinghurst. No one but Eleanor.

  Picking up a stick Jessica ran across the croquet lawn, whipping at her thigh as she leaped the hoops. She could go to the stables and see Max, she supposed, but it was no fun riding by yourself. It was no fun doing anything by yourself. She pulled up at the stand of beeches near the turn in the drive and peered through the gate in the rhododendrons but the tennis court was deserted, its net sagging on its posts. She slashed with her stick at a rhododendron flower, scattering pink petals, then trailed back along the edge of the wood, the stick clattering the iron railings. Above the wood Grandfather’s Tower rose up into the sky like Jack’s beanstalk in the story. From here she could see the bulge of the spiral staircase on its far side, a fat snake darker than the pale concrete of the tower itself.