by Clare Clark
He stayed for a week. His mother had good days and bad days. On the good days she sometimes wanted to talk to him about what might happen after she was gone. He learned to recognise the change in her expression, the careful steadying of the breath in her clogged lungs, the way she picked with a nail at a seam in the counterpane. Usually he contrived to escape the room before she could begin. He heard a knock at the front door or remembered a letter he had to write or the kettle he had left boiling on the stove. He did not always manage it. Once she caught him by the wrist and made him sit.
‘Not talking about it doesn’t make it any less real,’ she said. She told him that the Melvilles were to be his guardians. The arrangements had already been made. When he protested that he was more than capable of managing on his own his mother squeezed his hand.
‘I know,’ she said. ‘But I’m not. Let me look after you a little longer. Please?’
Another time she had him bring her a small silk pouch tucked at the back of her dressing-table drawer. Inside he found her gold poesy ring and another just the same, only larger. Oscar turned it over in his fingers to read the words engraved inside the band. Du allein. You alone.
‘It was your father’s,’ she said. It had never occurred to Oscar that his father had worn one too. His mother slid hers onto her left hand. She was so thin that she had to hold it to keep it on. It was the tradition in Germany, she told him, for a betrothed couple to exchange poesy rings. The rings were worn on the left hand until a couple exchanged marriage vows, and afterwards on the right. Oscar wondered why his mother had never told him this before. He had always presumed she wore the ring on her right hand because she did not want to remember.
‘We were better at being engaged than being married,’ his mother said. ‘You might want to try it the other way around.’
On the bad days he brought her tea she did not drink and watched her sleep, the pain moving across her face like clouds. Sometimes, muddled with morphine, she mumbled words he could not hear, her head twisting from side to side as though she were having an argument with herself. To calm her Oscar read poems out loud. He took down books at random from the shelves, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Christina Rossetti, Thomas Gray. In the Gray, on the frontispiece, someone had written Thoughts that breathe and words that burn, with all my love, and the date, August 1899. A month later his parents had married. Oscar touched the ink with the tips of his fingers. It shamed him, reading those words, how much he had wanted to be someone else’s son.
At nights he lay on his bed, his door open in case she cried out, and stared up at the ceiling. As a child, sent to bed before sundown, he had liked to fix his eyes on the crack above his bed until the ceiling began to swarm, making patterns of waves and grids that undulated, grey and silver, in and out of the pale paint as though they were breathing. Sometimes, if he hardly blinked at all, little black figures would appear from between the lines, clambering over and between the curves and angles. Sometimes they were people and sometimes they were numbers with legs. He had liked them. But when he tried it now, he seemed to have forgotten the knack of it. However much he looked, the ceiling of his room remained resolutely flat and white.
The day before he was due to return to Rhyl the country held its first General Election for eight years. The newspapers dubbed it the Coupon Election because Lloyd George and the Conservative Bonar Law had issued a coupon to the 159 Liberal candidates giving an assurance that, if they stood for election, no Conservative candidate would challenge their seats and that the arrangement would be reciprocal. The arrangement meant that the outcome of the election was a foregone conclusion but, as his mother said, surprises weren’t everything. She had Oscar help her to a chair in the window so that she could watch as groups of men and women made their way along the street towards the Town Hall.
‘Eight and a half million women,’ she said. ‘Can you imagine?’
They had finally won. For the first time in history women over thirty, if they met a minimum property qualification, were eligible to vote, along with almost all men over twenty-one. On this day across the country, more than twenty-four million men and women, nearly three times as many people as before the War, would take their turn at the ballot box.
‘We only went and damn well did it,’ she whispered, clasping Oscar’s hand in hers, and in Oscar’s throat there was an aching lump of pride and fear and sadness that he could not swallow.
She insisted that he left her while she dressed. It took a long time. When at last she called Oscar to help her downstairs it was plain that the effort had exhausted her. In the parlour she sat down shakily, her breath ragged and shallow.
‘Hat,’ she said, holding out her hand, but when she raised her arm to put it on the shock of the pain made her whimper. The hat fell to the floor.
‘Let me,’ Oscar said. ‘Now. The coat.’
He knelt beside her chair, sliding her arm into the sleeve as gently as he could manage. She looked at him, her face ancient with pain.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We can’t let that bastard Du Cros win.’
Du Cros was the Conservative candidate for Clapham. Everyone knew he would win, he was a coupon candidate with only an Independent standing against him, but that was hardly the point. Du Cros had always been passionately opposed to votes for women.
‘I can’t, dearest,’ she whispered. ‘I just can’t.’
She dozed a little after that. He did what he could to make her comfortable on the Chesterfield. She did not have the strength for the stairs. By half past three it was already almost dark. Oscar did not switch on a light. Instead, he left his mother sleeping and went next door to the Doyles’ house. When he came back he knelt by his mother’s side and very softly told her it was time to wake up. She opened her eyes, staring dazedly at the wheelchair in front of her.
‘We’ll have to hurry,’ he told her. ‘I promised Jimmy he’d have it back before opening time.’
The chair was the newest kind, with rubber tyres and a reclining back. Oscar set it to its most recumbent position and placed several cushions around the frame. Then, very carefully, he lifted her into the chair.
‘You don’t need a coat this way, see,’ he said, tucking a blanket around her. ‘Or your Best Straw, for that matter.’
His mother managed a smile. ‘I bloody well do. If any day deserves me Best Straw it’s today.’
It was freezing when they came out of the Town Hall, the air sour with fog. Oscar pulled the blankets more tightly around his mother. Then, removing her hat, he set it in her lap. When he kissed her cheek she caught his wrist with her good hand, pressing his knuckles to her lips.
‘Thank you,’ she murmured.
He smiled at her. ‘Ready?’
‘Ready.’
Careful not to jolt her, he lowered the chair down the step of the kerb and into the middle of the road. There was no traffic, only a ghostly grocer’s van on the other side of the street with its rear doors open, the horse stamping and rattling in its traces. Oscar bent down and, locking his elbows, pushed the chair out in front of him. Then, with a wild whoop like an Apache Indian, he broke into a run. The grocer’s horse shook its blinkered head, blind to the fog-blurred figures flying down the road behind him, their laughter unfurling behind them like streamers.
13
At the start of the War Jessica had gone with her mother and Phyllis to Southampton to meet the soldiers coming off the crammed troop trains. They had stood among the crowds waving off the ships for France, gaily dispensing paper bags filled with chocolate and cigarettes. The atmosphere had been one of a vast Sunday picnic, the newly enlisted soldiers singing and laughing and blowing kisses with a good deal of ‘Ooh, la, la!’ and ‘See you in time for Christmas!’ Part of Jessica had wished she could go with them.
Now they crept back silently, in dribs and drabs. Many were missing limbs or parts of their faces. Tom Dodds whose father had a small farm on the Ellinghurst estate had a hook instead of an arm which he used to drag bramb
les from ditches and to close gates. The oldest of the Scovell brothers had been blinded by gas. His mother had insisted on having him home, though Mrs Briggs said it would be kinder if he was in a Home. She did not say kinder to whom. The three Scovell brothers had always gone around in a pack like fox cubs and had often come up to the house to play tennis with Theo. Arthur Scovell was the only one left.
Phyllis came home too. On her last leave, a snatched two days before Christmas, she had told her parents she meant to stay on at the hospital for as long as they needed her, perhaps until the autumn. She did not say why she had changed her mind. Her letter was brief, hardly more than the time of her train. Jessica went with Pritchard to meet her. When she saw Phyllis she gaped.
‘Your hair,’ she said.
‘I like it, before you say anything,’ Phyllis said.
‘Actually, I was going to say that it suits you.’ She considered her sister, her head on one side. ‘Which was the Tudor king, the sickly one that died? Before Bloody Mary.’
‘Edward VI?’
‘Exactly. You look like Edward VI, in that picture in the National Portrait Gallery. The one Nanny always insisted was one of the Princes in the Tower.’
‘Poor little mite,’ Phyllis said and they both laughed. Nanny had never managed to pass that portrait without saying it. Phyllis looked older, Jessica thought, but also more elegant somehow, despite her shabby overcoat and a hat that looked as though someone had sat on it. Perhaps it was the hair. It emphasised her elfin face, the delicate line of her jaw.
‘Thank God you’re home,’ Jessica said. ‘I can’t tell you how ghastly it’s been.’
Later she lay on Phyllis’s bed as her sister dressed for dinner.
‘Archaeology?’ she asked. ‘But why?’
‘What’s wrong with archaeology?’
‘You’re really interested in bits of broken pot?’
‘I’m interested in the people that made them, in the great vanished civilisations of history. Aren’t you?’
‘Not much. I prefer my civilisations with a bit of life in them.’
‘I imagine the Egyptians felt the same way.’
Jessica rolled over, staring up at the ceiling. ‘I can’t stay here, Phyll. It’s killing me.’
‘Killing you?’
‘Don’t give me that look. You know what I mean.’
‘Then leave. You’re eighteen. You have a choice.’
‘Do I? Did you know the house in London is being sold?’
‘Father said something about it, yes.’
‘No one tells me anything. You have no idea what it’s been like here, walled up like one of your bloody Egyptian mummies. I got so desperate before Christmas I even wrote to Mrs Carey begging her to take me as a PG, but she never even answered. Can you believe it? All those years of paying Oscar’s school fees and not even a postcard. If there is a Season this year I’m going to miss the whole bloody thing.’
Phyllis was silent, buckling her shoe straps. Suddenly Jessica sat up. ‘If you’re going to be at university in London perhaps we could persuade Father to take a flat.’
Phyllis shook her head. ‘I’ve already arranged rooms in the college hostel.’
‘A hostel? But those places are beastly. Didn’t you have enough of inch-deep baths and single gas rings during the War?’
‘I told you, it’s all arranged.’
‘I’m sure you could unarrange it if you wanted to.’
‘But I don’t want to.’
Jessica stared at her sister. Then with an exasperated sigh she flung herself backwards onto the pillows. ‘I can’t believe you. You’re as bad as Eleanor. It’s as if both of you actually want me to die an old maid.’
‘I’m afraid you may not have a choice.’
‘What are you talking about? You’re supposed to be helping me, Phyll, not crushing my last crumbs of hope.’
‘All right, then. Here’s some advice. Do something.’
Jessica frowned. ‘Have you even been listening to me? I’ve tried everything.’
‘Have you? What about getting a job?’
‘A job? The War’s over, Phyllis.’
‘There are still jobs.’
‘For men. Come on, things aren’t what they used to be but they’re not quite that bad yet. Not until Cousin Evelyn throws us out onto the street.’
‘Except you said it was killing you.’
‘And it is. It is.’
‘Then do something. Make your own life, instead of waiting like Rapunzel for the last of the knights-errant to ride up on his white charger and offer you his.’
‘Why do you think I haven’t cut my hair?’
‘Ha ha. I mean it.’
‘So do I,’ Jessica said. ‘It’s not as though I’m asking for much. Before the War Eleanor would have dragged us to London whether we wanted it or not. I don’t know if there’ll even be Court presentations this year but—’
‘Is that what you want? To be paraded in front of a crowd of chinless horrors like a prize cow? Have you forgotten that last summer before the War, how Theo loathed every minute of it? How he spent every ball and party plotting his escape?’
‘Of course I’ve not forgotten. And I don’t give a fig for all that ghastly polo and Royal Ascot stuff. I want to go to nightclubs and dance all night and drink too much champagne and fall madly in love. I’m eighteen, Phyll. I want to live.’
Phyllis was silent, staring at her reflection in the dressing-table glass.
‘Don’t you want that?’ Jessica said. ‘To fall into someone’s arms and to know that every minute you’ve ever lived, every thing you’ve ever done up until that moment was nothing but the overture. To know that all of a sudden you’re not sleepwalking any more, you’re wide awake, and nothing will ever be the same because you’re not the same you that you were the day before, that something fundamental has happened that has changed you, something chemical, so that together you make something completely new like—like hydrogen and oxygen making water. Do you really not want to know how that feels?’
Phyllis gave her a strange look. Then she stood up. ‘Goodness,’ she said tightly. ‘I never knew you were such a hopeless romantic.’
‘You should try it,’ Jessica retorted. ‘Better a hopeless romantic than just plain hopeless.’
It was not entirely true, that Jessica did not give a fig about the Season. Theo had hated it, it was true. He had done wicked impressions of the awkward girls clutching their dance cards, the braying young men who pushed them around the dance floor like wheelbarrows and boasted of their conquests. The English upper classes, he said, thought it as vulgar to be good at dancing as it was to be clever or to speak French with anything resembling a French accent, and yet they insisted on trampling girls’ feet night after night in a round of parties that nobody but the florists and the caterers and the dressmakers profited from in the slightest. He called it the Slave Market. He still received dozens of invitations. Sometimes, when he was bored, he used the heavy cards as projectiles, flying them with a flick of his wrist across his bedroom into the fire in the grate. The cards did not burn well. Just like debutantes, Theo said. Too thick to be any fun at all.
Jessica had vowed then that she would never allow her mother to make her come out. In those days, though, it had been different. It had never occurred to her that her mother would listen to her, that there might be a time when Eleanor did not want to be in London. The promise of parties and theatres and glamorous dresses had been as much a part of her childhood as Ellinghurst. It had been easy to despise it all then, when there was no avoiding it.
At the same time she thought of the girls she had been at school with and the girls at the parties in Hampshire and she knew she could not bear it, if the Season turned out to be exactly the same.
On the last Saturday in February Princess Patricia of Connaught, a first cousin of the King, married Commander the Hon. Alexander Ramsay in Westminster Abbey and the Yorkshire Melvilles returned to stay at Ellinghurs
t. Cousin Lettice could talk of nothing but the wedding. She told Phyllis and Jessica that the Princess had decided on her marriage to relinquish her royal titles.
‘No one asked her to,’ she said. ‘She had to ask the King’s permission especially, but she insisted. She would not outrank her husband. Isn’t that lovely? She could have had any royal prince in the world but she followed her heart and chose a commoner. Of course, he absolutely worships her.’
‘What is it about you girls?’ Cousin Evelyn said, pressing his wife’s hand to his lips. ‘So silly about weddings.’
This time Cousin Lettice brought the whole brood. The three elder boys ran in circles through the house and across the garden, chasing one another with sticks, while the baby gaped like a landed fish in its perambulator. Cousin Lettice said that boys were like ponies; they needed to be exercised or they grew skittish and prone to bite. She did not mind about mud or torn buttons or dirty hands that marked her skirts. When the boys made wigs of pondweed she only laughed and said she liked their hair better when it was blond.
Phyllis was reading a book about Egyptian hieroglyphics. She explained to the boys that, because hieroglyph meant god’s words in Egyptian, the ancient Greeks had believed the system to be allegorical, even magical, the key to secret, mystical knowledge.
‘Look how complicated it is,’ Lettice said. ‘You must be awfully clever.’
‘Is there a picture for every word in the world?’ Lettice’s oldest boy asked Phyllis, peering at the page.
‘Not quite, though there are nearly five thousand. What they mean depends on context, do you know what that means? On their place in the sentence. It might be figurative or phonetic or symbolic or all three, all at the same time.’
The boy looked blank. Phyllis smiled at him. ‘See this eye? Depending on the sentence it might be the word for eye or something done by an eye, like seeing or understanding. Or it could stand for the sound the word makes when you say it out loud: I as in you and I. And sounds can be used on their own or as part of a longer word like, let’s see. Like I-ced buns. I don’t suppose anyone wants an I-ced bun, do they?’
