by Clare Clark
‘Did I ever tell you I can read fortunes?’ Gerald said.
‘I thought you just earned them.’
‘Show me your hand.’ He ran a finger lightly across her palm. ‘This one’s your life line. See how long it is? You’ll live to be a hundred and ten.’
‘Older even than you, then.’
‘No one’s older than me.’
‘This line’s deeper, though. It must be my telephone line. Or my clothes line.’
Aghast, Gerald put his hand over hers. ‘Heavens, how terribly awkward. A gentleman never looks at a lady’s clothes line.’ His thumb caressed the side of her hand. She smiled at him. Then she froze. Under the table, she could feel his other hand slide over her knee. She crossed her legs.
‘Gerald,’ she remonstrated but he only smiled and shrugged.
‘Don’t blame me,’ he said. ‘What else is Mr Wrong to do when faced with a gay girl in an excessively pretty dress?’
Later, in the lavatory, she sat and leaned against the watered-silk wall, her head swimming with champagne. Above her a voluptuous naked lady reclined in an elaborate gilt frame, one hand cupping her breast, the other tucked between her legs. Jessica shook her head at her disapprovingly as she reached for the lavatory paper.
‘And where is your Liberty bodice, young lady? You’ll catch your death.’
She had never meant to let things with Gerald go so far. She had expected to make other friends by now, to be going to parties. She had thought the girls at the office would know people, that she would run into girls from school or from Hampshire, that her mother would introduce her to the London friends she had known before the War. She had expected a mantelpiece thick with invitations, evenings at the theatre, dancing in nightclubs. Of course she let Gerald take her out to dinner. She was nineteen years old. Why on earth would she go home every evening like the other girls at Woman’s Friend and read detective novels and drink soup made from a cube when she could be dancing and drinking champagne? Gerald took her to heavenly places and, though sometimes she did rather wish that he knew people and could introduce her, she was also glad they never met anyone she might ever see again. The only friend Gerald seemed to have in London was a man called Ludo Holland, who was almost as old as him. Jessica liked Ludo. He was amusing and kind with a steadiness about him despite his ever-spinning carousel of actress girlfriends, but he was not someone she would ever bump into again. When the time came, she would leave it all behind and no one would be any the wiser.
And the time would come. The Season had begun and London was busy. It was just a matter of a few introductions. After that the whole thing would snowball and the parties would start and she and Gerald would go back to the way it had been at the beginning, occasional expensive lunches and an admiration that might almost pass for avuncular. Until then, she sighed, sliding up her camiknickers, and fumbling unsteadily for the chain, until then there was no possibility of doing without him.
‘So I shall just have to be clever, shan’t I?’ Jessica said, smiling tipsily at the lady in her gilt frame. The lady stared back at her with her shiny fish eyes and said nothing. Her white breasts were oddly childlike, with tiny scarlet nipples like glacé cherries. Jessica tutted at her, shaking her jowls like Nanny.
‘Put something on, dear,’ she said sternly, and went back to the dining room.
After dinner they went downstairs to dance. The nightclub was crammed. Ludo was already there, sitting at a corner table with a girl he introduced as Minty. All the other people seemed to know each other. She watched them, a raucous, restless, rackety crowd that rose and settled between tables, as noisy as rooks. Jessica thought she saw Lady Diana Manners in a corner, deep in conversation with a rakish-looking man with a patch over one eye.
Ludo had sprained his ankle. There was a stick propped up against the banquette. ‘No dancing for me,’ he said.
‘Then why did you come?’ Gerald asked and Ludo looked sideways at Minty in a way that made Gerald grin and shake his head. Ludo said that he had read in the Daily Mail that jazz music was contaminated with the primitive rituals of negro orgies and corrupted the young.
‘You young have it all your own way,’ he complained and he kissed Minty until she giggled and pushed him away. Gerald danced with Jessica and then with Minty. Minty had blonde hair and scarlet lips and a skirt edged with a fringe that showed her knees when she danced. She was a very good dancer.
‘What have you done with Gerald?’ Ludo asked Jessica as they watched them. ‘That kind of energy would be undignified in a man half his age.’
Jessica laughed. ‘I think you’re jealous.’
‘You could hardly blame me.’
She rolled her eyes at him. ‘It seems to me you’re not exactly miserable as things are.’
‘Appearances can be deceptive.’
‘Can’t they, though.’
Ludo grinned. Taking a cigarette case from his inside pocket he extracted two and lit them, handing one to Jessica. ‘My mother once sent my sister’s old doll to the Doll Hospital. Do they have such places any more? Perhaps they don’t. Anyway, my sister had loved that doll half to death, its hair all fallen out and the paint on its face rubbed away. It came back with bright yellow hair and these glassy blue eyes that seemed to bore straight into your soul. I thought my sister would be heartbroken, it looked nothing like it had before, but she absolutely adored the thing. It put the fear of God into me.’ He shook his head, tapping the ash off his cigarette. ‘After Christabel Gerald was in such a funk. For years. Nothing anyone did could shake him out of it. But recently, well, it’s like he’s been sent to the Doll Hospital. The old Gerald or near enough, but all brand new and shiny.’
‘Does he put the fear of God into you too?’ she teased. Gerald had never mentioned a Christabel. But then Gerald never mentioned anyone at all.
‘God, yes. I’m considering a repaint myself, just for revenge.’
A little after two o’clock in the morning she asked Gerald to take her home. He was in high spirits, his gestures exaggerated by drink. He had a new motor car, a low-slung sporty thing which he drove at great speed and with much crashing of gears. Jessica wanted to ask about Christabel. Instead, she stroked the plump leather arm rest.
‘A friend of my mother’s used to have a motor like this,’ she said as they roared up Park Lane. ‘A white Alfonso XIII.’
‘Beautiful machines. Did he ever take you for a spin?’
‘He preferred my mother. I once caught them kissing in the garden. Eleanor just laughed. She said everyone had to have some fun now and again or they forgot they were alive.’
‘Hard to argue with the principle.’
‘I was eleven. The next day I took my mother’s flower scissors and scraped them all the way down the side of that shiny white car. They must have known it was me but they never said anything. They said he had scraped it on the gate.’
Gerald took the turn to Edgware Road without braking. The tyres shrieked.
‘Please, pas devant la petite voiture,’ he said. ‘You’re making her nervous.’
‘Then she’d better hope you’re on your best behaviour. It’s only wicked men who get the scissor treatment.’
When they reached Elgin Avenue Gerald did not pull up outside Biddulph Mansions. He stopped on the corner, where a cluster of plane trees blocked the light from the street lamp. There was no one about. His left hand caressed the gear lever. When it moved to Jessica’s leg it was almost as though it had slipped there by mistake. Jessica picked it up and put it back on Gerald’s lap. In the light of the street lamp she could see the veins like dark worms beneath the thin old-man skin.
‘What did I say about being good?’ she said teasingly. ‘Goodnight, Gerald.’ She leaned over, pecking him on the mouth. He caught her as she pulled away, his hand cupping the back of her head, his tongue pushing between her lips.
‘There’s good and good,’ he murmured. ‘Now that’s what I call very good.’
Half-lifting
himself out of his seat he kissed her again, his lips still soft but his tongue insistent, twining itself around hers. One of his hands was on her thigh, the other on her ribs beneath her breast. She tried to squirm away from under him but the car was too small, he took up all the room. His tongue choked her. She could not breathe. Her hands on his chest, she pushed him away. The street was deserted but Jessica was still glad it was Maida Vale and miles from anywhere where someone might know someone who knew her.
‘You’re a bad, bad man, Your Excellency,’ she protested. ‘I have a horrible feeling you mean to corrupt me.’
‘Corrupt you?’ He smiled, his hand sliding up to nudge her breast. ‘Isn’t it a little late for that, my little alley cat?’
‘I don’t know what kind of girl you think I am but—’
A car swung past them, its headlights brief and dazzling. Horrified, Jessica pushed Gerald roughly away. She could feel him looking at her but she did not look back. She stared out of the windscreen at the car as it drove up the street, smoothing her skirt over her knees.
‘I’d like to go in now, please,’ she said tightly. Outside Biddulph Mansions the car slowed, its brake lights like red eyes in the darkness. Then it stopped. Jessica watched as a chauffeur in a peaked cap got out and walked round to open the passenger door. She felt sick. She wondered if they had seen her, if they knew who she was. A blonde woman in a fur climbed out, followed by a man. The woman was laughing. Instinctively Jessica ducked her head, a hand up to shield her face. Gerald snorted.
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘The morality patrol.’
Jessica waited until the man and the woman had gone inside. Then she crossed her arms. ‘I want to get out.’
‘I see.’
Jessica waited but he did not open his door. ‘Well?’
‘Well, what?’
‘Well, aren’t you going to let me out?’
‘I suppose so. In a moment.’ He looked at her sideways. Then, his hands on the steering wheel, he shook his head, exhaling a bitter soundless laugh.
‘What?’ Jessica demanded.
‘I was just thinking of that creature who declared she would die in captivity.’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘You told me that, do you remember? The first time I met you. That afternoon, it wasn’t just that you were lovely. You had such audacity, such—verve. You meant to squeeze life for every last drop of juice that could be got from it, and if other people didn’t like it, well, who ever gave a damn for what other people think? You were going to get what you wanted and the rest of the world could go hang. You were going to be free. God, it was wonderful. Intoxicating.’
‘Just because—’
‘Ludo laughed when I told him.’ His voice was soft, as though he were talking to himself. ‘He said I shouldn’t believe a word of it. He said upper-class girls were all the same, constipated by convention and lousy with etiquette. He said before I knew it I’d be being dragged to tea with your mother.’
‘My mother would rather die,’ she said tartly but he only shook his head.
‘You see? So much promise. I told Ludo he was wrong about you. That you were nothing like those ridiculous debutantes, that you were bold and original and spontaneous. That you were . . . irresistible. Was I the one who was wrong?’
He smiled at her and his smile was so sad that she let him kiss her after all. He kissed her gently at first and then harder, mashing his mouth against hers, and she closed her eyes and kissed him back, her mouth open and her tongue entwining itself with his, allowing herself to be carried along on the wave of it. His hands sought her neck, her breasts. She did not push him away. The more she kissed him the more she was the person he believed her to be, audacious and insolent and extraordinary. When at last it ended she was breathless and hazy and faintly triumphant.
‘My God,’ Gerald murmured, ‘you are irresistible.’ And Jessica’s heart turned over and she wondered if she might not be a tiny bit in love with him after all. She kissed him again.
‘I do really have to go in,’ she murmured. This time he did not protest. He walked her to the front door. As she fished her key from her bag he kissed her on the neck. Then he seized her around the waist and spun her round in a pirouette. She laughed, rolling her eyes at him. In the harsh glare of the porch light his hair shone silver and the lines in his face were thick and black. He looked as old as the hills.
‘Go home, Gerald,’ she said, and she gave him a little push with her hands. She could still hear him laughing as he climbed into his car and roared away into the night.
21
It did not take long for Oscar’s days in Cambridge to acquire a pattern. Despite, or perhaps because of, his irritation with Oscar’s early arrival and at a loss as to what to do with him, Mr Willis had reluctantly agreed to allow Oscar access to the Wren Library, a privilege usually granted only to members of the College. Every morning after breakfast, Oscar gathered his notebooks and his folders and walked over Magdalene Bridge and up Trinity Street to the cobbled sweep in front of Trinity’s Great Gate, on top of which, in the eighteenth century, the University’s first astronomical observatory had been built. Every morning he stepped through the archway with its heavy oak door and walked across the great grand sweep of Great Court, past the fountain and the chapel and the Great Hall, and through the arch to Nevile’s Court.
Every morning it took his breath away. It was on the stone flags of the north cloister that Isaac Newton had stamped his foot to time the echoes and determined the speed of sound. Oscar set his feet into the dents worn by centuries of feet and in the sunlit air the weight of history turned slowly, like columns of dust. The court had been designed by Christopher Wren. With its pale Italianate façades and its elegant colonnades it was perhaps the most beautiful place Oscar had ever seen and yet it was not its beauty that struck him the first time he saw it or its elegance but its immeasurable gravity, and the foolishness of the unintentioned pun had filled him with a rush of happiness like helium that almost lifted him off the ground. It was a joke that would have amused his mother.
Every morning he read and every afternoon he walked. He always went the same way, across Trinity Bridge and along the Newnham Road towards Grantchester. It was the sunniest May anyone could remember and on the Backs the warm afternoons were bright with chatter and laughter and the slow dip and splash of punts. Girls were not permitted on the river without a chaperone but they spread blankets on the grass banks, their parasols bright as butterflies. There were wicker picnic baskets and wind-up phonographs and bottles of champagne cooling in the river on lengths of string. Couples danced together on the lawns. The music drifted on the breeze, insistently gay, insinuating itself into Oscar’s feet.
He did not stop. He did not even take photographs. His head was too busy with the books he was reading. The book list Mr Willis had given him covered the first part of the Natural Sciences Tripos. Oscar read them all, not only physics but chemistry and biology. When a subject caught his attention he turned to the bibliographies and read more. The librarian was helpful, at least until Oscar enquired about subatomic physics. Then he produced a single slim volume by a Trinity Fellow, Mr James Jeans, published before the War. That, he said apologetically, was all that they had. Oscar knew better than to ask why they owned none of the books by German scientists. Instead, he read Mr Jeans.
Mr Jeans’ book was filled with incomprehensible equations but his central theory was clear. For years, in his work with black body radiation, he had attempted to accommodate his results within the parameters of classical mechanics. Instead, he had found them persistently in contradiction. Mr Jeans was obliged reluctantly to conclude that there was, underlying the most minute processes of nature, a system of mechanical laws quite different from the Newtonian laws upon which physics had been built thus far. But even if those laws could be identified, even if a complete set of equations to support them could be conceived and proven, the mathematics defied physical interpretation. An
y attempts to explain or picture the mechanisms involved, Jeans stated baldly, led only to a state of hopeless confusion.
The phrase was like a fragment of meat caught between Oscar’s teeth. It nagged at him. A state of hopeless confusion. Quantum theory explained subatomic physics but the human brain could not imagine it. But if something could not be imagined, then how could it possibly be true? As he strode on out of town, matching his thoughts to the metronomic tick of his heels against the stone, it occurred to him to wonder whether intellectual energy, like radiation, was also quantised, that it too was delivered in packets of predetermined size, proportional to the circumference of the brain, the length of the walking stride. Perhaps, he thought, if he could look inside his head, slicing off the top like a boiled egg, he would see the electrons of his thoughts circling the nucleus of his brain, compelled by the unfathomable laws of the hidden universe never to diverge from their preordained orbits. Perhaps, he thought, it was why they only ever seemed to take him in circles.
And still he read and walked and thought, each day in the same order. No one paid him the least attention. No one stopped at his desk or tipped their hat to him on the stairs. Even the porters, whose job it was to know everyone, hardly seemed to see him as he passed through Great Gate. Oscar did not mind. He felt light, divested of the awkward conspicuousness of his body, his whole self rolled up and contained inside the safe box of his skull. When, on the rare occasions he walked through the college in the afternoon, the place was hectic with undergraduates, laughing and shouting and waving tennis racquets with a noisy enthusiasm that smashed up the air into bright shards, but in the mornings, when the courts were deserted and magnificent and everyone in the University was deep in study, it seemed to him that the hush of the library was alive with a static hum, a symphony of thinking, as in every carrel and corner of the ancient buildings worlds grew and opened and held their silent faces up towards the light.
