We That Are Left

by Clare Clark

  H. J. G. Melville’s books. Oscar’s eyes shone. ‘Sir, I don’t know what to say.’

  ‘You scientists never do.’

  They drank their coffee in the lounge. Sir Aubrey’s feverish energy had evaporated and he slumped in his chair, his pouched eyes rimmed with red. When Oscar rose to leave he roused himself, pressing Oscar’s hand between his own. He told Oscar that if he ever needed anything he only had to ask.

  ‘And come and see us, won’t you? Come and bring your camera. I long to see what you find next. And Jessica is home every weekend.’

  ‘Thank you, sir. I should like that.’

  ‘We would not want you to forget us. We are all very fond of you.’ He sighed, shaking his head. ‘It got my grandfather too, you know. Cancer.’

  ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘No, well, no one talks about it, do they? It embarrasses them. Filthy bloody disease. An unspeakable instinct for the finest people. Like the War. It’s only the cowards and the charlatans who come home.’

  Oscar walked back across Parker’s Piece towards town. It was a breezy blue afternoon, high clouds scudding across the sky. He thought perhaps he might go to Ellinghurst. He could hardly begrudge the time when Sir Aubrey had been so generous. Henry Melville’s books! For that he would listen to any number of stories of Melvilles long dead. Besides, Ellinghurst was glorious in June. In Egypt, Sir Aubrey said, it was too hot for excavations by the end of May.

  In two weeks Phyllis was coming home.

  At the pillar box on Magdalene Street he saw Kit. He was talking to a girl in a spotted dress. She held a bicycle by the handlebars, its basket piled high with books. Oscar turned, hoping to slip by unobserved.

  ‘Greenwood, you snake, aren’t you going to say hello?’

  Reluctantly Oscar turned back. Kit grinned. ‘I don’t suppose you know each other, do you?’

  The girl shook her head. She had an upturned nose and a mass of pale brown hair swept up into a makeshift bun. Balancing her bicycle precariously against her hip she put out her hand.

  ‘How do you do?’ she said.

  ‘Frances Kellaway, Oscar Greenwood,’ Kit said. ‘Frances is a friend of Latham’s.’

  ‘Peter was at school with my brother,’ Frances explained.

  Oscar looked blank. Kit rolled his eyes at Frances. ‘Please excuse him. He knows perfectly well who Peter Latham is and he is delighted to meet you. It’s just that he likes to pretend that his mind is on higher things. That way he looks brilliant and ducks any obligation for good manners.’

  Frances laughed.

  ‘Frances is at Newnham. English Literature,’ Kit said to Oscar. ‘I have a hunch that her mind really is on higher things, only unlike you she is much too polite to show it. Look, I’ve got to go. If I’m late for another of Lopez’s supervisions all hell will break loose.’ He smiled at Frances and kissed her lightly on the cheek. ‘I’ll see you tonight, then.’

  Frances watched as he limped away, swift despite his stiff-legged gait. Her eyes were soft, her pale cheeks flushed with pink.

  ‘It was nice to meet you,’ Oscar said.

  ‘Yes. You too.’ She lingered as Kit disappeared through Magdalene gate. Then she smiled at Oscar. ‘Are you going my way?’

  They walked together up Bridge Street, Frances pushing her bicycle.

  ‘So have you and Kit been friends long?’ she asked.

  ‘We met at the beginning of term.’

  ‘He seems to know everyone. All the girls, at any rate.’

  ‘Well. He likes dancing.’

  ‘I know. It seems so unlikely, doesn’t it?’ She looked over her shoulder towards Magdalene as if she hoped to catch a glimpse of him. ‘He’s so clever and brave. And funny too, of course. I think half of the girls I know are a little bit in love with him.’

  Oscar did not know what to say to that.

  ‘Will you be there tonight?’ Frances asked. ‘At the Quinquaginta?’

  ‘I don’t dance. It’s an act of kindness, I promise you. I’ve two left feet.’

  ‘Me too. Kit doesn’t believe me. He says he has no left foot at all and if he can dance, anyone can. That it’s simply a matter of not thinking too much.’ She laughed the same uncertain laugh. ‘I’ve never been terribly good at that.’

  ‘“We’re fools whether we dance or not, so we might as well dance.”’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘It’s a Japanese proverb. Or so Kit claims.’

  ‘Is it? How dispiriting. Or cheering. I’m not sure.’

  ‘I wouldn’t worry. Knowing Kit he probably made it up.’

  ‘You make him sound like a rotter.’

  ‘Sheer jealousy. You wait until you’ve known him a bit longer, then you’ll understand. Attack is our only line of defence.’

  Frances laughed, her bottom lip caught between her teeth. She was not a particularly pretty girl but she had a pretty smile. Outside Trinity they said goodbye. Then she got on her bicycle, tucking up her skirt so it did not catch in the chain. Oscar had started towards Great Gate when she called after him.

  ‘He’s not . . . that is, I mean, I’m not being an idiot, am I?’

  He turned. ‘What?’

  ‘It’s only . . . never mind. Sorry. Sorry.’

  Wobbling a little, she bicycled away down Trinity Street. Oscar watched her back wheel disappear around the bend, then turned back towards the college. Above him Henry VIII gazed out coldly from his niche in the stone gate. At some point the previous century an undergraduate had scaled the gate and replaced the royal sceptre in his hand with the leg of a wooden chair. The joke had stood for over fifty years.

  ‘Handy to know they keep a spare,’ Kit had remarked once. ‘In case of emergencies.’

  Oscar ducked through the oak door and crossed Great Court. The afternoon sun caught the windows of Kit’s rooms, making him squint. He wondered if, instead of thermodynamics, Kit was thinking about Frances Kellaway with her pretty smile and her two left feet. He could not imagine it somehow. Girouard teased Kit about girls but Oscar had never known him serious about one. He was not sure that Kit knew how. It would require him to be serious about himself, at least for a moment, and Oscar was not sure he knew how to do that either.

  He felt a twinge of pity for Frances with her tentative laugh and her longing lighting up her face like fluorescence. So much was written about the wonder of love, books and books crammed with words, but what purpose did any of it serve, except to create an idea of the world that was not real? A poem was no different from a scientific theory; the sheer beauty of it might take your breath away, but if it failed to observe the facts it was worth nothing. Discontinuity was inherent in radiation phenomena. Falling in love with someone did not mean that they loved you back. Those were the facts, whether you could explain them or not, and all the elegant expression in the world could not make them different.

  23

  After nearly a month the novelty of working had worn thin. It was exhausting getting up early, wearisome waiting at the stop for the crowded trolleybus. As it jolted along the familiar route Jessica stared blankly out of the dirty window at the familiar dingy diorama, the figures scurrying along the pavements like wind-up toys. She thought how heavenly it would be to have a car, the passengers in the bus gaping at her as she roared along Marylebone Road. Gerald had held to his promise to teach her to drive. Twice before dinner, he had taken her to the Outer Circle of Regent’s Park and let her take the wheel. He said she was a natural. She wished Theo could have seen her. Gerald said the car could do eighty miles an hour on a straight road and even in the Park the speed was exhilarating. In the mornings, though, like Cinderella, the car was a distant memory. When it rained the other passengers smelled of wet dog. On warm ones they smelled meaty, like gravy.

  It was worse in the office. The sun beat down on the roof, heating it up like a greenhouse, and though they pushed the windows open as far as they would go on their rusted hinges, there was no breeze to stir the soupy a
ir. Jessica’s slice of window was painted shut. She pushed her chair back against the wall to avoid the aggressive strip of sunlight that moved across her desk every morning, imprinting its shape in purple on the underside of her eyelids and shrivelling the milky surface of her tea. She was tired of Doubtful and Betty-Blue-Eyes, tired of reducing diets and vinegar face washes and sponging black lace with tea.

  ‘We should be like Spaniards,’ Joan said, ‘and keep the curtains permanently drawn all summer.’

  ‘Except there aren’t any curtains,’ Peggy pointed out.

  ‘There must be some old blackout blinds somewhere.’

  ‘Blinds? I bet Ethel just tarred the windows, the old cheapskate. This is Woman’s Friend, after all.’

  ‘Disculpe, signorina! That’s Amigo de la Mujer to you.’

  There was supposed to be no talking in the office but Joan and Peggy talked all day, snatching their conversations in fragments in the narrow spaces between the clattering typewriters and Miss Cooke’s withering glare. The exchanges reminded Jessica of a toy Theo had had when he was small, a wooden box with coloured pegs sticking out of it and a hammer to hit them with. If you hit a peg hard enough it went in and another one popped out. You never knew which colour it would be.

  They called Miss Cooke the Bottlewasher. It startled Jessica that two girls could be like that together, like boys were, good-humoured, undemanding, slipping effortlessly from practicality to intimacy and back again and never taking offence, always on the edge of laughter. At school friendships had been whispery, clammy things, heavy with secrets. The girls had hunched their arms around their friends just as they had hunched their arms around their papers during examinations, defying anyone to peek. They had divided into pairs like lovers and held hands and put notes in one another’s satchels and wore two halves of the same pendant around their necks. Joan and Peggy were the same with everyone, even Jessica. It was just that they were more so with one another.

  Jessica could not imagine how they stayed so cheerful. There was always too much to do. She had hoped to persuade the Bottlewasher to let her go early on Fridays but Miss Cooke only said that there was plenty more for Jessica to do if she had spare time. She gave her articles to proofread, snippets to cobble together about cold cream and custard powder and the countless children of the royal family. On a particularly sweltering day, with Doreen off with the flu, Jessica was instructed to do the horoscopes. She rather enjoyed it. There was something cheering about ordaining the future. She read Joan’s out. Joan was a Capricorn. According to Jessica’s predictions the colour blue would prove lucky for her in the week ahead. The next day she came to work with a blue scarf knotted around her neck. She told Jessica she had borrowed it from a girl in her hostel.

  ‘You’d better be right,’ she said. ‘I hate blue. And it itches like the devil.’

  Gerald was a Sagittarius. Jessica wrote that it was a week for those born under the sign of the archer to count their blessings and not take loved ones for granted, but either she was wrong or Gerald did not read Woman’s Friend. On Monday he telephoned her at work, pretending to be a French friend of her mother’s visiting London, and, in an execrable accent, told her that he was going away for a few days on business. He promised to telephone when he got back.

  Without their evening to look forward to, the days dragged. Eleanor came to London to see Mrs Leonard on Wednesday as she always did. She told Jessica that Theo had been glad to hear that Phyllis was coming home. She said he had talked about Guy Cockayne, about his visit to Ellinghurst.

  ‘He said it meant so much to him, for us to know his friends from that time,’ she said. ‘He said they were another family to him.’

  ‘Perhaps we should ask Guy to dinner,’ Jessica suggested. ‘If that’s what Theo would like.’

  ‘Perhaps we should.’

  She gave her mother the last address he had sent her, care of a firm of solicitors in the City, and recalled with a prickle of anticipation his narrow hands, his pale poet’s face. Part of her had always imagined marrying a friend of Theo’s. She had watched them out of her bedroom window on summer evenings, playing croquet or drinking cocktails on the terrace, and wondered which one was hers and when she would be old enough for them to know it. Guy Cockayne was different from those boys with their tennis racquets and their easy laughter, but she still thought of him sometimes, when she was alone. There was something complicated about him that drew her. And he had loved Theo. She loved him a little already, just for that.

  The next night, which was Gerald’s night, she took a long bath and read a magazine while Nanny played Solitaire, clicking her tongue at the cards. In Mayfair and Belgravia the newly minted debutantes would be putting on their evening dresses. Before the War girls had been presented individually in the Throne Room but a four-year backlog rendered such a system unworkable. Instead, the King and Queen held garden party courts with the girls presented en masse and in ordinary day clothes. In the photographs on the society pages they clustered together awkwardly under their hats, like guests at a fête. Jessica thought she recognised one or two of them from school. She wondered if they had got any better at dancing since the days when they had pushed her around the school gymnasium, their damp hands clutching hers. She tried not to envy them the balls. She had asked Theo once if balls were dreamy and he had laughed and said only if she meant the kind of dream when things repeated themselves over and over and, however hard you tried, you could not run away or make yourself wake up.

  Theo would have adored the places Gerald took her to, the Grafton Galleries and the Embassy Club and Morton’s in Soho. At the Grafton there was a negro band and everyone was rich and beautiful and determinedly, recklessly happy. Jessica adored the club’s old-fashioned proprieties: the cakes from Gunter’s, the obligatory gloves, the demure layers of tissue paper obscuring the paintings of nudes on the walls were all part of a sly joke, an arch pretence of innocence that, when the band played syncopated jazz and the floor was crowded with dancers pressed together in the tango or moving their hips suggestively in the shimmy, was both soothing and deliciously absurd.

  Gerald disliked the Grafton. He said that there was no point in a nightclub that did not serve alcohol, that if he wanted cakes and sandwiches and iced coffee he could go to tea with the vicar. He particularly detested the violently pink concoction they called Turk’s Blood that was the speciality of the house. In his day, Gerald said, Turk’s Blood was a proper drink made with red Burgundy and champagne.

  Gerald liked the secret places, the cellars and the sleazy side doors where you had to ring the doorbell with a special code to be let in. He liked the Seven Souls and the Lotus and the Vampire Club, where there were men in lipstick with powdered faces and women in suits and ties, and the band was led by a negress with a gravelly voice who performed in a white dinner jacket and top hat and sang the popular songs with lewd lyrics of her own invention. He liked Rector’s, a dingy basement on Tottenham Court Road where decanters of whisky were provided in the gentleman’s cloakroom and the band, dressed in firemen’s helmets, came down from their places to dance like madmen among the crowd.

  Jessica supposed she liked them too. You could like things and not like them at the same time. She disliked the taste of cigarettes but she loved the way they made her feel, the enigmatic curl of the smoke around her face, the cool dismissive act of exhalation. When she smoked she felt like Theda Bara, exotic and mysterious. And the music was thrilling. When the band played the reckless rhythms of ‘Livery Stable Blues’ and ‘Tiger Rag’, she had to dance, to surrender to its mad exuberance until nothing mattered but the trombones and the motor horns and the cowbells and the frying pans beaten like drums, pounding like a score of hearts in her chest. Then the champagne and the music echoed in her bones and her teeth and shimmered beneath her skin, and she was someone else, someone wild who would die in captivity. In the flat unsparing stare of daylight, she thought of Gerald’s hands, his creased old man’s skin, and the recollection o
f what she had let him do could make her squirm. But in the darkness, under the plane trees, with the champagne and the music still resonating inside her, she wanted him. She wanted him to want her. She pushed his hands away but she waited for them to come back. She wanted them to come back. Her body arched and her breath quickened, just like his.

  She did not ask Gerald about Christabel. She did not want to be the kind of girl who cared about that sort of thing, but she did not like not knowing either. One night, alone with Ludo Holland at the table, she asked him.

  ‘He hasn’t told you?’

  ‘I haven’t asked. I don’t suppose it’s any of my business.’

  Ludo took a drag of his cigarette. ‘She was his wife,’ he said. ‘She died. A motor smash. Three years ago.’

  Jessica stared at him. ‘He was married?’

  ‘Very. It was a bad time.’ He tapped the ash into a dirty glass. ‘But then it was a bad time for everyone.’

  When Gerald returned to the table Jessica put her hand on his, sliding her fingers between his, and kissed him.

  ‘What’s that for?’ he asked but she only shook her head and kissed him again. She had never given a thought to his life before her. He did not seem the kind of man anything bad would ever happen to. She felt very tender towards him and at the same time faintly appalled. He was a widower. It gave him depth, the shadow of poignancy darkening his reckless gaiety. It also made him seem older than ever.

  When her father telephoned the flat Jessica demanded to know what was wrong. Her alarm made him irritable. He told her brusquely to be quiet and listen, that he meant to be up in London the next Thursday and that he wished to have dinner with her and Phyllis.

  ‘Phyllis is home?’

  ‘She arrives tomorrow.’ He ignored Jessica’s protestations that Thursdays were not convenient. He said that he would prefer to have dinner in the flat where they would be able to talk privately, without interruption.