by Clare Clark
‘She’s a shabti,’ Phyllis said. ‘A servant for the afterlife.’
Oscar cradled her in his hand. She fitted almost exactly into his palm. ‘She’s beautiful.’
‘She’s probably Seventeenth Dynasty. At that time nearly everyone was buried with one or two, some with hundreds and hundreds. They believed that the dead passed on to the Field of Reeds and that everyone would be expected to work together to cultivate it. The shabti was the servant who would do that for you. Look, here’s her hoe.’ She pointed at the painted line. ‘The hieroglyphs are the spell put on her so that she would answer for her master or mistress when they were called to work. Shabti means answerer.’
‘Where did you find her?’
‘In the souk in Luxor. The hawker had a biscuit tin full of them. He was rather disappointed I chose this one, he was angling for something grander, but I liked her. She looks so furious, doesn’t she? As though she’s been tricked.’
Oscar laughed. ‘Who can blame her? Bewitched into doing someone else’s hoeing for all eternity.’ He touched the shabti‘s face with one finger. ‘She’s wonderful. Too wonderful to give to me. You should keep her.’
‘Too late. She’ll only answer to you now.’ Phyllis closed his hand over the shabti and kissed him. Her lips were soft and warm. ‘Happy birthday.’
All he wanted was to kiss her back, for ever and ever. Instead, he sat up, looking down at the shabti. She glared at him balefully. He took a breath and held her out to Phyllis. ‘I don’t suppose you could wrap her up again and give her to me in April?’
She did not interrupt him as he explained. She lay on her stomach, her chin propped on her hands. When he was finished she kissed him. Then she took the shabti and put her in her bag.
‘April’s a nicer month for a birthday,’ she said. ‘More like a beginning.’ Later, staring up into the leaves of the willow, she said, ‘Do you think ours will be the generation that finally stops being ashamed of sex?’
It was she who undressed him, in the end. She was gentle, determined. She paid no heed to his assurances that she did not have to, that he was content to wait. She unbuttoned his fly and took him in her hand and, when he thought that he would explode with the ecstasy of it, she slid her leg over his, straddling him, and guided him inside her. He gazed at her, wordless, breathless, as she pushed herself upwards and arched her back, throwing her head back in a silent shudder of pleasure.
Afterwards, as they lay together, their legs tangled, he said that he was sorry, that next time it would not be over so quickly.
‘I know,’ she said and, twisting onto one elbow, she kissed him, her fingers finding their way between his shirt buttons to stroke his stomach, and immediately he felt himself hardening again, his bones melting like candle wax. She kissed him very slowly. Then she took his hand and placed it between her thighs.
‘Like this,’ she said and he knew then that he was not the first. Later, when he asked her, she said it had been during the War. She was not sorry. She had loved him, or thought she had. He had not loved her. It was not possible to love someone, she said, when you were very unhappy. The idea of Phyllis in another man’s arms tortured Oscar. Alone in Cambridge on the long hot nights, he imagined her with him, their bodies entwined in the moonlight. He could see the curve of her breasts pressed against his chest, the proprietorial arc of his arms.
He knew it was his own fault for asking. He had thought that knowing would help, like turning on the light and seeing that the monster behind the door was only his dressing gown hung on a hook. Instead, it only made the monster more real.
Then, as though someone had turned a switch, the summer was over. The deep blue sky turned grey, blotting out the sun. The temperature dropped. Two days later snow fell. It was not yet October. Cambridge was muffled, blanketed in white. Below Jesus Lock the river froze. The Silver Street boatman lifted his punts from their jetty and put them into winter storage. He said the cold would crack their hulls.
The first Saturday after the snow Oscar went to London. They went to the British Museum. Afterwards they sat in a stuffy tea room near Liverpool Street Station, watching the steam condense on the windows. He held her hand under the table. She told him she had been to see a doctor and obtained a Dutch cap. She had worn a ring, invented a story about her husband struggling to find a job. Oscar was startled by her candour, her resourcefulness. Phyllis only shrugged. They could not risk a baby. Outside, labourers were working to rebuild the part of the station destroyed by German bombers in 1917. The piles of sand and bricks were iced with snow, like cakes. He held her tight as he kissed her goodbye. He wanted to ask her what she had done with the ring but he was afraid she might think it a stupid question. Through her swaddling of scarves and jerseys he could hardly feel the shape of her.
The next Saturday the railwaymen came out on strike against an attempt to cut their wages. The strike paralysed the railway system for ten days. In Cambridge Oscar slept with both his jerseys on and his overcoat spread out over the blankets. In the mornings, there were patterns of ice on the inside of the window and, on the water in his washstand jug, a skin of ice like the milk skin on a cup of tea. Without the means to transport it coal piled up outside pits across the country. Mrs Piggott said darkly that they might as well be in Russia. She took to double-locking the front door at night, in case of trouble.
It was the longest Oscar and Phyllis had gone without seeing each other since Marjorie’s ball. Every morning Oscar scoured the newspapers for the latest news of the strike. He did not care about the railwaymen’s wages, the necessity of an eight-hour day. He just wanted them to go back to work. In the end the Government capitulated first. Oscar took the first train out of Cambridge. When he arrived in London he went straight to the hotel behind Marylebone Station. A place like that did not stretch to scruples. The proprietress with the copper hair was behind the desk. She grinned when she saw him, showing her long teeth.
‘Don’t suppose you got the time, do you?’ she said.
She gave him the key to Room 5. The electric fire was on a meter. Even with it fed the room was icy. They lay tangled together under the blankets in the narrow bed, only the tip of Phyllis’s nose showing as she told him excitedly about her lectures, her tutors, a proposed expedition to Malta to join the excavation of a Neolithic temple. Her term had just begun.
‘You’re going away?’ Oscar asked, disconcerted. The room was more dismal than he remembered. There was damp on the ceiling and scabs of mould along the splintered skirting boards.
‘If I can raise the money. It’s horribly expensive. They only tolerate students because we subsidise the digs.’
When she said she was waiting for the right time to ask her father, he knew that she was serious. Phyllis hated her dependence on her father, the obligations it brought. She lived as thriftily as she was able, impatient for a time when she would be in a position to support herself. She was matter-of-fact about Ellinghurst passing to distant cousins. She said there were advantages to the ancient injustice of primogeniture, that houses like Ellinghurst were nothing but prisons, bulwarks of stone and history that shackled their heirs, confining them to the same purposeless lives for generations.
‘Father could have been a distinguished scholar,’ she said. ‘He took one of the highest Firsts in Greats of his generation but when he was offered a fellowship, he refused it. He said he couldn’t live in Oxford, that his place was at Ellinghurst. He threw his life away.’
‘Perhaps he thought Ellinghurst was more important.’
‘Then that only serves to prove my point. The Bolsheviks are right. Private estates should be the property of the whole people, and not just for the good of the workers. For the landowners, too. To set them free.’
‘And exactly how free would you be without your father’s money to support you?’
‘This isn’t about the money. It’s about living a life that matters, that means something, not the one ordained by an accident of birth. We only get one chan
ce, Oscar. We can’t waste it.’
She was impatient, hungry for life, for learning. She raged against the injustice that women, when they married, were required to resign from careers in teaching and the civil service but she was baffled, too, by the eagerness of her contemporaries for marriage.
‘How is it that society has succeeded so triumphantly in convincing my sex that we are pitiful, thwarted half-women until we are joined with a man, when in fact it is marriage that denies a woman a self of her own, that robs her of her freedom and her independence and forces on her a form of legal home confinement? Don’t look at me like that, you know quite well it’s true. A man’s marriage is one part of him, a woman’s must be her whole life.’
‘It doesn’t have to be like that, surely?’ Oscar protested.
‘One of the other girls came in to lectures last week with a ring on her finger. I looked at that ring and all I could think of was those marks farmers paint on their sheep. A big inky splodge that says, “This one’s mine”. Of course she only came in to show it off, she had already withdrawn from the course.’
‘Perhaps she loves him,’ Oscar said quietly but Phyllis only frowned.
‘Even if she does,’ she said, ‘how can that possibly be enough?’
Phyllis did not hanker after a home. She had no interest in the domestic life and no desire to be tied down. The thought of motherhood oppressed her. Imagine, she said, the drudgery, the boredom, the wretchedness of a life without solitude, without the time and the freedom to study, to travel. It incensed her that, even as Parliament prepared to pass into law an act that would finally lift the bars that prevented women from entering the professions, when even Oxford and Cambridge, those bastions of obscurantism, teetered on the edge of granting women full admission, permitting them at last to gain the degrees for which they had studied and been examined, intelligent women continued to subscribe to the fiction that children were the crowning achievement of their lives. The purpose of life was not mindlessly to breed. It was to examine, to question, to try to understand. A single life was so brief, so full of possibility. Who in their right mind would squander it rocking a cradle?
It did not seem to occur to her that Oscar might not feel the same way.
The next day he returned to Cambridge to matriculate. Kit was already there. He had a new leg, a futuristic-looking contraption built from a copper-aluminium alloy. It was much lighter than his old leg and he moved on it almost gracefully but it did not stop the cramps.
‘Still, better than German jawbones, I suppose,’ Kit said, and when Oscar looked blank he shook his head and limped over to the bookcase. He scanned the spines, then pulled out a book in a worn green cloth cover which he tossed onto Oscar’s lap. Oscar turned the book over, glancing at the title. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville. He had never heard of it.
‘Just read it, would you?’ Kit said. ‘It’ll save an awful lot of time.’
Oscar took the book back to his room and forgot all about it. His days were busy, crowded with lectures and supervisions, including, once a week, a lecture from Rutherford himself. Oscar was always the first undergraduate to arrive in the Maxwell Theatre on that day, taking his place in the front row of the stacked wooden seats, but Rutherford was invariably there before him. A heavy-set man with a round face and thick pepper-and-salt moustache, he wore an old-fashioned black suit with a waistcoat and a pocket watch that he studied as the men filed in. He looked like a bank manager.
At midday precisely Rutherford snapped his watch shut and slid it into his waistcoat pocket. The silence was sudden and intense. Rutherford did not speak. Instead, he drew a few loose pages of notes from the inside pocket of his coat and glanced over them. When he was finished he folded the notes and slid them back inside his pocket. Then he clasped his hands together, the tips of his thumbs against his lips. As if pulled by invisible threads, every one of the undergraduates in the theatre leaned forward a little in their seat.
The Prof had no time for obfuscation, for answers that tied you in knots. Academic philosophy bored him. Theory, he said, was another word for opinion. What mattered were the facts. A simple experiment, using simple apparatus and directed by the disciplined imagination of an individual or, better still, a group of individuals with different points of view, was capable of producing striking and conclusive results beyond the imagination of the greatest philosopher or mathematician.
‘Theorists play games with their symbols,’ he liked to say, ’but we turn out the real solid facts of Nature.’ His lectures included frequent experimental demonstrations, as well as a copious stream of diagrams and photographs that served as experimental records. In experimental science, he said, the great discoveries came not from sophistry or pretension. They came from observation, from seeing with one’s own eyes not how one presumed or imagined or hoped things to be but how they truly were.
His students puzzled over this. They argued that physics was not as simple as the Prof liked to suggest, that the complexity would not just go away because he wanted it to. They said that there was a fine line between simplicity and lack of imagination, which was another kind of stupidity. Some claimed he had a chip on his shoulder because he was a simple man himself, a colonial from New Zealand whose father had worked in a flax mill. They also complained that he ignored the syllabus. They said it would be his fault if they failed their examinations.
Oscar took no part in these conversations. He never lingered after lectures in the courtyard. He liked to be by himself then, so that he might feel it humming in him, Rutherford’s joy in a good experiment and the thrill of believing, for as long as he could make it last, that all that was required to understand the great mysteries of the world was honesty and a faith in possibilities, whatever they might yield.
There were some older men among Oscar’s fellow freshmen, conscripts who had had to wait their turn to be demobilised. Mostly, though, they were boys just out of school. They felt very young to Oscar, though they were perhaps only a year or two his junior. He saw little of them. As for BUTTERWORTH D, whose name was painted next to Oscar’s at the bottom of the staircase and with whom he was supposed to share rooms, he appeared not to exist. There were mutterings of a deferment. Oscar let his books spread across the two small bookcases and piled his papers on the spare second desk. One misty November morning he returned shivering from the Baths in his dressing gown to discover that the man’s name had been removed from the noticeboard at the bottom of the staircase. All that remained of BUTTERWORTH D was a ghostly shadow of black letters beneath the fresh white paint.
He had never dared risk it until then, but the next Saturday at tea time, as the dusk gathered like sweepings in the narrow Cambridge streets, he smuggled Phyllis back to his room. They made love in BUTTERWORTH D’s single bed.
‘Two fools in a tub,’ Oscar said and Phyllis laughed and kissed him. Later, wrapped in blankets, they toasted crumpets in front of the fire. Phyllis glanced at the books piled on the floor. A flicker of surprise passed over her face.
‘Is this yours?’ she asked, extracting Moby-Dick.
‘A friend lent it to me. He said I had to read it.’
‘You should.’
‘You’ve read it?’
‘A few times.’
‘Oh, good. Then you can just tell me what happens and I don’t have to read it myself.’
Phyllis opened the book, slowly turning the pages. ‘Don’t you want to?’
‘I don’t read novels.’
‘That’s not true. You read The Time Machine.’
‘You remember.’
‘Of course. I read it too, after that.’
‘Did you?’
‘You made it sound interesting.’
Oscar brushed his lips against her bare shoulder. She smiled vaguely, absorbed by something on the page.
‘It’s strange, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘To think of before. When you were just . . . you.’
Phyllis did not answer. She bent her head, her face softening a
s she read. Oscar kissed her neck, then her ear. She leaned away from him a little, her eyes on the words. Gently he reached out and took the book from her.
‘Not now,’ he murmured, dropping it behind him on the floor. As he bent to kiss her he saw her glance at it. The hesitation was no longer than a breath before she turned, her body arching up to meet his. He found the book several days later, pushed out of sight beneath the narrow bookcase. He was supposed to be preparing for a supervision but it was no longer so easy to work in his room, not now she had been here. He picked up the book, turning the pages as she had, wondering which passage had caught her attention. The chapter was set out oddly, like a play. He frowned at it. Then he turned back to the beginning and began to read.
A week later he sat with Kit at breakfast. It was early, a little after seven in the morning, and Trinity Great Hall was almost empty, the silence broken only by the muffled clatter of plates from the kitchen. Above them the vast diamond-paned windows were turning from black to a streaky yellow-grey. Oscar ate his eggs absently, Moby-Dick open on the table by his plate.
‘Bloody hell,’ Kit said. ‘They’ve only gone and bloody done it.’
Oscar did not answer. He did not want to talk to Kit. He wanted to be beside Ahab and Starbuck aboard the Pequod, watching Moby-Dick rise up in the water, the corpse of Fedallah lashed to his side in a tangle of harpoon ropes.
‘Aren’t you going to ask me what they’ve only gone and bloody done?’
‘Later,’ Oscar said, his eyes on the page. As the great whale turned and swam away from the Pequod, Starbuck turned to Ahab. ‘Moby-Dick seeks thou not. It is thou, thou, that madly seekest him!’
‘Not later, Ishmael. Now.’ Ignoring Oscar’s protests, Kit placed the folded newspaper over the open book. ‘Right there.’
