by Clare Clark
They arrived back at Ellinghurst on the afternoon train. It was dark as they pulled up the drive, heavy clouds blotting out the moon. The house loomed above them like a cliff, its windows unlit. As they pulled up under the carriage porch Mrs Johns came out to welcome them. She told them that Sir Aubrey had been called away on business and would not be back until the next day. In the Great Hall Jessica removed her coat reluctantly. It was chilly, despite the roaring fire. The central heating was not working, Mrs Johns explained. There was a problem with the boiler or the pipes, no one seemed sure. She asked if Nanny meant to stay for supper but Nanny shook her head. She was eager to get back to her cottage.
Jessica ate supper alone. She did not bother to change. Afterwards she went upstairs. The hot water was still working, Mrs Johns explained, at least in the first-floor bathrooms. She would have a maid draw Jessica a bath. Jessica could hear the roar of the running water from the east wing corridor as she crossed the first-floor landing. She hesitated, leaning on the balustrade that overlooked the Great Hall. There were cobwebs on the vaulted beams, their loose threads drifting lazily in the updraught, and the suits of armour wore felted toupées of dust. Poor house, she thought, and she stroked the sleek wood of the balustrade. So much for Mrs Maxwell Brooke. It was time someone took things in hand.
She meant to go up to her bedroom and undress. Instead, she found herself walking down the passage that led to her mother’s bedroom. Outside the door she hesitated, one hand on the porcelain knob. Then, turning it, she went in.
The room was empty, as blank as a room in an hotel. There were no books on the curved shelves, no ornaments on the mantel, no photographs in frames. Even the silver carriage clock was gone. The bed was shrouded in a heavy coverlet Jessica had never seen before. She sat at the dressing table, staring at her reflection in the three-sided mirror. The powder puffs and the silver-backed hairbrushes and the hairpins in their china dishes had all been cleared away. All that remained was a pale mark on the polished walnut, a ghostly circle left by a long-ago glass. Jessica touched the circle with one finger. She slid open the dressing-table drawers. The top one contained the small brass key to its own lock. Otherwise they were empty. The drawers in the chest were empty too, neatly lined with sheets of folded paper. When Jessica leaned down she could smell it, under the paper smell, the lingering traces of lavender.
In the dressing room there was a large brownish patch like spilled tea on the wall above the window. The wallpaper with its tendrils of ivy was bloated, peeling away at the seam. Jessica opened the wardrobes. The rails were cleared, the shelves that had once held Eleanor’s rows of shoes quite bare. The wood inside the wardrobe was rough and raw-looking, marked with scuffs and, near the bottom, a scribbled mark in white chalk. The paper that covered the base was old and slightly askew. She squatted, smoothing it out, but the corner was awkward, as though the paper were folded too thick. She lifted it.
There was another piece of paper under the lining paper, folded several times into a square. She unfolded it. The paper was old, the creases so deep that in places the paper had split. It was engraved with the address of a club in Pall Mall.
Dearest E, I write in haste, already on my way home to you. Your letter—what can I say of your letter, except that it pierced my heart? Of course there is no one else. There has never been anyone but you. You are exhausted, I know, and wretchedly low in spirits as you always are in the first months, but such vile and baseless imaginings, such hateful threats? They are nothing but a torture to us both. You are my all, you and the little ones, and will be always. A
Her father returned the following afternoon. She heard the car, the sound of voices as Mrs Johns greeted him in the Great Hall. A gale was blowing in from the sea and, beyond the battlements, the trees tossed like ships against the darkening sky. She went down to meet him. He kissed her absently, his fingers plucking at the clasp of his briefcase, and disappeared to the library. He did not emerge for tea. Jessica sat alone by the fire in the morning room. She supposed there were things she should be doing, menus for the following day, a list of matters to discuss with Mrs Johns.
Instead, she flicked desultorily through old copies of her mother’s magazines. The elegantly drawn plates advertising furs and French undergarments were a far cry from the small advertisements for Triumph Female Pills and Phillips’ Dental Magnesia that peppered the pages of Woman’s Friend. She wondered which of the girls had been given her desk, who would become the platitudinous Mrs Sweeting in her absence and whether they would have to take on another girl, whether they thought of her when she was not there. She thought how glad Joan and Peggy would be that Lady Astor had won her seat in Plymouth by more than five thousand votes. ‘We are not asking for superiority,’ The Times had quoted her as saying, ‘for we have always had that; all we ask is equality.’ Jessica wondered if Joan had seen it or whether she should cut it out and send it to her at the magazine. She knew it would tickle her. It occurred to her too that they should definitely do a piece on Lady Astor’s costume on her first day in Parliament. The historic hat. Even the Bottlewasher could not call that politics.
The house was very quiet as she went up to change for dinner. When she returned there was still no sign of her father. She waited in the drawing room but when the door opened it was only Mrs Johns. Her father sent his apologies but he had urgent work to do. Again Jessica ate alone. To her surprise she found herself missing the oppressive clatter of the maid in the kitchen at Maida Vale, the shuffle and sigh of Nanny playing cards. The meat was tough. She chewed at it until the gristly mass of it in her mouth became intolerable and she had to spit it into her napkin. She did not wait for the maid to clear her plate. She rose, asking for coffee in the drawing room.
‘Two cups, please.’
She drank hers quickly. Then, pouring a second, she added sugar and took it to the library. She knew that the maid could do it just as well but she had had enough of being alone. She knocked and knocked again. When her father did not answer, she pushed open the door.
She did not see him at first. The leather chairs and the low tables and the lamps had all gone and, in their place, trestle tables, the kind that they had used for tenant parties before the War, were crammed in, end to end. Each table was heaped with books and boxes and ledgers and mountains and mountains of papers and envelopes and manila folders tied with string. Boxes filled the spaces under the tables and stacked the window seats, leaning drunkenly against the mullioned glass, and on top of the boxes the packages from the photographic developer in Bournemouth, hundreds and hundreds of them, heaped up like sandbags. Open books lay abandoned on every surface, bristling with paper markers or sprawled, spines broken, face down. Torn-up drifts of paper littered the floor. And everywhere, like bunting, fluttered scraps of paper covered in her father’s scrawl, pinned to the edges of the trestles, the carved frames of the bookcases, the panelled window shutters.
‘Father?’
‘What is it?’ His voice was muffled, impatient. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘I brought you some coffee.’
He stood and she saw him, tucked into a corner behind a mound of worn black ledgers. He was still wearing the tweed suit he had travelled in. Squeezing her way between the laden tables and the heaped-up boxes, she held out his cup. He frowned. Then, taking it, he swallowed the coffee in a single gulp. There was ink on his fingers and on the cuff of his shirt.
‘Thank you,’ he said, clattering the cup back onto the saucer.
‘Have you eaten?’
‘There’s a tray somewhere.’ He waved without looking up. ‘I’ll eat when I’ve finished.’
‘And when exactly will that be?’
‘Go to bed. I’ll see you in the morning.’
‘I could help you, you know,’ Jessica said. ‘With the book. If you wanted.’
‘Right now the book is the least of my concerns. Go to bed.’
‘Why? What’s the matter?’
‘The matter is that thi
s damned Government is determined to break us. Taxes, rent controls, inflation. Land values going down the drain. Twenty-five per cent we pay, now, on estate income. Twenty-five per cent! And that’s before death duties. How the devil do they think . . . ?’ He pressed his fingers to his temples, blowing out between his lips. ‘It doesn’t matter. Go to bed.’
‘What are we going to do?’
He shook his head, forcing a smile. ‘We’ll manage. Between us we’ll manage.’
‘You mean, when I get married.’
‘If only that were all it took.’
Jessica was silent. She picked up his cup and saucer, staring at the brown smear of coffee at the bottom. ‘Are you really thinking of marrying Mrs Maxwell Brooke?’ A frown like a twitch flickered over her father’s face.
‘Eleanor told me,’ she persisted. ‘Is it true?’
‘It’s an option I am considering.’
‘Because of Ellinghurst?’
‘It would certainly give us some breathing space.’
‘And if Eleanor refuses to give you a divorce?’
‘There are ways. I am talking to lawyers.’
‘Wouldn’t that mean a scandal?’
‘Almost certainly.’
‘And Mrs Maxwell Brooke? She wouldn’t run a mile?’
‘That’s a risk one has to take.’
Jessica looked at her father. ‘You would do all that? To keep Ellinghurst?’
‘One hundred times over. Wouldn’t you?’
She blinked. ‘I don’t know.’
‘But I do. This house is in your blood, just as it’s in mine. You could no more abandon it than abandon your children.’
‘Except I don’t have any children.’
‘Not yet. But you will. And when you do they will love this place as you and I do, in the marrow of our bones.’
‘I have to find a husband first.’
Sir Aubrey smiled drily. ‘That would be advisable.’
‘Husbands are not so easy to find, you know. These days.’
‘Perhaps you’re just looking in the wrong place.’
The tears rose unexpectedly in her throat. She turned her head. ‘I should let you get on,’ she said.
At the door she paused. Her father’s pen scratched noisily across the paper and his hair gleamed white in the circle of light from the desk lamp. ‘You would tell me, wouldn’t you, if there was anything else I could do?’
Her father was not listening. He turned a page of the ledger. Softly she closed the door.
33
On the last day of the Michaelmas Term, Mr Willis left a message for Oscar in his pigeonhole. He asked that Oscar come and see him urgently. Instead, Oscar went to the Victoria cinema on Market Square. The afternoon feature was South, an account of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s heroic and ill-fated attempt to reach the South Pole. Oscar watched as the grinning crew embarked on their expedition, waved off at the dock by a huge and cheering crowd. England had been at war with Germany for four days. In Antarctica the Endurance pushed through mile after mile of frozen sea, its glittering rigging festooned with icicles, its bow scything a path through the pack ice while all around icebergs loomed against the sky, vast white cities crowned with towers and spires. The sled dogs gambolled on the ice and the meteorologist played the banjo. It was magnificent and beautiful. Then the temperature dropped. Little by little, month after month and inexorably, the ice entombed the Endurance in its crushing grip. There was nothing Shackleton’s men could do but watch. Oscar watched too, bleakly, as, powerless against the ice, the 350-ton vessel crumpled like a paper boat. The rudder smashed first, then the mast, snapped like a matchstick before a violent eruption of ice forced the ship high into the air. For a moment the ice held it aloft, a broken trophy, Ahab’s Pequod. Then it was gone. Oscar closed his eyes, frozen and bereft. It was no solace to know that not one of Shackleton’s crew had lost their lives. In the row behind him a couple kissed as though they were drowning.
Phyllis had written from London before she left, a short breezy letter wishing him a happy Christmas and sending him an address in Malta where he might write to her. Since then he had received two picture postcards, one of the Grand Harbour in Valetta and another of a man in a tall hat milking a goat. The weather was mild, the work interesting. She had visited the Caravaggios in St John’s Cathedral. He stared at the black-and-white photographs, trying to picture her squinting in the sunlight by the blue Mediterranean Sea, or in whispering churches among the candles and the plaster Madonnas and the heavy smell of incense, but he did not write back. He could not think of what to say.
It was over. He understood that Phyllis had not said so, that on paper there was no reason why they could not go on exactly as they had before, but it did not change the facts. He thought of Rutherford behind his apparatus in the Maxwell Theatre, his fingers tucked into the pockets of his waistcoat.
‘As our friends the theoreticians would say . . .’
She did not want to marry him. It did not matter why. She did not want to marry him and that was that. He had asked and she had said no. The results were conclusive. The day after she went back to London Kit came to his rooms. Oscar heard him knocking but he did not answer. He waited for Kit to give up and go away. He did not want Kit’s sympathy, his empty reassurances. She would have married Kit. The thought haunted him. He dreamed of it, Kit laughing and Phyllis in a hat with a little veil, her pale face tipped up towards his. When he woke his eyes burned and his throat was raw as though he had been shouting in his sleep, and he wanted to break things and to bury his head in his pillow until the world went black and nothing mattered any more.
He did not attend his last supervision of the term. He sat on his unmade bed and watched the minute hand of his watch move slowly around the face until the hour was over. He could hear the clatter of the bed-makers in the court outside emptying their buckets through the iron gratings, the shrill whistle of a tradesman’s boy. He had an appointment with his tutor, Willis, but he did not go to that either. The next day a bad-tempered note from Willis insisted that Oscar come and see him urgently. Oscar did not answer it. He did not go to the library or to the last of Rutherford’s lectures. He heard the clocks strike one, a brief burst of voices on the stairs as men went down to lunch. Some time later there was a bang on his door. It was Kit. He had Girouard with him. He said that they would not leave until Oscar opened up. He said that if Oscar refused he would use his leg to break it down. Oscar did not answer. They banged for a while and then Girouard said something Oscar did not hear and they went away.
Later that day a note was pushed under Oscar’s door. It was getting dark by then but Oscar had not switched on the lights. In the grate the embers of the dying fire winked and faded. Oscar looked at the note for a long time. In the grainy gloom of dusk it looked like it was floating. Then he rose, shivering as he crossed the room on icy feet. He had not realised he had grown so cold. The paper was torn from a notebook and folded several times. Oscar unfolded it.
When it’s a damp, drizzly November in your soul it’s high time to get to sea. If you haven’t plans for Christmas how about the boundless oceans of Shropshire? K
He put the note in what remained of the fire. The paper blackened and shrivelled but it did not catch. When he pumped the bellows lacy fragments rose, drifting into the chimney like moths. The next day everyone went down and Oscar went to the cinema. When he came back a light snow was falling. It settled across the silent court, a fine white gauze, unmarked by footprints. A single light burned above his staircase door. All the windows were dark. He took the letters from his pigeonhole and went upstairs, his feet echoing emptily on the stone steps.
One of the letters was from Sir Aubrey. Opening it, Oscar slid out the enclosed photograph and studied it. It was a new game of Sir Aubrey’s, the photograph. Each one was of a particular detail at Ellinghurst, taken close up, which he challenged Oscar to identify. The first one was easy, the monkey bell push Sir Crawford had designed himself fo
r the breakfast room, the bell a wooden apple gripped in the monkey’s wrinkled old-man’s mouth. Since then he had sent several photographs in every letter. He refused to tell Oscar what they were, even when Oscar admitted to being stumped. He said that, if Oscar thought hard enough, he would remember.
Oscar propped them up on his mantelpiece like invitations. One was of a stone bird with raised wings which Oscar was certain he knew but which he could not place. He had carried it in his pocket for a week, walking in his head through the house, before, in bed one night on the cusp of sleep, it came to him that it was a part of the carved mantel in the library. The pleasure of the realisation made him smile in the dark. The next day, in London with Phyllis, he had found the photograph still in his pocket and extracted it.
‘Come on,’ he had said. ‘Do you recognise it?’ but Phyllis did not want to play. She said that Oscar should not encourage her father, that he was quite obsessed enough with Ellinghurst without people egging him on. Oscar knew that their correspondence made her uncomfortable, even though she only shrugged when he asked her and said that what he did was none of her business. To reassure her he left his letters out where she could read them but she never did, even when he asked her to.
‘Mostly I write about physics,’ he told her. ‘I’ve never mentioned you.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘Of course it matters. I wouldn’t want to think I was going behind your back.’
‘Well, are you?’
‘No, but—’
‘Then what I think isn’t important.’
‘But of course it is. It’s what matters most.’
‘Even if I am being entirely irrational?’
‘Even then.’
‘But why?’
‘Because I love you.’
She looked at him then and shook her head. ‘Except it’s not love when placating the other person trumps what’s right, is it? It’s tyranny.’
