We That Are Left

by Clare Clark

  ‘Jessica, my dear, you’re not off somewhere, are you? Don’t tell me Mrs Johns forgot to say I had telephoned? We’re here to see the poor patient.’

  There was no sign of Oscar as Jessica showed the Maxwell Brookes into the Great Hall and rang for tea.

  ‘None for me, dear,’ Mrs Maxwell Brooke said briskly. ‘We can’t really stop. We absolutely have to be in London by seven at the very latest, but of course we couldn’t bear to go without popping in. I suppose he’s well enough for visitors?’

  Brushing aside Jessica’s demurrals she bustled upstairs, Mrs Johns in her wake. Jessica and Marjorie stayed by the fire. The thick-ankled maid brought tea and walnut cake. It was only when Marjorie lifted her cup that Jessica noticed the sapphire on her left hand. ‘You’re engaged,’ she said.

  Marjorie smiled awkwardly, holding her hand out. ‘So it would seem.’

  ‘Your mother never said anything.’

  ‘It only happened the day before yesterday. It’s why we’re going to London, actually. We’re lunching with his mother tomorrow.’

  His name was Lionel Wilbraham. He was the older brother of a girl with whom Marjorie had come out, the much older brother, she admitted with a self-conscious laugh. He was thirty-five, an old man. He had been in the War until a gas attack left him with pulmonary tuberculosis; now he worked for the Ministry of Health. They had met at a weekend house party in Kent. He had arrived with another girl, she had assumed they were together. It had come as a complete surprise, at the end of the weekend, when he asked if he might telephone her. She had not thought he had noticed her at all.

  ‘Your mother must be thrilled,’ Jessica said.

  Marjorie made a face. ‘You know Mother. She’d have preferred a grouse moor. But she’s relieved. She was starting to worry I’d be left on the shelf.’

  ‘And at least he’s English. He is English, isn’t he?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Poor Terence Connolly,’ Jessica said and Marjorie flushed, her neck mottling pink as she took a slice of walnut cake.

  Mrs Maxwell Brooke hurried back down the stairs. ‘Marjorie, are you ready?’ She looked at Jessica, one hand pressed to her chest. ‘My dear girl, why didn’t you say? I thought it was another of his attacks but he looks perfectly ghastly. His face! And he couldn’t speak, couldn’t get one word out.’

  ‘He’s better than he was.’

  ‘The nurse would only let me stay a moment. She didn’t want me in there at all, only I absolutely insisted. She says it’s unlikely he will ever regain the use of his left side. That he’ll be paralysed, confined to a bath chair.’

  Jessica nodded numbly. Mrs Maxwell Brooke sighed, shaking her head as Mrs Johns helped her on with her coat. ‘Jessica, dear, I wish I could do more but I’m sure Marjorie’s told you her news? So you see, we absolutely have to be in London. You will promise to write and let me know how your father is, won’t you? And of course, if there’s anything I can do, anything at all. Your parents were both such a strength to me when Robert went. I don’t know what I’d have done without them, truly I don’t. Your mother is coming home, I presume?’

  ‘I’m not sure. I’ve not yet heard.’

  Mrs Maxwell Brooke pursed her lips as Mrs Johns opened the front door. The car was waiting under the carriage porch. ‘And your handbag?’ she chided Marjorie. ‘Goodness, dear, I hope you don’t mean to be so giddy when you’re married. You’ll drive that poor husband of yours to distraction.’

  ‘Goodbye, Jessica,’ Marjorie said. ‘I hope your father feels better soon.’

  ‘Thank you. And congratulations.’

  Mrs Maxwell Brooke smiled at her daughter as she climbed into the car. Then, with a sympathetic frown, she touched her cheek to Jessica’s. ‘You’ll let me know, won’t you, if there’s anything we can do? I can always send someone over from the house.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Take care of yourself, my dear. And have a happy Christmas. If you can.’

  ‘We’ll see you before then, surely?’

  ‘I rather doubt it. It’s to be a London wedding, St Margaret’s, so we’ll be up and down from town like a pair of Jack-in-the-boxes. By April I shall be good for nothing but hibernation.’

  ‘I’m sorry. The last thing you’ll feel like by then is the Season all over again.’

  A flicker passed over Mrs Maxwell Brooke’s face. She opened her mouth to say something. Then she closed it again, resettling her handbag on her arm. ‘Tell your mother to come home,’ she said. ‘In difficult times a mother’s place is with her children.’

  The tea was cold by the time Oscar came back into the Great Hall. He did not see Jessica curled up in a chair in front of the fire, a cushion in her lap. He stood in his coat and hat, looking up at the vaulted ceiling.

  ‘Where have you been?’ she said.

  Oscar jumped. He took off his hat. ‘I went for a walk.’

  ‘You missed the Maxwell Brookes.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘You’re not sorry in the least.’

  ‘Not really, no. How were they?’

  Jessica shrugged. She looked at the fire, the flames curling around the apple logs like ribbons. When she were small Nanny had told her that if you looked very carefully you could see your future in a fire, but however hard she tried she had never been able to see anything but flames.

  ‘How is your father?’ Oscar said.

  ‘A little better, I think.’

  ‘Might I go up and see him, do you think? I’d like him to know I’m here.’

  ‘Of course.’ She uncurled herself from her chair but he shook his head.

  ‘Stay where you are. You look comfortable. I know where I’m going.’ His hat still clutched in his hands, he started up the stairs.

  ‘You’re allowed to take off your coat, you know,’ she said.

  ‘Ah.’ He looked uncertainly at his hat, then put it on his head while he unbuttoned his coat and took it off, laying it over the banister. It slid slowly down the mahogany slope, catching on the carved eagle that topped the newel post. He took off his hat and looked at it again.

  ‘Throw it,’ she said. ‘Go on. For old times’ sake.’

  Oscar threw it. The hat missed the eagle by several feet and skittered across the stone floor to land beside Jessica’s chair. ‘Close,’ he said.

  ‘To what, exactly?’ Stretching out an arm, she picked it up. The brim was dusty. She brushed it, resting it on the cushion in her lap.

  ‘Your turn,’ Oscar said.

  Jessica grinned. ‘All right.’ She threw it without thinking, without standing up. It was a clumsy throw, a loop entirely lacking in the skimming elegance of Theo’s wristy flick, but to her astonishment the hat landed squarely on the eagle’s head, coming to rest jauntily over one eye. She looked at Oscar in triumph. ‘Bloody hell,’ she said.

  Oscar grinned. ‘Theo would be proud.’

  She grinned back. Theo had always pretended that the hat game was a fluke but the truth was he had practised and practised. She had watched him once from behind the banisters of the gallery, throwing Father’s top hat again and again. By the time Nanny discovered him there were dents all over the crown.

  ‘Old hats like this are old hat,’ he had declared, quite unrepentant as she chivvied him up the stairs, and when Nanny said sternly that he could tell that to his father, he said that someone had to do it and that Nanny should be thankful he was willing to save her the trouble.

  Oscar was gone for only a few minutes. When he came back downstairs his expression was sombre. The nurse was asking for her, he said. Her father’s condition had worsened. She had asked Mrs Johns to telephone for the doctor. When Dr Wilcox came he gave Sir Aubrey something to help him sleep. He said he would come back in the morning.

  Jessica and Oscar had dinner in the dining room. It was too large a room for two. They talked about Ellinghurst. It startled her, how many stories Oscar remembered, stories that she had forgotten or never properly li
stened to in the first place. There was a wistfulness in his dark eyes as he talked, the tenderness cut through with melancholy. She watched the shadows passing over his face and she felt a closeness between them, an intimacy borne not just of history but of understanding. Even when he fell silent there was no awkwardness. She knew how remembering swallowed the words sometimes, the dizzying way it opened the heart out like a flower and at the same time squeezed it like a fist. She knew it because it was just the same for her.

  35

  The next morning Oscar woke early. He stood shivering at the window, watching the reluctant dawn stretch slowly over the castle wall. Mist clung to the sloping lawns and snagged in the branches of the winter trees. It had rained in the night. Beneath him the terrace was slick, dark as a lake.

  In the Great Hall he tugged on his boots. When he had come down early as a boy there had always been a bustle about the house, hurrying maids with coal buckets or footmen with trays. Now it was deserted, the only sign of life a fire newly lit in the vast fireplace. It was as though the castle were just waking from an enchanted sleep, or slipping into one. Oscar hunched over the blaze as he pulled on his coat, closing his eyes against the shrivelling burn of the flames.

  Though the rain had stopped the air outside was heavy with damp. It clung to his hair, seeped into the wool of his coat. He walked down across the muddy lawn and through the copse of beeches towards the iron fence that marked the boundary of the wood, listening to the rooks stirring in the trees. The fence was choked with ivy and brambles, the path overgrown. He had to lift the rusting gate from a tangle of weeds to push it open. By the time he reached the tower the cuffs of his trousers were soaked through.

  He had thought the door might be locked. Instead, it gave way easily when he leaned against it. The windows of the Tiled Room were thick with grime and cobwebs so that the light was murky, like being underwater. One of them was broken. Ivy twisted through the jagged shards of glass and clung to the dirty tiles on the walls. The wooden seat that ran around the room had rotted in places. Several of the slats were missing. He stood there for a moment, remembering. Her hair had been longer then. She had worn a brown jersey and a green skirt and, around her neck, his woollen scarf with the stripes. Slowly he walked across the room, dry leaves whispering against his boots, and for a moment she was there, her arms wrapped around her shins, her cuffs pulled over her hands, her pale face gazing up at his. Through the dirty window the sky was the colour of her eyes.

  The previous afternoon, unwilling to return to the house while there were visitors, he had walked up through the garden, following the castellated wall around the house to the kitchen gardens and the old stables. He had stopped at Theo’s memorial and thought how municipal it looked with its polished black statue and its dome of shiny purple marble like burned skin, like one of those civic amenities paid for by local councillors that accommodated drinking fountains and troughs for thirsty dogs. The rough-hewn battlements behind it served only to make its glossy neo-classicism more incongruous, more absurdly faux, but then everything about Ellinghurst was fake. It was not a medieval castle any more than Theo’s memorial was a Greek tholos, but only a rich man’s romantic pretence, complete with ready-made ruins. No arrows had ever been fired from the arrow slits. The portcullis had never been lowered against a marauding enemy. That Jeremiah had insisted upon a portcullis that could be lowered did not make the house any less of a folly. A giant and magnificent folly but a folly all the same.

  Sir Crawford Melville had understood that. His tower was the most magnificent folly of all. He had not cared a jot for what posterity would make of it. He had built it because he wanted to, to see if it could be done. It had been his triumph, his legacy, the tallest structure of unreinforced concrete in all of England. And when he died he had had his ashes scattered from the very top because he knew that what mattered was not bricks and mortar but the loftiness of one’s ambitions, the splendour of one’s dreams.

  Oscar reached into his pocket, taking out the photograph of the tile. Phyllis would come soon, today or tomorrow. By then he would be gone. Would she write and say that she was sorry she had missed him? Only if it were true but perhaps it would be, a little. Perhaps she would think of him, of the last time they had been at Ellinghurst together on a frozen day four years ago with the ghost of Theo pacing the beech copse and the stink of Flanders clinging to their hair.

  She would not come to the tower. She would not walk, as he had walked, in the places where he remembered her, from the time before he even loved her. She would not miss this house when it was gone, or feel that with its loss a part of herself had been lost too. She was not sentimental, not like that. She had told him once she never understood why people clung so passionately to objects, why they invested such significance in tokens, theatre programmes or train tickets or the dried-out flowers from long-ago corsages. She could not see the point in keeping things. Things faded and crumbled to dust but the people that you loved became part of you, absorbed into the marrow of your bones, the soft pulp of your teeth, the cells of them dividing and dividing, altering you little by little and for ever. You could not lose them if you tried.

  He knew what she meant. He even envied her. It was easier not to care about things, especially when they were not yours to have. When Jessica had told him that Ellinghurst was to be sold he had felt the shock of it like a slap. It had never occurred to him to think of Ellinghurst as an asset, a representation of monetary value just as much as a bank note or a share in a company. It was simply a fact of life, Ellinghurst and the Melvilles, the house and the family indistinguishable, inseparable. Impregnable. The War had ripped open the earth like a sinkhole, sucking Theo down, but Ellinghurst would never fall. Encircled in its ivied walls, deep in its fairy-tale forest, the castle slumbered, and the paroxysms unmaking the world were nothing but a muffled rumble, a train passing far off in the distance. Bombs might fall, gas and shells and bullets choking and smashing, but at Ellinghurst the world continued the way the Melvilles wanted it to be, the way they had always pretended that it was. A fantasy bound in a folly. Oscar understood why it had made his mother so angry. It had not stopped him from wanting to pretend too.

  When Oscar had stood by his bedside Sir Aubrey had tried to say something. The words had not come. Instead, he had begun to weep. As the nurse hustled him away Oscar thought of Phyllis who would weep for her father as she had wept for Theo, but who would never weep for Ellinghurst. A house was a house, until it was a prison. The thought that this might be the last time he ever came here was a stone in Oscar’s throat.

  He turned over the photograph. On the back, in pencil, he had written her a message. He knew she would never see it but he wanted to leave it here, tucked under the seat where they had sat together that frozen day four years ago and somewhere, in a narrow fissure of his heart, the seeds of her had lodged and tentatively begun to germinate. Since then the cells in his body had divided innumerable times, his skin sloughed off, his hair and nails grown through and out. He was not the boy he had been then, because of her.

  The rasp of the door made him jump. He turned.

  ‘I thought you’d be here,’ Jessica said.

  ‘It’s not your father . . . he’s not . . . ?’

  She shook her head and looked at the photograph in his hand. It was a pattern, slightly blurred, with a star at the centre. ‘That isn’t one of Father’s, is it?’ she asked, glad to change the subject.

  Oscar nodded. ‘He used to send them to me at Cambridge. It was a kind of game we played. I had to guess.’

  ‘God, not you too. Bad luck. How did you do?’

  ‘All right, I think. Some were impossible.’

  ‘Like the hot air vent under the billiard table?’

  ‘That was one?’

  ‘I know. Who exactly crawls around peering under the furniture?’ She rolled her eyes, frowning at the picture in his hand. ‘What’s that one, do you know?’

  ‘It’s the floor. In here.’
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br />   ‘Is it?’ She pushed the leaves away with one foot. ‘So it is. And you knew it?’

  ‘Straight away.’

  She smiled. In his shoes she would have lied. She looked around the room, at the bench under the window where he had kissed her for the first time.

  ‘Four years ago,’ she said softly. ‘It seems like a hundred, doesn’t it?’

  Oscar did not answer. He put the photograph back in his pocket.

  ‘Theo always loved it out here,’ Jessica said. ‘He had his den here, remember, right at the top? He used to take me up there sometimes. One night when it was completely dark we lit sweetie papers and dropped them out of the windows. I thought I’d never seen anything so beautiful.’

  She smiled, remembering the flames like fiery wings in the darkness. Theo had leaned right out of the windows to watch them fall, so far that she had tugged at his legs to pull him back inside. She had forgotten that. She had tugged at his legs but he had shaken her off impatiently, catching her elbow painfully with one heel as he swung himself into the black hole of the empty window arch. He sat on the sill with his back to her, letting his legs dangle down outside. She did not dare say anything. Instead, she watched as he leaned out, holding the slim concrete pillars that held up the lintels. Then abruptly he twisted round, bringing his legs inside. She thought he would finally climb down. Instead, he leaned backwards out into the night, his back arched into the cold black wind of the night.

  ‘Look, no hands,’ he said. ‘I’m flying!’ Then he let go.

  ‘Catch me!’ he screamed and suddenly he was hurtling through Jessica’s head, not floating on the air like the lit sweetie papers or the scattered dust of Grandfather Melville, but falling, falling and smashing like an egg on the kitchen floor, and she had burst into noisy sobs and clutched at his legs and Theo had kicked out at her, hard enough that she let go, the scream huge in her chest, and she had thought he would fall then for certain but he had pulled himself back into the tower, his mouth tied in a knot, and said that if he had known what a baby she was he would have brought Phyllis instead. He had never taken her up to his den again.