by Clare Clark
Phyllis nodded at Oscar, ignoring the reproof. ‘Thank you,’ she said. There was nothing in her tone to suggest they had ever met. Beneath her hat her hair was lighter than he remembered it. He wondered if it was the sun. It was winter in Malta. She took off her coat. ‘How is he?’ she asked Jessica.
‘Better. A little. We hope. I’ve put you in the Chinese room, by the way. We’re not really using the upper floors any more, not since all the problems with the plumbing. You’ve time to go up before lunch if you want.’
‘I’d rather see Father.’
‘You can’t just turn up and barge in. He may be sleeping.’
‘Still.’
Jessica glowered at her sister. Then, as suddenly as it had come, the anger was gone. She felt perilously close to tears. ‘It’s bad,’ she said.
‘I know.’
They looked at each other in silence. Jessica did not trust herself to speak.
‘Come up with me,’ Phyllis said softly, taking her hand, and they went together, leaving Oscar standing in the Great Hall, his heart loud in his ears and his hands like someone else’s heavy at his sides beneath Jeremiah Melville’s censorious glare.
All that afternoon Sir Aubrey drifted in and out of sleep. Phyllis talked at length with the nurse, and afterwards she walked with Jessica to the village to visit Nanny. They took a cake and a collection of postcards Phyllis had brought back with her from Malta.
‘Nanny won’t want to see those,’ Jessica said, rolling her eyes. ‘She detests abroad,’ but Phyllis only smiled and said, ‘Spare the rod and spoil the child,’ which made Jessica laugh. Oscar was not sure why that was funny.
‘Come with us,’ Jessica said to Oscar but he shook his head.
‘It’s you she wants to see,’ he said and Jessica did not contradict him. Alone in the house he went to the library. To his surprise the door was locked and, when he asked Mrs Johns if he might have the key, the housekeeper said that she was sorry but Sir Aubrey had asked that no one be allowed into the library but him, so Oscar fetched a book of his own from upstairs and took it to the drawing room. Jessica was right. Even on a dull day the imposing room was washed with light.
He settled by the fire but when he tried to read the words squirmed like tadpoles across the page and, instead of Lorentz transformations and the aberration of light, he thought of Phyllis at the lunch table, her chin propped on her hands, her shoulders turned away from him as she asked Jessica about Dr Wilcox, about the treatment for pneumonia, the possibility of another seizure. He had tried to keep his attention on his plate but like a tongue probing a sore tooth his gaze kept returning to the curve of her ear, the dusting of freckles like powdered chocolate along her cheekbone, the soft down at the nape of her neck.
He had feared they might quarrel. Jessica and Phyllis were so unalike, not only in the way they looked but in what his textbooks would call their chemical properties, those qualities revealed by chemical reaction, by catalysis, by change, but instead he was startled by the ease between them, the careless abundance of shared references and private jokes. They slipped effortlessly from solemnity to silliness and back again, contradicting and consoling one another, their exchanges zigzagged with short cuts that made them hard to follow.
Like lovers, Oscar thought, silently helping himself to apple Charlotte he did not want. Since Phyllis had arrived she had barely spoken to him. Of course she had not. Her father was critically ill, possibly dying. It was a time for family. He dropped the spoon clumsily back into the dish. The maid straightened it and moved to offer the dish to Phyllis but Jessica leaned forward, pushing it away.
‘Do you want to be the Greedy Girl?’ she said disapprovingly to Phyllis who laughed and motioned to Doris to take the apple Charlotte away.
‘Is she coming?’ Phyllis asked and in the look that they exchanged there was no space for Oscar at all. He ate his pudding mechanically, the sweet crust clogging his mouth. The maid brought coffee. Jessica peered at the milk jug and said something about a skin and Phyllis cried, her shoulders shaking, and Jessica took her hand and they sat together, their fingers entwined, without saying a word.
It shamed him but he could not help it. It rose in his throat like smoke, the bleak sour fog of his schooldays. Du allein. Except Phyllis was not alone. She was not an only child as he was, nor an émigré, like his father, who could never go home. She had Jessica, her father, a place to belong to, to return to, a rope like the tether of a hot air balloon to reel herself in. He was not her only other. There were other people who would always love her as he did, without thinking, because the love was in their hair and their bones.
‘One loyal friend is worth ten thousand relatives,’ his mother had said and Oscar had believed her, of course he had. The two of them were the only real family they had left. His mother said that to understand the essence of humanity you needed only to study the ancient Greeks because they had known everything worth knowing, and, better still, they knew how to write it down. Since then Oscar had studied Poincaré and Lorentz and Bohr and Rutherford and Einstein. He had learned that it did not matter if people had believed the same things for centuries, for millennia. It still did not make them true.
He went upstairs and put the rings in a drawer with his mother’s letter, underneath his socks. He would wait until it was over, until Sir Aubrey was better. When Sir Aubrey was better he would come back. They would look out over the tumbled moors of the New Forest and past the smudge of the sea to the wide sprawl of the rest of the world and they would draw the lines of their lives together, parallel and never quite touching, like railway tracks laid down to the horizon. He loved her. He would not ask for more than she could give.
It grew dark. He did not go down for tea. Later he heard feet on the stairs, snatches of conversation, the low rumble of a man’s voice he assumed was the doctor. He did not want to go downstairs but he washed and changed and combed his hair, digging the teeth hard into his scalp, because love was selfless and what he wanted did not matter. Phyllis was not yet down. He accepted the glass of whatever it was that Jessica offered him and drank it too quickly as Jessica told him about Nanny. She had knitted cardigans for both the girls which she insisted on them putting on there and then.
‘Mustard yellow,’ Jessica said. ‘It’s enough to make you miss the War.’
A sombre Phyllis came down just as they were going through to dinner. Sir Aubrey’s temperature had soared. In his delirium he had mistaken Phyllis for his mother.
‘Grandmother?’ Jessica asked. ‘Are you sure?’
‘He called me Mama,’ Phyllis said.
‘Babies say Mama,’ Jessica said. ‘It’s what you say when you can’t say anything else. It doesn’t mean anything. The only reason mothers have always called themselves Mama is to get in first.’
‘Eleanor,’ Phyllis said, rolling her tongue over the vowels like someone trying out a foreign language, and to Oscar’s bewilderment both girls began to laugh helplessly, each attempt at recovery giving way to a new convulsion. They laughed until Jessica pressed her stomach and pleaded with Phyllis to stop.
‘I’m sorry, Oscar,’ Jessica said, wiping her eyes. ‘You must think us mad.’
‘Not at all,’ he mumbled. ‘It’s nice to see you laughing.’ He was glad Phyllis did not look at him. He was afraid she might be able to see inside his head.
At dinner Jessica asked him about Cambridge, his friends and his rooms and the photographs he had sent to Sir Aubrey.
‘You should see them, Phyll,’ she said. ‘They’re riddles, really. Like Father’s. There’s one that looks just like an angry face until you look closer and you realise it’s actually a door handle. Where did you say you found that, Oscar?’
‘St John’s.’ A side door near the Bridge of Sighs on a golden August evening. Phyllis had walked barefoot, swinging her shoes by their straps. He had photographed her feet, pale as fish in the trailing green weed of the river, and her wet footprints on the sun-warmed stone. Almost as soon as
he had clicked the shutter they were gone.
Phyllis said little. She knew all his answers anyway. As soon as dinner was over she pleaded exhaustion after her journey and bid them both goodnight. She kissed her sister and brushed Oscar’s cheek with hers.
‘You’ll have some coffee with me, won’t you?’ Jessica asked Oscar but he shook his head. His cheek prickled, electric with the touch of her. Jessica wore her long pearl necklace and a short silk dress with narrow straps like a film star’s nightgown. Oscar thought of Phyllis’s green-and-white striped summer dress, her squashed hat. Worth me Best Straw, he thought, and his heart ached.
Upstairs the bathroom door was locked. Jessica could hear the sound of water running. She banged on the door. ‘Phyll?’
‘What?’ Phyllis’s voice was muffled.
‘Let me in.’
The door clicked and Phyllis opened it, her toothbrush in her mouth. She went back to the sink as Jessica crossed to the lavatory. Pulling down her knickers, she sat down. White foam spilled down the handle of Phyllis’s toothbrush. She leaned forward to spit as Jessica wiped herself and reached up to tug on the chain.
‘Budge over so I can wash my hands,’ Jessica said, turning on the tap. Phyllis put her toothbrush under the flow. ‘Wait your turn.’
Reaching for the soap she pushed her sister away with her hip. Phyllis flicked her toothbrush at her, spattering her with tiny droplets of water, and she made a scoop of her hand, splashing water over the front of Phyllis’s nightgown. ‘Now look what you made me do,’ she said.
Phyllis took the hand towel from its rail and flicked it at Jessica’s neck. Jessica laughed, ducking out of the way. Halfheartedly Phyllis dabbed at the wet patch on her nightgown. The starched white towel was thick and glossy, the Melville monogram embroidered on it in white thread.
‘Are you all right?’ Jessica asked, taking it to dry her hands. ‘You hardly said a word all evening.’
Phyllis shrugged. She sat on the edge of the bath, the wet nightgown clinging to her thighs. The water made the white cotton almost transparent. Jessica could see the jut of her hipbones, the dark shadow of hair between her legs. She looked away, busying herself with her toothbrush.
‘He’s dying, isn’t he?’ Phyllis said quietly.
Jessica shook her head furiously. ‘Don’t say that.’
‘When I saw him I . . . it’s not him, Jess. Not any more. He’s not there.’
‘He’s got a fever, that’s all. It makes him confused. When that passes . . .’
‘Does Dr Wilcox honestly believe it will pass?’
‘He hopes. So should you.’ Jessica swallowed, scrubbing ferociously at her teeth. Phyllis pleated the fabric of her nightgown between her fingers.
‘Would I . . . would there have been time to talk to him? If I had got here sooner?’ She looked up at Jessica tentatively. Jessica stopped brushing. If you had been here, she wanted to say, if you had ever bothered to come home, you could have talked to him whenever you wanted. Instead, she shook her head.
‘Not since the second stroke,’ she said. ‘He hasn’t really been able to speak since then.’
Phyllis bowed her head, staring at the bunched-up fabric in her fist. Jessica spat out the dental cream, then turned on the tap, rinsing out her mouth. She did not know how it was possible to feel so angry with Phyllis and so very close to her, both at the same time. Phyllis said something she could not catch above the noise of the water. She turned off the tap. ‘What?’
‘I said I stayed an extra day. In Malta. Two days nearly. There was this relief, this extraordinary relief quite unlike the others, they think it might prove as important a discovery as the fat lady statue. I . . . I waited. I wanted to stay.’
Jessica shook her head. ‘Why are you telling me this?’
‘I thought it was what mattered, this piece of stone that had been buried in a field for thousands of years. That it was somehow more important. I never thought . . .’ She bit her lip. ‘What if he had died before I got here? What if I had never had the chance to say goodbye?’
‘He didn’t die, Phyllis. He isn’t going to, do you hear me? You have to stop saying things like that. It’s horrible.’
‘Saying things out loud doesn’t change anything,’ Phyllis said but there was something in the way that she said it that made Jessica think that she did not believe it either. They were both silent.
‘Your feet are blue,’ Jessica said.
Phyllis looked down. ‘More lavender, wouldn’t you say?’
‘Nanny would call that showing off.’
‘She would also tell us it was time for bed. Sleep, Jessica Margaret Crompton Melville, is a poor man’s treasure.’
‘And only thieves have important business after dark,’ Jessica said, pulling the cord of the bathroom light, and in the darkness they smiled at one another, their eyes glistening with memories.
‘I’d forgotten how full of us her cottage is,’ Phyllis said. ‘Like a museum of our childhood.’
‘We were her life.’ On the other side of the landing, along the passage of the East wing where their father slept, a lamp burned dimly.
‘I suppose we were. How sad.’
‘Why is that sad? She was ours, too, for years and years.’
At the door of the Chinese room Phyllis put her hand on the porcelain knob with its painted dragon. She did not turn it. She looked down the passage towards the faint light of the lamp. ‘Have you ever told him you love him? I mean, actually told him?’
‘I don’t have to. He knows.’
‘Does he?’ Phyllis stared at the rug, her toe tracing the pattern. ‘I keep thinking about something someone told me once. That it isn’t a scientist’s results that are the most interesting part of his experiment, it’s the facts he takes for granted before he starts.’
‘That sounds like something Oscar would say.’
‘Does it?’ She hesitated, her hand on the door knob, as though she meant to say more. Instead, she ducked her head forwards, kissing Jessica’s cheek. ‘I’m sorry,’ she murmured. ‘I should have . . . I’m sorry.’
‘Sorry for what?’ Jessica said but Phyllis had already closed the door.
Oscar undressed slowly. The fire had gone out in his room and it was very cold. When he got into bed he realised he had left his book in the drawing room. He reached into his knapsack and took out another. His mother’s book of Gray’s poems with Sir Aubrey’s photographs of Ellinghurst tucked inside. He opened the cover, reading the inscription. Thoughts that breathe and words that burn, with all my love. He frowned at the handwriting, struck by its familiarity. Then it dawned on him. The writing was Sir Aubrey’s. Not an inscription from his father to his mother at all, but from Sir Aubrey to Godmother Eleanor. His mother must have borrowed the book and forgotten to return it. He stared at the inscription. The words were different now that they no longer meant the same thing. Sliding the photographs out from between its pages, he put the book on the bedside table. He would have to leave it behind when he went back to Cambridge. The thought made him obscurely sad.
He fanned the photographs in his hand like playing cards, then laid them out, one after the other, on the counterpane. They had been printed by a machine on cheap cardboard and the images were soft, as though they were already starting to fade. They had an elegiac quality, as distant and unreal as the portraits of the Ellinghurst household that Sir Crawford had insisted on taking with a camera of his own invention, which had required an exposure time of nearly a minute so that the faces of the servants all came out blurred. As distant as the photographs on the boys’ dressing tables at school, those soldiers in their smart uniforms smiling into a future that turned out not to exist at all. When his mother saw the photographs Sir Crawford had taken she said that they did not even look like people, just ideas for people that someone had got bored with in the middle, which was so exactly what they looked like that Oscar had wanted to kiss her in delight. He thought of the way she smiled to herself when he read he
r the Gray poem about the goldfish from the book that was not hers, the way it spread on her favourite line: Presumptuous maid! He missed her. Perhaps, he thought, if she were here, he might be able to bear it better, the ache that pummelled inside him like a fist trying to punch a bigger hole.
He never meant to open the letter. He only meant to look at the envelope, to draw comfort from her familiar handwriting. To my dearest Oscar, on this happiest of days. He thought of the way she had sat in the parlour on days when she knew he was unhappy, her stockinged feet tucked under her and her book set aside on the arm of her chair, waiting for him to be ready. One corner of the envelope’s flap was not properly stuck down. Oscar picked at it, his thumbnail worrying the flap, and abruptly the gum gave way and the fold opened.
He missed her, her laugh and her frown of concentration and her silly music hall songs, the private smile over the top of her book. He wanted to believe what she believed, that one day he would marry and it would be the happiest day of his life.
The ink was blue and faintly smudged.
My dearest O, it is dawn as I write this, a grey winter’s dawn. Beyond the chimney pots the dull white sun is peering from under the clouds like a child reluctant to get out of bed. I ache too much to sleep and a good deal too much to try to get up so I am writing this to you.
I know too little of marriage to give advice. I made a mess of mine. I wish I had tried harder. A love affair, however passionate, is nothing but a chemical reaction, like gunpowder or phosphorus in water, dazzling perhaps but not profound. A marriage, even an unhappy marriage, is an act of creation. Exhausting sometimes, difficult often, but always interesting. You are thoughtful by instinct, attentive, endlessly curious. You see things others do not see. You will make a fine scientist. Perhaps you are one already. You will be good at marriage.
This letter is a last kiss. A fond goodbye. It was ever so. From today your family is not the one you were given but the one you have chosen for yourself. It is not a child’s majority but his marriage that topples the parent from his throne, that strips him of his power and his glory. The King is dead, long live the King. Amen to that. My father was a tyrant who terrorised my childhood but from Clapham he was nothing but a querulous, peevish old man.
