by Clare Clark
Jessica dug her nails into her palms. She had never meant to confide in her mother but she could not help herself. She could not endure to listen to any more of her vicious lies. ‘And that’s why he did what he did. Don’t you see? Father wanted me to marry Oscar. That’s why he left him the house. For us both.’
‘He told you that?’
‘Yes. He had had two strokes. He knew he was dying. He wanted to know Ellinghurst would be safe.’
‘So he arranged your marriage? How very thoughtful. And did he give you any choice in this matter?’
‘It wasn’t like that. Ellinghurst is my home.’
Eleanor stared at her. She shook her head, exhaling a disbelieving laugh. ‘So Aubrey was hedging his bets? How very unsavoury.’
‘For God’s sake, that’s enough!’ Jessica cried, flinging her arms out in fury. ‘Oscar is not Father’s son!’
Coolly Eleanor picked up her teacup, eyeing her daughter over the rim. ‘And you can be quite sure of that, can you? You’d marry him anyway, to please your dead father, this boy who may or may not be your half-brother?’
‘Don’t!’
‘My advice exactly. It’s perfectly clear you don’t love him. Besides, your children might have three heads.’
Jessica crossed her arms. She was shaking with anger. ‘Why did you come back, Eleanor?’
‘What else would I do? Aubrey was my husband.’
‘Ah, the grieving widow, back to spread her poison and seize her share of the spoils. And your Frenchman? I suppose you brought him with you?’ It was only a guess but she knew from the flicker that crossed Eleanor’s face that she was right. ‘Jesus, Eleanor.’ It might be amusing, she thought bitterly, if it were not so utterly pathetic. Turning, she walked towards the door and suddenly she found herself thinking with a pang of tenderness of Gerald, devastated by the death of his wife Christabel. She hoped he was all right, wherever he was.
‘I shan’t let you do this,’ Eleanor said quietly. ‘Rawlinson will be here at eleven. Phyllis and I shall see him, with or without you.’
Jessica shook her head. ‘No. You won’t.’
‘I’m doing this for you, Jessica. Do you really imagine I can stand back after what you’ve told me? How could your father have even . . . ? I shan’t allow it. I shall tell Rawlinson we mean to fight it, if it takes every last penny we’ve got. That scheming little bastard of Sylvia’s will never take my son’s place.’
Jessica stopped in the doorway. She turned wearily, her shoulders slack. ‘Oh, Eleanor, don’t you understand? What you want doesn’t matter, not any more. You can howl and rage all you like. Theo is dead. He’s dead. What matters now is keeping hold of what we have left.’
‘And what is that, without Theo?’
‘If you don’t know how can I begin to tell you?’
Eleanor hesitated.
‘Go back to France, Eleanor,’ Jessica said. Her voice was flat. ‘We don’t want you here.’
‘And if I don’t?’
‘If you don’t then I shall speak to Rawlinson about contesting your part of Father’s legacy. He had begun divorce proceedings against you, after all, and your adultery is hardly in question. Perhaps it was not the wisest decision, in the circumstances, to bring your lover to your husband’s funeral. I just hope he is patient. Do you know how long these things take to grind through the courts?’
‘Don’t you dare threaten me.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t call it a threat. More of an insurance policy.’
‘You wouldn’t.’
‘You don’t think so? Go home, Eleanor. There’s nothing left for you here. Take your Frenchman and go back to your graveyard before either of us do something we’ll regret.’
‘Jessica—’
‘Goodbye, Eleanor,’ she said. Turning, she closed the door behind her. She could feel her knees shaking, her heart thumping in her chest. More than anything she wanted to be somewhere else, somewhere her mother was not. Halfway across the Great Hall she broke into a run. She took the stairs in bounds, two at a time.
At the gallery she stopped, breathless, looking over the balustrade to the Great Hall below. She could feel them still, the coils of her mother’s lies, clinging to her like seaweed. Oscar was not her brother. Of course he was not. Eleanor’s assertions were nothing but fantasies and lies, the foul effluence of her rotting grief.
And yet. Her father had chosen Oscar. According to Rawlinson he had changed his will after his first strokes. He had not waited for Jessica. Whatever her father had hoped for, he had never spoken to her directly, never attempted to elicit any promises. He had said only that he wanted her to be happy, that he wanted them both to be happy. He had never meant her to do something she did not want to do. That was why he had done what he had done. He had left Ellinghurst to Oscar and made it safe. With or without Jessica, Oscar would be a Melville. The law would see to that. It was no longer up to her. Whatever she did, Ellinghurst was his.
The realisation lifted her like wings. Ellinghurst was Oscar’s, and the debts and the mortgages and the inexorable creeping decay were Oscar’s too. From now on the burden was his. He would bear it. He was kind and clever and good and he loved Ellinghurst. He would not let anything bad happen. He would keep it safe for all of them. And for as long as Ellinghurst was his it would be hers too, no matter what else she chose to do. Her mother’s lies were ludicrous, the poisonous fantasies of a lunatic, but what did that matter? What did it matter if Oscar were her brother or her uncle, if he were the son of the Kaiser or the devil or the second Son of God? Her father had made him a Melville. He was one of them. She did not have to marry him. She did not have to marry anyone. She could take lovers and travel the world. She could even go back to work. Joan would help her if she asked. She could leave all this behind, the leaking roof and the impossibility of finding servants and the ceaseless nagging anxieties about money, safe in the certainty that it would always be here to come back to, an anchor and a sanctuary. Hers but not hers, like family, to love and to depend on. To take for granted.
Gripping the balustrade tightly, she pushed herself forward, balancing on her stomach. The rail was wide, she would not fall, but she still felt the old exhilaration, as though she were flying. She stretched out her neck, feeling the tendons pulling at her breastbone, and closed her eyes.
Ellinghurst was Oscar’s. She was free.
41
The day was almost over, the light a last smear of silver where the sky met the sea. In the gloom the graceful concrete pillars that supported the window arches were pale as skin. Oscar touched one, running his hand down its cold flank. Beneath him the darkness congealed in the trees. It was a long way down.
Ellinghurst was not his, not yet. Mr Rawlinson had explained to him that the Melville name and arms could be transferred only by means of a Royal Licence, which would require the submission of a petition first to the Ministry of Justice and then to Buckingham Palace. He foresaw no difficulties but the process was slow. It would take several weeks.
By then Phyllis would be gone. She had deferred her archaeology studies for a year and was travelling to Egypt to rejoin Mr Carter’s dig in the Valley of the Kings. There was still no trace of the boy-king, Tut-ankh-Amen, but Mr Carter’s faith remained unshaken.
‘He has the courage of his convictions,’ she said to Oscar and he said nothing, because there was nothing left to say. Sir Aubrey had been dead less than two weeks. One day, he thought, he would be able to look at her and it would hardly hurt at all.
That afternoon, after Eleanor had arrived, she told him she was going for a walk. He watched her cross the lawn towards the woods, her hands deep in the pockets of her scarlet coat. He knew she was going to the tower. Some time later, while Mr Rawlinson argued with Eleanor in the morning room, he followed her. His legs were stiff, like whalebone. He stumbled through the woods, brambles tearing at his trousers. When he pushed open the door she was sitting on one of the broken benches in the Tiled Room, staring out of th
e window. The glass was clouded, lacy with cobwebs. In the watery grey light her face was very pale. She did not have her arms around her knees but she looked just as she had when she was eighteen, shivering in her jersey. She turned to smile at him. Her eyes were the same grey as the cobwebbed window. His heart turned over.
‘I wasn’t sure you knew where I was going,’ she said.
‘I knew.’
She held out her hand. He took it numbly, waiting for the pain.
‘You’re bleeding,’ Phyllis said softly. She kissed the scratch and, like an anemone, Oscar’s fingers closed into a fist. He pulled his hand away.
‘Mr Rawlinson,’ she said. ‘Is he still there?’
Oscar nodded.
‘We need to tell him. The longer you leave it the more complicated it gets. We need to go back there and tell him you won’t do it. My father’s will specifically said that in order to inherit you had to take the Melville name and arms. If you refuse there’s nothing they can do.’
Oscar was silent. He stared at the floor, at the eight-pointed stars like crossed ribbons, the latticework of the repeating patterns that enclosed them.
‘I’m sorry, Oscar. My father had no right to do that. To make it your responsibility like that, out of the blue. To . . . force it on you. It was cowardly. Cowardly and wrong.’
‘I’m going to do it.’
Phyllis stared up at him. She shook her head.
‘There’s no point in trying to talk me out of it.’ The words were ground glass in his throat. ‘I’ve made up my mind.’
‘I don’t understand. You can’t. We . . . we agreed.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Are you saying you’d rather have Ellinghurst than me?’ she said, trying to laugh, and her voice cracked on the last syllable. Oscar felt something inside him crack too. He clenched his fists more tightly, digging his nails into his palms.
‘I’ve made up my mind,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘So—what? I thought . . . I thought you loved me.’
‘I’m sorry.’ It was the only true thing he could think of to say.
‘Why?’ She looked up at him. She was crying. ‘Why?’
The pain was starting. It spread out from the centre of him, waves and particles, stabs of it jumping like electrons from one orbit to another, radiating pain and more pain, scintillating light. He made himself breathe. He would never tell her. He had promised himself that. It was the only gift he had left to give her, that she never had to know. It was better that she hated him than appalled herself.
‘I owe it to your father,’ he said.
Oscar leaned out of the window of the tower, closing his eyes, willing the icy wind to scour his mind, but in the darkness the image was clearer, sharp as a film. Her eyes between her parted fingers, her open mouth in the space between her palms, the tear that ran slowly over the knuckle of the index finger and down her left hand. Her ring hand. He put his hand in his pocket, fumbling for the poesy ring, slipping it over his thumb and pressing down until the metal bit against the bone. It had become a kind of ritual, like his mother’s ritual with the magpies.
Good morning, Mr Melville, where’s your brother?
‘You owe it to my father?’ she echoed and, when he nodded, she cried silently into the palms of her hands. She had not looked at him. When she was finished she wiped her face with her fingers.
‘So that’s it,’ she said and she stood up and shook the leaves from the skirt of her scarlet coat. Her eyes were red-rimmed, the grey touched with pink like the inside of seashells. He did not think he had ever loved her so fiercely.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said and she gave a high choked gasp as though there was something stuck in her throat.
‘So you keep saying,’ she said and she pushed past him and out of the tower, a blaze of scarlet against the harsh grey-brown of the winter wood.
He did not follow her. He sat on the broken bench, his head in his hands, and he thought of something Kit had said to him once, that it was not Einstein’s rearrangement of time and space that had proved the greatest jolt to man’s preconceived idea of the universe but Rutherford’s dissolution of all that seemed solid into tiny specks floating in the void. The immense void of interstellar space was awe-inspiring, mind-boggling even, but it was the void within the atom that meant it was no longer possible to believe that things were more or less as they seemed. Perhaps she would go back to Kit. They were alike, Phyllis and Kit. Apart from his mother they were the only two people in the world he had ever properly loved.
He had not spoken to her again. The next morning he had gone to London and waited for time to pass. Christmas came and went. There were parties to see in the New Year. He saw the lights in the windows, heard the music and the voices and the drunks staggering out of public houses to urinate against alley walls. Then he returned to Ellinghurst for the funeral. She was polite. She kissed his cheek, her face folded like a blank envelope. Jessica hugged him.
‘Dear Oscar,’ she said affectionately, as though she were starting a letter. Neither of them mentioned Eleanor. Oscar thought of her in France and wondered if there were some kinds of anguish a heart never recovered from, that extinguished forever the possibility of feeling anything ever again.
He put his hand in his pocket. His fingers found the photograph. He drew it out, turning it over to read the message he had written on the back. One fool in a tub. There was a box of matches in his pocket too. He took it out and struck one, touching the flame to the corner of the photograph. It went out. He struck another and this time it caught, the chemicals in the paper flaring green. He let it go. It fell and the wind caught it, tumbling the flame in the darkness. Jessica was right, it was beautiful. Then it was gone.
Slowly he made his way down the unlit staircase, one hand on the wall to steady him. It was a matter of putting one foot in front of the other. Tomorrow he would return to Cambridge. This term a fellow at Emmanuel would teach the University’s first course in quantum theory. The Prof was ambivalent. Quantum physics was still equivocal, makeshift, messy. There were members of the faculty who believed that a logical theory of the atom was simply beyond the capacity of the human mind.
The lamps were on in the library as he walked back across the lawn, spilling light out onto the terrace. In the far window he could just make out the profile of eyeless Mr Albus, the curls of his marble hair. Albert Einstein had once told the Prof that the idea that an electron exposed to radiation chose of its own free will not only when but in which direction to jump orbits was intolerable to him. He said that if that was the case he would rather be a cobbler than be a physicist. The way the Prof told it, it sounded like a threat. Oscar thought it sounded like a surrender. Einstein was famous these days, the closest thing science had to royalty, but electrons cared nothing for fame. The greatest physicist since Newton could mend boots to his heart’s content and electrons would still continue as they always had, jumping or not jumping, choosing or not choosing, driven by an imperative that defied human understanding. There was no point in believing, like Captain Ahab, that one man’s rage and resolve could prevail against the inexorable might of the white whale. Ahab had thought his madness sane because he could explain it. He banged his whalebone leg against the deck and the thump was like a tom-tom, summoning him to war. But Ahab was wrong about the whale. A whale was neither malicious nor vengeful. A whale, like an electron, followed its own impenetrable laws. The dark realms of the sea were like the black wastes of the universe, beyond human reach. Moby-Dick rose and blew, as whales had done since the start of time, and, even as he sounded and Ahab was swallowed by the sea, he sang, impervious, unaware that such a thing as men existed.
When Oscar was a boy he had thought that knowledge was everything. He thought that if you knew everything then you could understand everything. He did not think that any more. Perhaps he would make a good cobbler. They could go into business together, Einstein & Greenwood. Einstein & Melville. And Sons. Einstein had two boys
. He was also divorced. The newspapers had made much of that. He had divorced and married again. His new wife was also his first cousin. They would have a good deal to talk about, Oscar thought, as they stitched uppers and banged nails into worn heels.
He walked around the terrace, peering in through the library windows at the chaos of papers and books on every surface. One table was entirely covered in boxes of photographs, all printed with the name H. GRAHAM PHOTOGRAPHY in large capitals on the side. Perhaps if the cobbling went well, Oscar thought, Einstein & Melville could diversify. Out of habit he tried the double doors at the end of the library and to his surprise they opened.
Sir Aubrey’s desk was just as he had left it. His fountain pen lay discarded on a pile of handwritten notes. On the desk and on the floor beside the chair were stacks of matching notebooks, all bound in the same dark morocco like the volumes of a huge encyclopaedia. Oscar opened one. It was a diary from 1837, the year that Jeremiah Melville had embarked on the building of the castle. He turned the pages.
Nicholson proposes a moat, less for authenticity than for the romance of the reflection, and over it a drawbridge but, unless it lifts, I should just as well have a ponderous and mysterious-looking entrance. One should feel very much that, crossing it, one is entering a separate and better world.
Somewhere in the house a gong sounded. Oscar glanced at his watch. It was almost time for dinner. Eleanor would be there and Jessica and Marjorie Maxwell Brooke and her mother. As the only man he would be placed between the two older women. He would not have to talk to Phyllis.
The name caught in his heart like a thorn. He closed his eyes, waiting for the pain to ease. He knew he should go up and change. Instead, he pulled out Sir Aubrey’s chair. Sitting down, he began to read.
