We That Are Left (31 page)

‘You could live here too if you wanted.'

‘I don't think so.' She lifted the lid of the piano, ran her finger down the keys. ‘I thought you said this block was all businessmen and widows.'

‘It is . . . mostly.'

‘Which category does the woman who lives across the landing fall into?'

Jessica shrugged. ‘How would I know? I've never met her.'

It was not quite a lie. They had never been introduced. But Jessica saw her sometimes, a blonde in nail polish and scarlet lipstick, sliding into the Rolls-Royce that waited outside the building. Once, late at night, as Jessica struggled with her key, the door of the other flat had opened and a grey-haired man in evening dress had come out. He had stopped to light a cigarette on the landing but, when he raised his eyes and saw Jessica, he had put his hand to his cheek like a horse's blinker and hurried away down the stairs.

‘I'm not sure Nanny would approve,' Phyllis said. ‘She appeared to be going out in her nightgown.'

‘Definitely a businessman, then.'

Phyllis smiled and Jessica smiled too. She looked at the clock on the mantel. Father would be here any moment. She had butterflies. ‘Drink?' she said.

Phyllis drank whisky. Jessica had gin. By the time their father arrived Jessica was a little giddy. They talked about his train journey and the closeness of the weather and ate soup and veal in a white sauce. It was not until the maid had served the apple Charlotte that Father cleared his throat and said that he had something to say. Jessica buried her face in her wine glass, letting the fumes dance in her head.

‘Cousin Evelyn has made his position very clear,' Sir Aubrey said. ‘Should he inherit Ellinghurst he will sell. I have stressed
to him repeatedly his duty to family, to history, to the ties that have bound the Melvilles to Ellinghurst since the reign of Charles II but to no avail. He cares only for money. For profit.'

He raised his hand, silencing Phyllis's protest. After long consideration, he said, he had come to a decision, one which he had now had the opportunity to discuss with the estate's lawyers. Throughout its history, the house had passed from father to son, and, once, in the eighteenth century, to a nephew, there being no direct male heirs. But while this arrangement was a cherished tradition, it was not enshrined in law. There were no legal restrictions on the inheritance of the estate. The current baronet might bequeath it by will as he chose.

‘This has been a difficult and painful decision,' he said. ‘The Melville baronets reside at Ellinghurst. That is and has always been the proper order of things. I had always hoped—I had expected—that it would continue to be so. But Evelyn gives me no choice. His inheritance would be a catastrophe. The house must go to one of you.'

Phyllis and Jessica exchanged looks.

‘I have turned it over and over and it is the only solution. You would have to be married, of course, that goes without saying. It would be advantageous if there was money. There are . . . pressures on the estate. None, however, are insurmountable. You will raise your sons at Ellinghurst and they shall inherit in their turn. The Melville line will continue.'

‘Except they wouldn't be Melvilles, would they?' Phyllis said. ‘Not if we were married.'

‘They could be. The law allows for it.'

‘You would expect our husbands to change their names?'

‘There have always been Melvilles at Ellinghurst.'

Phyllis considered her father. Then, quietly, she began to laugh. Jessica stared at the table. The wine and the gin had muddled her head. She could not think straight. She could not understand why Phyllis was laughing.

‘I must say, Father, it's quite an offer,' Phyllis said. ‘Marry my daughter, give her all your money and take her name,
and in exchange you get a crippling mortgage and a house of dubious architectural merit. How could any right-thinking man resist?'

‘Phyllis, for God's sake,' Jessica said. ‘Can't you let Father finish?'

‘Why? What could he possibly add that could make this plan of his anything but entirely preposterous?'

‘I think you should at least listen to what he has to say.'

‘Do you indeed?' She shrugged, holding up her hands. ‘All right, then. Go on. I'm all ears.'

Even Jessica in her confusion had to admit that her father's proposal was unconventional. Whichever of his daughters married first would inherit the house on Sir Aubrey's death. Entailments would prevent it from being sold or devised by will. It would instead pass directly to that daughter's male heirs or, if she had none, to the male heirs of her sister. Whoever inherited the estate would be required under the terms of the entailment to adopt the Melville name.

‘So it's a race?' Phyllis said. ‘Even better. A fight to the death. Or should that be debt?'

‘I am sixty-six years old,' Sir Aubrey said stiffly. ‘I shan't live for ever.'

‘Don't say that,' Jessica protested.

‘I'm sorry, Jessica, but we must face facts. Decisions have to be made.'

Phyllis considered her father. She was no longer laughing. ‘Very well. Since we are facing facts let me add a few of my own. I mean to be an archaeologist. I don't intend ever to marry and I have absolutely no desire for children. I don't care how many legal documents you draw up, I will never live at Ellinghurst or take any responsibility for its future. I will not be enslaved by the legacy of my forefathers. I have my own life to lead. Is that fact enough for you?'

‘You're young,' Sir Aubrey protested. ‘Wait until you fall in love.'

‘I'm not so very young, Father, and I have already been in
love. If that changed anything it was only to make me surer than ever.'

‘And what about your duty, your obligations as a Melville?' he demanded.

‘I'm sorry for the servants, the tenants, of course I am, but I cannot be held responsible for them. Times change.'

‘So you would throw away three hundred years of history?'

‘I couldn't do that even if I wanted to. Nothing changes the past.'

‘But Ellinghurst is in our blood. It's who we are.'

‘No, Father,' Phyllis said, ‘it's a house. An impossible, impractical house. I'm sorry.'

Sir Aubrey's hands tightened into fists. With deliberate dignity he turned away from his oldest daughter. ‘Jessica?'

‘I . . . I don't know. I mean, I love Ellinghurst, you know I do. But it's a lot to take in.'

Sir Aubrey folded his hands together, his face expressionless. Then, silently, his shoulders shaking, he bowed his head.

It was an exquisite relief when the maid came in and Sir Aubrey cleared his throat and patted his nose with his handkerchief. Gratefully Jessica suggested coffee in the drawing room. Not long afterwards Phyllis left to catch her bus. She said she had to get back before the hostel locked the doors. Sir Aubrey and Jessica drank their coffee in silence. At Ellinghurst the last of the light would be fading from the rose-gold sky, the air soft with the scent of roses and cut grass.

‘I will think about what you said, Father,' Jessica said. ‘I promise.'

There was another long silence. Jessica could hear the maid moving about in the kitchen. ‘What does Eleanor think?'

Sir Aubrey frowned at her, baffled. ‘Eleanor? Whatever does this have to do with your mother?'

The story was called
The Winds of Romance
and concerned a shop girl and a mysterious dark-eyed sheik. Jessica tried to fix her attention on the lines but the words swam on the page. Instead, she stared out of her slice of window. The wires in the reinforced glass turned the white sky to graph paper and distorted the lines of the chimney pots, making them ripple like flags.

After her father had gone back to his club she had stayed awake a long time, drinking what was left of the wine and thinking about Ellinghurst. Phyllis was right, even if she was right for the wrong reasons. Her father's proposal was ridiculous, ridiculous enough to be faintly alarming, but not because of his expectation that they would both marry. There was nothing remotely unreasonable about that. Unlike Phyllis, Jessica was normal. She had no intention of ending up a spinster. It was all very well dabbling at
Woman's Friend
while she was nineteen, it was a lark, an adventure, something to shock her mother with, but she could no more imagine working for the rest of her life than she could imagine flying to the moon. Work was not for ever, not unless you were a failure at everything else. Jessica would fall in love. She would have a heavenly husband, heavenly sex, with any luck plenty of heavenly money. Heavenly children too, she supposed, in
time, though she could not quite imagine it. Of course she would. Unlike Phyllis, she intended to be happy.

But Phyllis was right about the other part. Even a millionaire quite
boulversé
with adoration would hardly leap at their father's proposition. To take on Ellinghurst and the burden of death duties, to raise their children as Melvilles, a cuckoo in his own cripplingly costly nest? Jessica loved every stone of Ellinghurst but even she could see that it was no Chatsworth. An American heiress might be lured by the promise of dukedoms and Van Dykes but a neo-Gothic castle with a rotting racquets court and a thirteen-storey tower built of unreinforced concrete? Even the ghostly endorsement of Christopher Wren could not turn that into a convincingly silken purse.

And yet, for all that, it would be wonderful. Jessica had never imagined she would have to leave Ellinghurst, or not completely. It would still be her home, even when she lived somewhere else. It would always be where she belonged. London was wild and gay and intoxicating but when she imagined herself happy she imagined herself at Ellinghurst, in the clear green water of the lake or sprawled on the lawn in the sunshine, listening to the wood pigeons and the distant thwack of tennis balls. In her imagination she walked through the arched rooms and every hinge, every handle, every slope and glance of light was as familiar as her own body.

And Theo was there, not in her mother's extravagant memorial or even in his old bedroom, which Eleanor still refused to clear out, but in the worn treads of the stairs, the scuffs on the paintwork, tucked up inside the too-small coats and lined-up boots in the old pantry. The previous weekend, Jessica had gone out to the old greenhouses and amidst the boarded-up windows and the broken pots she had found Grandfather Melville's old bath chair. Mould grew grey maps on the cushions and the damp wicker sagged but when she sat in it and her fingers closed around the arms, she was ten years old again, her heart in her mouth and her hair streaming out behind her, terrified and exultant,
conscious only of the chair's careering jolt and the soaring joy of Theo's approbation.

So much had been lost already. The thought of never again going to Ellinghurst, of the pieces of their lives there, so many generations of lives, being pulled apart and packed into lorries to be split up and sold, it was unbearable.

She went home for the weekend reluctantly, apprehensive of being cornered by her father, of being pressed. She did not think she could endure it if he cried. Phyllis was no help, of course. She had work in London, she said, and could not come home. On Saturday morning Jessica rose late and dressed slowly, keen to avoid her father at the breakfast table. It was both a surprise and a relief when Eleanor told her that Mrs Maxwell Brooke and Marjorie were coming to lunch. It was a long time since her mother had had guests at Ellinghurst.

‘I didn't know you still saw Mrs Maxwell Brooke.'

‘I don't,' Eleanor said. ‘She invited herself. Out of the blue. She said Marjorie was dying to see you again.'

‘Really?' Jessica looked bemused.

‘She was absolutely insistent. There was nothing I could do to stop her.'

Jessica had not seen Marjorie Maxwell Brooke since before the War. She had written after Theo died, of course, but by then Eleanor and Mrs Maxwell Brooke were no longer friends. Jessica had never written back. Of all the girls who had trailed after Theo Marjorie had been the most irritating.

‘You know she's in love with you,' she had said to Theo once. ‘She keeps your photograph in the drawer of her bedside table and kisses it every night before she goes to sleep. And she practises her signature. Mrs Theodore Melville inside all her exercise books, over and over.'

Actually, she did not know that for certain but she was sure it was true. It was what the girls at her school did when they mooned after boys and Marjorie was easily as silly as they were. She had hoped to make Theo shudder. Instead, he
laughed. To Jessica's bafflement he had never minded Marjorie, even though she was not pretty in the least and had a laugh shrill enough to bring on neuralgia.

The Maxwell Brookes arrived promptly in time for sherry at twelve thirty. Mrs Maxwell Brooke had darker hair than Jessica remembered and a good deal of gold jewellery. As for Marjorie, the lankiness of adolescence had hardened into angularity, sharp juts and knobs that her expensive wool dress did little to soften. She had cut her hair. The bobbed style was impeccably fashionable but it was not becoming. It emphasised the thinness of her nose, the pointed spade of her chin. The bones of her wrists were as prominent as knuckles.

Marjorie was a debutante. She was twenty-three. Mrs Maxwell Brooke talked breezily of the court balls that were expected at Buckingham Palace once a final Treaty of Peace had been signed.

‘You're not out yet, are you, dear?' she said to Jessica. ‘We had rather hoped Phyllis might be one of Marjorie's girls but she isn't, is she? Certainly we've not seen her, though we've kept our eyes peeled. Goodness, but there are a lot of them. Planning a ball is perfect headache.'

Jessica looked at Marjorie. ‘A ball,' she said. ‘How thrilling.'

At lunch Mrs Maxwell Brooke talked to Sir Aubrey about Ellinghurst. She was very gay. Her grandfather had known Grandfather Melville and she told a long and rather muddled story about a gun Grandfather Melville had invented for him to shoot wasps. ‘It was frightfully dangerous,' she said. ‘But a marvellous way of deadheading the roses.' When she laughed her bracelets rattled like castanets.