We That Are Left (51 page)

He picked up the smaller ring, his mother's, running his thumb lightly over its surface. In places, where the leaves were raised, their tips were blunt, worn soft. Unlike ivy, gold was soft and malleable. It acceded easily to those who worked it, as ornament, as currency, as medicine, as symbol of love. As the ring caught the light he thought of the dappled green patterns made by sunlight dispersed through the leaves of a willow tree by a river, the dazzling glitter of reflected water falling in bright lozenges on bare skin, the dark red gleam of a bent head. Sometimes when she roused herself to sit, her mouth swollen and blurred with kisses, her rumpled hair stood up from the back of her head, charged with static and the evening sun, and sometimes, when the clouds were low and bruised with rain, the red was almost brown and her grey eyes had a greenish tinge, like lichened stone. What colour would they be in Egypt, beneath the harsh Egyptian sun, or among the fallen grey tombs of a thyme-scented Mediterranean hillside?

He closed his hand around the rings, feeling them press twin circles into his palms. Tomorrow he would take her to the top of the tower, all 385 steps up, and there, where the winter wind whipped in from the sea to howl in the glassless windows, he would ask her to not marry him, to live together with him after her own ordinance in whatever unholy estate she desired for as long as they both should live. She would say yes—wouldn't she? Then he would slide his mother's poesy ring onto the finger of her left hand and hold out his hand so that she could put his father's ring on his. When his parents married they had moved the rings to their right hands according to German tradition. He and Phyllis would wear them always on their left. They would symbolise a promise
of a different kind, the promise to go on promising, to live together forever in a state of beginning, their vows to each other accepted and unspoken.

He raised his hand to his lips, kissing the rings like a cardinal through the flesh and bone of his fingers. There were lights in the darkness now, a lorry's sweeping headlights, then the slitted eyes of curtained houses, smeared street lamps, the illumnated face of a municipal clock. The train slowed, its brakes screeching. It was nearly ten o'clock. Tomorrow. It was only two hours until it was today.

Jessica glanced at herself in the long mirror. She had changed for lunch into a dress she had bought in Bond Street when Gerald had first told her about the job, a breathtakingly expensive sheath of russet jersey by a French couturier whom the saleslady had declared
le dernier cri
. The dress was simple and elegant, cut on the bias. It had long sleeves and a demure neckline but the jersey moved against her when she walked, clinging to her hips, and the colour emphasised her creamy skin, the golden gleam of her hair.

Dr Wilcox had come again that morning. Her father was still feverish but his breathing was less laboured and he no longer coughed blood.

‘Take heart, my dear,' the doctor had said, squeezing Jessica's elbow. ‘Sir Aubrey has always been strong as an ox.' She had smelled his sour breath, the doggy whiff of his tweed suit. His ears were hairy and there were white flecks of loose skin like dandruff caught in the slack folds of his chin.

‘If you don't mind, Dr Wilcox,' she had said icily, extracting her arm. ‘I am not a pet to be pawed at.'

The doctor had left soon after that, his wattled neck a satisfactorily livid shade of purple. It made Jessica wonder why she had never said anything before. Peering at her reflection, she reached for her scarlet lipstick and unscrewed it. Then,
hesitating, she put it back and picked up a second, a satiny pale pink. She smoothed it over her lips, then pressed them together, setting the colour.

The letter from Joan lay unfolded on her dressing table. It had come in the morning post. It turned out that Gerald had talked to someone at
Perspective
after all, that the editor had agreed to see Joan on the strength of his personal recommendation. Three interviews later they had offered her a job on the permanent staff. She was to start in the New Year.

How can I ever thank you? I would offer to stand you lunch at the Busy Bee when you are next in London, if that were not more punishment than reward. I have a terrible feeling I may actually miss the place once I'm gone. Peggy tells me that's Perspective for you. Well, of course she does. There really is no help for her
.

Jessica was glad for Joan. She did not let herself think about Gerald. That time was over, in the past. There was comfort, all the same, in knowing that he had done as she had asked him, that he was not so very angry with her after all. Perhaps he wondered about her sometimes, just as she sometimes wondered about him. She thought of Joan, her pencil scoring indignantly through another article about how to catch a man.

‘Don't you ever want to marry?' Jessica had asked her once but Joan had only shrugged.

‘You have to work really hard to find a husband these days. It's not the kind of work I'm interested in.'

Oscar was sitting in the Great Hall when she came downstairs, his fingers drumming his knees. When he saw her he stood hurriedly, almost knocking over the low table in front of him. ‘How's your father?' he asked.

‘A little better, I think. No worse, at any rate.'

‘I'm glad.'

Jessica nodded. To her surprise she realised she was nervous. ‘Why don't we go through to the drawing room?
Phyllis will be here soon. I don't know about you but I could do with a drink.'

Oscar glanced again towards the front door. ‘Not for me, thank you.'

‘Well, keep me company at least. It's nicer in there. Sunnier. And no grimacing ancestors or medieval instruments of death.'

Oscar looked up at the halberds and lances and crossed pikes, at Jeremiah Melville who glowered at him furiously, clutching his stick. ‘He doesn't seem to hold out much hope for the pair of us, does he?' He smiled, twisting his hands together nervously, stretching his fingers back from his palms. The pair of us. The words gave her courage.

‘I do hope you'll stay,' she said. ‘Just for a few more days. Having you here, it's been such a comfort for Father. For me, too. To have someone here to talk to, to share the anxiety . . .

I know you're afraid that with Phyllis back you'd be in the way but you wouldn't, not a bit. The opposite, in fact. Phyllis is so pig-headed when it comes to Ellinghurst, pig-headed and unkind, she doesn't care if she upsets anyone, she just says exactly what comes into her head, and I'm not sure Father is in any state . . . well, there's no changing her, she's beyond hope, but at least if you're here she'll behave. People always behave better when it's not just family, don't they?'

He did not answer. Jessica heard the low growl of an automobile engine, the crunch of the gravel as it drew up under the carriage porch. Mrs Johns bustled through the Great Hall, tugging briskly at her cuffs.

‘I'd be so grateful,' Jessica said but he was not listening. He watched, a lump like a half-swallowed mouthful in his throat, as Mrs Johns opened the door and said something and then suddenly there she was, framed in the stone arch of the door in her scarlet coat, almost exactly as he had imagined her, only slightly, startlingly different, as though it were her face that were wrong and not his recollection. Jessica crossed the hall.

‘Thank God you cabled,' she said. ‘We had time to replenish
the whisky supplies.' And Phyllis laughed and kissed her sister's cheek and began to unbutton her coat and Oscar stepped forward and her hands dropped away to her sides and she looked at him and her lips parted and her grey eyes were dark around the edges, like clouds. ‘Oscar.'

‘Phyllis,' he said and it was like a word repeated too often, its shape strange and senseless in his mouth.

‘I didn't know you were here.'

‘Father asked for him,' Jessica said defensively. ‘He came immediately. And thank God he did. You have no idea . . . the last few days. I'm not sure I could have borne them on my own.'

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.