We That Are Left (24 page)

‘He came?' she asked Eleanor softly.

Eleanor nodded, smiling over her handkerchief.

‘He was strong enough to come through plainly?'

‘As though he were in the room.'

Mrs Leonard nodded. ‘I'm glad. And you?' she asked Jessica. ‘Did you find the answers you sought?'

Jessica shrugged. She wanted to get out of that airless room, out into the street where the raw wind smelled of coal and blew away the past that clung to her like cobwebs. She waited in silence as Mrs Leonard turned on the lights and her mother made an appointment for another sitting the next week. She knew she should be glad. Mrs Leonard was her golden goose, the Trojan horse from whose belly she might besiege London and lay it waste. But all she could think of was Messica. By her sides her fingers stretched and curled, sifting the air for the dust of him.

When Mrs Leonard opened the parlour door a creamy ball
of fluff bounded in. She picked it up. It snuffled happily in her arms, its tongue lolling like a pink petal.

‘This is Ching,' she said. ‘She is always excitable with new sitters. So many strangers in the house at once, of course. And here is my husband with your coats and hats. Thank you, my dear.'

Outside it had grown dark. The street was clogged with fog, curls of yellow-grey like wisps of sheep's wool snagged around the street lamps. Jessica crossed her arms tightly across her stomach, hugging herself close. Beneath her fur hat her mother's eyes shone.

‘Oh, Jessica,' she sighed, squeezing Jessica's arm. ‘Do you see now? How death does not part us? He was there with us, just the same as ever.'

Her breath made ghosts in the air. Jessica looked away. ‘Was he?'

‘How can you even doubt it? The initial M for Melville, Jim Pugh's dog, the party with the magician. Messica Jelville. Who knows of that but us?'

Jessica did not answer.

‘For God's sake, what else must he do?' Eleanor cried. ‘What manner of hoops must he jump through before you accept that he's still with us? That he is not gone?'

Jessica closed her eyes. She could feel the press of it at the back of her throat, the sharp point of all the terror and grief she had swallowed and never acknowledged, not just for Theo but for them all, all those thousands and thousands of laughing young men who had never come back.
So many lost boys
. What good did it do, to think about them now? The War was over. The guns were silent. The battlefields swarmed with armies of Chinese coolies, paid to salvage what remained of Flanders from the mud and bones. Already, they said, the flowers were beginning to come back. Why then would anyone want to make themselves remember? Was it not unbearable enough to lose them once, without losing them again by appointment every Thursday afternoon?

The fog tasted of sulphur and rusted metal. She thought of Mr Cardoza and of the other soft-palmed, soft-bellied old men in the Savoy Grill stroking the stems of their champagne saucers with their fat fingers, fingers that had never held a gun, fingers that would beckon and prod and paddle the flesh of girls who should have been kissing their slaughtered sons, and she wanted more than anything to be in Hampshire where the air was clear and smelled of gorse and lichen and the salt lick of the sea.

What was gone was gone. There was no getting it back, however hard you wished.

Scientific experiments did not always deliver the expected results. This, Mr Beckers said, was why experiment and not theory was the engine of science. The facts were the facts, whether you could explain them or not. In 1911 Ernest Rutherford had aimed a beam of high-speed radium alpha particles at a sheet of thin gold foil. If atoms were diffuse spheres of electrical charge then most of the alpha particles should have passed straight through the foil; a few might have been slightly deflected. Instead, some of the alpha particles ricocheted straight back. It was, Rutherford was later to remark, like firing a 15-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and having it bounce back and hit you. Rutherford realised that the atoms in the gold foil contained a tiny but very powerful concentration of positive charge that repelled the positively charged alpha particles.

He had proved the nuclear structure of the atom.

Oscar thought about Rutherford's experiment a great deal in the weeks after his mother's funeral. He had known when she died that she was gone for ever. There was no God and no aether, no ectoplasm or survival, despite the sensational stories in the popular newspapers, the first-person accounts of levitations and manifestations and conversations with the dead, the spirit photographs and the scientific proofs. The dead were
not gathered on the Other Side, transmitting their messages of love and reassurance like radio waves for mediums to receive. At Rhyl, while they waited to be demobbed, he and several of the other officers from the Royal Engineers had occupied themselves with constructing primitive crystal sets on which they picked up a ghostly blend of voices, the dots and dashes of Morse code, and the crackling hum of static. Sometimes there were shrieks. It seemed like a kind of magic, a door opening to worlds concealed behind worlds, except that it was not. It was quite simple, once you got the hang of it. Electronic transmitters converted sound waves into electromagnetic waves and the crystal set converted them back into sound. It was beautiful and fascinating but it was not magic. There was no transmitter for the dead. The dead were gone.

And yet his mother was not gone. She slipped in under the doors, through the cracks in the window sashes. Sometimes in the evenings, sitting by the parlour fire, he heard the click of her key in the lock of the front door, the rustle of her skirts as she stepped into the hall, bringing with her a faint eddy of coal dust and cold pavement. He heard her voice in the garden from an upstairs window, the echo of her laughter as he walked down the kitchen passage, the clatter of her feet on the stairs while he shaved. Once, returning to the house, he even heard her playing the piano. The music stopped as he opened the door. He heard the squeak of the old piano stool, the click of the lid closing. But when he opened the door to the back parlour the room was empty, the air flat and undisturbed, the piano stool where he had left it, pushed up against the bookshelf. She wasn't there. And still she was, often.

He supposed he was glad, sort of. He wondered how long she would stay.

The house was not his. When Oscar said there must be some mistake the solicitor frowned unhappily and peered at his papers.

‘No mistake,' he said. ‘The house is owned by a Mr—where
is it?—a Mr Alfred Phillips. You have until June to vacate the premises. Your mother didn't . . . goodness. I had rather assumed . . . no, well. I'm awfully sorry.'

A solicitous solicitor, Oscar thought numbly. His mother would have liked that. His name was Pettigrew. Mr Pettigrew explained that the rent had been met while his mother was alive by the earnings from an insurance policy that provided for her in the event of her husband's death. The policy had also yielded a small monthly stipend, payable until his mother's death.

‘So that's it?' Oscar said. ‘There's nothing?'

‘Nothing? Heavens, no.' Mr Pettigrew was meticulous, matter-of-fact. Once all disbursements had been met his mother's assets comprised an account at the bank with a credit balance of eighteen pounds, nine shillings and four pence, along with her effects. Oscar inherited the contents of the house to include his mother's jewellery, the two gold poesy rings and her ruby earrings and the diamond brooch in the shape of a feather. In addition there was a second bank account, taken out by his mother but held in Oscar's name. The credit balance of that account was twelve hundred pounds.

‘The funds are placed in a trust to allow you to take up your place at Cambridge,' Mr Pettigrew said. ‘Four hundred a year would be sufficient, I understand, if not exactly generous. As the trust's executor, I am charged with the management of the fund. I recommend a monthly allowance. It is easy with a capital sum to convince oneself one is richer than one is.'

Oscar stared at Mr Pettigrew. Twelve hundred pounds was a small fortune.

‘She said there was money for the University,' he said, hardly able to take it in, but Mr Pettigrew only smiled vaguely and put the file of papers on his desk. An envelope with Oscar's name typed on it in capital letters was clipped to the cardboard cover. Oscar wondered what was in it and why Mr Pettigrew did not give it to him. Perhaps it was his bill. He
wondered how much of the twelve hundred pounds would go to Mr Pettigrew. Even solicitous solicitors did not work for nothing.

Mr Pettigrew closed the folder. ‘I think that's everything. Unless you have any questions?'

Oscar shook his head.

‘My involvement will continue until the funds of the trust are fully disbursed, by which time you will be twenty-one and at liberty to direct your own affairs. I shall look forward to meeting you again then. Of course, if you should need anything in the meantime . . .'

‘That's it?'

‘I think so.'

‘But what am I supposed to do with everything?'

‘I don't quite follow you.'

‘The books. The plates. The furniture. We have a piano. What am I supposed to do with the piano?'

Mr Pettigrew looked stricken. ‘I can arrange for someone to come. A valuer. If you'd like. Or there's storage, of course. Small items of value such as your mother's jewellery can always be kept here, in our safe, if you prefer.' When Oscar did not answer he patted the folder with both hands. ‘No, well, no need to decide now. Just let us know.'

Oscar shook the solicitor's hand dazedly and went home. It was silent when he walked in and very cold. He lit a fire. Then he sat down. He could not think what else to do. It was March. The next time anyone expected him anywhere was October.

Phyllis sent him a postcard. The picture was a photograph of the British Museum, its austere courtyards deserted. On the back she wrote that she was leaving for Egypt to visit the excavations at the Valley of the Kings. She did not say who she was going with or when she would be coming back. She hoped he was well. There was no room on the postcard to say anything else. She signed it P. Oscar tucked the postcard into the frame of the mirror on his chest of drawers, writing
side out. Whenever he brushed his hair or looked for a pair of socks he touched the P with his finger.

Time passed and the P grew smudged. The days smudged together too. Oscar knew he should be planning, packing tea chests. Instead, he lay on his bed. Spring was coming and the pale sun stretched its long fingers through the windows and traced patterns of lace on the dirty glass. Sometimes he heard his mother in the kitchen, rattling the drawers. He walked to the end of the street and bought bread and milk and cheese and thought of Phyllis kneeling in a desert as old as time, her eyes screwed up against the harsh African sun, her fingers with their bitten nails sifting the hot dust for fragments of the past.

He should not have kissed her. He knew that. A kiss like that was not the start of anything. It was a place to hide. He could remember almost nothing of that day, except how much he had wanted to kiss her and keep kissing until the world was no wider than the space between their faces, the circle of her arms. Afterwards when he thought of kissing her he could not summon it, only the gleam of the fire on her hair, the cup of her hands around her whisky glass. It did not turn his insides upside down. It held them steady.

He thought about going away. He wished he knew where he wanted to go. In a bookshop near Waterloo he purchased a second-hand guide to the Alps. He looked at the pictures of mountains and edelweiss and placid-faced cows and he thought how beautiful they were and how little they had to do with him.

Instead, he went to the library. He had read all the books they had on physics so he read the newspapers instead. There was unrest in Egypt. The Egyptian people wanted independence, an end to the British protectorate that had been supposed to last only the duration of the War. They staged a campaign of civil disobedience. The British exiled the leaders of the movement and ruthlessly suppressed their demonstrations. British soldiers patrolled the cities. Thousands of Egyptians
were killed, but the violence only fanned the flames of nationalism. There were strikes and riots, attacks on railway lines, on colonial buildings, on ordinary British citizens. The newspapers talked of revolution.

Oscar took the postcard out of the frame of his mirror. He put it in his pocket. He thought perhaps it might be safer there. He thought of Phyllis in the Tiled Room with her chin on her knees, by the fire with her whisky, in the hall with her head against his chest, and he thought that if anything happened to her he would not be able to bear it, not because of the kiss which had not been his to take, but because she was kind and clever and finally going to University, which was what she had always wanted, and because when they talked it was not like a chess game but like one of Ernest Rutherford's experiments, simple and familiar and absorbing and utterly unexpected all at the same time.

He did not know if she was caught up in the troubles. He did not know if she was hurt or if she had come home. The not knowing itched at him like lice. He thought of writing to Jessica but could think of no pretext for a letter. Instead, he wrote to Sir Aubrey.

I wanted to thank you. For as long as I live I shall never forget the extraordinary kindness you and your family have shown to my mother and to me. Without you this time would mark only an end. Instead, it is also a beginning. I take up my place at Trinity in October and hope one day that somehow I shall be able to repay you for all you have done. I think often of my many happy times at Ellinghurst and should be glad of news of the family if you have time to write.

Affectionately, Oscar