We That Are Left (3 page)

Jessica caught sight of Theo and Terence through the window as they crossed the gravel drive. They were laughing. They had changed into white flannels and Terence was wearing a panama hat. The hat made Terence's face look redder than ever. Jessica stood four-square in the entrance of the Great Hall, her fists on her hips, so that when they pushed open the door, still laughing, they almost knocked her over.

‘Where the bloody hell have you been?' she demanded. The swearing made her feel better. She eyed the tennis racquets in Theo's arms. ‘You're not going to play bloody tennis, are you?'

‘Bloody tennis?' Theo said. ‘Where on earth did you get that idea?'

‘The racquets.'

‘Racquets?' Theo looked down at the racquets and gaped. ‘Good Lord. Where the devil did those spring from?' Terence laughed as Theo pushed the racquets into his arms and, whisking Terence's panama from his head, sent it skimming towards the eagle on the newel post. The brim clipped the eagle's beak and skittered upside down along the floor.

‘You missed,' Jessica said.

‘That depends on what I was aiming for,' Theo said and Terence laughed again, his red mouth wide open. Jessica glared at him.

‘You shouldn't leave people out,' she said to Theo. ‘It's rude.'

‘What's rude?' Marjorie skipped down the stairs. She was
wearing a tightly belted tennis dress and shoes so white they made Jessica blink. Behind her, dressed in her ordinary blouse and skirt, Phyllis scuffed her feet, a book dangling from one hand. She kept her thumb tucked between the pages, marking her place.

‘Miss Messy here, that's who,' Theo said and, reclaiming a racquet from Terence, he bounced the strings on Jessica's head. ‘You should hear the swear words Nanny's been teaching her. The two of them would put a navvy to shame.'

Marjorie sniggered. Jessica glowered at her. She hated it when Theo called her Mess and Messy. Miss Messica Jelville, he would say, as though his tongue had got it muddled up, and Eleanor would laugh and laugh. But at the same time she could not help being glad just a little that he had a special name for her he had made up all by himself. He never called Phyllis anything but Phyll.

‘Ready?' Theo said as Terence retrieved his hat. Then he frowned. ‘Come on, Phyll. You haven't even changed your shoes.'

‘What difference does that make?' Phyllis said. ‘I won't be any less hopeless with different shoes.'

‘There's no point in playing if you refuse to try.'

‘Well, in that case . . .' Baring her teeth in a smile, she turned to go back upstairs, her eyes already on her book. Marjorie caught her arm.

‘Please, Phyllis,' she wheedled, glancing at Theo. ‘We need you. Don't we need her, Theo? It's much more fun with four.'

‘Or you could let them play singles,' Phyllis said. ‘You know they'd rather.'

‘Would you?' Marjorie asked Theo. ‘Would you really?' And she bit her lip and made her eyes go round at him in a way that made Jessica want to be sick on her snowy white shoes.

‘For God's sake, Phyll,' Theo snapped. ‘Just play, won't you?'

‘I can play,' Jessica offered quickly. ‘I've been taking lessons.'

‘I don't even know why you want me,' Phyllis said. ‘You'll only growl at me every time I hit it into the net.'

‘Miss Whitfield says I have a natural eye for the ball,' Jessica added.

‘He won't,' Marjorie said. ‘You won't, will you, Theo?'

Theo's mouth twitched, his eyes sliding sideways towards Terence. ‘Well, I suppose if she were on the other side I mightn't. Then I might even enjoy it.'

‘Is that what we on the East Coast call a challenge, Melville?' Terence said.

‘For you, most certainly. Have you seen Phyllis on a tennis court?'

‘That's it,' Phyllis said. ‘I'm not playing.'

‘Come on now,' Terence said. The way he looked at Theo suggested some kind of private joke. ‘Wouldn't it be a little bit fun to knock that self-satisfied smirk off your brother's face?'

‘It'd be a joy and a pleasure. Unfortunately, though, he has a point. My tennis is execrable.'

‘Nonsense,' Terence said, still looking at Theo. ‘Trust me. It will be a cinch. A snap. A picnic. A breeze. A piece of cake. A walk, my friend, in the park.'

‘Extraordinary,' Theo said. ‘In the old country only a matter of weeks and already so fluent in hubris.'

‘Just wait till you see me serve.'

‘I've heard Terence is fearfully good,' Marjorie confided to Phyllis. ‘You'll hardly have to hit a stroke. You can just stand there looking pretty.'

Phyllis rolled her eyes. ‘If only Miss Pankhurst could hear you, Marjorie. She'd be so proud.'

‘What about me?' Jessica demanded. ‘Why can't I play?'

‘Are you still here?' Theo asked. Then, putting one hand on the top of her head and another around her chin, he tipped back her face, twisting it from side to side. ‘Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the Royal Society. Today we will be studying the sadly not-so-rare species, the Spoiled Child.'

‘Let go of me,' Jessica protested, trying to wriggle free, but Theo only tightened his grip, his fingers digging uncomfortably into her jaw.

‘Mark,' he said, ‘the distinctive pout, the ill-tempered frown between the eyebrows. Not uncommonly this will be accompanied by the protruding tongue—'

‘Let her go, Theo,' Phyllis said as Marjorie giggled, her hand over her mouth. ‘We can let her pick up the balls or something, can't we?'

‘And be your slave?' Jessica said. ‘No fear.'

‘Fine.' Phyllis shrugged. ‘We'll see you later, then.'

‘You can't just leave me all alone.'

‘Oskar's around, isn't he? And anyway, I thought you were putting on a concert?'

‘It's not a concert, it's an Extravaganza. And I can't do anything with you gone because you're all in it.'

Theo looked at Terence and snorted. ‘When hell freezes over.'

‘It isn't for you, actually, Theodore Melville. It's for Eleanor.' She rolled the name on her tongue like an elocution teacher. Her mother was always telling her to pronounce it properly and not like a maid who dropped her ‘h's.

‘For Eleanor?' Theo said, copying her enunciation. ‘Would that be the Eleanor who prizes children's shows above all other entertainments?'

‘She'd like it if you were in it,' Jessica said sulkily. Theo did not try to deny it. However short-tempered Eleanor was, however restless or peevish or bored half to death buried in the back of beyond, she was never impatient with Theo. Sometimes she even kissed him for no reason or smoothed the hair away from his forehead. When Jessica's hair escaped her ribbons, Eleanor just winced and sent her up to Nanny.

‘Do it with Oskar,' Theo suggested. ‘I mean, the boy's pure music hall.' He strummed his tennis racquet like a Spanish guitar. ‘Zey call me Oskar Grunewald, ja, zey do. Some days I zay one word, some days even two.'

‘Don't, Theo,' Phyllis said. ‘That's unkind.'

‘It's not unkind if it's true,' Jessica said.

‘Actually, it's more unkind if it's true,' Phyllis said. ‘And why are you backing him up? I'm the one on your side.'

‘No you're not. You're ruining my Extravaganza just as much as Theo, only you won't come straight out and say so. Which makes you worse.'

Terence grinned, showing white teeth. ‘Well, ain't you a pistol, little sister?'

Jessica considered the American boy, her eyes narrow. Then slowly she raised her hands, the first two fingers pointing at his head.

‘Bang, bang, you're dead,' she said. Blowing the smoke from her fingertips, she stuck out her chin and stalked through the servants' door towards the kitchen.

Oskar had not seen the Children's Encyclopaedia in the library before. It came in eight thick volumes, a two-foot stretch of blue leather that took up almost a whole shelf of the bookcase. He stood on tiptoes to inspect it. At school the encyclopaedias had letters on their spines to mark out which part of the alphabet they were for, but these ones just had numbers, one to eight. Under the number, there was another, much bigger number showing the page numbers for that book, surrounded by a pattern of gold leaves and a scabbard. Oskar knew what a scabbard was because of the Roman exhibition at the British Museum but it was the numbers that caught his attention.

Oskar could not explain how he felt about numbers except to say that they were his friends. His mother smiled when he said that and said she knew what he meant but that it might be better not to tell the other boys at school. She said that, unlike numbers, schoolboys were unpredictable, that they did not always behave the way you expected them to. She did not seem to understand that numbers did not either, or not all the time. Sometimes, when you were ill in bed, they got all agitated in your head, and it was like the day they went together to see the men riding their bicycles in the Olympic Games and he thought he had lost her, primes and squares
and cubes pushing and shoving and squashing out the light; except that numbers matted themselves into thick ropes that kept getting bigger and more twisty until you thought your head would burst. But most of the time numbers were smooth and cool and fitted together so you could make buildings out of them. The number buildings were beautiful.

Oskar's mother liked words more than numbers, which meant that she knew lots of stories about them. She told Oskar about the shepherds in Lincolnshire in the Middle Ages who had their own numbers that started
yan, tan, tethera, pethera
, but only went up to
figgit
, which was twenty, because if a shepherd had more than twenty sheep he would scrape a line in his crook and start at
yan
all over again. She said that the word calculate came from the Roman word for pebble because the Romans counted with stones, and that digit, which was a grown-up word for finger, was also a grown-up word for number and that was why numbers were counted in groups of ten, because people counted on their fingers and ten was how many fingers you had for counting on.

‘Unless you were Anne Boleyn, of course,' she said. Anne Boleyn was the Queen who married King Henry VIII when his other wife was still alive so that he could not be a Catholic any more. Oskar did not care for Anne Boleyn any more than he cared for the broken bits of pot at the British Museum, but he quite liked the shudder that came from eleven fingers, and he really, really liked the idea of a number system that went up to eleven before starting again. For a while when he was littler, he had invented his own number system that went up to
dat
, which was eleven, and then afterwards, when he saw that it would work better to have a base that divided by lots of other numbers, to
tog
, which was twelve. His mother said that there had been several clever men in the nineteenth century who had tried to change the number system so that everyone counted in twelves, especially in Britain where there were already twelve pennies in a shilling, but that no one had wanted to listen. She said that it was one of the things that
she would never understand, that even when it was quite plain that things would be better if they changed, most people still wanted them to stay exactly the same.

Volume
6
, pages 3727–4463. Both 3727 and 4463 were prime numbers. Oscar liked odd numbers better than even ones and primes most of all because each one had its own special shape. He slid the book from the shelf. It was new, the spine stiff and the gold very gold. At home the books were all battered and when you opened them the pages fell out or letters or scraps of paper covered in his mother's handwriting. She was always putting letters and lists in books to mark her place and forgetting all about them. Once Oskar had found a telegram announcing the birth of JESSICA MARGARET CROMPTON MELVILLE STOP; another time a French train ticket from before he was born. The books in the Melvilles' huge library did not look like anyone had ever read them at all.

Carefully he opened the book. When he was small he had asked his mother if Sir Aubrey had read all the books in his library and his mother had laughed and said that not even Sir Aubrey could love Ellinghurst as much as that. She said that according to the estate records most of the books had been purchased by the yard, like silk for curtains, boxes and boxes just to cover the shelves, but that some had been chosen specially by Sir Jeremiah who was Sir Aubrey's great-great-grandfather.

‘What else explains so much Scott?' she said and she smiled so that Oskar knew it was a joke even though he did not understand it. He often did not understand the things his mother said but he knew better than to ask her to explain because mostly the explanations were not very interesting. He was interested in Sir Jeremiah, though. It was Sir Jeremiah who had turned Ellinghurst from an ordinary manor house into a medieval castle and built castellations and turrets and a moat with a bridge and a huge arched gatehouse with machicolations and a portcullis and a lookout tower with a hole for boiling oil. Oskar's mother had told Oskar that Sir
Jeremiah had been an admirer of Richard the Lionheart and, like the great Crusader king, believed in gallantry and chivalry and the unrelenting plunder of the people for profit. She said that if your concern for the tenants on your land extended only as far as their potential capital yield, it was probably prudent to have a portcullis, just in case.

‘No little lily-handed Baronet he,' Oskar's mother said, and Oskar knew from the way that she said it that the words came from a poem. Oskar's mother loved poems. She said that poems could be just as beautiful as mathematical equations but Oskar knew that she only thought that because she did not really understand mathematics.

The first thing in
Volume
6
was a shiny colour plate of the Solar System, the planets suspended in their orbits like swirly glass marbles. Oskar knew about the Solar System. He knew that the rings of Saturn were made up of small particles of ice and rock and that Jupiter was two and a half times the mass of all the other planets put together, with its largest satellite, Ganymede, bigger even than Mercury. He knew that, from where he was on Earth, the Sun was ninety-three million miles away. It puzzled him when other people remarked to his mother on how clever he was to remember so many things. Facts were like books or socks. If you put them back in the same place you always knew where they were when you needed them.