We That Are Left (36 page)

It was in a sort of trance that she watched Guy put his hand on the weasel man's thigh, his long fingers splayed. The man moved closer. Guy's hand slid upwards. He touched the man's chest, his neck. Then, sliding his fingers into the man's hair, he pulled him towards him. Jessica saw the weasel man's lips part, the glint of his pointed tongue as it pushed into Guy's mouth. The music stamped and banged in Jessica's head as she stared, rooted to the spot. The weasel man put his hand between Guy's legs and he jolted, rising slightly out of his seat, his mouth opening as though he would eat the weasel man alive. Their tongues writhed together, coiling and twisting. Then the weasel man pulled away. He stood and Guy stood too, so abruptly he knocked over a stool, and, with the weasel man leading, they pushed their way out of the club.

Man's love is of man's life a thing apart
, Jessica thought dizzily.
'Tis woman's whole existence
.

She told Gerald she wanted to go home. When he protested, declaring her a bore, she pleaded a migraine headache and said that she would be quite all right if only he could see her into a taxi cab. She was glad when he did not insist on taking her home. The thought of him pawing at her made her feel sick.

She let herself into the flat. Dawn was breaking and, to the east, the paling sky burned pink and gold. The pink was the colour of Guy Cockayne's tongue. She could not stop the pictures from flickering in her head, fragments of film run too fast. She had always laughed at the men in their lipstick at Dixie's. They seemed so absurd, like pitiful versions of the boys dressed up as girls in Theo's school plays. She had not thought of what they did together, the disgusting things they did together. The thought of Guy and the weasel man, writhing together in a car under the plane trees—

Suddenly Nanny's bedroom door opened and Nanny was standing there. She wore a plaid dressing gown that Jessica recognised from her childhood and an elasticated net over her hair. Her face was crumpled with sleep. She crossed her arms. ‘Exactly what time do you call this, young lady?'

Jessica took one look at Nanny's grim expression and burst into tears.

‘Why do men have to be so . . . beastly?' she sobbed and she let Nanny take her into her arms and rock her, just as she had when Jessica was a little girl.

A week later, on a damp grey Saturday, she went with the other girls from the office to the Peace Parade. Somewhere in the crowd were Nanny and her niece, up from Essex for the day. Nanny had looked forward to it for weeks. There would be bands and merry-go-rounds and folk dancing in the Park and, in the evening, a huge firework display. It made Jessica uneasy. She was not sure Theo would have wanted to be remembered that way. She went all the same. She was glad that the girls had asked her. She was glad too that she did not have to go home.

She had always loved Ellinghurst in July, the trees in full leaf, the borders riotous with stocks and lupins and delphiniums and shock-haired dahlias, the grey walls of the battlements billowy with blue campanula. The bees humming in the dropping roses and the sun-warmed flags of the terrace under bare feet and the mossy cool of the woods and the dappled green lake with its darting dragonflies, the bow of the old rowing boat nudging drifts of yellow irises and bulrushes like fat cigars. In July the schoolroom was locked and inside the magic circle of the castle walls time drowsed like a sun-drugged cat.

She longed for it, staring out of her slice of window at the padded white sky, but she did not go home. Instead, she walked beneath the dusty plane trees along the Grand Union Canal. Beneath the iron railings the pavement was green with goose droppings. The last time she had been to Ellinghurst was the weekend after Marjorie's ball. The garden was extravagantly abundant, almost wild, the hedges choked with honeysuckle, the path through the woods knee-high with feathery grass. Her father said it was impossible to find men who wanted the work, that the War had made them greedy He was in a fractious mood, his voice querulous. His hands shook as he spread his toast. For the first time Jessica saw that he was an old man.

She told him she would ride while he worked but he said that there were things to discuss. He demanded to know what she had done about arrangements since they had last met. What about Marjorie Maxwell Brooke's dance? Who had she met and what were their prospects and how soon before things were more settled? She realised, did she not, that there was not a great deal of time?

He gave up eventually and went to the library but, when she walked through the garden less than an hour later, she saw him signalling to her from the window. She pretended not to see. It was only a few minutes before he appeared on the terrace. He said he wanted to ask her opinion about a point in his book,
something about the dance floor Grandfather Melville had invented for the Great Hall that was sprung and mounted on wheels to permit it to be easily moved, but when she asked why he was asking her he did not go back to the house. Instead, he sat next to her, gazing out over the sloping garden.

‘It's all here,' he said. ‘Don't you see? Everything that means anything.'

All that day and the next he sought her out, in the morning room and by the lake and in the shade of the beech trees at the bottom of the lawn, until she thought she would go mad with it.

‘I'm trying, Father,' she said and she glared at him to keep herself from crying. ‘I'm trying.'

She wanted to talk to Eleanor, to have her intercede on her behalf, but she knew it would not do any good. Her parents barely spoke to one another any more. Eleanor did not come down for breakfast. Her father ate his lunch in the library. At dinner they spoke through her, as though only she understood both of their languages. In the past when they had gone through periods of not speaking to one another their antagonism had charged the air around them like a thunderstorm, the silence crackling with static. It was not like that this time. There was no tension, no awkward atmosphere. They had simply ceased to see one another. When one of them entered a room to find the other there neither of them said anything. They did not exchange glances or sigh or tut under their breath. The one at the door simply turned around and went somewhere else. That was the thing about Ellinghurst. Even with two thirds of the rooms shut up there was always somewhere else to go.

Despite the drizzle the streets were packed. Crowds filled the pavements and spilled out over the streets, bringing the traffic to a standstill; they stood on bollards and boxes and walls and railings; they squashed onto balconies and hung from lampposts and out of open windows, throwing handfuls of
biscuits and damp confetti, roaring and clapping and singing at the tops of their voices. The noise was deafening.

Jessica followed Peggy as she squirmed through the crush towards Trafalgar Square, nearly losing a shoe when someone trod on her heel. Nelson's Column was wreathed in garlands of flowers. Packs of children sat on the backs of Landseer's lions and on their heads, kicking their heels against the lions' muzzles. The front of the National Gallery was festooned with Union Jack flags.

Jessica stood on tiptoes. She could just see the caps of the troops as they marched up from Whitehall where a monument had been erected as a symbol of remembrance, a huge wooden box like an upended coffin where the troops would salute the dead. Peggy said they had called it the Cenotaph, which was Greek for empty tomb. It was the kind of thing Phyllis would know. Perhaps Phyllis was here in the crowd somewhere, thinking about Theo, remembering or trying to remember. She had hardly seen Phyllis since she came back from Egypt. She never came home to Ellinghurst. She said she was too busy in London with her work, that she had years of books to catch up on if she was to be ready when her University course began in September. Jessica knew she was avoiding their father. She came to the flat one Wednesday evening when Eleanor was in London but, when Jessica tried to talk to her about it, she murmured evasively and changed the subject. All through dinner she was vague and preoccupied and as soon as it was over she left.

‘I don't know what's wrong with that girl,' Eleanor said. It was not until her mother had gone to bed and she sat alone looking out over the dark castellated chimney pots of Little Venice that Jessica realised that Phyllis was happy. Her smile clung to the air in the drawing room like Alice's Cheshire Cat.

If anything the crowds were thicker in the Mall. The wide road was lined with wooden obelisks painted white. They looked like flower trellises but perhaps they were tombs too. On and on the men came, battalion after battalion through
the drifting rain, marching up towards the Palace. Fifteen thousand, Peggy said. Fifteen thousand men who did not die. Around Jessica everyone was whooping and waving flags and programmes and souvenir paper handkerchiefs printed with flowers. One squealing troop of girls had Union Jack flags wound around their heads like turbans.

‘We love you, boys!' they shrieked as the machine men filed past, square after perfect square. ‘We love you!'

Beside Jessica a man stood with a small boy on his shoulders. The boy was wearing a forage cap so much too big for him that he had to hold it up with both hands. A Japanese officer passed on a dancing black horse, his battalion marching behind him. Over his shoulder he carried a white flag with a scarlet sun. The boy turned his head to look and she saw the badge. A crown and tiger in a wreath of laurel leaves. The Royal Hampshire Regiment. Theo's regiment. She thought of Guy's sketch, the cap badge picked out in meticulous detail, then pushed the thought away.

‘Nice hat,' she said to the little boy.

The boy eyed her and kicked the man's chest. The man looked sideways at her, his eyes bloodshot and unfocused. He smelled of spilled beer.

‘Tigers,' the little boy said.

‘Hampshire Tigers,' she said and she had a sudden vivid memory of Theo in his uniform, not blithe as he had been on the day he left, his cap tipped back on his head at an angle calculated to exasperate Father, but home on leave that Christmas when he was always drunk. Scotch-tinted spectacles, he had told her, with a laugh that did not sound like his. But what was like him, by then?

‘Three and a half days,' the man barked suddenly. He was very drunk. Jessica tried to move away from him in the crush but he swung round to glare at her, the boy swaying on his shoulders. ‘If all the dead men had marched, this fucking circus would have taken three and a half fucking days.'

There were fireworks that night, ten thousand rockets fired from Constitution Arch in Hyde Park. Peggy and Joan went to watch them. Jessica went home.

The flat was dark. Nanny was still out with her niece. Jessica closed the curtains but she could still hear the bangs. When at last she drifted into an uneasy sleep she dreamed she was back at Marjorie's dance, in the eau-de-Nil bathroom with its marble basins and its oval looking-glasses and its lamps that were gold goddesses, holding up glass spheres of light. The pale girl in the pale green gown was curled on the watered-silk chaise as she had been then, except this time it was not a book she held in her lap but knitting, a khaki scarf that grew longer and longer, curling like a tapeworm around Jessica's ankles. Jessica stood at the looking glass, the rim of the marble basin cool under her hands, but it was not her own reflection that she saw staring back at her but the girl on the chaise, her unblinking pale green eyes as blank as sea glass. She did not say anything. She just went on knitting, the needles clicking unnoticed in her fingers as she looked at Jessica with her rose silk dress and her honey-coloured hair and the desolation in her as loud as the roar of the sea inside an empty shell.

Every man you might have married
, her glass eyes said,
is already dead
.

For the rest of Oscar's life he never knew a place in the world as beautiful as Cambridge in the summer of 1919. It was as if the nerves in him had been magnetised, irresistibly drawing sensation to his eyes, his lungs, his brain, his skin, until the intensity of it was almost too much to bear. He walked along the familiar streets in a daze of seeing, overcome by the greenness of the lawns and the blueness of the sky and the perfect pewter gleam of the cobbles beneath his feet, struck time and again by the loveliness of things he had somehow never noticed before: the round glass panes in an overhanging upper window like bottoms of bottles, the splintery grey grain of a warped medieval lintel, the straining neck and gripping claws of a pockmarked gargoyle clinging for dear life to a narrow ledge, its mouth stretched wide and its veined wings raised and half-opened, ready for flight. He had not thought the world so full of ordinary marvels. He stopped often, the business of the day forgotten, captivated by the repeating pattern of coiled Chelsea buns on a tray in a baker's window or a cat asleep in a puddle of sunshine, his ears translucent pink, his long whiskers as dazzling as the filaments of electrical light bulbs. On warm evenings, when the tourists had packed up their guidebooks and their picnic baskets and the tethered punts drowsed four deep in the shallows beyond Clare Bridge,
he read by the river in the shade of the horse chestnut trees as the filigree light danced on the underside of the pale stone bridge and behind him, like an alchemist, the chapel of King's College turned the evening light to gold.

Sometimes the hot weather caused thunderstorms, the air crackling with electricity. Then, as the clouds massed on the horizon, purple as bruises, and the horizon darkened to pencil shading, the obscured sun cut through the clouds in brilliant columns of light. A lifetime before, or perhaps only a few weeks, crossing Waterloo Bridge, he had tried to explain Rayleigh scattering to Phyllis, the dispersion of light by molecules in the air smaller than the wavelength of the light. He told her that it was because of Rayleigh scattering that the sky was blue and sunsets pink and orange.