We That Are Left

First U.S. edition 2015
Copyright © 2015 by Clare Clark

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to
[email protected]
or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

First published in the United Kingdom by Harvill Secker, a Penguin Random House Company 2015

www.hmhco.com

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Clark, Clare.
We that are left / Clare Clark.—First U.S. edition.
pages; cm
ISBN
978-0-544-12999-3 (hardcover)—
ISBN
978-0-544-13016-6 (ebook)
1. Sisters—Fiction. 2. Upper class—Fiction. 3. World War, 1914–1918—England—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6103.L3725W4 2015
823'.92—dc23 2014049774

Cover design by Martha Kennedy

Cover photograph © Richard Jenkins

v1.1015

Extract from
The Time Machine
by H. G. Wells, reprinted with permission of A. P. Watt at United Agents on behalf of The Literary Executors of the Estate of H. G. Wells.

 

For Luke, Alice and Frances,

a third each,

because That's Fair

 

They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old:

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning

We will remember them.

LAURENCE BINYON, SEPTEMBER 1914
.

It was raining as they followed the coffin from the church. A gusty wind snatched at people's hats. At the head of the procession the rector clamped his arms against his billowing robes and sang, ‘We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away,' and the wind caught the words and scattered them like leaves.

They stood together at the graveside, Phyllis and Jessica and Oscar, their heads bowed. Behind them Cousin Evelyn held an umbrella over Lettice, its apex into the wind to keep it from blowing inside out. She was expecting again. A girl this time, she was sure of it, she had confided happily to Jessica. She had never felt sicker in her life.

Afterwards they went back to the house for tea and sandwiches. Marjorie helped Jessica with the cups while Oscar shook hands with some of the tenants, red-faced and awkward in their Sunday suits. From his frame above the fireplace Jeremiah Melville observed the proceedings grimly, his hands clasping his stick. Oscar tried not to look at him.

On the other side of the Great Hall Mr Rawlinson murmured something to Phyllis who nodded and stared out of the window. Her black suit emphasised her pale skin, the red gleam of her hair. Rawlinson turned, catching Oscar's eye.
Oscar pretended not to see. The lawyer wished only to pay his respects, he supposed, but he would not speak to him. A more tactful man would have chosen not to come.

It was not much of a party. When the last of the guests was gone Oscar left the women in front of the fire and went for a walk. The wind had dropped and the air was damp and chill. It smelled of wet earth and rotting leaves and, very faintly, of the sea.

He walked down through the darkening garden and across the croquet lawn towards the tower in the woods. It still drew him, after so long. At the bottom of the spiral staircase he paused, one hand on the stone arch that led through to the Tiled Room. The floor was thick with leaves and the windows were overgrown with ivy and brambles, tendrils snaking through broken glass to entwine themselves around the rotting benches. The tiles on the walls were grey, sticky with dirt and cobwebs. He rubbed one with the side of his fist. It gleamed in the dusk like the white of an eye.

By the time he reached the top of the tower he was out of breath. The light was paler here. The low mass of the Isle of Wight smudged the horizon, and the breeze sang in the glassless windows. Sir Aubrey had brought him up here once when he was a little boy. Sir Aubrey had not appeared to know that this room was Theo's private fiefdom, that access was permitted only by invitation. He just made Oscar promise he would not tell Godmother Eleanor. Godmother Eleanor thought that the tower was dangerous. Sir Aubrey told Oscar that the tower had thirteen storeys and 385 steps, that it was 218 feet tall and eighteen feet square, not counting the external staircase, and rested on a foundation nine feet deep, that the concrete was two feet thick at the base of the tower and one at the top, that it had taken a team of forty workmen five years to build. Oscar had been so interested he almost forgot to be afraid about Theo finding out. Everything had been numbers in those days, for Oscar.

The window on the west side of the tower looked down
over the house. From so high a vantage point the castellated bastions and turrets of Ellinghurst looked like a child's sandcastle, the vast ivied walls that enclosed it to the west hardly more than a curved line of pebbles in the sand. Beyond the sloping lawns the grassy moat was flooded with shadow and the house on its mound was an island, the wide vistas of the park spreading to the south, to the north the dark-clotted woods and hills of the New Forest. Beyond the barbican of the gatehouse Oscar could just make out the river, a blue-black scrawl amidst ink-blot trees.

The farms were to go. It was a good time to sell, Rawlinson said. The agricultural subsidies introduced by the government during the War had increased the productivity of the land and the profits of farmers. There were mutterings in Westminster about repeal but, while the legislation stood, tenants were keen to buy and, with the hikes in schedule tax, it made sense to convert a reduced income into a tax-free capital gain. Oscar had stared at the ledgers that held the estate accounts, the columns of numbers jumbling in his head. If Rawlinson was right about land values the sales would raise sufficient funds to meet death duties and keep their heads above water, at least for the present.

They had not talked about the future. It was too soon. In time, though, Oscar knew, the park would have to go. Rawlinson did not say so but Oscar knew he had already begun to put out feelers. The estate was mortgaged to the hilt and, without the income from the farms, they would struggle to meet the payments. Little by little Ellinghurst would retreat up onto its mound, its drawbridge pulled up against the marauders whose advances paid its debts and kept the roof from falling in.

Oscar did not know if he would stay on at the University. He had insisted to Rawlinson that he be permitted to graduate but he was no longer sure why it mattered. There was no possibility of a graduate research post, not any more, so why not throw it in now and devote his energies to Ellinghurst?
The loss, if there was one, was small, selfish. Science would not mourn him. Nearly five years ago Sir Aubrey's brother Henry had been killed by a sniper at Gallipoli. Though only in his early thirties when he died, Henry Melville had already left an indelible impression on the textbooks. It was widely agreed among the scientists of Oscar's acquaintance that, had he lived, his work would have won him the Nobel Prize.

No one doubted that he would have gone on to do work of the utmost importance, work that in time would have marked him out as one of the very great scientists of his generation, and yet since his death that work had not been left undone. It had been done by others. The fissure opened by his loss had been stopped, the plaster smoothed over. Experimental physics was a collective enterprise, like the construction of an anthill. The particular character or contribution of each individual ant was not of consequence. What counted was the cumulative edifice. Great scientists were rare but not so rare that their work died with them. If a scientist failed to make a discovery one year, then another would make it the next. One way or another, the anthill would inexorably rise.

Ellinghurst was not like that. After three hundred years they were the only ants left. It was chance that had saved Oscar, chance and Mr Rawlinson. He knew to be grateful. In the last six months of the War the British Army had suffered nearly half a million casualties, almost a fifth of the War's grim reckoning. Whatever the truth, he had made his choice. There was a debt to be honoured, a duty to be discharged. The papers were signed and Sir Aubrey laid to rest. He would do what he could, as Sir Aubrey had wanted. He would not be the one to break the chain. Perhaps, in time, the house, the name, would come to feel like his own. By now he of all people should know that names meant nothing.

It was done. Ellinghurst was theirs. Their future was set. There was no purpose in wondering what might have been, or if it was what he wanted after all.

Terence held the chair steady as Theo tied the scarf over Jessica's eyes. He tied it very tight, so tight it pulled her hair and pushed her eyeballs down into their sockets, but Jessica did not protest. She gripped the chair's wicker arms as Terence wheeled her out to the middle of the lane.

‘Cheese,' Theo said and she forced a grin. His camera clicked. She could feel the wind tugging at the loose ends of the scarf, the tumble of apprehension in her stomach. The lane was steep here, steep enough that the red-faced lady bicyclists who panted doggedly all the way up the gentle slope through the village had to get off their machines and push. It made their mother laugh to see them. Sometimes when they were motoring, Eleanor would tell Pritchard to drive right up behind them and sound the horn. Phyllis hated it when she did that but the sight of the bicycles wobbling into the verge only made Eleanor laugh harder. She told Phyllis and Jessica that she was performing a Public Service, that the red-faced ladies should be glad of the excitement.

The red-faced ladies pushed their bicycles downhill too. Father said it was because otherwise their bicycles might run away with them and Eleanor laughed and said it was the only thing that ever would, which made Father's lips
go thin. Jessica could see the hill in her mind's eye: the bumpy grey lane dropping away like a laundry chute between the high banks of the hedgerows until at the bottom by the gate to Stream Farm it curved sharply right over the river. Theo said that the bath chair would go in a straight line when the road turned so that the worst that could happen was that the chair would tip over when it went into the thick grass beside the Stream Farm field and that was fine because grass was a soft landing. Jessica knew that was not the worst thing that could happen but there was no point in thinking about that. Nanny said it was thinking too much about bad things that made them happen in the first place.

‘Ready?' Theo said and Jessica nodded and pushed the ends of her fingers hard into the basketwork of the chair to make herself feel braver. It was stupid to be afraid. Theo said that fear was the reason so many people lived small unhappy lives. Jessica was small for her age, Eleanor was always saying so, but she had no intention of ever being unhappy.

‘You know what, Theo?' Terence Connolly said in his stretched-out American drawl. ‘You've made your point.'

‘Rules is rules. We said whoever drew the red match, right, Jess?'

Jessica nodded, biting hard on the inside of her lip. She wished Terence Connolly would just shut up so she could get the whole thing over with.

‘So the kid's got guts,' Terence said. ‘You don't have to make her spill them all over the roadside.'

‘You're not being a pansy, are you, Connolly?' Theo said and he jerked the chair, letting it go and catching it again just as it began to roll. Jessica's stomach turned over. Behind her Marjorie giggled. It was all Jessica could do not to climb out and sock her. Marjorie Maxwell Brooks was always at Ellinghurst, because her mother wanted more than anything to be friends with Eleanor and traipsed around after her saying how much she had enjoyed the So-and-sos and where did she
get her marvellous eye for colour. Marjorie had adenoids, which meant she breathed through her mouth and her words came out full of ‘d's as though she had a permanent cold in the head.