We That Are Left (12 page)

‘Lion eyes. That's what Nanny always called them.'

‘Lion eyes.' He nodded. ‘Yes.'

‘She used to say it was all very well having lion eyes but what counted was a lion heart.' She faltered, not knowing how to ask. ‘Was Theo . . . was he very brave?'

Guy leaned forward, straightening the row of photographs on the table. His hands were long and narrow, with narrow pale nails.

‘Theo was the bravest man I ever knew,' he said at last. ‘It didn't matter how bad it got out there, he just refused to be afraid. He said it wasn't courage, just contrariness, bred in the bone. He said you were just the same.'

‘He talked about me?'

‘Of course.'

‘What . . . what did he say?'

‘That you were just like him. Ferocious. Free. Undomesticated. The kind of wild creature that would die rather than live in captivity.' He laughed, a choked cough, and ducked his head. ‘Sorry.'

Jessica stared at the floor and tried to imagine Theo saying such things about her. All her life she had loved him and looked up to him, she had wanted to be like him, for him to notice her, and all her life she had grieved because he was not looking. Except that he was. He had. He had thought she was like him. The stab of pride bent her double.

The door opened and Eleanor came in. Phyllis was with her. Guy stood. When they sat down Eleanor sat very close to him on the sofa, her leg almost touching his. She wept when she saw the photographs. She said that Theo had talked about photographs with Mrs Waller, that he had grown quite impatient with her when she had not understood. Stripes behind, he had said, and she pointed to the pattern of sandbags behind Theo. Stripes behind. She said it as though it made sense of everything.

Guy drank his tea. Not long after, he said he had to leave to catch his train and asked if he might wash his hands. Eleanor went upstairs to lie down and Jessica waited for him with Phyllis in the Great Hall. He took a long time. When Jessica
went to find him he was standing in the passageway, his eyes closed and his forehead against the wall.

At the front door she shook his hand, feeling the narrowness of it, the long bones moving under the skin.

‘Might I write to you out there?' she blurted. ‘For Theo's sake, I mean. Because of Theo.'

Guy hesitated. Then he nodded. ‘Please,' he said.

The next day the Yorkshire Melvilles left to return to Harrogate. It was raining, a fine drizzle that caught in the trees like smoke. Jessica waited with Phyllis and her father under the stone arches of the carriage porch as Cousin Evelyn helped Cousin Lettice and the nursemaid and the grub baby into the car. When everyone was settled he came back to the porch. His coat glinted with tiny beads of rain.

‘Come and visit,' he urged as he kissed Phyllis and Jessica. ‘We'll show you why there's two sort o' folk int' world, them from Yorkshire and them that wished the' were.' His Yorkshire accent was abysmal.

‘I expect you'll be glad to be back,' Father said.

‘Ah, well, you know, the home fires and all that.' They shook hands. Then Cousin Evelyn patted Father awkwardly on the arm. ‘Thank Eleanor for us, won't you? I hope she feels better soon.'

Sir Aubrey nodded. ‘Safe journey,' he said.

Cousin Evelyn bent to climb into the car. Then he straightened up again.

‘I hope you know how sorry I am, Aubrey,' he said. ‘This . . . situation. It's not what any of us would have wanted.'

As the car crunched away Sir Aubrey walked out onto the gravelled sweep. He watched as it made its way slowly down the drive, following the curve of the rhododendrons until it disappeared from sight. It was only when the rain began to fall in earnest that he turned and went back into the house.

According to Mr Beckers, the aether did not exist. Or at least it did not exist in the way that Newton and scientists up until the nineteenth century had thought of it, as the invisible essence of which all bodies were made. The questions that had once been considered among the most urgent in physics—How dense is the aether? Is it fluid like water or solid like steel? Which way do the particles of the aether oscillate when an electromagnetic wave travels across it?—had never been answered, but this was not ignorance, Mr Beckers said. It was knowledge. The questions could not be answered because they were the wrong questions to ask in the first place.

The aether was not a kind of matter. It had none of the characteristics of matter, such as mass or rigidity. There was no more purpose in asking about the material properties of the aether than there was in asking about the material properties of time. Some physicists had even argued that modern theories no longer had any need of the aether, that it had effectively been abolished. Mr Beckers said that was a red herring. He said that those physicists just did not like the word, because for so long the aether had been imagined as a kind of material jelly when in fact it was something else entirely.

The aether, he said, was just another word for space.

Oscar was studying for the Cambridge scholarship to read
Natural Sciences. Mr Beckers said that if he could only improve his mathematics Oscar had a good chance of winning it. He offered to give Oscar lessons after supper, when the other boys were ragging in the Common Room. Oscar agreed reluctantly, and mostly because it was a relief to have somewhere else to go.

Mr Beckers was gentle and encouraging and under his tutelage the numbers began once again to move, just a little, like wind through grass. Oscar supposed he was glad, though he was afraid Mr Beckers was wasting his time. The prospect of Cambridge seemed impossibly remote, and not just because of the money. By the end of the Michaelmas Term of 1917 any hope that the Americans would finish things off had been dashed by the failures of the summer offensives. Worse, the triumph of the Bolsheviks meant that the Russians were as good as out of the War. With the prospect of victory on the Eastern Front Germany looked stronger than ever.

All through that term and the short dark days of the Lent term that followed, the boys in Oscar's year were called up. Several applied for temporary exemptions to allow them to sit the Matriculation examinations. None was granted. The demand for men was more urgent than ever. Walker, a quiet boy in Oscar's physics set, was advised to keep up his studies in the Army and obtain leave in June for the duration of the examinations. Four weeks later Walker was killed when a tank exploded at his training camp.

Oscar was the youngest boy in the year. In August he too would be called up. All these years he had waited for the chance to demonstrate his patriotism, to prove that he was British to the bone, but now that it was nearly upon him, the prospect of fighting was a cold knife on the back of his neck. It was not so much the newspapers, though they were bad enough, or even the roll-call of the dead that concluded the end-of-term assembly, the same surnames repeating again and again like a gramophone record with the needle stuck. What haunted Oscar were the rumours that drifted through the
school like poisonous gas, the executions for cowardice and desertion, the men shot by their own officers to force the rest of the platoon over the top. It was all right in the daylight but at night, in the darkness, the dread came in waves and the stink of Theo's uniform rose like bile in the back of his throat.

To keep it at bay he thought of Jessica. He could no longer summon her face, not exactly, but her body was more certain than ever. He had grown bold with her over the years. She did not resist as he pulled the cardigan from around her shoulders, slowly unbuttoned her silky blouse. Sometimes she straddled his lap. She never wore underwear. Her full breasts were high, like the breasts of the girls in the postcards the boys passed round after lights out, her thighs were white and willingly parted. When he stroked her she stretched like a cat, her head back and her honey-gold hair spilling over her shoulders. Afterwards, as his heart slowed, he slept. It did not stop the dreams coming in the night, the sandbags that erupted in his face, explosions of scarlet and splintery bone.

At the end of March, with the country reeling from the success of the German offensives on the Western Front, Oscar went to Trinity College, Cambridge to sit his scholarship examinations. Beyond the window of the train the sky above the Fens was white-grey and as lumpy as wallpaper paste. In his pocket he had a letter from his headmaster, delivered to his room the night before.

It is a matter of little argument
, Mr Harrington wrote,
that the three greatest physicists in history are Archimedes, Newton and Maxwell. Of those three, only Archimedes had the misfortune not to be a Trinity man
. As
for the current Master of the College, you would do well to remember that it is none other than the great Sir John Joseph Thomson, Cavendish Professor and Nobel laureate. What better guide as you commence your first explorations of our mysterious universe?

Oscar fingered the corners of the folded letter and thought
of Pierre Curie who had once absent-mindedly left a few milligrams of radium in a vial in his coat pocket. The radium had scorched right through the heavy tweed of his waistcoat and left him with a permanent scar on his chest. It seemed to Oscar that the envelope in his pocket was possessed too of its own radiant energy, rays of ink and possibility that penetrated the flesh of his fingertips and made them fizz with anticipation.

Before Thomson the atom had been indivisible, the most fundamental unit of matter. It was Thomson who made them look deeper, Thomson whose discovery of electrons had inspired the work of Rutherford and Bohr. The idea that Oscar might breathe the same air as J. J. Thomson, that he might walk the same corridors and eat in the same dining hall and venture into the same laboratories, perhaps even see with his own eyes the apparatus used in the very first experiments with cathode ray tubes—the thought made his head spin.

There were cadets drilling in Great Court as he hurried around the perimeter, and a huddle of officers beneath the arch that led to Nevile's Court. The next day, going back on the train to London, there were more soldiers and kitbags sprawled like bodies on the floor. The soldiers were drunk. They passed a tin water flask between them, squinting with the hit as they drank. At Baldock one of them was sick out of the window.

Oscar sat in the corner and watched the grey fields unspooling behind the train like a bolt of fabric. All he could think of was how soon he might be able to go back. The interviews had gone well, he was sure of that. He might not have done well enough for the scholarship but surely they would not turn him down. For the first time it occurred to him that perhaps it would not be so bad if the Germans won and the War was over. Then physics would start again.

Physicists are not politicians, Mr Beckers had said. How can they be? Physics is universal. This is what the theory of special relativity tells us. The laws that govern light and
gravity apply as much to the furthest corners of the Universe as they do on Earth. And because of the universality of physics the history of the Earth is provincial. What for us is a million years, or four, may be to someone travelling at speed no longer than the blink of an eye.

Oscar had only the vaguest grasp of Einstein's theories, but he knew his story, that a German scientist had renounced his citizenship to avoid compulsory military service and, as the bloodiest conflict in all of Earth's history raged around him, he had looked not only down a microscope or through a cathode tube but up and out at all of the natural world—space, time, the unity and harmony of the entire universe—and seen in all its unimaginable complexity the most universal of universal laws.

Or so he claimed.

The faster an object moves, the vaster it becomes. Where was it the War was hurtling, as it grew bigger and bigger and blotted out the sun? Oscar no longer cared. He no longer cared whether he was German or English or Mandarin Chinese. In Berlin at this very moment there was a boy just like him, his eyes raw from reading, his stomach tipped upside down by the monstrous prospect of war, and in a matter of months one of them would kill the other, and why? Because he happened to be there.

He closed his eyes, leaning his head against the upholstered seat, and reached out for Jessica.
Kiss me
, he said.
Kiss me and let me live
.

Two days before the school was due to break up for the Easter holidays a water tank burst in the attic of Oscar's boarding house. The torrent of water flooded the building and brought down several ceilings on the upper floors. The boys had to be evacuated. It was not safe for them to stay. Camp beds were hastily put up for the younger boys in other houses but, with lessons all but finished for the term, the Sixth Form boys were asked to go home.

The boys sent telegrams, summoning mothers and chauffeurs. Oscar did not bother. The sight of the telegraph boy with an envelope would only mean agonies for every mother in his street. Besides he always went home by train.

It was a little before seven when he reached Clapham. The unlit sky was bright with stars and, beyond the black ramparts of the chimney pots, the moon was a sliver of phosphorus. The house was dark, the blackout curtains drawn, but when he pushed open the front door he saw that the lamps in the back parlour were lit. After months of daylight raids the Gotha bombers now flew at night. He shut the front door quickly behind him.

‘Mother?' Dropping his suitcases he opened the parlour door. His mother rose from her chair by the fire, knocking a book from its arm. Flustered, she bent to pick it up. Her cheeks were pink. On the other side of the fireplace, in Oscar's chair, sat Sir Aubrey Melville.

‘Oscar, darling, whatever are you doing home?' she said, embracing him. ‘Tell me you haven't been expelled?'

‘There was a flood. They sent us home early. Sir Aubrey. Please, don't get up.'

‘Oscar, old chap. What a pleasant surprise.'