We That Are Left (15 page)

He stood like that for a long time. Then, feeling rather foolish, he pushed himself away, patting the tree awkwardly as a father might pat a weeping child. Dusting the greenish marks from his coat he turned back towards the house. It was on the last tree, above the crook of a branch where the bark creased like skin, that he saw the initials carved into the trunk. Reaching up he traced the shape of them with one finger. TVCM. Theo Vyvyan Crawford Melville. He could smell cigarette smoke. He looked around but there was no one there, only the beech trees and the soft kiss of the grass against his trousers.

On impulse he took the camera into his hands and took a photograph. Immediately he wished he had not. Once, when he had shown his mother a picture he had taken of her while she was sleeping in her chair, she made a face and told him that there were primitive tribes who believed that the camera stole your soul. He thought of that as he pressed his hand against the carving, feeling the shape of it against his palm.
Forgive me
, he said silently. The breeze sighed. Then, putting his palm against his cheek, he walked away.

Before the War it had never occurred to Jessica to think of Ellinghurst as a prison, except in games. The house's high walls, its moat and portcullis and the battlements that curved like an arm around its shoulders, had been there to keep other people out. She had always loved the moment, coming home for the school holidays, when the car passed beneath the arch of the gatehouse and she was home, every stone and tree hers and familiar. She had wished then that she could close the great oak doors with their heavy iron studs that always stood open, so that Eleanor's friends from London had to go back to their trains and all of Ellinghurst and Eleanor would belong to Jessica alone.

By the end of the summer of 1918 the walls had grown so thick it was all she could do not to scream. The newspapers were full of horrified reports of drunkenness and depravity among the young women of Britain who, freed from the restraint of fathers and husbands, were running wild, neglecting homes and morals and producing a plague of illegitimate children. Jessica knew she was supposed to be shocked. Instead, she envied them. She walked down to the village almost every day, ostensibly to visit Nanny and to help with the parcels for the prisoners of war, but really because she had to get out of the house. The silence between her parents was a kind of tinnitus, ringing in her ears.

Her father no longer joined them for lunch. He had his meals served in the library, which he had taken over for his book. No one was allowed in there, not even the maid to dust. Baize-topped card tables had been set up along the length of the room and still the floor was heaped with books and blueprints and ledgers and notebooks filled out in neat columns detailing shooting bags and the contents of the wine cellar. Sir Aubrey emerged reluctantly at dinner, restless to return, but when Jessica passed the windows and looked in he was never writing, only gazing up at the bookshelves or staring into space. In the morning room her mother stroked her scraps of paper from the seance as though they were bank notes.

She wrote to Guy Cockayne. There was nothing to write about so she wrote about Theo. She wrote about the rope with a knot in its end that the gardeners had put up over the lake as a swing one summer and how Theo had climbed the rope and dived off the branch instead, about the Great Bath Chair Races and the drunken stag beetles and the goat in the nursery in a bonnet in time for tea: ‘Another sandwich, Nanny?'

How foolish this must seem to you
, she wrote and he wrote back,
Tell me more
. His letters were infrequent and very short. He said he was no good with words. Instead, he sent drawings, mostly sketches of soldiers on scraps of paper torn from a notebook.
These men are who I am
, he wrote. The portraits were raw, unguarded, whole lives laid bare in a few strokes of the pencil. She did not show them to anyone. One of the young men was recognisable from the photographs Guy had brought for Eleanor. He bent forward, leaning on his rifle, his eyes fixed on the ground. Another was of a sleeping man, his body slumped against a wall, his cap tipped down over his face. Though the man himself was conjured in a few lines, the badge on his cap was meticulously detailed, the tiger staring out from his wreath of laurel leaves with undisguised contempt.

It was only later that it occurred to Jessica that the man was not sleeping but dead.

In August Jessica kissed a boy called Mervyn. She did not like him. She did it because he was the boy the other girls liked and because she wanted something to happen. She knew it would provoke the other girls, that they would tell their mothers and whisper about her behind her back, but she did it anyway. She could not bear that she was eighteen and the only boy she had ever kissed was Oscar Greenwood. She closed her eyes and pretended Mervyn was Guy Cockayne but it did not help. It was like kissing a dead wet fish. Much worse than Oscar who at least had turned out to be rather beautiful with his big dark eyes, even if he was mute and could not say boo to a goose.

Mervyn sent her a poem. In the second verse he rhymed Jessica with love-sicker. Jessica knew then that she had to get out. If she stayed in Hampshire she would go as mad as one-armed Godfrey Charrington who had been at Ypres and who jumped six feet into the air if anyone so much as clattered a teaspoon.

Summer cooled to autumn. In France the Allies were pushing the Germans back all along the line but in England there was a new enemy. As the Spanish flu swept the country, what poor parties and entertainments there had been were all cancelled. In Bournemouth they opened the windows in the cinemas every four hours to air out the auditoria; they sprayed the trains and the buses and even streets with chemicals to stop the infection from spreading.

Sir Aubrey said it was worse in London. He worried about Phyllis. The hospitals were overflowing and medical schools had closed their third- and fourth-year classes so that the students could work in the wards. It was not just wounded soldiers and the poor who were dying. A man from his club had lost his wife and all three of his grown-up children one
after the other, like skittles. Everyone was frightened, though they pretended not to be. At the Savoy Hotel, he said, the barman had invented a cocktail made from rum and whisky called a Corpse Reviver.

Jessica knew he only told her the stories to keep her prisoner. She told him she would rather die of influenza in London than of boredom in the New Forest. She did not care if she tempted Fate, not any more. She was eighteen years old, for heaven's sake. When was her life going to be allowed to begin?

And then, abruptly, it was over. In London the crowds flooded the streets of the West End like a roaring sea, surging through Trafalgar Square and sending waves of revellers over the steps of St Martin-in-the-Fields and up against the railings of the National Gallery. The night of the Armistice was wet and foggy but the tops of omnibuses were packed with nurses and office girls and yellow-skinned munitionettes waving and blowing kisses, their hair jewelled with rain, while in the crush below, and half-mad with euphoria, girls wrapped in Union flags kissed drunken soldiers and danced with drunken sailors and sat astride Landseer's damp-streaked lions to watch the German guns that had been dragged in from the Mall set on fire. As the flames caught the throng linked arms and, at the top of their lungs, belted out the words to ‘Land of Hope and Glory'.

They sang too in the Strand where, for the first time in four years, the street lamps blazed and restaurants threw up their blackouts, spilling a dazzle of light and laughter out onto the teeming pavements. In the Savoy Hotel officers of the Royal Flying Corps swung from the chandeliers, while across the light-spangled river, whooping groups of girls staggered to catch the last trains at Waterloo Station, so intoxicated that they had to be rolled along the platforms like barrels of beer. Discarded on benches and in gutters, the sodden newspapers proclaimed a single word in letters two inches tall: VICTORY.

Jessica was not in London. She walked with her father into
Ellinghurst village where the church bells were tolling and let Mrs Holt from the dairy press her against her upholstered bosom. Outside the shop the women gathered in giddy clusters, unsteady as children off a merry-go-round. Sir Aubrey went into the Red Lion and shook hands with the landlord and bought beer for the men inside. Jessica went to see Nanny who cried and laughed and would not let go of Jessica's hand. Jessica looked at all the childish souvenirs on Nanny's mantelpiece, the potato pictures and the clay pots and the samplers with the too-tight stitches, and she wondered what Nanny would do all day, now there was no longer any call for socks.

When her father came out they went home.

That night Jessica cried. She had not cried much for Theo, not even after he died. The grief that had encased her was stiff and hard, a plaster cast that held her rigid, and the tears too were solid, packed together like the lumps embedded with rock and pebbles that fell sometimes at Hordle Cliff. She cried for Theo and his friends and for Uncle Henry and Mrs Briggs from the bakery's three red-headed sons and Hubert Dugdale who served less than a month as a subaltern before he was killed by a gas attack. She cried for all the boys Theo had brought home to Ellinghurst who would never come again, their laughter drifting up from the tennis court and later from the terrace as they danced to the gramophone in the lavender dusk. She told herself she should be happy but she was not happy. Peace had broken open the plaster cast and it was not joy that flooded out or even the lightness of relief but only a bleak grey desolation. The old world would not come back. With the guns silenced and the bloodshed finally at an end, Theo was no longer dead for as long as the War dragged on.

He was dead for ever.

And still nothing changed. Phyllis wrote to say that she was staying at her hospital. Her father went back to the library. Three days after the Armistice, Mrs Johns' sister received a
telegram from the Front informing her with deep regret that her youngest boy had been killed during action on the Sambre. In the afternoon, while Mrs Johns wept in the kitchen, Eleanor went to Bournemouth.

Jessica watched from the landing window as the car swung down the drive and out of sight. Then she turned and walked along the passage. Outside her mother's bedroom door she hesitated. As a child, on Nanny's afternoons off, when her mother was out or in London and the housemaid thought she was in the nursery or playing in the garden, she had sometimes crept into her mother's bedroom. Such trespass was expressly forbidden, of course, but the prohibition had only added to its allure. She had sat at her mother's dressing table, gazing at her reflection in the three-part glass, scooping her mother's hairpins from their porcelain saucer and letting them run through her fingers, or stroking with the tips of her fingers the shivery softness of her down powder puff. She had opened the wardrobes and buried her face in the clothes hanging up there. Once she had even put on her mother's silk wrap and lain down on the bed, gazing up at the silk rose at the centre of the canopy. The thought of her mother undressed and all alone, her hair loose about her shoulders and her day-time self unhooked like a corset, had given her butterflies.

Jessica opened the door and went in. The room was her favourite in all the house, with large windows looking out over the lawn and, through an arch, a circular sitting room in the tower that abutted it, with long thin windows made to look like arrow slits. The furniture had been built for the room, the curved backs of the writing desk and the silk-covered chaise matching exactly the curve of the wall. Jessica ran a hand over the ink well, the box of writing paper edged in black. As a child she had thought that, if she touched the things that her mother touched, if she slipped her arms into her furs and lay as she lay beneath the canopy of the four-poster bed, if she breathed in the same musky, powder-dusted air, the leftover fragments of her, then she might, little by little,
become more her mother and less the other person that she was when she was not paying attention, the person that made her mother press her lips together and stiffen when Jessica hugged her goodnight as though she were something dirty that might spoil her dress.

How foolish she had been. This room was no more her mother than the abandoned dresses in her dressing-room wardrobes. How could it be? Theo was dead and most of her mother with him, and the room remained just the same. Apart from a framed photograph of Theo on the bedside table that had once been on the mantelpiece, it looked no different from before. There were still flowers on the tables, a fresh cake of soap in the dish on the washstand. It smelled as it always had, of lavender and beeswax. It was no more the encapsulation of her mother's true self than Theo's mummified room with its fading team photographs was the bedroom of a living boy. Whatever remained of Theo's spirit, or her mother's, they were not here. All that remained of either of them had long ago been dusted away.

Something was wrong. Eleanor was never home so early. From the morning room Jessica heard Pritchard bang open the door to the kitchen passage, his muffled shout as he called for Mrs Johns. She watched from the gallery as together they helped Eleanor into the house. She was shaking and weeping. She could hardly walk. In the hall she screamed and twisted away from Pritchard, her fist raised as though she meant to strike him.

‘Don't touch me,' she sobbed. ‘Don't . . . don't touch me.' Her legs gave way beneath her and she sank to the floor, her face pressed against the arm of a chair, clutching at it as though it were the one thing keeping her from drowning. Mrs Johns knelt beside her. Very gently she prised her hands from the chair. Pritchard cleared his throat. Mrs Johns looked up to the gallery. Hurriedly Jessica ducked back into the East passage. She was still there when Mrs Johns brought her mother upstairs.