We That Are Left (20 page)

He took her home. She was very weak. Dr Seeley said she had only a few days left and that she would be more comfortable with the nuns but Oscar knew he was wrong. She lay in bed, fragments of consciousness clinging to her like cobwebs, as he sat with her, her wasted hand in his, and read her poetry and told her all the stories he could remember of their lives together and all the things that scientists were going to discover, now that the War was finally over and it no longer mattered where you came from but only what you could see. He thought she smiled. Then, one morning a little after dawn, she began to shiver. Her temperature soared and she fell into a restless twitching sleep from which he could not rouse her. At noon the twitching ceased. When Dr Seeley came he offered Oscar his commiserations and instructed him to disinfect the house to prevent the spread of infection. He said it would be best to burn everything in her bedroom that could not be boiled, just to be sure.

The funeral service was brief. Afterwards the congregation gathered on the steps of the church while the coffin was carried to the hearse. The pond was a sheet of beaten pewter and the leafless trees made cracks in the white ice of the sky. Oscar stared at his feet. His shoes were very shiny. He wondered who had polished them and how it was that he had got here.

It was Phyllis who took his elbow and steered him to the
motor car. He sat between her and Sir Aubrey as they drove in silence to the graveyard. Jessica and her mother were in a second car behind them. It had been explained to him that the burial would be attended only by immediate family and his mother's most intimate friends. The rest of the mourners would go back to the house in Clapham where refreshments had been arranged. Later he would have to face them but not now. There were more words at the graveside, a blur of white faces and black hats. People pressed his hand. He climbed back into the motor car.

‘Nearly there,' Phyllis said.

They drove back past the church on the Common. There was a lady in a brown hat walking alone along the pavement. She raised a hand to adjust her scarf and for a moment it was her. Oscar's heart lurched. It was only when he looked again that he saw it was not her, nor even like her. His mother was walking with the angels, wasn't that what the vicar had said? Reunited with her husband in Heaven. Oscar had found himself wondering if that might be open to negotiation. His parents' marriage had not been happy. Embittered by his own failures, Joachim Grunewald had resented his wife's independence, her passionate convictions. He had wanted her at home, as thwarted and aggrieved as he was.

‘Of course Wilberforce never troubled himself with the bondage of women,' Oscar heard his mother say quite clearly, as though she was sitting next to him in the car. ‘It was only men that he believed were born equal.'

The parlour was full and uncomfortably warm. People were smoking and drinking tea and whisky and glasses of wine. Someone had put out plates of sandwiches. Oscar saw Sir Aubrey pick up the gargoyle photograph from the mantelpiece and stare at it. Then, smiling a little, he put it back. Women he vaguely recognised kept coming up to Oscar and pressing his hand. The smell of the whisky and the wine and the pipe smoke and the half-chewed insides of people's mouths as they talked all mixed up with the faint smell of disinfectant made him feel sick. He squeezed through the crush towards the
door, nodding at the faces that loomed towards him, mumbling at him with their wet lips.

‘Excuse me,' he said, again and again. ‘Excuse me.'

The landing at the top of the stairs was empty. He leaned against the wall, his forehead against the cold plaster. Then, twisting round, he slid down the wall into a squat and put his arms over his head. There was the click of a door.

‘Oscar?'

She still came to him, still comforted him as he was tipping into sleep. Sometimes she was Jessica in her silk dress with the string of pearls around her neck and sometimes Jessica from the tower or a slippage of the two, her clothes melting from her as he took her in his arms.

‘Oscar, are you all right?'

He looked up. Jessica frowned at him, her hands on her hips, her hair bright as butter against the black of her suit.

‘You should really come downstairs,' she said. ‘It's quite rude, you know, hiding away up here.' When he did not answer she sighed. ‘I'm sorry, you know. About your mother.'

Oscar put the heels of his hands over his eyes. Lagrange's Four-Square Theorem states that every positive integer can be written as the sum of at most four squares. Given this theorem, prove that any positive multiple of eight can be written as the sum of eight odd squares. How many times had he played this game, sitting here on the landing before his mother woke and the day was allowed to begin? He tried to arrange the numbers in his head but they only slipped and stuck like defective typewriter keys.

JUST BLOODY KISS ME
, they punched out instead.

He did not know what was wrong with him. His mother was dead and all he wanted was to kiss Jessica, to kiss her and kiss her until there was no room left inside him for anything but kissing, no feeling but the feeling of her face against his face, her mouth on his.

GO AWAY
, the metal arms banged out against the inside of his skull.
KISS ME. KISS ME. KISS ME
.

Jessica scuffed at a worn patch in the carpet with the toe of her shoe. ‘I'm not surprised you couldn't stand it down there. All those ghastly old people trying to look mournful while stuffing their faces with cake.' She considered him. Then she sat down on the stairs, wrapping her arms around her knees. ‘You know in India they take their dead to the banks of a holy river and burn them with wreaths of flowers. Then they scatter the ashes on the water. People say it's barbaric but how could it possibly be more civilised to shovel the dead into the earth like a dog burying a bone? At least the Indian way is beautiful. Romantic. You can't do romantic with cups of tea and egg sandwiches.'

Oscar did not answer. He heard the sound of footsteps on the stairs.

‘Oscar?' Sir Aubrey called up. Jessica leaned over the banister. ‘Jessica? Have you seen—Ah, there you are. What are you two doing hidden away up here?'

‘Oscar just needed to be on his own for a bit.'

‘Right. Of course. Still, it'd be best if you could come down, old chap. You too, Jessica. People are leaving.'

‘We're coming,' Jessica said. When her father was gone she turned to Oscar. ‘Are you packed? Father says you're coming home with us tonight.'

Oscar shook his head.

‘You should. Eleanor hates to be kept hanging about.'

‘I'm not coming with you.'

‘But of course you are.'

‘I'm not. I want to stay here.'

‘Really? On your own in this house, where she actually died?'

‘Just go away,' he blurted, the words out before he could stop them.

Jessica shrugged. ‘Fine. But don't shout at me. It's Father's stupid idea to take you to Ellinghurst, not mine.'

Downstairs she trailed after Phyllis as her sister gathered up dirty glasses. She hated funerals, she decided. She wished
they could leave. She knew Eleanor did too. Her mother had barely talked to anyone, just stared out of the window with her cheeks sucked in. Her father on the other hand had insisted on talking to everyone, even the old Suffragette ladies with their moustaches and their skirts made of horse blankets.

‘You could help too if you wanted,' Phyllis said.

Jessica picked up a half-empty teacup and followed Phyllis into the back parlour. The room was crowded with books, stacked in piles on the table in the window and on the mantelpiece and the piano and the fender stool and in the corners on the floor. Phyllis nudged the books on the table to one side and put down her tray of dirty glasses. Jessica added her cup to the pile, then idly picked up a book, glancing at the spine.

‘You'd have thought someone might have tidied up,' she said. When Phyllis did not answer she sighed. ‘Oscar's refusing to come to Ellinghurst. He says he wants to stay here. Don't you think that's a bit creepy?'

‘I think it's exactly what I'd want if I was him.'

‘He can't stay here by himself.'

‘Then maybe one of us should stay with him.'

‘One of us? Do you really think Father would agree to that?'

‘For God's sake, Jess, Oscar's as good as family.'

‘I wish someone had told him that before he tried to slobber all over me.'

A woman in an apron sidled up to Phyllis, muttering something about more whisky. Phyllis nodded. ‘I'll see to it. Tell Father about Oscar, would you, Jess? We should see what can be arranged.'

Jessica nodded absently, peering out of the window into the small square of garden at the back where a few leafless plants straggled in pots. It was impossible to believe that she had begged to come and live here, that she had imagined Clapham to be the answer to her prayers. No wonder Mrs Carey had never invited any of them to visit. Except Phyllis, of course, and then Phyllis was always so busy being good she never noticed anything. It made Jessica think of the houses
one saw from the train as one neared Paddington Station, not quite as run-down perhaps, at least here the windows were unbroken and there were no strings of ragged laundry to get dirty again before it was even dry, but it had the same makeshift feeling, the rooms too small and the walls too thin. And so crammed with stuff! Jessica half expected a shopkeeper to sidle up to her, murmuring prices.

‘I don't suppose you'd let me hide in here with you?'

Jessica turned around. The gentleman was old, perhaps as old as her mother, tall and broad in an elegantly cut suit. His hair was thick and winged with silver. In one hand he held a glass, in the other a bottle of whisky.

‘Emergency measures,' he said. ‘I'm not very good at funerals.'

‘I don't think anyone is good at funerals.'

‘I don't know. The Women's Legion out there seem to be having a whale of a time. I suppose if you've been a Suffragette you learn to take your pleasures where you can.'

Jessica smiled.

‘Drink?' he asked. When she shook her head the man sloshed three fingers of whisky into his glass and put the bottle on the piano. Then he came to stand next to her in the window. He did not introduce himself. He smelled nice, of leather and cigars and an unobtrusive woody cologne.

‘Even Sylvia's most staunch defenders would have to concede that she hadn't the least aptitude for gardening,' he observed.

‘Didn't your nanny ever tell you it was wrong to speak ill of the dead?'

‘And what about the dead plants? Look at that poor—whatever that brown thing is along the back wall there. Dead as a doornail.'

‘It's a clematis. That's what clematis look like in March.'

‘How do you know that? Are you a farmer?'

‘Yes, I'm a farmer. I farm clematis.'

‘Very shrewd. Everyone will always need clematis eggs.'

Jessica laughed.

‘I have to admit,' he said, ‘I always thought of farmers as an unsightly lot. Not that I ever go to the country, you understand, but one hears things. I appear to have been misled.'

‘Are you flirting with me, Mr . . . ?'

‘I'm trying. I'm not sure it's entirely successful but I am trying. Lovely girls expect it, don't they?'

‘Do they?'

‘You're no help. I shall have to go and find another lovely girl and ask her. The trouble is there are so exasperatingly few of them, particularly at funerals.'

‘Perhaps you go to the wrong kind of funeral.'

‘Lovely and heartless. Now that's an even rarer breed.'

‘Better than ill-mannered and drunk.'

He laughed. ‘How about lovely and heartless and ill-mannered and drunk? If you can manage all that and a few exaggerated facial expressions, you can forget the clematis. You're nine tenths of the way to being a bona fide film star.' He lowered his voice confidentially. ‘You do know that's why men love film stars, don't you?'

‘Because they're ill-mannered and drunk?'

‘That helps. But mostly because their expressions are so blessedly unambiguous. We men are simple creatures. Idiots, really. It's unreasonable to expect us to work out for ourselves how a girl is feeling. We need her to make it easy.' He brandished his fists, his face contorted in a grimace. ‘Angry.' Then he gasped, a dying swan, the back of his hand pressed tragically against his brow. ‘Sad.' He shrugged. ‘I'd like to see a law.'

‘A law obliging girls to pull faces?'

‘Precisely. Title cards too, while we're at it. And an orchestra. Life's significant moments should come with a rousing score. That way one would never miss them.'

‘That isn't very reassuring.'

‘On the contrary. One would never make a mistake again.'

‘And what about the girls who couldn't pull faces? What would happen to them?'

The man sipped his drink thoughtfully. ‘They'd have to be disposed of. Humanely, of course, but the law's the law. An example must be set.'

‘Help. Then I shall have to practise.'

‘You shall. You'll need lessons, of course. If I can be of any assistance . . .'

‘I think I can manage.'

‘Ah, but can you really? Show me your “I'm wildly, absurdly in love with you” face.'

‘My what?'

‘Come on,' he said. ‘Your life's at stake. Show me.'

Jessica laughed awkwardly, rolling her eyes. ‘I shall do no such thing.'

‘But it's easy.' Seizing her hands, he sank to his knees. She gaped at him, too startled to laugh, as he gazed up at her, his face slack with adoration. Then, shrugging, he stood, dusting the knees of his trousers. ‘I'd strongly advise lessons. I shan't be able to do a thing for you otherwise, come the revolution. Perhaps we should discuss it over lunch.'