We That Are Left (30 page)

He felt a twinge of pity for Frances with her tentative laugh and her longing lighting up her face like fluorescence. So much was written about the wonder of love, books and books crammed with words, but what purpose did any of it serve, except to create an idea of the world that was not real? A poem was no different from a scientific theory; the sheer beauty of it might take your breath away, but if it failed to observe the facts it was worth nothing. Discontinuity was inherent in radiation phenomena. Falling in love with someone did not mean that they loved you back. Those were the facts, whether you could explain them or not, and all the elegant expression in the world could not make them different.

After nearly a month the novelty of working had worn thin. It was exhausting getting up early, wearisome waiting at the stop for the crowded trolleybus. As it jolted along the familiar route Jessica stared blankly out of the dirty window at the familiar dingy diorama, the figures scurrying along the pavements like wind-up toys. She thought how heavenly it would be to have a car, the passengers in the bus gaping at her as she roared along Marylebone Road. Gerald had held to his promise to teach her to drive. Twice before dinner, he had taken her to the Outer Circle of Regent's Park and let her take the wheel. He said she was a natural. She wished Theo could have seen her. Gerald said the car could do eighty miles an hour on a straight road and even in the Park the speed was exhilarating. In the mornings, though, like Cinderella, the car was a distant memory. When it rained the other passengers smelled of wet dog. On warm ones they smelled meaty, like gravy.

It was worse in the office. The sun beat down on the roof, heating it up like a greenhouse, and though they pushed the windows open as far as they would go on their rusted hinges, there was no breeze to stir the soupy air. Jessica's slice of window was painted shut. She pushed her chair back against the wall to avoid the aggressive strip of sunlight that moved
across her desk every morning, imprinting its shape in purple on the underside of her eyelids and shrivelling the milky surface of her tea. She was tired of
Doubtful
and
Betty-Blue-Eyes
, tired of reducing diets and vinegar face washes and sponging black lace with tea.

‘We should be like Spaniards,' Joan said, ‘and keep the curtains permanently drawn all summer.'

‘Except there aren't any curtains,' Peggy pointed out.

‘There must be some old blackout blinds somewhere.'

‘Blinds? I bet Ethel just tarred the windows, the old cheapskate. This is
Woman's Friend
, after all.'

‘Disculpe, signorina
! That's
Amigo de la Mujer
to you.'

There was supposed to be no talking in the office but Joan and Peggy talked all day, snatching their conversations in fragments in the narrow spaces between the clattering typewriters and Miss Cooke's withering glare. The exchanges reminded Jessica of a toy Theo had had when he was small, a wooden box with coloured pegs sticking out of it and a hammer to hit them with. If you hit a peg hard enough it went in and another one popped out. You never knew which colour it would be.

They called Miss Cooke the Bottlewasher. It startled Jessica that two girls could be like that together, like boys were, good-humoured, undemanding, slipping effortlessly from practicality to intimacy and back again and never taking offence, always on the edge of laughter. At school friendships had been whispery, clammy things, heavy with secrets. The girls had hunched their arms around their friends just as they had hunched their arms around their papers during examinations, defying anyone to peek. They had divided into pairs like lovers and held hands and put notes in one another's satchels and wore two halves of the same pendant around their necks. Joan and Peggy were the same with everyone, even Jessica. It was just that they were more so with one another.

Jessica could not imagine how they stayed so cheerful. There was always too much to do. She had hoped to persuade the
Bottlewasher to let her go early on Fridays but Miss Cooke only said that there was plenty more for Jessica to do if she had spare time. She gave her articles to proofread, snippets to cobble together about cold cream and custard powder and the countless children of the royal family. On a particularly sweltering day, with Doreen off with the flu, Jessica was instructed to do the horoscopes. She rather enjoyed it. There was something cheering about ordaining the future. She read Joan's out. Joan was a Capricorn. According to Jessica's predictions the colour blue would prove lucky for her in the week ahead. The next day she came to work with a blue scarf knotted around her neck. She told Jessica she had borrowed it from a girl in her hostel.

‘You'd better be right,' she said. ‘I hate blue. And it itches like the devil.'

Gerald was a Sagittarius. Jessica wrote that it was a week for those born under the sign of the archer to count their blessings and not take loved ones for granted, but either she was wrong or Gerald did not read
Woman's Friend
. On Monday he telephoned her at work, pretending to be a French friend of her mother's visiting London, and, in an execrable accent, told her that he was going away for a few days on business. He promised to telephone when he got back.

Without their evening to look forward to, the days dragged. Eleanor came to London to see Mrs Leonard on Wednesday as she always did. She told Jessica that Theo had been glad to hear that Phyllis was coming home. She said he had talked about Guy Cockayne, about his visit to Ellinghurst.

‘He said it meant so much to him, for us to know his friends from that time,' she said. ‘He said they were another family to him.'

‘Perhaps we should ask Guy to dinner,' Jessica suggested. ‘If that's what Theo would like.'

‘Perhaps we should.'

She gave her mother the last address he had sent her, care of a firm of solicitors in the City, and recalled with a prickle of
anticipation his narrow hands, his pale poet's face. Part of her had always imagined marrying a friend of Theo's. She had watched them out of her bedroom window on summer evenings, playing croquet or drinking cocktails on the terrace, and wondered which one was hers and when she would be old enough for them to know it. Guy Cockayne was different from those boys with their tennis racquets and their easy laughter, but she still thought of him sometimes, when she was alone. There was something complicated about him that drew her. And he had loved Theo. She loved him a little already, just for that.

The next night, which was Gerald's night, she took a long bath and read a magazine while Nanny played Solitaire, clicking her tongue at the cards. In Mayfair and Belgravia the newly minted debutantes would be putting on their evening dresses. Before the War girls had been presented individually in the Throne Room but a four-year backlog rendered such a system unworkable. Instead, the King and Queen held garden party courts with the girls presented
en masse
and in ordinary day clothes. In the photographs on the society pages they clustered together awkwardly under their hats, like guests at a fête. Jessica thought she recognised one or two of them from school. She wondered if they had got any better at dancing since the days when they had pushed her around the school gymnasium, their damp hands clutching hers. She tried not to envy them the balls. She had asked Theo once if balls were dreamy and he had laughed and said only if she meant the kind of dream when things repeated themselves over and over and, however hard you tried, you could not run away or make yourself wake up.

Theo would have adored the places Gerald took her to, the Grafton Galleries and the Embassy Club and Morton's in Soho. At the Grafton there was a negro band and everyone was rich and beautiful and determinedly, recklessly happy. Jessica adored the club's old-fashioned proprieties: the cakes from Gunter's, the obligatory gloves, the demure layers of tissue paper obscuring the paintings of nudes on the walls were all part of a sly joke,
an arch pretence of innocence that, when the band played syncopated jazz and the floor was crowded with dancers pressed together in the tango or moving their hips suggestively in the shimmy, was both soothing and deliciously absurd.

Gerald disliked the Grafton. He said that there was no point in a nightclub that did not serve alcohol, that if he wanted cakes and sandwiches and iced coffee he could go to tea with the vicar. He particularly detested the violently pink concoction they called Turk's Blood that was the speciality of the house. In his day, Gerald said, Turk's Blood was a proper drink made with red Burgundy and champagne.

Gerald liked the secret places, the cellars and the sleazy side doors where you had to ring the doorbell with a special code to be let in. He liked the Seven Souls and the Lotus and the Vampire Club, where there were men in lipstick with powdered faces and women in suits and ties, and the band was led by a negress with a gravelly voice who performed in a white dinner jacket and top hat and sang the popular songs with lewd lyrics of her own invention. He liked Rector's, a dingy basement on Tottenham Court Road where decanters of whisky were provided in the gentleman's cloakroom and the band, dressed in firemen's helmets, came down from their places to dance like madmen among the crowd.

Jessica supposed she liked them too. You could like things and not like them at the same time. She disliked the taste of cigarettes but she loved the way they made her feel, the enigmatic curl of the smoke around her face, the cool dismissive act of exhalation. When she smoked she felt like Theda Bara, exotic and mysterious. And the music was thrilling. When the band played the reckless rhythms of ‘Livery Stable Blues' and ‘Tiger Rag', she had to dance, to surrender to its mad exuberance until nothing mattered but the trombones and the motor horns and the cowbells and the frying pans beaten like drums, pounding like a score of hearts in her chest. Then the champagne and the music echoed in her bones and her teeth and shimmered beneath her skin, and she was someone else,
someone wild who would die in captivity. In the flat unsparing stare of daylight, she thought of Gerald's hands, his creased old man's skin, and the recollection of what she had let him do could make her squirm. But in the darkness, under the plane trees, with the champagne and the music still resonating inside her, she wanted him. She wanted him to want her. She pushed his hands away but she waited for them to come back. She wanted them to come back. Her body arched and her breath quickened, just like his.

She did not ask Gerald about Christabel. She did not want to be the kind of girl who cared about that sort of thing, but she did not like not knowing either. One night, alone with Ludo Holland at the table, she asked him.

‘He hasn't told you?'

‘I haven't asked. I don't suppose it's any of my business.'

Ludo took a drag of his cigarette. ‘She was his wife,' he said. ‘She died. A motor smash. Three years ago.'

Jessica stared at him. ‘He was married?'

‘Very. It was a bad time.' He tapped the ash into a dirty glass. ‘But then it was a bad time for everyone.'

When Gerald returned to the table Jessica put her hand on his, sliding her fingers between his, and kissed him.

‘What's that for?' he asked but she only shook her head and kissed him again. She had never given a thought to his life before her. He did not seem the kind of man anything bad would ever happen to. She felt very tender towards him and at the same time faintly appalled. He was a widower. It gave him depth, the shadow of poignancy darkening his reckless gaiety. It also made him seem older than ever.

When her father telephoned the flat Jessica demanded to know what was wrong. Her alarm made him irritable. He told her brusquely to be quiet and listen, that he meant to be up in London the next Thursday and that he wished to have dinner with her and Phyllis.

‘Phyllis is home?'

‘She arrives tomorrow.' He ignored Jessica's protestations that Thursdays were not convenient. He said that he would prefer to have dinner in the flat where they would be able to talk privately, without interruption.

Jessica supposed it was something to do with Ellinghurst. Ever since Cousin Evelyn had delivered his verdict she had tried not to think about what would happen to the house when Father died. It was one thing having Lettice and her grub babies at Ellinghurst, quite another selling it as a school. At least the Yorkshire Melvilles were family. If they lived at Ellinghurst it would still be their house, or nearly theirs. She would visit them when she wanted and everything would be almost the same. But a school? There would be lessons in the Library and Prize Giving in the Great Hall. When she thought of hordes of screaming ten-year-olds rampaging along the corridors it made her feel sick.

The maid agreed to work an evening shift. Jessica left the food to her and Nanny. Her father never noticed what he ate. She asked Nanny to arrange for whisky and gin to be delivered, to make sure there were candles and flowers and wine and a fire laid in the dining room. She told Nanny to have the bill sent directly to her father.

Gerald was put out when she told him she would not be able to see him but Jessica only laughed and told him he was not the only one with other business to attend to.

‘And no, it isn't any of your business what my business is,' she said and she smiled into the receiver at his silence on the other end of the line. The pleasure of piquing his jealousy made up just a little for two whole weeks without dancing or drinking champagne.

Phyllis was the first to arrive. Jessica hugged her.

‘Welcome home,' she said. ‘How was Egypt?'

‘Interesting. Hot. Where's Nanny?'

‘I sent her to the flickers. She wanted to see you but Father insisted. Private business and all that.'

Phyllis peered out of the window at the row of new houses going up further down the street, the distant green of the market gardens. ‘Nice place,' she said.