We That Are Left (34 page)

‘Early?' Lucinda said. ‘Actually, I think you're one of the last.'

Jessica frowned. ‘But I don't understand. Where are all the men?'

Oscar had not noticed it before but now that he looked he saw that there were only a handful of men among the clusters of ballgowns that crowded the room. Several, grey-headed and bespectacled, were plainly fathers, enduring the proceedings with ill-concealed boredom as their thick-waisted wives talked avidly together. Some were boys, Oscar's age or even
younger. The few in between were spaced around the room, black-coated candles around which the girls gathered like moths. One, shorter than the girls who leaned in towards him, was bald as an egg but for a few soft hairs like a baby's that gleamed gold in the light of the chandeliers. Another sat in a chair, his crutches propped against the table beside him. One leg of his trousers was pinned up over a stump. He stared into the middle distance as several girls fussed around him, fetching drinks and cushions. There were perhaps ten girls to every man.

A raw-faced youth clapped Oscar on the shoulder.

‘Not dancing, Greenwood?' he said. It was Geoffrey Winterson. When Oscar introduced him to Jessica and Lucinda, he ignored Lucinda and asked Jessica to dance. She hesitated, then, shrugging, allowed him to lead her onto the floor.

‘So you're at Cambridge,' Lucinda said. ‘You must be fearfully clever,' but before Oscar could think of a reply a gaggle of girls clustered around them.

‘Cinders, there you are! I'm sorry, are we interrupting?'

‘This is Oscar Greenwood,' Lucinda said and she tucked her hand into the crook of Oscar's arm. ‘He was just about to ask me to dance.'

‘Actually, I—'

And suddenly there she was. He did not notice what colour she was wearing, only the pale grey of her eyes, her soft uncertain smile.

‘Hello, Oscar.'

‘Phyllis,' he said. ‘You came.'

It was impossible to talk to her. He tried several times to make his way through the crowd towards her but each time Marjorie's mother headed him off, tucking her arm in his and steering him towards someone he simply had to meet. She introduced him as Marjorie's dearest childhood friend and insisted he dance, not only with Marjorie but with several other girls who smiled bravely as he trod on their toes and
whose names he forgot as soon as the music stopped. Over their shoulders he glimpsed Phyllis as she nodded and smiled politely at Marjorie's friends and elderly relations. For a while she sat with Nanny. She did not dance. The light from the chandeliers gleamed on her shingled head. A little before eleven, she touched him on the elbow. The girls around him exchanged looks as she murmured that she had a headache and was going to go home.

‘Not yet,' Oscar said. ‘I've hardly seen you.'

‘Well. You've been busy.'

‘At least let me see you into a taxi.'

Outside, among the sleek cars parked along the kerb, several cabs idled.

‘Cab, sir?' a liveried footman asked. Oscar looked at Phyllis.

‘How's the head?'

She smiled guiltily. ‘Miraculously a great deal better.'

‘It's a beautiful night,' he said. ‘We could walk a little. If you wanted.'

They walked together, side by side, in and out of the soft pools of lamplight that lined Elizabeth Street until the last strains of the orchestra were swallowed up into the night. She did not look at him or take his arm but all down his left side his skin was electric with the closeness of her. It was very warm. In the velvet sky the crescent moon sprawled on its back, trailing veils of cloud.

‘I'm sorry if I dragged you away,' Phyllis said.

‘Don't be. I mean, you didn't. I was glad.'

‘You didn't want to stay?'

‘Not even a bit.'

‘But you were in demand. You danced with everyone.'

‘It wasn't really dancing.'

‘It looked like it to me.'

‘Do you know Newton's third law? For every force or action there is a reaction of equal magnitude in the opposite direction. I didn't dance with those girls. We simply kept one another from falling over.'

Phyllis laughed and Oscar's heart turned over. She had always laughed like that, in gulps like sneezed hiccups. Until that moment he had not known he had forgotten.

‘When did you get back?' he asked.

‘A week ago. Ten days.'

‘I thought your father said the excavation season ended at the end of May.'

‘I stayed on.'

‘To work?'

‘Not really. I just wanted to stay.'

There was a silence. For the first time it occurred to Oscar that perhaps Phyllis had met someone else. That she was in love or, worse, engaged to be married. Of course she was. A girl like her would have no shortage of admirers. She opened her mouth to say something else and he was seized by a sudden urgent longing not to know. Not yet.

‘So,' he blurted, ‘what exactly were you excavating?'

‘We were looking for a tomb. The tomb of the boy-king Tut-ankh-Amen.'

‘And did you find it?'

‘No such luck. Poor Mr Carter. He's the archaeologist leading the excavation. It was his third season in the valley, three years of digging with nothing but the foundations of a few mud huts to show for it. He was very gloomy by the end. He's sure the tomb's there but his patron is losing patience.'

‘This boy-king is important, then?'

‘Actually, he's rather obscure. We know almost nothing about him.'

‘So why does he matter so much to your Mr Carter?'

‘Because we know almost nothing about him.'

Oscar smiled. He wondered if Mr Carter was the reason Phyllis had stayed in Luxor an extra month. ‘It must be disheartening,' he said. ‘Digging for nothing.'

‘Disheartening and dusty and dull dull dull. Until suddenly it isn't and the world stands still and you'd happily have dug ten times as long for one tenth of the joy.'

Oscar thought of Mr Rutherford and his research assistants crouched in the dark in the cellar of the Cavendish Laboratory in front of a brass chamber filled with nitrogen, counting the scintillations on a zinc sulphide screen. ‘Like physics,' he said.

They turned the corner onto Buckingham Palace Road. Between Victoria Station and the dark-choked trees of Grosvenor Gardens there was a taxi stand with a green cabman's shelter, its gas-lit windows fogged with steam. A cab waited at the rank. The driver leaned against the bonnet, smoking a cigarette. The smoke clung to the warm night air like cobwebs.

‘Are you tired?' Oscar asked softly. ‘Do you want to go home?'

Phyllis shook her head. Crossing Eccleston Bridge they walked through Pimlico towards the river. The houses that lined the narrow streets were tall and dark behind their high iron railings, as secretive as books.

‘I'm sorry, though,' Oscar said. ‘It must have been disappointing.'

‘It should have been, I suppose, but it wasn't. Not in the least. I mean, we didn't find the tomb, of course, but . . .' She shook her head. ‘Never mind.'

‘Tell me.'

‘It doesn't matter.'

‘It does to me.'

She ducked her head. ‘I found . . . it sounds so stupid. But I found . . . life.' She smiled at him awkwardly. He did not smile back. There was a stone in his throat. He hated Mr Carter with all his heart.

‘Life,' he said.

‘Everyone thinks that archaeology is the study of dead things. I think that's partly what drew me, at the beginning. That everything about it had been dead for thousands of years. There is nothing so utterly dead as an Egyptian mummy. Have you ever seen an embalmed body, unwrapped, I mean? It's like a faggot of bones. The skin is brown, set hard. It stinks
of resin. It's the starkest, most sombre thing you ever saw. Even when it isn't behind glass in a museum it's impossible to imagine it breathing or laughing or eating. It was how I felt too, for a while. I felt I belonged with them, the grim, melancholy, shrivelled people whose great bequest to history was the solemn honouring of their dead.'

‘And now?'

‘Now I see I had it all wrong. All that deadness, the dogged cataloguing of bones, that's not archaeology. They're part of it, of course, an archaeologist needs bones, just as an accountant needs ledgers or a physicist needs . . . whatever physicists need, but the ancients were no more piles of bones than we are pieces of meat. Before they died they lived. The ancient Egyptians most of all. They were so blithe, so joyful. They danced and they feasted and they told stories and they sang songs, wonderful songs. They've found some of the songs during excavations but the truth is they never died. You still hear them when you go into the villages, these sweet explosions of melody bubbling up like springs. And the tombs! There was one tomb I visited where the walls were inscribed all over with these extraordinary carvings, gazelles leaping as the sun came up and wild duck and butterflies and songbirds wheeling in the sky. It sounds silly, I know, but it was as if the artist had not just carved animals and birds into that stone but happiness. The sheer joy of living.'

‘It sounds wonderful.'

‘And it's not even the past. That's the thing. One day at the excavations, a labourer raised a millstone. It was thousands of years old. Later that afternoon a farmer came and asked if he could have it. To use. His was broken and he needed a new one. Nothing's changed. The women still grind corn in their doorways in exactly the way they do in the tomb-paintings, and the little boys have the same shaven heads with the little tuft of hair left for decoration, and the singers at weddings still put their hands behind their ears when they sing, and the dancing girls with their kohled eyes shake the same
tambourines they shake in the Pharaonic reliefs. There is an epitaph the ancients often carved in the tombs of their dead:
Thou dost not come dead to thy sepulchre, thou comest living
. It is almost as if they are all borne along by the present, only the present is not the tiny slice of time we allow it to be but a great rolling river, deeper and broader than we can begin to imagine. Does that sound ridiculous?'

‘Just because we can't picture something doesn't mean it isn't true.'

‘I thought scientists weren't allowed to say things like that.'

‘These days they are.'

They had reached the river. They leaned on the stone wall, gazing down at the inky water, the gleaming mud of the pebble-studded flats. The stone was rough with lichen and warm as skin. The tide was coming in. Oscar could taste the salt on the faint breeze. Above the smudge of trees along the Embankment the gas-lit clock-face of Big Ben hung in the sky like a harvest moon.

‘You sound happy,' he said.

‘I think I really am. For the first time in my life there's a place for me; I finally know what I'm for. It's different for you, you've known that all your life.'

Oscar shook his head. ‘Not really.'

‘You have. You just don't realise it because you don't know how it feels not to know. I didn't know, not for a long time. I thought I went to Egypt to dig but really I went because I didn't want to feel. I wanted to forget. It was only when I was there that I finally understood that remembering is all we have. We hurtle through life scarcely catching our breath and then when it's over everything gets thrown away, all of it, important or foolish, fine or squalid, swept up and thrown out, emptied out into some midden of forgetfulness. We think it's that or live for ever in the shadow of death. But we're wrong. We have to remember as the Egyptians remember, joyfully, by grinding their corn and telling their stories and singing their songs. That's how we raise them from their tombs.'

Oscar was silent. Behind her an electric tram drew a brief vivid streak of light across the dark bow of Vauxhall Bridge. Then it was gone.

‘I'm sorry,' Phyllis said. ‘I shouldn't have . . .'

‘You should. It helps. To talk about it.'

‘You must miss her very much.'

‘I do. I keep thinking of things I want to tell her.' His mouth twisted. ‘Perhaps I should be telling someone else. Telling her stories and singing her songs.'

‘Perhaps you should.'

He turned his head. She looked at him steadily, her face pale in the darkness.

You're the one I want to tell
, he wanted to say.
Only you
. Instead, he leaned on the wall, gazing out over the coal-chip glint of the river. ‘I thought you were going to tell me that you were getting married,' he said.

‘Married? Why on earth would you have thought that?'

He shrugged. ‘I don't know. I suppose I was afraid you might have met someone in Egypt. You know. Fallen in love.'

‘Well, I didn't.'

‘You're sure? Not Mr Carter or an Egyptian farmer or a . . . a lost boy-king?'

Her laugh was very quiet, barely more than a breath. He turned towards her. For a moment they looked at one another. Then, taking her hands, he pulled her towards him. The clouds had cleared and the night sky was dizzy with stars. Oscar felt small and very steady, as though at this moment he and Phyllis were the exact centre of space-time, the tiny nucleus around which all the universe's electrons sketched their orbits. When he took her hand she did not protest. The skin of her palm was rough and calloused. He touched the callouses one by one, learning them by heart. Softly, Big Ben sounded out the quarter hour.

‘I'm sorry,' he said. ‘About the last time. I meant to tell you that before.'

‘It was my fault. I should never have—'

‘You were right. That time. I'm not sorry now.'

‘No.'

‘Promise me you won't run away again.'

‘In these shoes? I couldn't if I wanted to.'

‘I knew I liked them. You should wear them always.'

Phyllis smiled, her face tipped up towards his. In the darkness her eyes gleamed pearl-grey, like the sky just before the dawn. Bending down, he kissed her. He kissed her, his mouth matching hers, and the trams and the river and the moon and the stars blurred and spun all around them like the pictures from a magic lantern, light and shadows, and the only thing in the world that was real was her, her mouth against his mouth and her fingers in his hair. The faster an object travels the slower time passes.