We That Are Left (41 page)

There were some older men among Oscar's fellow freshmen, conscripts who had had to wait their turn to be demobilised. Mostly, though, they were boys just out of school. They felt very young to Oscar, though they were perhaps only a year or two his junior. He saw little of them. As for
BUTTERWORTH D
, whose name was painted next to Oscar's at the bottom of the staircase and with whom he was supposed to share rooms, he appeared not to exist. There were mutterings of a deferment. Oscar let his books spread across the two small bookcases and piled his papers on the spare second desk. One
misty November morning he returned shivering from the Baths in his dressing gown to discover that the man's name had been removed from the noticeboard at the bottom of the staircase. All that remained of
BUTTERWORTH D
was a ghostly shadow of black letters beneath the fresh white paint.

He had never dared risk it until then, but the next Saturday at tea time, as the dusk gathered like sweepings in the narrow Cambridge streets, he smuggled Phyllis back to his room. They made love in
BUTTERWORTH D
's single bed.

‘Two fools in a tub,' Oscar said and Phyllis laughed and kissed him. Later, wrapped in blankets, they toasted crumpets in front of the fire. Phyllis glanced at the books piled on the floor. A flicker of surprise passed over her face.

‘Is this yours?' she asked, extracting
Moby-Dick
.

‘A friend lent it to me. He said I had to read it.'

‘You should.'

‘You've read it?'

‘A few times.'

‘Oh, good. Then you can just tell me what happens and I don't have to read it myself.'

Phyllis opened the book, slowly turning the pages. ‘Don't you want to?'

‘I don't read novels.'

‘That's not true. You read
The Time Machine
.'

‘You remember.'

‘Of course. I read it too, after that.'

‘Did you?'

‘You made it sound interesting.'

Oscar brushed his lips against her bare shoulder. She smiled vaguely, absorbed by something on the page.

‘It's strange, isn't it?' he said. ‘To think of before. When you were just . . . you.'

Phyllis did not answer. She bent her head, her face softening as she read. Oscar kissed her neck, then her ear. She leaned away from him a little, her eyes on the words. Gently he reached out and took the book from her.

‘Not now,' he murmured, dropping it behind him on the floor. As he bent to kiss her he saw her glance at it. The hesitation was no longer than a breath before she turned, her body arching up to meet his. He found the book several days later, pushed out of sight beneath the narrow bookcase. He was supposed to be preparing for a supervision but it was no longer so easy to work in his room, not now she had been here. He picked up the book, turning the pages as she had, wondering which passage had caught her attention. The chapter was set out oddly, like a play. He frowned at it. Then he turned back to the beginning and began to read.

A week later he sat with Kit at breakfast. It was early, a little after seven in the morning, and Trinity Great Hall was almost empty, the silence broken only by the muffled clatter of plates from the kitchen. Above them the vast diamond-paned windows were turning from black to a streaky yellow-grey. Oscar ate his eggs absently,
Moby-Dick
open on the table by his plate.

‘Bloody hell,' Kit said. ‘They've only gone and bloody done it.'

Oscar did not answer. He did not want to talk to Kit. He wanted to be beside Ahab and Starbuck aboard the
Pequod
, watching Moby-Dick rise up in the water, the corpse of Fedallah lashed to his side in a tangle of harpoon ropes.

‘Aren't you going to ask me what they've only gone and bloody done?'

‘Later,' Oscar said, his eyes on the page. As the great whale turned and swam away from the
Pequod
, Starbuck turned to Ahab.
‘Moby-Dick seeks thou not. It is thou, thou, that madly seekest him!'

‘Not later, Ishmael. Now.' Ignoring Oscar's protests, Kit placed the folded newspaper over the open book. ‘Right there.'

Reluctantly Oscar followed Kit's finger. Under the headline
REVOLUTION IN SCIENCE, NEW THEORY OF THE UNIVERSE
, the paper reported that a team of British astronomers
had travelled to the island of Principe off the west coast of Africa to photograph the recent solar eclipse. Their results had been presented at a joint meeting of the Royal Society and the Royal Astronomical Society in London. By plotting the positions of the background stars visible near the perimeter of the darkened sun, the scientists had proved that, in the gravitational field of the sun, light bent not as the laws of Newtonian science would suggest but in precise accordance with Einstein's theory of general relativity.

When interviewed, the President of the Royal Society admitted to finding parts of Einstein's theory opaque. He also acknowledged that, to support his assertions, Einstein had offered three experimentally quantifiable cases as proofs. The first, relating to the motion of the planet Mercury, had already been verified; the second, the angle of light deflection around the sun, could now be considered confirmed. Although there remained uncertainty about the third, which concerned the spectrum of light emanating from the sun compared with the light of laboratory sources, one thing was beyond doubt: the Einstein theory had now to be reckoned with. Human conceptions of the fabric of the universe would never be the same again.

‘Well?' Kit demanded.

Oscar put down the paper. He thought of those nights during the War when he had sneaked out into their tiny garden after his mother was asleep to stare up at the familiar patterns of the constellations. In Clapham on those clear nights space was constant and absolute and so, with the blackout, was the darkness. Now space was curved and light did not travel in a straight line and at night the street-lamp dazzle of London threw an orange veil over the sky, hiding the stars.

‘You know what this means, don't you?' Kit said. ‘Not only has the miraculous Mr Einstein changed physics for ever, he may just have achieved the great miracle of changing Cambridge University. They'll have to teach us this stuff now. I've got to go but come for tea. We can celebrate. The King is dead, long live the King.'

With one hand on the table, the other on the back of his chair, he levered himself to standing. When Kit was in pain the bad side of his face seemed to shrink, pulling down the corner of his eye. It looked like he was winking.

Alone Oscar gulped the last of his tea. The trickle of undergraduates had thickened to a steady stream and the rumble of their chatter bounced and echoed beneath the vast vaulted ceiling, combining with the clatter of cutlery and the chink of cups and saucers like the tuning up of an orchestra. Oscar thought of Ishmael who set sail with Ahab in pursuit of the great whale, not like Ahab because he was in the grip of an obsessive hatred for the beast but because he was curious and he itched for the sea.

‘And the great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open,' Ishmael said and Oscar felt it too, the magnificence of the future as it rose from the depths of unknowing and made a snow hill in the air.

Eleanor cabled three times from France that autumn, each time delaying her return for several weeks. Nanny's niece had gone to take care of her daughter who had had a baby and Nanny sometimes stayed in the flat at weekends. Jessica could have stayed too, if she had wanted, but to her surprise she realised she wanted to go home. She was glad to get away from London, from Gerald. She only took a little cocaine, just enough to tip her into gaiety, but sometimes she had difficulty sleeping and on Fridays she was often short-tempered and jittery. The ache in her as the headlights of the car swept round the turn to pick out the great stone gates was as sharp as homesickness. She drank tea in front of the fire and read the books she had read as a child. Sometimes she rode Max. She was too big for him and he was getting old. She let him canter on a loose rein, pulling him up when he started to wheeze. In the cold air his breath made clouds that caught in his eyelashes.

She took pleasure from solitude, from the safety of sameness. It perplexed her that her father, who had only ever regarded guests as an unwelcome interruption, was suddenly intent on company. Several times he wrote to Oscar in Cambridge, inviting him to stay. When Jessica asked why he said that it was a kindness, that Oscar had nowhere else to
go. He said that a house like Ellinghurst did not suit being empty.

‘He's your guest if he comes,' Jessica warned him. ‘I gave up nurse-maiding Oscar Greenwood years ago.' But Oscar never came. He had commitments to the University and too much work to do. Instead, he wrote letters which Sir Aubrey left on the hall table for Jessica to read when she came home. To her surprise he was a lively correspondent, though when he wrote about science she could hardly understand a word he said. Sometimes he enclosed newspaper cuttings or photographs he had taken.

‘He has Theo's old camera,' Sir Aubrey told her. ‘The Brownie, do you remember?'

Jessica remembered. Knowing that the camera had been Theo's made her look at the photographs more closely. The snaps he sent were mostly of Cambridge but occasionally he sent pictures of Ellinghurst he must have taken during the War: the bust of Socrates distorted through the mullions of the library window or the deserted stables with Max staring out disconsolately over his half-door like a lone drinker at a bar. There were never any people in Oscar's photographs but it seemed to Jessica that there had been, that the stillness he captured had not had time properly to settle but rippled like the surface of a pond into which someone had thrown a stone.

She did not try to explain the feeling to her father. Her father had recently purchased his own camera, a considerably more sophisticated model than Oscar's Brownie, and she did not want to encourage him into another of his disquisitions on the art of photography. His pictures were also of Ellinghurst, taken from every conceivable angle and intended as illustrations for his book, but though they were carefully competent they had none of the simple intimacy of Oscar's snapshots. Once Oscar sent a picture of the Tiled Room in the tower, taken through the arch of the open door, and when her father showed it to her Jessica thought of that raw afternoon when the boys from Theo's regiment had come and Oscar had looked
at her as though she was as much of a miracle as water into wine, and she had not wanted to give it back. When she asked her father if she might keep it, he hesitated only slightly before nodding. She told him she liked the idea of always having a piece of Ellinghurst in her handbag.

Oscar was not the only person Sir Aubrey invited frequently to visit. Most Saturdays that autumn Mrs Maxwell Brooke joined them for lunch. She did not bring Marjorie. She told Jessica that there were house parties every weekend during the pheasant shooting season, that Marjorie was always dashing from one county to another. It was not true, she said, all the doom and gloom people liked to spout about the War having changed the world for ever. Little by little, and not a moment too soon, things were finally going back to the way they were before.

‘I wonder if you might not think of shooting here again, Aubrey?' she said. ‘The shooting parties here were always marvellous,' and there was a little notch between her eyebrows as though she were doing calculations in her head.

Jessica could not help but notice how successfully Mrs Maxwell Brooke had insinuated herself into the space left empty by Eleanor. She was shrewd, of course. Although it was plain that Saturdays were not the only days she visited, there was no suggestion of impropriety. She was careful always to ask Jessica if she might speak to Mrs Johns about some trifling domestic issue or other and, when Jessica expressed surprise, she confided that both Eleanor and Aubrey had lent unfailing support in the dark times after the death of her own husband years before, that she could not think how she would have managed without them. It was a privilege, she said, to have some small opportunity to return their many kindnesses. A man like Aubrey, she said, should not have to bother himself with the everyday responsibilities of running a household.

‘Ellinghurst is a great blessing and a great burden,' she said. ‘It is not right that your father should have to bear it alone.'

‘I'm sure Eleanor will be very grateful for all you've done,'
Jessica said sweetly and she took some pleasure in the flicker that crossed Mrs Maxwell Brooke's face. She supposed Mrs Maxwell Brooke was lonely with Marjorie away all the time but there was no point in encouraging her. Soon Eleanor would be home. She wondered what Mrs Maxwell Brooke would do then, whether she would disappear or try instead to reprise the role she had played so eagerly before the War, of Eleanor's principal admirer and acolyte.

On 11 November, at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the country marked the first anniversary of the Armistice with a Great Silence. The hour was marked by a burst of rockets fired upwards into the sky. As the blasts echoed through the grey mist of the morning, every passenger train on the railways, every clattering goods train and shunting engine, shuddered to a halt. In every city buses and lorries and taxis stopped where they stood, their engines stilled. Beneath the pavements of London the Underground trains waited motionless in their tunnels and the ships in the Channel stayed their course. As the explosions faded and the chiming bells of clocks and churches fell silent, all sound ceased. Men pressed their hats to their stomachs and bowed their heads. Kneeling children pressed the palms of their hands together. In the offices of
Woman's Friend
the girls stopped typing and put down their pencils and closed their eyes. For two long minutes everyone remembered.

No one wanted to break the silence. It extended awkwardly, fading into a rustle of paper and clearing throats. For the rest of the day the mood in the office was sombre. Joan and Peggy hunched over their work, the frantic clatter of the typewriters another kind of silence. Later, as she put on her hat, Jessica caught sight of Miss Cooke sitting in the cubicle of her office. She was crying silently, knuckles white against her face.