We That Are Left (43 page)

‘Don't call me Mess. You know I don't like it when you do that.'

‘So? It's what you are. Look at yourself.'

Jessica looked down at her lap but she could not see anything. Where her body should be there was just smoke and darkness and the blare of car horns and screaming, coming from a long way off.

‘What a mess, Miss Mess,' Theo murmured. It sounded like the beginning of a song or maybe a limerick. ‘What a messy bloody mess.'

‘I'm sorry,' she said and she was crying, crying all over, tears pouring through her hair and down her arms and dripping from the tips of her fingers. Theo pulled at the car door but he could not open it. His hair was very long, longer than she remembered. It fell over his eyes. The ends of it caught in his eyelashes. He did not push it away.

‘It's stiff,' Jessica said. ‘You have to pull really hard.' And she put her hand out towards him but her hand was glass and so was the window, cold and hard, and he was on the other side and his mouth was moving and she could not hear what he was saying and her face was glass and her tears too. If she listened she could hear the high-pitched chime they made as they shattered.

‘My own Mess,' he said, his voice suddenly very close, and he leaned through the window and the glass did not smash
but flowed around him like water and he took her in his arms and she thought he was going to embrace her and she wanted to weep with relief but instead he pulled at her, jerking her neck and jolting a shock of pain through her skull. She cried out. He let her go and immediately he started to fade, the outline of him blurring and swirling like smoke.

‘Stay with me,' she cried and she snatched at him, her fingernails like claws, and for a moment he was there, a part of her, and quite gone, both at the same time.

When she came back to herself again she was no longer in the car. Her head floated on her neck like a balloon, dizzy with rushing sparks of light. She closed her eyes. Someone was beside her. He was crying.

‘Theo?' she murmured.

Theo did not answer. Jessica blinked blearily. It was dark. The wind tossed in the dark shapes of the trees and scattered the rain in furious handfuls. She saw wet pavements, a narrow white pillar, the car, half-mounted on the pavement. It was twisted at an awkward angle like a broken arm, its bonnet crumpled against a lamppost. In the circle of lamplight the road was bright with rain and broken glass.

She shivered. Her feet were wet, her stockings too. When she turned her head the pain made her giddy. She closed her eyes, swallowing nausea. When she opened them again she saw Gerald sitting beside her. He had his hands over his face. His shoulders shuddered as he wept into his palms.

‘Are you hurt?' she asked. Her voice did not sound like her own.

He bent his head lower, his back convulsed with sobs as he rocked backwards and forwards, emitting a ghastly high-pitched keening like an animal caught in a trap. She leaned towards him but at the same time something in her recoiled. She could not quite bring herself to touch him.

‘Gerald, what is it?' she said. ‘Are you hurt? Please, Gerald, you're scaring me. What is it?'

His back heaved, once and then again, as though he were being violently sick. Then, with a frightful moan, he turned, burying his face in her lap, his arms clutching her around the waist. She stiffened. She could feel his tears soaking into the pale silk-chiffon of her dress. She prayed it was not blood. She would never get blood out without Nanny noticing, she thought, and immediately hated herself for thinking it.

Her head throbbed as she made herself stroke his back. She knew she should call an ambulance. She would have to ring on someone's doorbell and they would ask her who she was, who Gerald was. What possible explanation did she have for being alone in a car with Gerald in the middle of the night? The police would come, they would take a statement. Gerald had been driving recklessly. If he was summoned to go up in front of a magistrate it would get into the newspapers. People would know she had been there. Her name would be published. She hated him then, for his carelessness. She could feel the panic rising in her like smoke.

‘It's all right,' she said through gritted teeth. ‘Everything's going to be all right,' but he only wept harder. His sobs were an agonised howl, wracking his body, the breath torn from him in painful shudders.

‘For God's sake, Gerald,' she said. ‘You have to tell me what's wrong.'

He raised his head. His eyes were red, swimming with tears, his face smeared with snot, but she could not see any blood. ‘Help me,' he whimpered.

The fear then was like acid in her bones. He had sustained internal injuries, perhaps he was dying. If he died, the scandal . . . but she could not think that. He was dying. She could not abandon him. ‘I'm going to go for help,' she said.

He shook his head, clutching at her like a child. ‘Don't leave me.'

‘I have to. We need to get you to a hospital.'

‘I don't need a hospital. I need you.'

‘I know but if you're hurt—'

‘But I'm not hurt,' he moaned and his face crumpled, tears spilling down his cheeks. His shoulders shook. ‘Not a scratch. Not a fucking scratch.'

She looked at him. ‘I don't understand.'

He twisted to look at her, clutching at her coat with his fists. ‘I can't do this any more. Don't let me do this any more.' His eyes were wild with pain and distress. ‘Don't leave me. Please. Marry me. Marry me, darling.'

She gaped at him, the disgust hardening in her throat.

‘Marry me,' he pleaded, his voice cracking. ‘Oh God, don't you see? You're the only one who can save me.'

A taxi cab swung into the street, catching them in its headlights. Jessica raised a hand against the glare as the cab slowed and pulled over. A gentleman in the back lowered the window.

‘Has there been an accident? Do you need help?'

Jessica waited for Gerald to say something but he only buried his head in her coat. ‘Please,' he whispered.

Jessica wanted to slap him. Instead, she smiled her most charming smile. ‘You are kind and I know we must look like the most awful vagrants, but this is actually our house. Our housekeeper is just telephoning the police but we thought it best for my husband to sit here for a moment, just to get over the shock. We'll take him in presently. Such bad luck, a dog ran out in front of us, he had to swerve to avoid it. The lamppost rather got in the way.'

‘Indeed. Well, so long as you're both unhurt.'

‘Quite unhurt, thank you. The dog, too, I'm glad to say. One just hopes it will look both ways next time it crosses the road.'

The man smiled. Then, touching his hat, he settled back into the cab. Jessica watched its taillights disappear around the corner and thought of Theo, asking her what she was waiting for. Pushing Gerald away, she stood up.

‘I'm sorry,' she said. Sliding off her glove she unclasped the diamond bracelet from her wrist and held it out to him. He did not take it. He stared at her, tears shining in his bloodshot
eyes. Carefully she laid the bracelet on the step beside him. ‘Goodbye, Gerald.'

‘Don't leave me,' he pleaded, holding out both hands. ‘You can't leave me. Where are you going?'

She bit her lip, gazing up the lamplit street. In the shadows near the Park she thought perhaps she saw someone move. She knew he would not come back. She looked at the crumpled car and then at Gerald. Lightly she touched her fingertips to the bruise on her forehead and winced.

‘It's time I went home,' she said.

The weekend before she left for Malta Phyllis came to Cambridge for a whole weekend. It was the first time she had managed such a thing. A friend of hers at Bedford College had put her in touch with a cousin who was in her third year at Newnham. Exasperated with the college's draconian chaperonage rules, the cousin and her sister, a year younger and also at Newnham, had persuaded their parents to rent them a house in Grange Road beyond the reach of the authorities. As long as she did not mind the sofa, Phyllis was welcome to stay the night.

Oscar went with Phyllis to leave her suitcase. Irene Howard was a tall lean woman in a fisherman's sweater and tweed trousers.

‘Just put your things down anywhere,' she told Phyllis. ‘I'm afraid it's a bit of a mess.'

The hall was narrow and as crammed as a junk shop. There were bicycles propped against the hall wall and tea chests brimming with crumpled newspaper and piles of books and hats and gramophone records and opened letters and, up the stairs, pairs and pairs of empty shoes, like an invisible queue. Beside the laden coat stand there was even a battered Indian totem pole with outstretched wings and a malevolent expression.

‘Handsome, isn't he?' Irene said. ‘I swapped him for my uncle's skeleton. Not his actual skeleton, obviously. That would have been unfeeling. The one he had as a student doctor. He used to dress her in pearls and fur coats and stand her in his window to spook the neighbours. She was our chaperone all last year. Dear Mrs Mandible. She was an utter Gorgon.'

Irene and Beatrice were throwing a party. Irene had Oscar help her move the table and a sofa to make room for dancing. ‘You will come, won't you?' Irene said as they left and, to Oscar's dismay, Phyllis agreed that they would. They walked along the river, the bare trees black against the dirty snow of the sky, and he thought of the hours that they should have had, the hours that now were no longer theirs, and he hunched his shoulders, his hands deep in his pockets.

Phyllis did not notice his silence. She breathed on her mittened fingers to warm them and talked gleefully of the sculptures that the dig had recently uncovered, scores of images of the human figure from small clay models to full-size statues carved from the local limestone.

‘Some of them are so detailed they show quite plainly the style of dresses that the Bronze Age women would have worn,' she told him, her voice crackling like static in the frozen air.

Further downstream an old beech tree had fallen across the path, its roots in the air like an outstretched hand, its leafless branches raking the water. Phyllis stroked its grey flank. Then, finding a foothold, she clambered up onto it, lichen chalking green marks on her skirt. For a moment she stood looking down at him, her hair bright beneath her woollen hat, her cheeks flushed pink from the cold. Oscar wished he had brought his camera. Not that Phyllis would have let him take a picture. She hated having her photograph taken. She always hid her face when he tried, or turned away. The few photographs he had of her he had stolen when she was asleep. The pictures moved him, stirred him even, but they discomfited him too. For all the intimacy of the pose there was something
closed about her sleeping face, something he could not reach. He was jealous of the places she went to in her dreams.

Laughing, her arms held out like wings, she walked away from him along the slippery bark towards the water.

‘Be careful,' he called after her as she neared the bank but she did not hear him. She picked her way along the tree until she stood in the cleft of one of the high branches. She was much higher now, high above Oscar and the black rush of the water. She threw her head back, her mouth open, her arms held above her like a pagan priestess, a silhouette against the dead white sky. She shouted or perhaps she sang. Oscar did not know. The wind whipped the sounds away before he could hear them. He watched her, waiting for her to turn and make her way back to him.

The party was crowded, thick with smoke and music. People were dancing in the dining room and in the parlour. A man in a velvet coat swerved a bicycle through the crush, a laughing girl balanced on the handlebars. Someone had put a gown and mortar board on the totem pole. It eyed Oscar coldly as he squeezed past it. Kit was leaning against the parlour wall with a glass in his hand, talking to a tall girl wearing what appeared to be a pair of silk pyjamas. Beside her was a table set with a bewildering array of bottles. When Kit saw Oscar he gaped theatrically.

‘Bloody hell,' he said. ‘The mountain has come to Muhammad. Mix the man a drink, Bea, there's a good girl. While you're at it make it two. I need something for the shock.'

The girl in pyjamas was Irene's sister. She took a bottle of gin from an ice bucket on the table and poured a slug into a silver cocktail shaker, along with a splash of something from a green bottle.

‘One of Bea's martinis and you won't know yourself,' Kit said. ‘Or anybody else, for that matter.'

Irene squeezed through to join them. ‘Hello, Kit, darling. You look ravishing as always.' Kissing him on the cheek, she
intercepted the glass Bea was holding out to Oscar, dropped an olive in it, took a gulp and, sighing happily, handed it back. The gin was oily, swirled with cold.

‘Just making sure it's not poisoned,' she said. ‘Be an angel, Bea, and fix one of those for Phyllis.'

‘Where is she?' Oscar asked.

‘Upstairs powdering her nose. She'll be down in a minute.'

Oscar sipped his drink as Kit asked Irene about the play she was rehearsing.

‘Oscar and I shall come,' he said. ‘We shall sit in the front row and scream like schoolgirls every time you make an entrance.'

‘How lovely,' Irene said. ‘Only according to Miss Clough it is improper for men to see girls in men's clothing. It's brothers and fiancés only.'

‘Like Herod.'

‘Like Herod, only less compassionate.'

Behind Kit Oscar saw Phyllis hesitating in the doorway. He waved and she smiled, her bottom lip caught between her teeth. Oscar's heart turned over.

‘This is Phyllis,' he said to Kit. Still laughing Kit turned. The laugh caught in his throat. Phyllis stared at him.

‘Phyllis,' he said.

‘Hello, Kit.' The words came out squashed. She did not look at Oscar.

‘Don't tell me you two know each other?' Irene said.