We That Are Left (46 page)

Phyllis had written from London before she left, a short breezy letter wishing him a happy Christmas and sending him an address in Malta where he might write to her. Since then he had received two picture postcards, one of the Grand Harbour in Valetta and another of a man in a tall hat milking a goat. The weather was mild, the work interesting. She had visited the Caravaggios in St John's Cathedral. He stared at the black-and-white photographs, trying to picture her squinting in the sunlight by the blue Mediterranean Sea, or in whispering churches among the candles and the plaster Madonnas and the heavy smell of incense, but he did not write back. He could not think of what to say.

It was over. He understood that Phyllis had not said so, that on paper there was no reason why they could not go on exactly as they had before, but it did not change the facts. He thought of Rutherford behind his apparatus in the Maxwell Theatre, his fingers tucked into the pockets of his waistcoat.

‘As our friends the theoreticians would say . . .'

She did not want to marry him. It did not matter why. She did not want to marry him and that was that. He had asked and she had said no. The results were conclusive. The day after she went back to London Kit came to his rooms. Oscar heard him knocking but he did not answer. He waited for Kit to give up and go away. He did not want Kit's sympathy, his empty reassurances. She would have married Kit. The thought haunted him. He dreamed of it, Kit laughing and Phyllis in a hat with a little veil, her pale face tipped up towards his. When he woke his eyes burned and his throat was raw as though he had been shouting in his sleep, and he wanted to break things and to bury his head in his pillow until the world went black and nothing mattered any more.

He did not attend his last supervision of the term. He sat on his unmade bed and watched the minute hand of his watch
move slowly around the face until the hour was over. He could hear the clatter of the bed-makers in the court outside emptying their buckets through the iron gratings, the shrill whistle of a tradesman's boy. He had an appointment with his tutor, Willis, but he did not go to that either. The next day a bad-tempered note from Willis insisted that Oscar come and see him urgently. Oscar did not answer it. He did not go to the library or to the last of Rutherford's lectures. He heard the clocks strike one, a brief burst of voices on the stairs as men went down to lunch. Some time later there was a bang on his door. It was Kit. He had Girouard with him. He said that they would not leave until Oscar opened up. He said that if Oscar refused he would use his leg to break it down. Oscar did not answer. They banged for a while and then Girouard said something Oscar did not hear and they went away.

Later that day a note was pushed under Oscar's door. It was getting dark by then but Oscar had not switched on the lights. In the grate the embers of the dying fire winked and faded. Oscar looked at the note for a long time. In the grainy gloom of dusk it looked like it was floating. Then he rose, shivering as he crossed the room on icy feet. He had not realised he had grown so cold. The paper was torn from a notebook and folded several times. Oscar unfolded it.

When it's a damp, drizzly November in your soul it's high time to get to sea. If you haven't plans for Christmas how about the boundless oceans of Shropshire? K

He put the note in what remained of the fire. The paper blackened and shrivelled but it did not catch. When he pumped the bellows lacy fragments rose, drifting into the chimney like moths. The next day everyone went down and Oscar went to the cinema. When he came back a light snow was falling. It settled across the silent court, a fine white gauze, unmarked by footprints. A single light burned above his staircase door. All the windows were dark. He took the letters
from his pigeonhole and went upstairs, his feet echoing emptily on the stone steps.

One of the letters was from Sir Aubrey. Opening it, Oscar slid out the enclosed photograph and studied it. It was a new game of Sir Aubrey's, the photograph. Each one was of a particular detail at Ellinghurst, taken close up, which he challenged Oscar to identify. The first one was easy, the monkey bell push Sir Crawford had designed himself for the breakfast room, the bell a wooden apple gripped in the monkey's wrinkled old-man's mouth. Since then he had sent several photographs in every letter. He refused to tell Oscar what they were, even when Oscar admitted to being stumped. He said that, if Oscar thought hard enough, he would remember.

Oscar propped them up on his mantelpiece like invitations. One was of a stone bird with raised wings which Oscar was certain he knew but which he could not place. He had carried it in his pocket for a week, walking in his head through the house, before, in bed one night on the cusp of sleep, it came to him that it was a part of the carved mantel in the library. The pleasure of the realisation made him smile in the dark. The next day, in London with Phyllis, he had found the photograph still in his pocket and extracted it.

‘Come on,' he had said. ‘Do you recognise it?' but Phyllis did not want to play. She said that Oscar should not encourage her father, that he was quite obsessed enough with Ellinghurst without people egging him on. Oscar knew that their correspondence made her uncomfortable, even though she only shrugged when he asked her and said that what he did was none of her business. To reassure her he left his letters out where she could read them but she never did, even when he asked her to.

‘Mostly I write about physics,' he told her. ‘I've never mentioned you.'

‘It doesn't matter.'

‘Of course it matters. I wouldn't want to think I was going behind your back.'

‘Well, are you?'

‘No, but—'

‘Then what I think isn't important.'

‘But of course it is. It's what matters most.'

‘Even if I am being entirely irrational?'

‘Even then.'

‘But why?'

‘Because I love you.'

She looked at him then and shook her head. ‘Except it's not love when placating the other person trumps what's right, is it? It's tyranny.'

He had played that conversation again and again in his head since the day on the bridge. Every time he sat down at his desk with a piece of paper to write to Phyllis in Malta he thought of it again and he put his pen down and put his head into his hands because there was nothing to say. Sound could not travel in a vacuum, however loud you shouted.

The photograph was of a geometric pattern, an eight-pointed star like a cross with two points at each end, surrounded by a honeycombed pattern, light against dark. In the centre of the star was an eight-leafed flower. From the blur of light in one corner it was plain that the surface of the pattern was glazed. Oscar knew it immediately. He pressed his fingers against his eyeballs, fiercely enough to make the darkness sparkle. Eyeballs were harder than people thought which was why the white, the fibrous outer layer of the eye, was called the sclera, after the Greek word
skleros
, meaning hard. Then, blinking, he put the photograph face down on the desk and unfolded the letter. The handwriting was slapdash, scribbled in haste or perhaps on a train. Oscar's eyes skimmed the page, hardly taking in the words, the acknowledgement that the previous photograph had indeed been a detail from a painted panel in the drawing room, the hope that this one might prove more of a challenge, the repeated entreaty to come to Ellinghurst for a weekend or perhaps even for Christmas.

It would mean so much to me and I know Jessica would be glad of the company. I told you, I think, that Phyllis is away in Europe, and it is awfully dull for her rattling around on her own
.

The letter went on to several pages. Oscar did not read them. He looked at the plain back of the photograph on his desk. The pattern burned through the card, projecting itself like a film onto the back of his skull. It was one of the floor tiles from the octagonal room of the tower in the woods, the ones that Sir Crawford Melville had had brought back especially from India. He thought of Phyllis huddled on the bench the day that Theo's uniform arrived at Ellinghurst, her arms around her shins, the cuffs of her jersey pulled down over her red hands. When she had looked up there had been two marks on her forehead where she had pressed it against her knees. He thought of Theo standing under the beech trees, the smoke of his cigarette smudging the dusk like chalk dust, and it was Theo who seemed real then and Phyllis the apparition, so that when he reached out for her in his imagination his hands slipped right through her and she faded, diminishing as he watched until all that was left of her was an ache in the air, tender as a bruise.

The next morning, there was a brisk knock on his door.

‘Mr Greenwood?' Mr Willis said sharply. ‘Mr Greenwood, I know you are in there. If I have to force the lock there will be a fine for damage to college property.'

Reluctantly Oscar opened the door. Mr Willis took in his dishevelled state, the chaos of books and cups and discarded clothes that littered the room.

‘Alive, then?' he said.

‘I'm sorry, sir. It's just I've been . . .'

The tutor shook his head wearily. It was plain that his interest in Oscar's health extended only as far as establishing that he was extant. In a tone that reminded Oscar of the public
information films shown in cinemas during the War, Mr Willis informed him that the freezing weather had caused several pipes in the court to burst. A problem with the main required the paving to be dug up, making access to the staircases on Oscar's side impossible. Oscar had until the following morning to vacate his rooms.

‘If you had come to see me when I first summoned you, arrangements might have been made to avoid disruption to your studies. As it is I am told there is nothing in college until next week. You have somewhere you can go, I hope?'

Oscar shrugged.

‘Well, I'm sure you'll think of something,' Willis said wintrily. ‘Happy Christmas, Mr Greenwood.'

Oscar sat at his desk for a long time after his tutor had gone, staring at the photograph of the tower floor. Later he walked up to Mrs Piggott's house on Chesterton Road. When he asked about the room she said she was sorry but she had another gentleman up there now, a travelling salesman. She offered him a cup of tea.

It was snowing again as Oscar walked back over Magdalene Bridge, sticky flakes that clung to his coat and hat. The grey sky sagged over the college roofs and the river was oil-black. Ahead of him the black outline of a man pushed a bicycle along the narrow pavement. Oscar walked along the wavy line left by the tyre, the fresh snow creaking under his feet. In his rooms he packed a bag. The photograph of the tile from the tower was propped up against his table lamp. He picked it up, running his finger over the honeycombed patterns that encircled the star. He could not go, he knew that, it was impossible, and yet the urge to be there, where there was so much of her, where the air bore the mark of her like an imprint in snow, was so strong it was a kind of breathlessness. He opened Sir Aubrey's letter again.
It would mean so much to me and I know Jessica would be glad of the company
. For a moment he let himself imagine it, walking in to the Great Hall, sitting in the window seat in the library,
on the circular bench in tower. Then, biting his lip, he turned the page.

I have been thinking a great deal of Thomas Gray these last weeks. Gray published fewer than one thousand lines of poetry in his lifetime, afraid, he said, that they would be taken for the works of a flea. As a young man I marvelled at his humility. Now I find myself wondering if it was not cowardice that constrained him, fear of failure or, worse, of mockery. It is safer to do nothing than to do something and fail. Gray died aged fifty-five. How old must one be before one understands that omission is the greatest failure of all?

Oscar put the letter into his pocket and picked up his suitcase. At the door of his room he hesitated. Putting the suitcase down, he went to the bookcase. It took him several minutes to find the slim volume of poems he had read to his mother in Clapham. He held it in his hand, one hand smoothing the cover. Then, sweeping the Ellinghurst photographs from the mantelpiece, he tucked them inside the book and put them both into his coat pocket.

At the Majestic Hotel the proprietress looked up when he arrived. Her hair was no longer copper but a dark purplish-red.

‘And just what time do you call this?' she asked drily as she hauled out her ledger. ‘Alone, are you?'

He did not know why he had come. The room was even worse than he remembered it. He did not bother to get undressed. He pushed some coins into the meter and huddled under the blankets on the lumpy mattress, flooded with a miserable gratification at the squalor of the room, the prodigal agony of remembering.

It was very late when he finally slept. When he woke he could not remember where he was. It had snowed again in the night and the room was harsh with light. His head ached and he was filled with an obscure shame, like a drunk only
half able to remember the night before. He knew then that he could not stay. His clothes were crumpled, twisted awkwardly around his body. He smelled of trains and old dog.

He washed in the grimy bathroom at the end of the passage and changed into a clean shirt. He had to go away, somewhere where the air was clear and everything was unfamiliar. He would go to Europe, to the Alps. He would learn to ski. The improbability of the idea only added to his determination. He thought of the pictures in his book, the figures small as ants against the white majesty of the mountains, and then of Phyllis in bed, her knees a hump of blankets, her red head bent over her book of hieroglyphs. The bird with the human head was the glyph for soul, and the scarab beetle was said to push the sun into the sky at the dawn of every day. He wondered dully if there might be a time one day when not everything made him think of her.