We That Are Left (6 page)

‘Sacrifice is traditionally the theme of Easter, not Christmas,' he said, ‘but this war has turned our world upside down and us with it. Let us steady ourselves with the certainty that those who have fallen have done so for the salvation of mankind. Let us not grieve. Let us rejoice in their valour and their heroism. Let us give thanks for their willing sacrifice. And on this day of hope let us consider the words of H. A. Vachell: “to die saving others from death or, worse—disgrace—to die scaling heights; to die and carry with you into fuller ampler life beyond, untainted hopes and aspirations, unembittered memories, all the freshness and gladness of May—is not that cause for joy rather than sorrow?”'

Eleanor stood up. Throwing off her husband's restraining hand, she pushed out of the pew. Everyone stared, their heads turning to follow her as she swept up the aisle. For the first
time Jessica noticed that they were almost all women. The only men in the church were old or little boys. The porch door banged. There was a silence, then coughs and shushing. The fat parson asked the congregation to rise. As the organ wheezed out the first notes of ‘Oh Come All Ye Faithful' Jessica looked at Phyllis.

‘Leave her,' Sir Aubrey said.

Jessica hesitated. Phyllis shook her head. Then, closing her hymn book, she followed her mother out of the church.

When the freeze was at its hardest, and the midday sun hardly more than a pallid smear on the lowering sky, Sir Aubrey told Phyllis and Jessica that Mrs Carey was coming to stay. Mrs Carey was Mrs Grunewald, only since the War she had gone back to the name she had had before she was married. She had changed Oskar's name too. Now he spelled Oscar with a ‘c' and his surname was Greenwood, like the dentist in America who made a set of teeth for George Washington out of hippopotamus bone. The story of Greenwood the dentist had been one of Theo's favourites.

‘What do you mean, they're coming here?' Jessica protested. ‘They're German.'

‘They're not German in the least. Mrs Carey comes from Sussex.'

‘Oskar's father was a Hun.'

‘Joachim Grunewald was a composer. An artist. He would have detested this war as much as anyone.'

‘So what? He'd still have fought for the other side. Against us.'

Sir Aubrey was silent. He bent his head over his plate, cutting his meat into smaller and smaller squares. The scrape of knife against china set Jessica's teeth on edge. On the other side of the table Phyllis turned a page of her book, her chin propped on her cupped hand. Her dogged deafness enraged Jessica. Did nobody but her read the newspapers? Had they not seen the stories of German soldiers in Belgium, the mutilation and the
torture and the bayoneting of babies? Her father looked at the meat on his plate. Then, piercing a piece with his fork, he lifted it to his mouth. The square was small enough to swallow in one go but he chewed it and chewed it, his eyes fixed on the tablecloth. The chewing made Jessica want to break something.

‘I won't let them come here,' she said furiously. ‘How could you even think of it? The enemy in our house, under our roof?'

Sir Aubrey pressed his lips together and swallowed. ‘For the last time, Jessica, Oscar Greenwood is not German. His father was naturalised before he was born. The boy is as English as you are.'

‘Except that his father was a Hun. She wears a ring with an inscription in German on the inside. Remember, Phyllis? Mrs Grunewald's ring? She took it off once and showed it to us.'

‘Her name is Mrs Carey.'

‘She wore a German ring because her husband was a Hun. You can't just change that with a—a piece of paper.'

‘The law would say otherwise.'

‘So you don't care that Oscar has German uncles, German cousins? You don't care that it might have been one of Oscar's family who killed Theo?'

‘For God's sake, Jessica!' her father shouted, banging his glass down on the table so hard that Phyllis jumped. Jessica bit the inside of her cheek to keep her steady and made herself meet her father's glare. She could feel her heart thudding in her chest. His hands were clenched on the table and for a wild moment she wondered if he meant to hit her. There were flecks of spittle in the corner of his mouth and his neck was mottled purple and red. She could see the hairs in his nostrils moving in and out as he breathed.

Then, as if a wire had been cut, he looked away. The side of his hand caught the handle of his fork as he reached into his lap for his napkin, knocking it to the floor. Phyllis leaned down and picked it up, putting it on her own plate.

‘I'll ring for a clean one,' she said but Sir Aubrey shook his head.

‘I've had enough,' he said and, not looking at Jessica, he wiped his mouth very carefully on his napkin. Then he folded it and put it on the table and pushed back his chair. They listened in silence as the echo of his footsteps receded down the passage.

‘Well,' Jessica said. ‘He's in a filthy temper.'

Phyllis did not answer. Reaching for the bell she rang it. ‘You've finished, haven't you?' she said as an afterthought, eyeing Jessica's barely touched plate.

‘What do you care?' Jessica pushed the plate away. The smell of congealing gravy made her feel sick. She supposed it was too much to hope for, that Phyllis would ever take her side. She scowled at her sister but Phyllis pressed her lips together and went back to her book.

‘You could talk to me,' Jessica said. ‘It would make a nice change.'

‘Or you could read,' Phyllis said evenly. ‘That would make a nice change too.' When Enid came in to clear the plates she lifted her book from the table to make it easier for her to reach but she did not stop reading. Eleanor detested maids in the dining room, she said it made her feel as though she were eating in a public house, but even she had grown used to it. There were no footmen left at Ellinghurst, not since Harold and Robert had enlisted.

‘Coffee in here, miss, or in the drawing room?' Enid asked.

‘In here is fine, thank you, Enid,' Phyllis said. Enid put the pot in front of her and set out the cups. Jessica waited for Phyllis to pour. Then, with a noisy sigh, she reached for the pot herself and poured two cups, pushing one in front of her sister.

‘Thank you,' Phyllis murmured absently and went on reading. Jessica drank her coffee. She thought about leaving the table but she did not have anywhere else to go. She did not want to be alone. Instead, she pleated the edge of the tablecloth and wondered why it was that Phyllis refused to take any interest in clothes and make-up. Nanny always said
that Phyllis's red hair was striking, which was the kind of word people used when they could not find anything nicer to say, but her pale pointed face cried out for a little colour and her chest was as flat as a boy's. She had never shown the least interest in parties even though she was meant to have come out the previous summer. No one had, of course. There had been no Season in 1915, no debutantes or presentations at Court. The War had stopped all that, stopped it dead, just as it had stopped absolutely bloody everything else.

The blackness was rising in her again. Dropping the hem of the tablecloth Jessica kicked at the table leg, swinging her foot backwards and forwards like a pendulum. It hurt her toes, which helped somehow so she went on kicking. The thumps shook the table. Phyllis frowned.

‘You shouldn't frown like that,' Jessica said. ‘You'll get awful wrinkles.'

‘Like this?' Phyllis's frown deepened. Without lifting her eyes from the page she reached for her coffee cup.

‘You're not seriously going to drink that?' Jessica said. ‘It's got a skin on it.'

Phyllis glanced at the cup, grimaced and put it back down. Jessica leaned over, jabbing at the skin with her spoon. ‘For a girl who's supposed to be clever you can be unbelievably dense.'

Phyllis gave a strangled cry and dropped her book on the table. ‘Sometimes, Jessica . . .' She held her hands out, palms up. ‘What exactly is wrong with you?'

‘What's wrong with me? I'm not the one who tried to drink coffee with a skin on it like a . . . like a French letter! Oh, don't look so shocked. If you thought less about French books and more about French letters you'd probably be a lot less miserable.'

‘Is that right?'

‘You know it is.'

‘And there I was thinking I was miserable because Theo is dead. How dense can you get?'

When she slammed the door the pictures shook.

Alone at the table Jessica jammed her spoon into the sugar and twisted it, scattering brown crystals across the starched white cloth. It was usually Jessica, not Phyllis, who was the door slammer at Ellinghurst. Quite out of the blue, the lines of a poem came to her, a poem sent to their mother by Theo, who had never had any time for poetry, after Uncle Henry had been killed at Gallipoli.

War knows no power. Safe shall be my going,

Secretly armed against all death's endeavour;

Safe though all safety's lost; safe where men fall;

And, if these poor limbs die, safest of all.

Dropping the spoon with a clatter Jessica began to cry.

Oscar went to the tower. There were 385 steps in the tower, from the bottom to the top. 385 was not only a prime number and the sum of three other primes but a square pyramidal number, which meant that if you arranged one hundred balls in a
10 X 10
square and then put the other balls on top, 385 balls would be enough to make a pyramid like the ones in Egypt. Sir Aubrey had once told Oscar that the tower had been built without any scaffolding at all, just one piece on top of the other. Like an equation, Oscar had thought. He wanted to count each of the 385 steps as he climbed them and let the numbers drop one by one into his brain, like stones into a pond.

That morning the postman had brought a brown paper parcel tied with string. The parcel contained Theo's uniform from the Front. Godmother Eleanor had laid it out on Theo's bed, on the freshly washed sheets. The waistcoat and breeches were bloodstained, the jacket torn. Everything was stiff with mud. Oscar had not known mud could smell like that, as though mud was not earth at all but made of rotting meat. Its thick reek stopped his throat and crept like a fog under the doors and into the curtains. It was impossible to be upstairs.

Oscar had gone first to the library where everything smelled of wax polish and paper but when he opened the door his
mother was in there with one hand on Sir Aubrey's arm and Sir Aubrey was rocking backwards and forwards, just rocking without making any noise, so he had fled outside before they knew he was there.

The buttons on Theo's uniform had tigers on them. The Royal Hampshire regiment. Everyone at school knew all the regiments in the British Army. They talked all the time about how they wished they were not too young to go to war. They said they would give the Hun a pasting and every time they said that someone would look at Oscar. They called Oscar the Boche. It did not matter that he had a picture of Theo in his uniform on the dressing table by his bed. Bash the Boche, one of them would shout, and each one would take turns to kick him or slap him or punch him in the ribs. They said he was a spy and stole the torch his mother had given him for his birthday because they said he would use it to signal to Germans in the night. At the end of term McAvoy had told everyone that Oscar's father had been unmasked as a secret agent, that he had been taken to the Tower of London where he would be executed by firing squad.

He did not tell them that his father was already dead. They knew anyway, even if they chose not to remember, and if there was any trouble they would have to tell his mother and he did not want that. She said that there was nothing to be afraid of but the truth was that, since the sinking of the
Lusitania
, she had been afraid a good deal. The days of Churchill joking about interning German wine with his dinner were long gone. Now everything remotely German was wicked and disgusting, not just Hock and Moselle but German sausage and Goethe and even Beethoven. In Clapham the greengrocer's shop was smashed up and set on fire for having a German-sounding name, even though the owners were Hungarian and had been there for more than fifty years. His mother took off the poesy ring she always wore on the third finger of her right hand. Oscar's father had given it to her when he proposed marriage. The gold ring was engraved with entwined ivy leaves and,
inside the band, the words
du allein
which meant
you alone
in German. Her finger was narrower where the ring had been, as though the gold had rubbed it away.

When his mother told him she was changing their names she said that she understood if it made him sad or even angry. Oscar was only angry that she would not let him be Carey like her, but only a version of his German self. He did not believe her when she said that he was the most English boy you could ask for because his father had chosen to be English rather than just being born that way. Every time he looked at something and the German word for it came into his head first he felt cold inside, as if the boys at school were right and he was the enemy after all. It frightened him that he might do something German in his sleep.

He walked briskly across the lawn towards the woods, gulping the cold air, but all he could see was Godmother Eleanor's face when she opened the parcel. Oscar's father had come to London because his family disapproved of him, but there were plenty of brothers and sisters who had stayed. Before the war Tante Adeline had sent his mother a card every Christmas. She had five sons, all grown up, and dozens of nephews, Oscar's cousins. He knew that statistically the possibility that it was one of them who had killed Theo Melville or the Knox brothers or his mother's friend Mrs Winterson's oldest son was vanishingly small, but that did not stop him from thinking about it all the time. As he pushed open the door to the tower the stink of Theo's uniform clung greasily to his hair and skin, gagging the back of his throat.