We That Are Left (7 page)

It was a moment or two before he saw Phyllis. She was crouched up in a ball on the wooden bench that ran around the Tiled Room, her arms wrapped around her shins like a fledgling fallen out of its nest. A book was open face downwards on the bench beside her. As Oscar backed away she looked up. Her pointed nose was red.

‘Oh,' she said. ‘It's you.'

‘I'm sorry. I didn't mean . . .'

‘It's all right.'

‘I'll go.'

‘No. Don't.'

Oscar hesitated. Phyllis sniffed and scrubbed at her red-rimmed eyes with the cuff of her jersey. ‘Please don't,' she said. ‘We don't have to talk or anything. It might just be nice to . . . be with someone for a bit. You know?'

Oscar nodded. He thought perhaps he did know, a little. He wanted to say he was sorry about Theo but the words stuck in his throat. He thought of something his mother had said to him once, that it was not always easier to say sorry just because you knew for certain that something was your fault.

‘You're cold,' he said instead.

She shrugged and pulled her jersey over her hands. ‘I'm all right,' she said. She was not wearing a coat. Oscar looked down at his own overcoat, his striped muffler. He had never had a new coat before, not new to him, but his mother had taken one look at him when he came back from school and said that he looked like a scarecrow.

‘Look at you,' she had said, pulling him in front of the glass. ‘That coat's so tight it looks like your arms are on back to front,' and he had laughed, because that was exactly what it looked like, and he had kissed her on the top of her head, which made her laugh too. The coat was one of Theo's castoffs and like all of Theo's clothes it was beautifully made, only Oscar had grown three inches since the summer holidays. Three inches was an increase of 4.286 per cent, once you had rounded down the extra decimal points. There was another bigger coat of Theo's in the wardrobe but they had gone to Arding & Hobbs instead and bought a new one. Oscar hesitated. He could hear the rattle of Phyllis's teeth chattering.

‘Here.' He pulled off his scarf and thrust it at her. ‘You can have it. Not to keep, I mean, I'll want it back later but . . .'

To his surprise Phyllis gave a lopsided smile. ‘Thank you,' she said. As she wrapped it round her neck Oscar thought of
the matted rag of khaki in Theo's package. In Clapham the streets echoed with marching columns of men. On the Common, next to the bit they had dug up for vegetables, a large square had been commandeered by the War Office for officer training. The soldiers' cap badges glinted in the sun and their polished boots were spotless.

‘I'm very sorry,' he said, looking at the floor. ‘About Theo,

I mean.'

‘I know.'

Oscar could think of nothing else to say. He buried his hands in his pockets, only his book was in one of them so he took it out and put it on the table. He thought of the last time he had seen Theo, when he had been home on leave. Godmother Eleanor had never left him alone, sitting on the arm of his chair, running her fingers over his shoulders or through his hair. At meals she sat him beside her and rested her hand on his arm. He thought of Charles II who had grown so tired of his scrofulous subjects coming to him to be healed that he had hired royal strokers to do it for him. That was the way Godmother Eleanor usually touched people too. Not Theo. The way she touched Theo it was as if he was a magnet and her fingers made of iron filings.

Phyllis picked up his book. ‘
The Time Machine
. Is it any good?'

‘I don't know yet. I like the beginning.'

Phyllis opened it. She read the first page, then turned over. Oscar did not like other people touching his things but he did not say anything.

‘I like this part,' she said. ‘Where the Time Traveller says that there's no such thing as an instantaneous cube. That in order to exist something must have not only Length, Breadth and Thickness but Duration. It has to exist in time. I've never thought of it that way before. That Time could be a dimension.'

‘There's no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it
.'

Phyllis's finger found the line. ‘Yes.'

‘Wells is right,' Oscar said. ‘Space and time should be thought of from a four-dimensional point of view. Mathematically, I mean.'

‘Is that what they teach you at school?'

‘I wish. School stuff isn't nearly that interesting.'

‘And I thought it was only girls who weren't allowed to learn anything worth knowing.'

Oscar was silent. Last term his mathematics master had stopped teaching him with the rest of the class. He had given Oscar a list of books and sent him to the library. Most of the books were good. Oscar had particularly liked the one about mathematical rules that turned out not to be rules, like the angles of a triangle always adding up to exactly 180°. The mathematician who proved this was not a rule was called Riemann. Riemann had also invented a new kind of geometry and proposed a hypothesis to explain the distribution of prime numbers which Oscar's master said was one of the most important unresolved problems in pure mathematics, but when he gave Oscar a book about Riemann to read during prep Oscar accidentally left it on his desk. Bernhard Riemann was German.

‘Eleanor says you're a Mathematics prodigy,' Phyllis said. ‘That you'll win a scholarship to Oxford.'

‘Maybe. I'd like to.'

She stared at her knees. ‘You're lucky. Eleanor wouldn't let me go. She says that the really clever girls know not to look too clever. Men don't marry clever girls apparently.'

Oscar looked surprised. ‘I didn't know that.'

‘Uncle Henry tried to change her mind. He said that . . . well, I suppose it doesn't matter now.'

They were both silent. Phyllis tucked her fingers inside the cuffs of her jersey and hugged herself to keep warm. Her pointed face was milky pale and there were purple shadows under her eyes. She looked very tired and sad. Oscar tried to think of something kind to say to her.

‘Did you know it's because of your Uncle Henry that they don't let scientists fight any more?' he said at last. ‘Not the really good ones, at any rate.'

‘Really?'

‘My physics master gave me a book about him. Well, more of a journal really. There was an article in it about your uncle.'

‘About it being because of him that scientists aren't allowed to fight?'

‘No, Mr Hall told me that. The article was about Melville's Law.'

Phyllis smiled faintly. ‘Eleanor always says Melville's Law is that the less a Melville has to do, the more time he will spend in his study pretending to do it.'

‘Actually that's not Melville's Law.'

‘I know. It's a joke.'

‘Oh,' Oscar said. He stared at the floor. ‘Sorry.'

‘The awful thing is I don't actually know what Melville's Law is. The real one, I mean.'

Oscar hesitated. ‘Do you want me to tell you?'

‘Please.'

‘Melville's Law proved a systematic mathematical relationship between the wavelengths of the X-rays produced by chemical elements and their atomic numbers.'

‘I don't even know what that means.'

‘It means that until your uncle came along, people thought that atomic numbers were semi-arbitrary. I mean, they knew they were based approximately on atomic mass but they didn't think they were fixed or anything. Melville's experiments proved that an element's atomic number correlates directly with the X-ray spectra of its atoms.'

‘Is that important?'

‘Of course it's important. Before him nobody knew it was true.'

‘But does it matter? I mean, does it make a difference, knowing?'

Oscar frowned. ‘If you mean what will it change, I'm not
exactly sure. There's a lot I don't understand, and we don't exactly do it in school. But knowing always makes a difference, doesn't it? I mean, surely it's the point. Of everything.'

She smiled. Her face was sharp, all points and angles, but her eyes were soft. She did not look as though she was laughing at him on the inside.

‘What?' he said.

‘Nothing. It's nice to hear you talking, I suppose. You don't talk much.'

‘I don't usually have anything important to say.'

‘That doesn't seem to stop most people.'

‘My mother says it is because I got muddled with German and English when I was small so I decided it was better not to speak at all.' It was an old joke, one he had forgotten he remembered. Then he saw the way Phyllis looked at him and something inside him shrivelled. ‘I don't speak it any more,' he blurted. ‘I was never any good anyway.'

Phyllis did not answer. The silence made Oscar's throat ache. ‘My father used to get so angry with me,' he gabbled. ‘He said that German was the language of science and high culture. Even though he hated Germany and never went back. He said that next to the Germans the English would only ever be enthusiastic amateurs.' He hung his head. ‘I'm glad he's dead.'

‘Don't say that,' Phyllis said fiercely.

‘But it's true.'

‘I don't care. You're not allowed to be glad anyone's dead, not anyone at all. Not any more.'

The afternoon was darkening. In the grey light Phyllis's face looked very white. Outside the wind was getting up. Oscar could hear the whistle of it in the top of the tower, the sea shush of the rustling trees. Neither of them spoke. Oscar thought of Nanny who did not live in the house any more but in a damp cottage in the village, crowded with feathers and stones and splotchy drawings and samplers with the stitches pulled too tight. The day before his mother had made
him visit her and, when it was time to leave, she had cried, the tears clotting in the powdery creases of her cheeks, and said that she hoped Oscar would be a brother to the girls now, with Theo gone.

Phyllis reached out and put her hand on Oscar's arm. The tips of her fingers were yellow with cold. ‘Thank you,' she said.

‘For what?'

‘For telling me about Uncle Henry. For not being like most boys of fifteen.'

Oscar looked at her hand on his sleeve. Then awkwardly, like a game of Pat-a-Cake, he put his on top of it. ‘I'm good at that,' he said.

The door banged open.

‘Phyllis?' Jessica called out, clattering up the shallow steps into the Tiled Room. Immediately Phyllis slipped her hand out from under Oscar's. ‘Oh, I'm sorry,' she said. ‘Am I interrupting something?'

‘Don't be pathetic,' Phyllis said. ‘What are you doing here, anyway?'

‘Looking for you, if you must know. You're to go back to the house. The men from Theo's regiment are here.'

‘I thought Eleanor—'

‘Yes, well, she didn't. Won't. Whichever. Father says you'll have to do.'

The sisters looked at each other. Then Phyllis nodded. She stood up, unwinding Oscar's scarf from around her neck.

‘That's all right,' he said. ‘You can give it back to me later,' but Phyllis balled it up and held it out to him. Oscar took it. It was warm, like something alive.

‘Hold on.' Jessica brushed away the bits of dead leaf that clung to her sister's jersey. ‘That's better. You should brush your hair before you go in, though. And put some lipstick on. You look terrible.'

‘Jesus, Jess, they're here to pay their respects, not go to a bloody dance.'

Jessica watched, her crossed arms hugging her chest, as Phyllis hurried through the gloom towards the Great Gate. At the edge of the lawn a white dog was barking at the grass.

‘Are you all right?' Oscar asked.

‘Of course I'm bloody all right,' she snapped. ‘It would just be nice if for once everyone in this house didn't take their misery out on me.'

Since Theo's death the other Melvilles had grown older, greyer, huddled inside their skins like hand-me-down overcoats, but not Jessica. It was impossible not to look at her. She was so new-looking, so extravagantly, insistently shiny. Even in the murky light of the Tiled Room she glowed as though there was sunshine inside her. Her honey-coloured hair reminded Oscar of the gleam on the smooth underside of his mother's chin when he held up a buttercup to see if she liked butter.

‘Eleanor says there's no point to anything any more.' She talked without turning round, as though she were talking to the trees outside the window. ‘Not now, not with Theo gone. She told your mother that the darkness was like drowning. That she could not remember how to breathe. Your mother said to remember that she still has Phyllis and me. And Father, of course.' She exhaled a tight little laugh. ‘It didn't seem to be much consolation.'

Oscar did not know what to say. He looked at the floor. Inside his head, like a gramophone record going round and round, he heard the words his mother always used to sing when he went to sleep:
Guten Abend, gute Nacht, mit Rosen bedacht
.

‘She can hardly bear to look at us,' Jessica said. ‘It's like our being alive makes Theo being dead even worse.'

Morgen früh, wenn Gott will, wirst du wieder geweckt
. Oscar bit his lip, squeezing the song out of his brain.
Tomorrow morning, if God wills, you'll wake up again
. He thought of his mother in the library, Sir Aubrey like a broken toy in her arms, the sadness leaking out of him like sawdust.

‘It's the shock,' he said helplessly. Jessica shrugged. She kicked at the leg of the bench.

‘You and Phyllis looked pretty thick,' she said.

‘We were just talking.'

‘Just talking.' She looked at Oscar. Then she sat down next to him on the bench. It was dark enough for her face to be fuzzy round the edges, even close up. Sir Crawford had wanted electrical lights all the way up the tower but Trinity House had forbade it. They said that the tower was too close to the sea, that ships might mistake it for a lighthouse. ‘You were holding hands. I saw you.'