We That Are Left Read online

  And yet his mother was not gone. She slipped in under the doors, through the cracks in the window sashes. Sometimes in the evenings, sitting by the parlour fire, he heard the click of her key in the lock of the front door, the rustle of her skirts as she stepped into the hall, bringing with her a faint eddy of coal dust and cold pavement. He heard her voice in the garden from an upstairs window, the echo of her laughter as he walked down the kitchen passage, the clatter of her feet on the stairs while he shaved. Once, returning to the house, he even heard her playing the piano. The music stopped as he opened the door. He heard the squeak of the old piano stool, the click of the lid closing. But when he opened the door to the back parlour the room was empty, the air flat and undisturbed, the piano stool where he had left it, pushed up against the bookshelf. She wasn’t there. And still she was, often.

  He supposed he was glad, sort of. He wondered how long she would stay.

  The house was not his. When Oscar said there must be some mistake the solicitor frowned unhappily and peered at his papers.

  ‘No mistake,’ he said. ‘The house is owned by a Mr—where is it?—a Mr Alfred Phillips. You have until June to vacate the premises. Your mother didn’t . . . goodness. I had rather assumed . . . no, well. I’m awfully sorry.’

  A solicitous solicitor, Oscar thought numbly. His mother would have liked that. His name was Pettigrew. Mr Pettigrew explained that the rent had been met while his mother was alive by the earnings from an insurance policy that provided for her in the event of her husband’s death. The policy had also yielded a small monthly stipend, payable until his mother’s death.

  ‘So that’s it?’ Oscar said. ‘There’s nothing?’

  ‘Nothing? Heavens, no.’ Mr Pettigrew was meticulous, matter-of-fact. Once all disbursements had been met his mother’s assets comprised an account at the bank with a credit balance of eighteen pounds, nine shillings and four pence, along with her effects. Oscar inherited the contents of the house to include his mother’s jewellery, the two gold poesy rings and her ruby earrings and the diamond brooch in the shape of a feather. In addition there was a second bank account, taken out by his mother but held in Oscar’s name. The credit balance of that account was twelve hundred pounds.

  ‘The funds are placed in a trust to allow you to take up your place at Cambridge,’ Mr Pettigrew said. ‘Four hundred a year would be sufficient, I understand, if not exactly generous. As the trust’s executor, I am charged with the management of the fund. I recommend a monthly allowance. It is easy with a capital sum to convince oneself one is richer than one is.’

  Oscar stared at Mr Pettigrew. Twelve hundred pounds was a small fortune.

  ‘She said there was money for the University,’ he said, hardly able to take it in, but Mr Pettigrew only smiled vaguely and put the file of papers on his desk. An envelope with Oscar’s name typed on it in capital letters was clipped to the cardboard cover. Oscar wondered what was in it and why Mr Pettigrew did not give it to him. Perhaps it was his bill. He wondered how much of the twelve hundred pounds would go to Mr Pettigrew. Even solicitous solicitors did not work for nothing.

  Mr Pettigrew closed the folder. ‘I think that’s everything. Unless you have any questions?’

  Oscar shook his head.

  ‘My involvement will continue until the funds of the trust are fully disbursed, by which time you will be twenty-one and at liberty to direct your own affairs. I shall look forward to meeting you again then. Of course, if you should need anything in the meantime . . .’

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘But what am I supposed to do with everything?’

  ‘I don’t quite follow you.’

  ‘The books. The plates. The furniture. We have a piano. What am I supposed to do with the piano?’

  Mr Pettigrew looked stricken. ‘I can arrange for someone to come. A valuer. If you’d like. Or there’s storage, of course. Small items of value such as your mother’s jewellery can always be kept here, in our safe, if you prefer.’ When Oscar did not answer he patted the folder with both hands. ‘No, well, no need to decide now. Just let us know.’

  Oscar shook the solicitor’s hand dazedly and went home. It was silent when he walked in and very cold. He lit a fire. Then he sat down. He could not think what else to do. It was March. The next time anyone expected him anywhere was October.

  Phyllis sent him a postcard. The picture was a photograph of the British Museum, its austere courtyards deserted. On the back she wrote that she was leaving for Egypt to visit the excavations at the Valley of the Kings. She did not say who she was going with or when she would be coming back. She hoped he was well. There was no room on the postcard to say anything else. She signed it P. Oscar tucked the postcard into the frame of the mirror on his chest of drawers, writing side out. Whenever he brushed his hair or looked for a pair of socks he touched the P with his finger.

  Time passed and the P grew smudged. The days smudged together too. Oscar knew he should be planning, packing tea chests. Instead, he lay on his bed. Spring was coming and the pale sun stretched its long fingers through the windows and traced patterns of lace on the dirty glass. Sometimes he heard his mother in the kitchen, rattling the drawers. He walked to the end of the street and bought bread and milk and cheese and thought of Phyllis kneeling in a desert as old as time, her eyes screwed up against the harsh African sun, her fingers with their bitten nails sifting the hot dust for fragments of the past.

  He should not have kissed her. He knew that. A kiss like that was not the start of anything. It was a place to hide. He could remember almost nothing of that day, except how much he had wanted to kiss her and keep kissing until the world was no wider than the space between their faces, the circle of her arms. Afterwards when he thought of kissing her he could not summon it, only the gleam of the fire on her hair, the cup of her hands around her whisky glass. It did not turn his insides upside down. It held them steady.

  He thought about going away. He wished he knew where he wanted to go. In a bookshop near Waterloo he purchased a second-hand guide to the Alps. He looked at the pictures of mountains and edelweiss and placid-faced cows and he thought how beautiful they were and how little they had to do with him.

  Instead, he went to the library. He had read all the books they had on physics so he read the newspapers instead. There was unrest in Egypt. The Egyptian people wanted independence, an end to the British protectorate that had been supposed to last only the duration of the War. They staged a campaign of civil disobedience. The British exiled the leaders of the movement and ruthlessly suppressed their demonstrations. British soldiers patrolled the cities. Thousands of Egyptians were killed, but the violence only fanned the flames of nationalism. There were strikes and riots, attacks on railway lines, on colonial buildings, on ordinary British citizens. The newspapers talked of revolution.

  Oscar took the postcard out of the frame of his mirror. He put it in his pocket. He thought perhaps it might be safer there. He thought of Phyllis in the Tiled Room with her chin on her knees, by the fire with her whisky, in the hall with her head against his chest, and he thought that if anything happened to her he would not be able to bear it, not because of the kiss which had not been his to take, but because she was kind and clever and finally going to University, which was what she had always wanted, and because when they talked it was not like a chess game but like one of Ernest Rutherford’s experiments, simple and familiar and absorbing and utterly unexpected all at the same time.

  He did not know if she was caught up in the troubles. He did not know if she was hurt or if she had come home. The not knowing itched at him like lice. He thought of writing to Jessica but could think of no pretext for a letter. Instead, he wrote to Sir Aubrey.

  I wanted to thank you. For as long as I live I shall never forget the extraordinary kindness you and your family have shown to my mother and to me. Without you this time would mark only an end. Instead, it is also a beginning. I take up my place at Trinit
y in October and hope one day that somehow I shall be able to repay you for all you have done. I think often of my many happy times at Ellinghurst and should be glad of news of the family if you have time to write.

  Affectionately, Oscar

  P.S. I hope you like the photograph.

  The photograph he chose was one he had taken on his last visit. He had asked Jim Pugh to stop on the curve in the lane just as the castle came into view. It was not the prospect in all the paintings, the broad sweep of lawn rolled out in front of the castle like a carpet. From the lane the swollen summer trees obscured all but the tallest towers, encircled in the crook of the high north wall. Oscar had knelt in the verge, tilting the camera up so that the slanting evening sun tangled in the thickets of feathery grass. In the photograph it looked like the house was hidden deep in the forest, like an enchanted castle in a fairy story. Above the towers the mackerel sky was streaked with light.

  He received a reply two days later. It ran to several pages, the first two outlining in detail Sir Aubrey’s plans for extending the castle’s fortifications, in particular the construction of an immense castellated wall from the south of the house almost to the stables. The new drive would require motor cars to pass through a new barbican gateway to the north and on around to the gatehouse.

  The wonderful photograph you sent me has spurred my resolve. How is it that so many fail to see what you capture so delightfully, that the house is not one house but many, each angle and viewpoint and fall of light offering a fresh pleasure? This way visitors will make almost a full circle of the house before they arrive. A composition so artfully conceived must be appreciated in the round.

  It was not until the final paragraph of the letter that Sir Aubrey mentioned the family.

  Phyllis is presently in Luxor, Thebes as was, before beginning her studies in archaeology at London University. The news from Egypt is alarming but she assures us she is a good distance from the troubles and quite safe. I would rather she were safe here in Hampshire but it would seem that the days when a daughter heeded her father are long gone. As for Jessica, she has her heart set on a job in London as assistant to the editor of a magazine which she claims will lead to great things. An archaeologist and a magazine journalist. It is hardly what one had imagined but then what is, I suppose, any more?

  A fortnight later Oscar read in The Times of the spread of Egyptian unrest to the countryside, the bloody violence and burning of villages that had resulted in hundreds of Egyptians dead. Again he wrote to Sir Aubrey. He expressed interest in the new fortifications, in the progress of Sir Aubrey’s book. He asked if Jessica was in London and if he might call on her. He enclosed another photograph, taken beneath the gatehouse arch one afternoon when he sought shelter from a thunderstorm. The ribs of the vaulted arch were reflected in the puddles and the sky was almost black. As he slid the photograph into the envelope he thought of the fair he had once gone to with his mother, where a gypsy woman in a ruffled dress had called out to passers-by to cross her hand with silver in exchange for their fortune.

  The newspapers are full of Egypt, he wrote. I do hope Phyllis remains unaffected by the troubles.

  When Sir Aubrey replied he spent several pages detailing the conversations he had had with architects, the difficulties of finding skilled stonemasons. He included several sketches made in cross section. It was not until the penultimate paragraph that he mentioned Phyllis. The work sounds hard and hot and frightfully tedious but it is plain that it fascinates her. She is very busy.

  Oscar’s days by contrast were desultory. He drifted through the London streets as the spring weather gave way to gales, wild squalls that whipped rain into needles and shrieked in the chimney pots. On the Common the wind ripped the branches from the trees, their new leaves curled tight like tiny green fists. In the library Oscar read books about the Valley of the Kings, the magnificent decorated tombs of the pharaohs, filled with the treasures they would need in the afterlife, and the strange discovery just before the War of a humbler sepulchre containing the bodies of sixty soldiers, killed in a fierce battle four thousand years before. At home, one evening, he sat alone in the parlour and pretended to tell his mother about what he had read but talking out loud only made him feel foolish and he kept forgetting what it was he meant to say. He muddled the dates and the dynasties, his tongue stumbling over the unfamiliar names. He told the empty room that it would have to read the book for itself. It was not his story to tell.

  Then one windy April morning, turning the pages of the newspaper, Oscar’s eye was caught by an article near the bottom of the page. Ernest Rutherford, the newly appointed Cavendish Professor of Physics at Cambridge University, was resisting attempts by the government to confiscate his supply of radium, on loan from the Vienna Academy of Sciences, as enemy property.

  The jolt was like an electrical shock. He felt it in the soles of his feet, in the roots of his hair. It was forbidden to deface the newspapers in the library but he tore out the article anyway and put it in his pocket. All that day as he walked, he touched the scrap of newsprint in his pocket and the electricity surged and crackled under his skin. At home in Clapham he looked around him at the dirty windows and the piles of dirty cups and the clothes discarded on the floor and he wondered if they were his things or if the confusion had been made by someone else. He felt as though he had been asleep for a long time.

  That evening he wrote to E. Willis, his college tutor at Trinity, asking if he might be permitted to matriculate not in October as planned but in two weeks, at the start of the Summer Term. He said that he knew that there were rules but that he was not sure he could wait any longer, that he had waited much too long already.

  Upstairs the wind whistled in the chimney. It sounded like somebody laughing. He thought of taking the letter to Cambridge in person, of going to Liverpool Street Station and getting on a train and refusing to leave until they agreed to let him start, but he thought they might think he had gone mad. There was something of madness in him. He hugged it to him, not wanting to let it go. When he posted the letter it made a faint clang as it fell, like a bell ringing.

  It was April but that night it snowed. The house was filled with a flat white light, with a silence dense as cotton wool. In the kitchen the drawers were undisturbed, the spoons lying quietly in their stacked embrace. The piano was dumb. There was no dark head resting against the wing of the Chesterfield, no humming or laughter or patter of footsteps on the stairs. He opened the wardrobe in the hall, buried his face in the soft folds of her coat with its astrakhan collar. The coat still smelled of her, faintly, but she was not there.

  Mr Willis wrote back from Cambridge. He was sorry but there was no question of a place for Oscar until the beginning of the Michaelmas Term. He enclosed a reading list, hoped Oscar would use the intervening time wisely, and looked forward to seeing him in October.

  Oscar sold his mother’s coat. He sold the rabbit fur stole and the peacock scarf. He sold the piano to Miss Nicholson who lived around the corner with her brother, and his mother’s brass bedstead to a man with a cart. The things he could not sell he gave away. At night he lay in bed and stared at the ceiling. The little black men did not come. There was sadness in it, but there was stillness too, and peace.

  When all the drawers and the cupboards were empty, and the books nearly all in boxes, he made enquiries about boarding houses in Cambridge. There were several rooms available, including an inexpensive attic in a house on Chesterton Road which offered, the landlady said, pleasant views over the town. The landlady’s name was Mrs Piggott. Oscar wrote to confirm that he would take the room with immediate effect.

  He took the letter to the post box at the end of the street. When he got home, he lit a fire in the back parlour and settled himself in his armchair, a cup of tea on the floor by his feet. There was a pile of books on the fender stool. He leaned down and took one off the top. It was one of his mother’s, Emily Dickinson’s Poems. Oscar thought of the poem his mother had asked for again and
again when she was ill:

  Hope is the thing with feathers

  That perches in the soul,

  And sings the tune – without the words,

  And never stops at all.

  The book had been opened so often on that page it fell open when he held it. He put the letters from Cambridge inside and, closing it, put the book on the arm of his chair. The book was small and the corners of the letters stuck out. From time to time as he sipped his tea, he touched the corners of the letters very gently with the pad of his thumb. From time to time too, he looked up over at the Chesterfield and smiled, so that she would know he was thinking about her, that he had not forgotten that she was there, even when she was gone.

  19

  The flat was in an imposing mansion block in Maida Vale, five storeys of red brick adorned at its eastern end by a pair of turrets, each topped with a pale green cupola. The turrets made Jessica think of home. The flats were very respectable, the agent said, and popular with widows as well as businessmen who had to be in London during the week. The one he showed them had three bedrooms and two rooms the agent insisted on calling receptions. He pointed out the liveried porters, the landscaped gardens, the latest plumbing and electrical amenities, including electric bells and a tradesman’s lift. He stressed the advantages of an accommodation that was less than ten years old, that might conveniently be managed with only one servant.