We That Are Left Page 7

  He played the film so often he almost forgot it was real. But it was real. For a minute at least, perhaps much longer, Jessica Melville had let him kiss her. She had kissed him back. When it stopped she had wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and looked at him, her bottom lip caught between her teeth.

  ‘I’m going in,’ she said. And then, ‘I’m the first girl you’ve ever kissed, aren’t I?’ When he nodded, she smiled to herself. ‘Then you’ll always love me. For the rest of your life.’

  He watched her run back down the path towards the garden. He did not follow her. He did not want to go back to nursery tea and the interrogatory brightness of the electrical lights. He could not imagine how he would be able to talk to Jessica now, or even look at her, not after what had happened. And what about his mother? He could not hope that she would not notice the change in him. The kiss had marked him like a brand. He might as well have purple hair or smudges of lipstick all over his face.

  He had kissed Jessica. Jessica Melville who looked like an actress and swore like a sailor, who provoked and infuriated him but whose face, when he thought of it, caused him to jolt as though electrified. Every time he remembered it exploded inside him like a firework: he, Oscar Greenwood, had kissed Jessica Melville. The preposterousness of it made him want to laugh out loud.

  He had stayed in the tower a long time. When at last, awkward and half-frozen, he skulked back into the house, there was no sign of anyone. His mother was upstairs with Godmother Eleanor, Sir Aubrey working in his study. The children were served a hurried supper in the breakfast room. Phyllis read her book. He could feel Jessica beside him, the hum of her like an engine running, but he kept his eyes on his plate, pretending to eat. In the back of his throat, he could taste the rotten stink of Theo’s uniform.

  The next morning, from his bedroom window, Oscar watched his mother and Sir Aubrey walking across the lawn. Behind them the tower rose like an upended pencil from the dark scribble of the woods. Oscar closed his eyes, summoning the press of Jessica’s mouth against his, the exquisite shimmer of her in the pit of his stomach, but it was Theo Melville he saw, the smear of his pale face in the twilight. They did not send bodies home from the Front, not any more. There were too many of them. Theo Melville would be buried where he fell, if there was enough of him to bury. It was hard to imagine a man’s spirit finding peace amidst the ceaseless thumping of the guns.

  People said there was no such thing as ghosts but Oscar knew there were. Not headless spooks with clanking chains like the ones in stories but spirits, traces of the energy that had made them alive in the first place. Human bones and brains and flesh were not alive by themselves. They were made of matter and matter was inert, its atoms completely controlled by the forces acting on it, the nature of the energy in the aether. The atoms themselves could not change their state. They could not start or stop on their own. That was the law of inertia, and all material atoms were obedient to it, whether they formed an engine or a clockwork toy or a human body.

  The mistake most people made was that because they could not see energy, only matter, they believed that matter was more real than energy. Oscar did not understand this. A magnetic field existed, whether there were iron filings there to demonstrate it or not. Without a wireless set sound waves passed through the aether unseen and undetected. Why could the same not be true of human life, that the essential energy to animate each individual continued to exist, even when the body was no longer there to prove it? Pierre Curie, the Nobel laureate who with his sister Marie had discovered both radium and polonium, had regularly attended seances. He had hoped that, properly conducted, they might unlock the secret of radioactivity.

  And yet. He thought of the yellowing piece of paper Mr Beckers, the new science master, had pinned to the classroom wall, printed in his distinctively Continental script.

  A THEORY CAN ONLY BE DISPROVED BY EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE. EVIDENCE CAN NEVER PROVE A THEORY BECAUSE OTHER EVIDENCE, YET TO BE DISCOVERED, MAY EXIST THAT IS INCONSISTENT WITH THE THEORY.

  On the train home he asked his mother if the men from Theo’s battalion had gone to the woods.

  ‘Why?’ she asked. ‘Did you see someone?’

  ‘In the distance. Vaguely. I thought maybe . . .’

  ‘That it was Theo.’

  Oscar nodded. He wished his mother could not always see inside his head.

  ‘Perhaps it was,’ she said.

  ‘Perhaps.’

  His mother was silent for a long time. Then she sighed. ‘We all saw Theo this weekend,’ she said. ‘One way or another.’

  In June Oscar sat the Matriculation examinations. He scored nearly perfect marks in science and Latin but in mathematics he barely scraped a pass. Mr Leach told the headmaster that he had neither aptitude nor application for the subject and that there was no place for him in his classroom. He meant it as a punishment but it felt to Oscar like a reprieve. He had forgotten almost all his German, except those fragments that slipped in on phrases of music or late at night as he was falling asleep. Languages were like that: untended, the part of the brain that you had cleared for them reverted to wilderness. Oscar wanted the same to be true of numbers too.

  They did not go back to Ellinghurst that summer. His mother muttered about Mr Asquith and essential journeys. It was near the end of the holidays, trying to clear a space on the kitchen table amid the mountains of piled-up books and papers, that Oscar came across a letter from Sir Aubrey, folded several times and tucked into a book of poetry.

  I wish it were otherwise but I’m sure you can imagine how painful it is for Eleanor to see Oscar. Your boy is grown so tall. Pray God they bring this nightmare to an end before he is old enough to know its horrors.

  Oscar would not be eighteen for two more years. It was impossible to imagine that the War could go on that long, just as it was impossible to imagine that it would ever end. The wretchedness was like the black London dust, a thin layer of grime so pervasive you forgot that anything could ever be quite clean. In their street in Clapham almost every house was mourning someone. No one wore mourning like Godmother Eleanor’s. They just seemed smaller somehow, shrunk inside their ordinary clothes. The week before he and his mother had seen the local doctor’s wife at a supper to raise money for refugee children. She wore a blue dress with a white armband around the sleeve.

  ‘John and I have been highly distinguished,’ she told them quietly. ‘Charles has died for his country.’

  At home afterwards his mother had cried. She said that of all the filthy things about the whole filthy business the filthiest was the idea that death was glorious. She said that it was not right that the dead boys should not be mourned, just so that those who were left behind could go on believing in a sacred war. She and her old friends from the Suffrage movement no longer wrote pamphlets and articles about the Vote. Instead, they campaigned to persuade countries outside the War like America to force a mediated peace. Most of the women were like Oscar’s mother and had jobs during the day, so they worked at night. The newspapers damned them as fanatics and hysterics and accused them of being unpatriotic, but his mother only shrugged. She said that if this was where men’s brains got us, it was time people listened to women’s hearts.

  The War swallowed everything. Oscar did not mind so much not going to Ellinghurst, it was easier somehow to keep Jessica safely in his head than to imagine what would happen if he were ever to see her again, but he longed for there to be somewhere left where the War was not. The streets pounded with marching columns of recruits in civilian clothes and, on the Common, beyond the high fence that marked the perimeter of the vegetable fields, faceless soldiers in gas masks threw dummy grenades and squirmed through trenches scored deep into the muddy ground. Even his bedroom had blackout blinds and candles on the bedside table in case of raids and a huge enlistment poster stuck up on the wall right outside the window. On the benches around the pond smashed-up men with crutches or hopeless coughs stared at nothing, while above them the barrage balloons
drifted in the sky, nosing the clouds like fat black fish. No one flew kites any more. The flying of kites was forbidden by law. On the High Street grey-faced women queued for meat and tried not to cry.

  His mother had a job with an insurance company. There were not enough clerks with all the men at the Front. She worked long hours and fell asleep in her chair after supper. The holidays were long and empty. When he suggested to his mother that they go to the music hall she said that she could not bear it, that the shows were nothing but government propaganda, a blatant recruiting campaign. She said she could not sing along to songs like that. Instead, Oscar went to the flickers. Afternoon tickets were cheap. The projectionist at the Globe on Clapham High Street had lost the right side of his face at Mons and sometimes when a reel spun and sputtered to its end there was a long blank silence, nothing but a flickering white screen and an empty tube of light above the audience in which dust turned in slow circles, and when someone went up to the booth and banged on the door, they found the projectionist rocking backwards and forwards in his chair, his eyes fixed on the film that he could not stop, that ran always and unrelentingly in his head.

  The War swallowed everything. It even swallowed physics. Teaching was supposed to be a reserved occupation but at Oscar’s school most of the masters who were young enough had joined up all the same. The new science master was a Belgian refugee called Beckers. Mr Beckers had a twisted spine from poliomyelitis so the boys called him Bed Beckers in bad Belgian accents. They liked him, though. He had taught at the University in Leuven until the German invasion had forced him to leave. Many of his colleagues there had been German themselves. Mr Beckers said that there were no politics in science, that scientists were all on the same side.

  Mr Beckers had brought two suitcases with him when he fled to England, both filled with books and papers and scientific journals. The Germans were burning the library and, besides, he said, clothes never fit him properly anyway. He told Oscar that in Europe many scientists had serious doubts about the completeness of Newton’s theories and gave him some articles to read. Sometimes, when the other boys were playing rugger or cricket, he asked Oscar to tea in his little room. They sat in front of the electrical fire and talked about physics. Mr Beckers told Oscar about radiation and X-rays and Ernest Rutherford’s hypothesis of the atom in which electrons did not bounce randomly around as the Wise Man had thought, but moved in elliptical orbits around a central nucleus. All of Rutherford’s experiments supported his theory. There was only one problem. It was impossible. His theory contravened the fundamental laws of physics. Faraday and Maxwell had already proved that an electrically charged particle produces radiation if it is diverted from a straight path. Since Rutherford’s electrons were in circular orbits they should have been radiating all the time and therefore losing energy, causing them to spiral down into the nucleus in a fraction of a second. Rutherford’s atom was impossible. It should have collapsed in on itself. And yet it did not.

  It was not Rutherford but a Dane called Niels Bohr, Mr Beckers told Oscar, who suggested that an electron orbiting a nucleus does not radiate. This was just as impossible as Rutherford’s theory, but yet again the experiments seemed to bear out his hypothesis. Bohr went further. He said that the orbit of electrons around the nucleus was predetermined. An electron could only be stable at definite distances from the nucleus; an electron could jump from one permissible orbit to another and as it did so it either absorbed light or emitted light. It was this emission of light that caused spectral lines, the measurable dark or bright lines emitted by atoms that made up a kind of fingerprint for each element on the Periodic Table and which had mystified scientists since the mid-nineteenth century. Bohr’s experiments with hydrogen bore out his assertions, Mr Beckers said, his eyes shining. The Dane had brought order to the exterior of the atom just as Rutherford had brought order to its nucleus.

  He had also thrown all of classical physics up into the air. A lot of scientists did not like it. While some hailed his theory as one of the great discoveries of the age many more dismissed it as fantasy. Classical physics depended upon cause and effect: if a happened, then b must follow. Bohr’s electron was not only random, it knew in advance at what frequency it was going to vibrate when it passed from one stationary state to the other. Which was impossible. Or was it? Given Bohr’s results, what other explanation could there be?

  That, Mr Beckers said, was where the story ended, for now. Just as things had started to get properly exciting, the War had come. Laboratories emptied as men like the Melvilles’ Uncle Henry signed up to fight and foreign scientists were expelled as enemy aliens. Men who had been colleagues and collaborators were abruptly adversaries, fighting on opposite sides. Their experiments were mothballed. Instead, they were made to work on secret War projects like bombs and poison gas. The books and journals stopped. Letters were censored. The War blacked out physics, just as it blacked out everything else.

  Until it ended nothing important would happen ever again.

  6

  The summer of 1916 was warm and dry. The War was going badly, the news worse almost every week, but in Hampshire there were still picnics and tea parties and tennis parties and, in the long pink evenings, musical recitals of such mind-numbing dullness that Jessica had to fight the urge to scream obscenities or tear off all her clothes. The other girls had known each other all their lives. The boys were their brothers and cousins and the occasional school friend, shipped in from another provincial backwater to make up numbers. They were pimply, raw-looking creatures, hardly more than starter moustaches with manners. Occasionally someone produced a man who was older, on leave or wounded in the War. Neither stuck around very long. Jessica could not blame them. Anyone with any sense could see that there was nothing to keep them in the country. The only ones that stayed had no legs or could not breathe or they shook so much they could not hold a cup of tea. Everyone was kind to them but it was still a relief when they went home. Their afflictions embarrassed everyone, themselves most of all.

  By then Jessica was the only one left at home. In January Phyllis had volunteered as a VAD and gone to London. Eleanor had tried to stop her. She said that Phyllis’s first duty was to her family, that there was plenty of war work in Hampshire, that nursing was dull and exhausting and often dangerous, that terrible, unspeakable things happened to unsuspecting nurses at the mercy of wounded men long starved of female company, that surely Phyllis realised that she would be of no earthly use to a hospital, a girl who had never once cared for a doll, let alone a real person, and did she really think Matrons let their nurses wander around all day with the noses in a book, but Phyllis only shrugged and said that she had made up her mind.

  ‘They give the VADs all the worst jobs, you know,’ Jessica told her. ‘Lavinia Petersham says her sister does nothing but sweep floors and scrub lavatories. She never even gets a day off.’

  ‘So?’ Phyllis said.

  ‘So I’m just telling you. You won’t be allowed to actually nurse anybody or anything. You’ll be a glorified charwoman.’

  ‘What else could I be? I’m barely qualified for that.’

  ‘You don’t mind?’

  ‘That my upbringing and education together have failed comprehensively to furnish me with a single valuable practical skill? Yes, actually, I do.’

  ‘You can still change your mind,’ Jessica said. ‘It’s not too late.’ But Phyllis only gaped at her as though she had spoken in Japanese. A week later she went to London to start her training. She took Theo’s suitcase with her, the one Grandmother Melville had given him when he first went away to school. It was made of brown leather with his initials embossed on the lid. When Eleanor saw it she gasped and pressed her hand against her mouth.

  ‘I liked the idea of him keeping me company,’ Phyllis said.

  Like a bird, Eleanor’s hand lit on the corner of the suitcase. She stroked the scarred leather with the side of her thumb.

  ‘I’d forgotten that old thing,’ Jessica said so
ftly.

  ‘I know,’ Phyllis said. ‘I’m just hoping it won’t insist on eating oranges and refuse to open the window.’

  ‘Or retch into its handkerchief when anyone else tries to get into the carriage and mutter about tropical diseases,’ Jessica added.

  ‘Or try to catch butterflies out of the window with Eleanor’s silk parasol.’

  Eleanor gave a sob, pulling the suitcase towards her with both arms. Phyllis glanced at Jessica.

  ‘You can’t have it,’ Eleanor cried. ‘It isn’t yours to take. Going into his room, rifling through his things. I shan’t let you, do you hear me? I shan’t let you.’

  Phyllis hesitated. Then she shook her head. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘He wasn’t just yours. He belonged to us too.’

  She took the suitcase. When she kissed Eleanor goodbye at the front door Eleanor turned her face away, her neck stretched taut, and went into the house without looking back.

  With Phyllis gone and half the servants, Ellinghurst was silent as a church. Even the horses had been taken for the War. When summer came Jessica went to the parties because there was nothing else to do. She hit tennis balls deliberately into the trees and smoked cigarettes while pretending to look for them. She drew up a list of the boys and asked the girls to score them all out of ten according to how good they thought they would be at doing it. Once she brought a bottle of gin she had stolen from the drawing-room drinks cabinet and suggested to several of the girls that they sneak off and have a proper party on their own. Nobody came. She drank some of the gin and poured the rest into a potted fern. She hoped it died. The girls were drips and goody-goodies, every last one of them.