We That Are Left (2 page)

She also had the biggest stupidest pash on Theo that Jessica had ever seen. She could not say a word to him without tittering or going red. Last Christmas, Theo dropped his handkerchief and Jessica saw Marjorie pick it up and press it to her face even though Theo had just blown his nose on it. Jessica had never seen anything more disgusting in her whole life. Marjorie was supposed to be Phyllis's friend because they were the same age but Marjorie just trailed behind Theo like Mary's little lamb and all Phyllis ever wanted to do was read books. When Phyllis died, Jessica thought, she would not want to be buried or even burned up to ashes like Grandfather Melville but squashed flat like a pressed flower inside a huge fat book and afterwards, when someone tried to read it, they would have to peer through the mush of her brain and scrape her dried brown guts from the gaps between the lines.

‘You wouldn't have done it, would you, Marjorie?' Terence asked.

‘Not for all the tea in China,' Marjorie said, still giggling.

‘But I don't like tea,' Jessica said loftily and Theo laughed.

‘That's my girl,' he said, squeezing her shoulder, and the rush of pride burned her throat almost like crying.

‘Go,' she commanded, and with an almighty push she was flying, hurtling downhill with the wind whipping at the scarf and the bumps in the rough surface of the lane clattering her bones like she was a skeleton, and as her eyes filled with tears her chest tore open with a great white scream that was terror or triumph, she did not know which, and the darkness turned bright with flashing silver stars and she thought that this was what it must be like to be a bird, a bird or a motor racing car, and then quite suddenly there was an almighty jolt and the chair stopped dead and she was thrown, like a bird, through the air and for a moment time stopped and she wondered
what came next and how badly it would hurt, before she landed with a thump that knocked the breath out of her in a thick patch of nettles.

Nanny tutted as she rubbed calamine lotion on the nettle stings. She said that idle hands were the devil's playthings and that the stream was no place for a girl who should have been drawing or practising the piano. Then she tied up Jessica's hair again, smoothing the strands with her gnarled red hands. Jessica did not mention the bath chair. She had no intention of getting Theo into trouble. Not that he ever was in trouble, not properly. When Nanny told him off he only pulled silly faces and tickled her in the place on her side that made her go squirmy and said that he knew she was only pretending to be cross.

As for their parents, Theo could have burned the house down and Eleanor would have laughed and told him how pretty the flames were. It made Father furious when Eleanor stuck up for Theo but when Father shouted at him it only ended up in an argument and Theo always won. He had a way of smiling at Father when he was angry that made Father squeeze his hands into fists and walk out of the room.

When finally Nanny stopped fussing over her and let her leave the nursery Jessica ran downstairs and out into the garden but she could not see the others anywhere. Her skin was sore and horribly itchy, and the palms of her hands burned. She licked the hard white bumps, trying to soothe them. They tasted of calamine. She grimaced, wiping her tongue on her sleeve.

It had grown cool, fat clouds clotting the sky. Around the terrace, the roses shivered, their pale heads pressed close together, and the horse chestnuts waved their flat green hands up and down. Someone, Terence maybe, had left a cricket sweater on the wrought-iron bench by the oak tree. Jessica hoped it would rain and the sweater would get spoiled. She did not like Terence Connolly one bit. His mouth was too red
and when he talked his voice was loud and American. He was the most awful boaster too. When Father had asked him if he played tennis he had gone on and on about the stupid tournaments he had won until she had wanted to scream. It baffled her that Theo had insisted on inviting him to stay for another whole week by himself instead of leaving the next day for London with his parents. She supposed it must be the Brownie camera that had turned his head. Before they had arrived with their piles of stupid American presents no one had wanted any of the Connollys at Ellinghurst. No one but Eleanor.

Picking up a stick Jessica ran across the croquet lawn, whipping at her thigh as she leaped the hoops. She could go to the stables and see Max, she supposed, but it was no fun riding by yourself. It was no fun doing anything by yourself. She pulled up at the stand of beeches near the turn in the drive and peered through the gate in the rhododendrons but the tennis court was deserted, its net sagging on its posts. She slashed with her stick at a rhododendron flower, scattering pink petals, then trailed back along the edge of the wood, the stick clattering the iron railings. Above the wood Grandfather's Tower rose up into the sky like Jack's beanstalk in the story. From here she could see the bulge of the spiral staircase on its far side, a fat snake darker than the pale concrete of the tower itself.

Grandfather was Father's grandfather, not Jessica's, but they called the tower Grandfather's Tower because that was what Father had always called it. Jessica's real grandfather had died when Father was young, which was a long time ago because Father was old, much older than other people's fathers. Jessica kept her eyes on the top of the tower as she walked. She liked the way that the closer you got to it the more it looked like it was falling over. It was because it was so tall. Father said the style was Italianate, which meant that it belonged in Venice and not in the New Forest. Eleanor detested it, she called it an eyesore, but it was still one of her favourite stories, how
Grandfather Melville had come back from India concrete-mad and been introduced to a lady called Mrs Gleeson who was a Spiritualist, which meant she could talk to dead people. Grandfather Melville and Mrs Gleeson had become very, very good friends, Eleanor said, making her mouth and her eyes go round so that everyone laughed. It was because of Mrs Gleeson that Grandfather Melville had been able to speak to Sir Christopher Wren who had been dead a long time and get his help with the tower's design. Sir Christopher Wren, it turned out, was quite as excited about unreinforced concrete as Grandfather Melville.

‘A wiser man might have worried that Wren was a good two hundred years too early for concrete,' Eleanor liked to say, ‘but what's a detail or two when you're holding hands in a darkened room?'

Jessica's father hated it when she told that story. Sometimes when she was in the middle of telling it he just got up and went out of the room. Then Eleanor would laugh and tell the other story he did not like, about Grandfather Melville pushing footmen off the top of the tower to test his flying machines. She had always forbidden the children to go up there, she said it might fall down any minute, but they still went. There was a room on every one of the thirteen floors but the top one was Theo's. He said that thirteen was his lucky number. No one was allowed up there but him. Jessica wondered if he would live up there when Father was dead and the whole castle belonged to him.

Slowly she walked up the steps towards the house. Usually she liked to walk along the ramparts because it was fun to jump the gaps in the battlements but she did not feel like it today. The stings smarted on her arms and legs and her bruised shoulder throbbed. She could not believe that the others had deserted her. Somehow in her mind she had imagined them all gathered in triumph on the terrace, Theo raising a glass of lemonade to toast her pluck. Instead, as usual, he had vanished into thin air and she was left all alone, wriggling like a fish
inside her sore raw skin. She looked back at the tower. Phyllis was probably there right now, curled up in the Tiled Room, hunched over some book or other. The Tiled Room was octagonal and had painted tiles not just all over the floor but on the walls too. Father said that in India they used tiles because they kept rooms cool. Grandfather Melville must have forgotten about English weather because the Tiled Room was cold as an icehouse but Phyllis did not seem to mind. Jessica wondered if she even noticed. Of all the infuriating things about Phyllis perhaps the most infuriating was the way she always behaved as though books were real and real life just a story somebody had made up without thinking.

The Great Hall was deserted, the doors to the drawing room and the long gallery both closed. Jessica kissed the carved eagle that topped the newel post on the beak and looked up at Jeremiah Melville who glared down at her from his frame above the chimneypiece. All around him on the walls were clubs and shields and crossed pikes and bits of old armour. Jeremiah Melville's ancestors had been farmers, not medieval knights, but he had made pots of money from Indian cotton and decided he did not want to live in a boring manor house but in a castle with a minstrels' gallery and towers with arrow slits, even though by then there were no minstrels any more and everyone just shot one other with guns. Jeremiah Melville had been Grandfather Melville's grandfather.

‘Where is everybody, Rexy boy?' Jessica asked, stroking the stone lion that sprawled over the huge fireplace. One day, she hoped, she might persuade Eleanor to let her have a dog. Behind her a sudden shaft of sunlight flooded the stained-glass windows, splashing pools of colour across the stone flags. Jessica put her toe into a lozenge of yellow. She supposed Mrs Maxwell Brooke and Mrs Connolly were still traipsing round Salworth House with Mrs Grunewald, unless they had already died of boredom. As for Eleanor and Mr Connolly, who knew how far away they were by now? Mr Connolly's new motor car was white with red leather seats and shiny silver wheels
with the spokes all criss-crossed like a game of pick-up sticks. It only had room in it for two people. When Mr Connolly had taken them all out to look at it Eleanor had stroked its glossy flank and told Mr Connolly that a girl could die happy in an automobile like that, and Mr Connolly had smiled at her like the witch smiled at Hansel and Gretel when she was getting ready to eat them up.

Jessica despised Mr Connolly even more than she despised Terence. Partly it was because he opened his mouth too wide when he laughed and wore oil in his hair and ugly coats with patterns and too many pockets. Mostly she did not like him because he was too stupid to realise that Eleanor did not care for him any more than she cared for any of the others. He was always staring at her when he thought no one was looking. The day before, when Jessica was lying beside the gallery banisters pretending to be a tiger in a cage, she had heard the door to the drawing room open underneath her and Mr Connolly say ‘My God, look at you,' in his American voice that was shouty even when he was whispering, and she had wanted to drop something heavy on his head. She thought that Mr Connolly would be a terrible driver with Eleanor in the car, that he would spend the whole time looking at her and not at the road he was driving on.

A girl could die happy in an automobile like that.

‘But of course I'll die, you silly,' Eleanor had said with a gay laugh when Jessica was little. ‘We'll all die. But you mustn't worry. I shall be sure to do it very beautifully,' and Jessica had a sudden violent picture of Mr Connolly's white automobile crumpled like a paper bag and Eleanor sprawled with her head thrown back, a shiny line of blood like scarlet nail polish running from her mouth.

She shook her head like a kaleidoscope to make the picture change and scrubbed at her nose. She thought about going up to the nursery but Oskar was probably in the nursery and Oskar was worse than nobody at all. Oskar was Mrs Grunewald's son and the same age as Jessica, which meant
that everyone expected Jessica to play with him. She tried to tell Nanny it was impossible but Nanny only put on her stern face and said it was Jessica's job to make sure her visitors had a nice time.

Jessica could not see why Oskar had to be her visitor when it was not her who had invited him, and she did not have the foggiest idea how anyone could tell if he was having a nice time. Oskar could go through a whole day saying nothing at all, just staring into space or reading a maths book, and, when you finally lost your temper with him and demanded to know if he was actually still alive, he only blinked at you in that startled way of his, his eyes like sucked aniseed balls, as though it was perfectly normal for a boy who was not ill to sit quietly all day long and never once yawn or complain or want to run somewhere and break something. He was always writing down numbers, rows and rows of them so tightly packed together there was hardly any white left on the page, and when he talked it was just the same, strings of facts so unspeakably boring you could not imagine ever wanting to know them, let alone learn them by heart. Theo said Oskar was like the Engine in
Gulliver's Travels
, that if you could only work out where to crank him up, he would spool out pointless information for the rest of his life in seventeen languages at once.

In the middle of the hall table there was a big silver bowl full of pale pink roses. Jessica took one out and, holding it up in front of her, glided across the hall towards one of the suits of armour that guarded the bottom of the stairs. The armour held a pike in one hinged metal hand. The other hand was empty, the arm slightly outstretched. Clasping the cold fingers, she bowed her head.

Will you, Jessica Margaret Crompton Melville, take this man to be your awfully wedded husband? He loves you to the ends of the earth and he wants more than anything else in the world to buy you an Alfonso motor car.

Why, in that case, I will.

Tearing the petals from the rose and throwing them above her head, she processed triumphantly back towards the front door. She had only ever been to one wedding, last year when Uncle Henry married Aunt Violet. It had not been in the least romantic. Uncle Henry was twenty-five years younger than Father but he was still ancient. When he made his speech he did not kiss Aunt Violet or say they would live happily ever after or anything. When Jessica asked Eleanor why not, her mother had made a funny face and said surely she knew by now that the Melvilles were the coldest fishes in the sea?