Read Online We That Are Left by Clare Clark - Free Book Online

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.
    â€˜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 ofthe 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.
    â€˜I’m very sorry,’ he said, looking at the floor. ‘About Theo,
    I mean.’
    â€˜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?’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜Wells is right,’ Oscar said. ‘Space and time should be thought of from a four-dimensional point of view. Mathematically, I mean.’
    â€˜Is that what they teach you at school?’
    â€˜I wish. School stuff isn’t nearly that interesting.’
    â€˜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.